Bangladesh Cinema And National Identity

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been adopted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh. At the same time, this has been the period for the articulation of modern nationhood and cultural identity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyses the relationship between cinema and modernity in Bangladesh, providing a narrative of the uneven process that produced the idea of "Bangladesh cinema." This book investigates the roles of a non-Western "national" film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. Drawing on the idea of cinema as public sphere and the postcolonial notion of formation of the "Bangladesh" nation, interactions between cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims in different social and political matrices are analyzed. The author explores how the conflict among different social groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities. In particular, he illustrates the connections between film production and reception in Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim identity. Questioning and debunking the usual notions of "Bangladesh" and "cinema," this book positions the cinema of Bangladesh within a transnational frame. Starting with how to locate the "beginning" of the second Bengali language cinema in colonial Bengal, the author completes the investigation by identifying a global Bangladeshi cinema in the early twenty-first century. The first major academic study on this large and vibrant national cinema, this book demonstrates that Bangladesh cinema worked as different "public spheres" for different "publics" throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Filling a niche in Global Film and Media Studies and South Asian Studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of these disciplines.

This book analyses how independent filmmakers from Bangladesh have represented national identity in their films. The focus of this book is on independent and art house filmmakers and how cinema plays a vital role in constructing national and cultural identity. The authors examine post-2000 films which predominantly deal with issues of national identity and demonstrate how they tackle questions of national identity. Bangladesh is seemingly a homogenous country consisting 98% of Bengali and 90% of Muslim. This majority group has two dominant identities – Bengaliness (the ethno-linguistic identity) and Muslimness (the religious identity). Bengaliness is perceived as secular-modern whereas Muslimness is perceived as traditional and conservative. However, Bangladeshi independent and art house filmmakers portray the nationhood of the country with an enthusiasm and liveliness that exceeds these two categories. In addition to these categories, the authors add two more dimensions to the approach to discuss identity: Popular Religion and Transformation. The study argues that these identity categories are represented in the films, and that they both reproduce and challenge dominant discourses of nationalism. Providing a new addition to the discourse of contemporary national identity, the book will be of interest to researchers studying international film and media studies, independent cinema studies, Asian cinema, and South Asian culture, politics, and identity politics.

Studies the rise of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in the 1950s and 60s by showcasing the interactions between global politics and local social and economic developments.

This book examines the circulation and viewership of Bollywood films and filmi modernity in Bangladesh. The writer poses a number of fundamental questions: what it means to be a Bangladeshi in South Asia, what it means to be a Bangladeshi fan of Hindi film, and how popular film reflects power relations in South Asia. The writer argues that partition has resulted in India holding hegemonic power over all of South Asia’s nation-states at the political, economic, and military levels–a situation that has made possible its cultural hegemony. The book draws on relevant literature from anthropology, sociology, film, media, communication, and cultural studies to explore the concepts of hegemony, circulation, viewership, cultural taste, and South Asian cultural history and politics.

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, new national cinemas promoted and reinforced prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. At the same time, industrial and independent cinemas contributed to remarkably porous and hybrid film cultures, reflecting the intertwining of South Asian histories and their reciprocal cultural influences. This cross-fertilization within South Asian cultural production continues today. South Asian Filmscapes excavates these complex politics and poetics of bordered identity and crossings through selected histories of cinema in South Asia. Several essays reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners, while others interrogate how filmic politics intersects with discourses of nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language. Together, they offer a fluid approach to the multiple histories and encounters that conjure “South Asia” as a geographic and political entity in the region and globally through a cinematic imagination.

The Emergence of Bangladesh analyses and celebrates the first 50 years of Bangladesh as a nation, bringing insights from key scholars in Bangladeshi studies to an international audience, as well as ‘bringing home’ to a domestic audience the work of some of the nation’s greatest intellectual exports, the Bangladeshi scholars who have made a mark in their field of study in academia. The book offers unique coverage of the battlegrounds on which the founding of the new nation was fought, including language, power and religion, and provides unique insight into some of the hot spots that continue to shape the development of the nation: the issues of gender, culture, ethnicity, governance, the economy and the army. Those with an interest in understanding the past or present Bangladesh will find this a trove of frank and readable analysis.

This book explores the aesthetic forms of the political left across the borders of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film, literature, poetry and cultural discourse to illuminate the ways in which political commitment has been given aesthetic form and artistic value by artists and by cultural and political activists in postcolonial South Asia. With a focused conceptualization this volume asks: Does the political left in South Asia have a recognizable aesthetic form? And if so, what political effects do left-wing artistic movements and aesthetic artefacts have in shaping movements against inequality and injustice? Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, the contributors detail the trajectories and transformations of left-wing cultural formations and affiliations and focus on connections and continuities across post-1947/8 India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.