ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the construction of a Bengali-Muslim identity in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Bengal, and asks why feature films signifying such a hyphenated cultural identity were not made until the late 1940s, in spite of the existence of a vibrant Bengali-language film production industry in Calcutta during the 1920s to 1940s. It shifts the focus from East Bengal to Calcutta, the center of colonial Bengal. The chapter presents the roles of the Bengali renaissance, print media and the Bengali cinema of the Calcutta film-production industry during the 1920s to 1940s in creating and maintaining the Bengali-Hindu public sphere created by these bhadraloks. It demonstrates that Hindu bhadraloks leading the Calcutta film industry used this Bengali cinema to build and maintain the sense of a Bengali-Hindu public sphere in colonial Bengal. The chapter demonstrated how the Bengali cinema of the 1920s to 1940s Calcutta film industry- leading film-production centers in colonial India-was aligned to Bengali-Hindu cultural modernity.
