ABSTRACT
Bangladesh has gone through various opposing constructions of nation and identity during the mid-to late-twentieth century – a period that can be readily linked with globalization in South Asia – processes in which religion, in particular a certain form of communalism, have played a crucial role. In 1947, religion (that is, Islam) gave momentum to the construction of the state of Pakistan and, within it, of East Pakistan. In 1971, advocating an antiIslamic secular Bengali identity, East Pakistan moved to become the independent nation of Bangladesh. It was during the construction of such a ‘secular’ nationalist discourse that religion became marked as communalism. Religion and communalism have, therefore, come to be defining factors in the construction of identities for Bengali Muslims, who constitute 85 per cent of the population of Bangladesh today. Although approximately 15 per cent of the population in Bangladesh is non-Muslim, Muslim identity has been propagated as the religious identity of the country – and as, furthermore, a part of, and prerequisite for, nation-building. Bengali Muslim identity is thus the majoritarian identity that seeks ‘to be exclusively or exhaustively linked with the identity of the nation’ in Bangladesh, and may be seen as a primary state of a ‘predatory identity’ – an identity ‘whose social construction … require[s] the extinction of other[s]’ (Appadurai 2006: 51-52). There has, therefore, been a tension between nation-building and religious pluralism in Bangladesh since the early 1970s, a tension that has shaped the interaction between nation and religion amid the rapid globalization of the media and the economy. What I wish to explore in this chapter is how various filmic forms
in Bangladeshi cinema have located, recorded and reconstructed such an interaction between nation and religion, and what kind of cinematiccultural approaches have been appropriated in order to narrativize the tension between nation-building and religious communalism in Bangladesh. I do so through deconstructing the cinematic construction of communalism in a rapidly globalizing Bangladesh alongside and within the identity formation process of Bengali Muslims, the majority group that normalized ‘Bangladeshi’ identity for themselves. I focus on filmic discourses in the late-1970s, a period when a globalizing Bangladesh went through both a rigorous process of
Islamicization and state-led modernization under the rule of General Zia-ur Rahman. I dissect the films of this era in order to identify the cultural processes involved in creating a visual-rhetorical lexicon for or against communalism and globalization in Bangladesh. I take cinema to locate the rhetoric of communalism in the late-1970s because film was at the time the key visual medium for the Bangladeshi public, since even the single, government-run television channel was inaccessible for many people because of the high price of television sets. While popular genre-based films were drawing large crowds in a rapidly urbanizing Bangladesh, art films also had followings in the major cities. I analyze the texts of these oppositional cinematic cultures and contextualize them as and within national and nationalist cultural productions. I find that different, sometimes conflicting constructions of religion are at
work in these two cinematic discourses. On the one hand, mainstream, industry-based films participated in the development of a discourse that identifies Islam as a positive force by projecting it in everyday contexts, and thus presented Islam as apolitical and popular – as well as complementary to global modernity. These films regarded religion as ‘faith’, as Ayesha Jalal puts it in her article in this volume. On the other hand, the art films produced in the margins of the film industry projected religion as communalism and thus as an anti-modern force. These cultural-modernist films constructed a version of Islam that was at war both against the global modern and against secular-nationalist forces. These films thus highlighted the use of religion, to draw from Jalal again, as a ‘social demarcator’. For the secularnationalist middle class who constituted the audience for such films, Islam was an obstacle to constructing national modernity as they envisaged it for Bangladeshis
The state in post-colonial Bangladesh played an important role in establishing the ‘rules of the game’, both in terms of constructing a national modernity as well as a national film industry. Though the relationships between the state, national modernity and local cinema culture followed quite a curved (if not crooked) line and did not necessarily fulfil the nation-building visions of the pro-Western, modernist middle class, we need to contextualize these in order to understand the larger paradigm of communalism and globalization in the cinematic rhetoric of Bangladesh. Over the last three decades, Bangladesh has witnessed a growing conflict
between secularism and Islamism or, more precisely, between secular culturalnationalism and religious communalism. While Islam has proven particularly influential in Bangladeshi political spheres since the state-backed process of Islamicization that took place in the 1980s and ‘90s, such a communalizing process began in the late 1970s, within a few years after Bangladesh became an independent nation-state. This process of constructing Bangladesh as
a Muslim state horrified the leaders and advocates of the Bangladeshi war of liberation, which was fought upon ideals like secularism and socialism. In the 1960s a secular notion of Bengali culture had served as the keystone for the rise of the Bengali nationalist discourse that challenged Pakistani-Muslim identity and ultimately made possible the independence of Bangladesh. However, religious communalism in the form of Islamism gained momentum after the 1975 killing of Sheikh Mujib, the ‘father of the nation’, who led the cultural-nationalist movement and liberation war against the Pakistani, proIslam junta. With his death, the secular-modernist Bangladeshi state began to transform itself into an ‘Islamic’ state under military generals like Zia and Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who utilized Islam in order to construct a community of Bengali Muslims who would subscribe to their agenda of transforming Bangladesh into a modern Muslim nation-state. In the late 1970s Zia and his political party the BNP advanced the process
of Islamicization in every sphere of public life. As Ali Riaz, a scholar of Islamism in Bangladesh argues, the ‘BNP views Islam as an integral part of the socio-cultural life of Bangladesh’ (Riaz 2004: 18). With the support of the BNP and Muslim-modernist leaders like Zia, in the late 1970s communalist groups re-emerged and grew. The foremost of these was the JI, the largest and most active body promoting fundamentalist Islam in Bangladesh since it had been a part of Pakistan. While it was banned during the Mujib era for opposing the Bangladeshi war of liberation, since its re-emergence it has been engaged in propagating the ‘establishment of an “Islamic state”’ (Riaz 2004: 18). During the 1980s, under the military-led government of General Ershad, a
form of state-supported religious communalism gained momentum. For example, the Ershad regime committed more funds towards the expansion of Islamic learning and education by establishing 1,845 new madrasas (and proposing to establish another 4, 451) (Rahim 2001: 260). Thus, the late 1970s to late 1980s was the period when Bangladesh completed its transformation from being a secular ‘Bengali’ nation-state to becoming a Muslim ‘Bengali’ one – as well as a transition from a project of cultural to religious modernity. This turn to incorporate religion into the process of nation-building can be
interpreted as an effort to exemplify local forms of modernity capable of challenging the perceived threats of global/western modernity. Such an urge to develop a home-grown modernity can be seen from the 1970s in not only the political, but also in the economic and cultural spheres. With the emergence of a small group of local capitalists (thanks in part to the support and connections of the ruling clique), investments increased in culture-related industries. The film industry received a particularly strong boost of new capital as it was seen as a good sector to invest in and multiply ‘black’ (that is, untaxed and undeclared) money. This was especially true following the 1972 ban on the theatrical screening of Indian and Pakistani films, which rendered the local film industry the chief provider of visual entertainment to a
captive, ‘Bangladeshi’ (primarily Bengali Muslim) audience. Such a national market for indigenous Bengali-language cinema – alongside the state-level efforts to construct a ‘Bangladeshi’ identity amid globalizing forces – drove the Bangladeshi film industry to become a medium-sized popular film industry. In its first decade of existence, between 1966 and 1975, the Dhaka-based film industry produced an average of 28 films each year. However, from 1976, with the injection of a large amount of black money, the number of films produced rose dramatically, from an average of 42 films per year between 1976 and 1983 (with a bumper crop of 50 in 1979), to an average of 67 films per year between 1984 and 1992 (with 1989 the peak year with 78 films) (Quader 1993: 211). Thanks to local investments and the state policy of capacity tax,1 the
number of cinema theatres also increased dramatically in this period – an astounding 400 per cent between 1971 and 1984. While there were only from 110 to 122 cinemas in operation in East Pakistan in the 1960s, the number of theatres doubled in Bangladesh in the first three years after independence (up to 220) and then doubled again in the next eight years (to a total of 444 by 1984) (Kabir ‘The Cinema’: 17; Quader 1993: 397). By 1990 there were 767 cinemas (Quader 1993: 397). Such major capital investment served to transform the Bangladeshi film
industry, since ‘“With much higher capital requirements, it became critical to reach a mass audience’ which for some critics means that Bangladeshi cinema was transformed ‘“into a vehicle of mass culture which is tawdry, cheap and vulgar’” (Abdullah 1991: 136). Through such a ‘massification’ process, Bangladeshi cinema in the 1980s became a medium-sized, vernacular-language national film industry. Although such a process divided the viewership of cinema in Bangladesh (into those who favoured vernacular versus transnational films), the success of Bangladeshi cinema lay in its targeting of a very distinct market sector, namely a non-English-speaking, predominantly Bengali Muslim ‘national’ audience. However, as I demonstrate in the rest of this chapter, the survival and development of Bangladeshi cinema lies in its complex, partly conflicting and partly dialogic relationship with the formation and reconfiguration of the state and national identity as related to globalization and communalism in the postcolonial nation-space called Bangladesh.
