ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the institutional and textual modes of Bangla cinema in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It focuses on the relationship of popular cinema to both the Bangladesh nation-state and market forces. The chapter identifies amid rapid urbanization, globalization and commercialization, and explains how Bangla cinema proved itself to be a vernacular, but profit-making popular-culture industry. The chapter uses these films: Father as Servant and The Mother two of the record money-spinners of the Dhaka film industry, as examples to illuminate the role of popular cinema texts in constructing Bangladeshi national identity. It highlights how the Bangladesh nation-state employed the Bangla cinema of Dhaka to help create a standard national identity and to protect local film capitalists and maximize their profit-making. This chapter argues that the ban against Indian films imposed during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan signifies the state's intention of homogenizing Pakistani cinema solely to forward a state-sponsored national identity.
