Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity PDF

Bangladesh Cinema and National
Identity
Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been
Downloaded by 1.2.231.62 at 20:36 28 September 2017
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 iden-
tity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyzes 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 postcolo-
nial notion of formation of the “Bangladesh” nation, interactions between
cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims in different social and political matri-
ces are analyzed. The author explores how the conflict among different social
groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities. In par-
ticular, he illustrates the connections between film production and reception in
Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim iden-
tity. 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 lan-
guage cinema in colonial Bengal, the author completes the investigation by iden-
tifying 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.
Zakir Hossain Raju is Professor in Media and Communication and Dean of

Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Independent University, Bangladesh. His
research focuses on film and identity, cultural translation and popular visual
culture in trans-Asian contexts, especially relating to the cinemas of Bangladesh,
India, Malaysia and South Korea.
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and Development in Pakistan National Identity
Nadeem Malik In search of the modern?
Zakir Hossain Raju
Bangladesh Cinema and
National Identity
In search of the modern?
Zakir Hossain Raju

First published 2015
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Zakir Hossain Raju
The right of Zakir Hossain Raju to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Raju, Zakir Hossain.
Bangladesh cinema and national identity: in search of the modern? /
Zakir Hossain Raju.
pages cm – (Routledge contemporary South Asia series; 89)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion pictures–Bangladesh. 2. National characteristics in motion
pictures. 3. Motion picture industry–Bangladesh. 4. Muslims in motion
pictures. 5. National characteristics in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1993.5.B3R35 2014
791.43095492–dc23 2014016862
ISBN: 978-0-415-46544-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-74759-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Amma
For Disha
and in memory of
Contents
Preface xiv
Introduction 1
1 Methods in film historiography: towards an interpretive

history of Bangladesh cinema 15
2 National cinema and non-Western modernity: framework

to study Bangladesh cinema 40
3 National cinema study and beginning of Bangladesh film

history 65
4 Bengali cinema and cultural modernity in colonial Bengal 91
5 The Dhaka film industry and Bengali-Muslim modernity

in postcolonial East Pakistan 115
6 Popular cinema: between nation-state and market forces in

contemporary Bangladesh 143
7 Cultural modernity and art film discourses: towards a

global Bangladeshi cinema? 172
Bibliography 202
Index 219
Preface
This book—an attempt of writing a history of Bangladesh cinema—holds a

history of two decades. This history is also an Australasian journey as the book
developed over my stay in Melbourne, Sydney, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul
during this period. From these places the project collected a lot of debts from
multiple crowds of people.
Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity is reworked from my PhD thesis
that I submitted to La Trobe University in Melbourne in 2004. However, this
book project started a decade back through a series of chance encounters—as
normally happens in European art cinema films. I, as a college student and aspir-
ing film-maker in late 1980s Dhaka was engrossed in such art films. I had no
idea about Asian cinema or national cinema as a study object. Only after I met
Japanese film critic Tadao Sato in 1991 at the Hawaii International Film Fest
ival, where my first film Face in the Millions was featured and he invited me to
show my film in Fukuoka—at the “Focus on Asia” Film Festival in 1992, did I
have my first encounter with some forms of Asian cinema.
This encounter deepened there with my chance meeting with Aruna
Vasudev, editor of Cinemaya: Asian Film Quarterly and founder of NETPAC
(Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema). Aruna immediately roped me
into NETPAC and demanded that I write for Cinemaya. When I wrote a
survey on Bangladesh cinema for Cinemaya in 1994, I never imagined that I
would be writing a whole monograph on this subject. This process began in
Melbourne in the late 1990s, when I started doctoral study at La Trobe Uni-
versity and I got Chris Berry as my mentor and friend. I had met Chris—also
by chance in 1993—in one of the NETPAC gatherings, which was also in
Honolulu.
With Chris’ extraordinary support, supervision and enthusiasm—during
1997–1998—the doctoral thesis started to take shape. In 2000, Chris had to leave
for University of California, Berkeley, but he was always out there with this
project until I completed the dissertation in 2004, and also after that—throughout
the last decade, when it took the shape of this book. I am deeply indebted to him
for his scholarly guidance as well as friendly advice, especially during the hard
times when I felt that I could not complete the task. This academic project would
never have been possible without his support.
Preface xv
Dr. Felicity Collins, who was my doctoral supervisor at La Trobe in the early
2000s, also had a profound impact on the final shape of the thesis. The painstak-
ing suggestions made by Felicity helped me to revise the later chapters thor-
oughly. I also thank Dr. Adam Knee, who supervised the project for a brief
period, and my doctoral colleagues and friends in Melbourne during 1997–2002:
Moinak Biswas, Stephen Teo, Brian Yecies, Dharmasena Pathiraja, Audrey Yu
and Jubin Hu—often over coffee or lunch—helped me rethink the role of Bang-
ladesh cinema as an Asian national cinema.
Institutionally, Universities in Australia, Bangladesh and Malaysia, as well as
a few fellowships, made this project possible. Starting with a Postgraduate
Research Scholarship awarded by La Trobe University in the late 1990s, an
ASIA Fellowship from the Ford Foundation in 2006–2007 and a Korea Founda-
tion Fellowship in 2012–2013—all these kept my research efforts ongoing. My
workplace in Dhaka since 2000—Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB)

also supported the project during these years. The late Bazlul Mobin Chowd-
hury, vice chancellor of IUB during 2000–2010, gave extraordinary support. Our
current vice chancellor, M. Omar Rahman, has also gone out of his way to
support and allow me to complete it. Monash University Malaysia in Kuala
Lumpur, where I taught during 2008–2010, helped to turn the thesis into this
book. The final revision of the book coincided with my 2013 Fellowship at the
Korean National University of Arts in Seoul, where Kim Soyoung and the Trans-
Asia Screen Culture Institute extended all kinds of cooperation.
Between the 1998 Film and History conference in Brisbane and the 2013 Asian
Cinema workshop in Singapore, I presented parts of this book in earlier forms at
various conferences in Dhaka, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Copenhagen, Amsterdam,
Erfurt, New Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and a few other places. My ideas were
challenged as well as sharpened through my interactions with so many scholars in
these places. I must acknowledge the enthusiasm and friendship that I received on
the way from a host of Asian cinema scholars, including Ravi Vasudevan, Ashish
Rajadhyaksha, Earl Jackson, Manjunath Pendakur, David Hanan, Shaoyi Sun,
Valentina Vitali, Brian Shoesmith, Koichi Iwabuchi, Jyotsna Kapur, S. V.
Srinivas, Lotte Hoek, Gaik Cheng Khoo, Benjamin McKay, Hassan Muthalib,
Ashley Ratnavibhushana, Anjali Roy, Anne Ciecko and Wong Tuck Chong.
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from Routledge as well as
the examiners of my doctoral thesis: Paul Willemen, Dipesh Chakrabarty and
Nabil Zuberi—all of whom wanted to see this published as a monograph. The
valuable suggestions forwarded by the reviewers and examiners were immensely
helpful to me, especially enabling me to think through some difficult theoretical
terrains. I also thank my colleagues at Routledge Asian Studies: Dorothea
Schaefter, Jillian Morrison and Rebecca Lawrence, who have been extraordin
arily patient and helpful during last few years when I took time to prepare the
manuscript.
I duly acknowledge that early versions of two sections from the book have
been previously published. These are, “Bangladesh Cinema: Native Resistance
and Nationalist Discourse,” in Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in
xvi Preface
a Global Frame, ed. Anne Tereska Ciecko (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006) and
“National Cinema and the Beginning of Film History in/of Bangladesh,” Screen-
ing the Past 11 (2000), URL: www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/
firstrelease/fr1100/rzfr11d.htm (last accessed in 2009).
Two people who are no longer with us would be happiest to see this book
published. These are my brother Rafiqul Hasan Nepi and my children’s “god
father” Wayne Levy. Nepi(bhai) was the one who, early on my journey, made
me promise that I would complete the project. Wayne and his family truly hosted
Disha and I in Melbourne. Wayne’s friendship is attached to this project from
beginning to end. My family, including my siblings and my in-laws, especially
my late father-in-law Obaidul Islam, have always inspired my research and
writing.
My mentors at the University of Dhaka, AAMS Arefin Siddique, Ahaduzzaman
M. Ali, Ali Riaz and Gitiara Nasreen, have been ever enthusiastic and helpful
with the project on its long journey. I also remember the late Alamgir Kabir and
Tareque Masud and record my gratitude to Morshedul Islam, Manzare Hassin
and Tanvir Mokammel—the stalwarts of Bangladesh independent cinema—who
introduced me to the world of image and sound, and how to look at it critically.
I list as the last, but not the least, our children—Athai Ariana and Inesh
Iravan—who missed me a lot whilst I worked on this project, but always made
my days with their smiles.
Introduction
The interaction of cinema with Bangladesh began at a time when there was no
“Bangladesh” at all. Film exhibition began here at the end of the 1890s and
silent film production began during the 1900s. Film as a newly-invented,
technology-based entertainment from Europe reached this land when it was the
eastern part of Bengal under British India. This was the “Bengal delta,” a
region “that roughly coincides with modern Bangladesh.”1 This was also the
time when the people of the delta started imagining a modern community iden-
tity that later led them in becoming a nation-state. During the mid to late twen-
tieth century, the area went through two national formations—through the
1947 partition of India the Bengal delta turned into the eastern wing of Paki-
stan state, and through the 1960s nationalist movements and 1971 liberation
war, it became an independent nation-state, “Bangladesh.” How has cinema,
an imported, “Western” cultural form, gone through a process of indigeniza-
tion in the Bengal delta since the 1890s? What were its connections and con-
tentions with the national and nationalist formations during this period of more
than a century? This book takes up these as central questions and addresses
them from various vantage points.
Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity then investigates the roles of a
non-Western, “national” film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and
identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. While cinema has been
adapted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh throughout the twentieth
and early twenty-first century, this is also the period for the articulation of
modern nationhood and cultural identity of/for Bengali Muslims, the majority
population living in the Bengal delta and for that matter also in Bangladesh.
Similar to the non-linear formation of the nation-state, cultural identities and
national modernity, this book is a narrative of an uneven process that produced
the idea of a cinema that can be marked as “Bangladesh cinema.” Here, I
question and problematize the very notion of Bangladesh cinema and also of
“Bangladesh,” one of the least discussed nation-spaces from the geopolitical area
often marked as the “non-West.” I use East Bengal, East Bengal/Pakistan and
East Pakistan, as well as Bangladesh and Bengal delta, to name this non-Western
nation-space, especially to denote how it represented different political-cultural
formations in different historical junctures.
2 Introduction
Going beyond the physical facts and figures on Bangladesh cinema, by taking
cinema as social institution, I propose a model of conceptualizing this cinema.
My aim is to situate the function of Bangladesh cinema texts, from production to
reception, within the broader social, political and cultural domain of twentieth-
century Bangladesh. I believe that,
Film and cinema . . . can only exist within social, economic, and cultural
parameters. . . . Film production and reception necessarily involve a series of
complex relations between cultural forms and structures, economic relations
within an industrial-commercial matrix, and the socio-political realities
within which production and circulation take place.2
Following this proposition, I look at the “relation between representation and

reception”3 of Bangladesh cinema. In order to analyze this cinema as a social

institution interacting with other social institutions, I understand Bangladesh
cinema as:
a site of discursive contestation for and among multiple, diverse, and unequal
constituencies; . . . a potentially unpredictable process due to overlaps and con-
junctures between different types of publicity and diverse publics; and . . . a
category containing a more comprehensive dimension for translating among
diverse publics that is grounded in material structures . . . .4
In this way, I take the dissection of the relation between cinema and “diverse
publics” as the prime task of this study on cinema and national identity in Ban
gladesh. The interaction between cinema and the ideas of nation and modernity
throughout the last century or more fostered complex modes of appropriation for
the film medium in Bangladesh—a process that I aim to understand and demon-
strate in this study. I take Bengali Muslims of the Bengal delta as the principal
actors in relation to cinema here. This is because of the “centrality of this merged
identity among the majority of the population.”5 Their identities—as Bengalis,
as Muslims, as Bengali-Muslims and later as Bangladeshis, Bengali-
Bangladeshis or Muslim-Bangladeshis—as shaped in different circumstances,
have played with and upon the roles and functions of the cinema here.
I focus upon various contestations and constructions that developed out of
such interactions between cinema and Bengali Muslims in different historical
“moments” as I go along. The emerging middle-class Bengali Muslims of colo-
nial East Bengal fought the hegemony of middle-class Bengali Hindus in
1910s–1940s Calcutta, for constructing and expressing a certain version of
Bengali-Muslim identity through cinema. Using this identity as a “cultural iden-
tity” of/for Bengali Muslims of the delta, the cultural–nationalist Bengali
Muslims in the 1950s and 1960s led the development of a vernacular film indus-
try in East Pakistan—the renamed East Bengal—under the new state of Pak
istan.6 This industry produced what may be termed as the second Bengali cinema
of the world (Calcutta being the first) which contributed to the sense of a
Introduction 3
v ernacular cultural modernity for Bengali Muslims—a modernity that was
rooted into and developed out of the East-Bengali cultural world. This paradigm
of local-born modernity was also closely related to the development of a new
form of identity among Bengali Muslims—what has been termed as “separate
Bengaliness”—an identity that was “distinctly ‘deltaic’: it was limited to East
Bengal/Bangladesh.”7 As the population of East Bengal/Pakistan started to
separate themselves from the larger “Bengali” identity as developed in colonial
Bengal, the imagination of such a new Bengali identity became important in late
twentieth-century Bangladesh.
I argue and demonstrate in this study that identity streams such as this new,
“deltaic” Bengali identity—as developed from the mid twentieth century
onwards, as well as the Bengali-Muslim identity that developed in early
twentieth-century East Bengal—consolidated a cultural-national modernity of/
for Bengali Muslims over last hundred years or so. This modernity—as a
counter-discourse to Muslim nationalism patronized by the Pakistan State and
also to Bengali modernity as developed in nineteenth-century (West) Bengal—
served as a major and continuing trend of national modernity in East Bengal/
Bangladesh.
Under the Bangladesh nation-state, cinema institutions and texts went through
commercialization during the later decades of the twentieth century. The indus-
trializing and homogenizing drives of the postcolonial state and the rise of local-
based capitalism gave rise to a vibrant national popular cinema in post-1971
Bangladesh. In the circumstances, the Dhaka-based Bengali cinema that
developed as a vernacular, “cultural” cinema during the 1950s and 1960s trans-
formed itself to meet state-national aspirations. This cinema increasingly shed
the cultural marks of Bengali-Muslim and delta-focused Bengali identities in
order to become a “Bangladeshi,” Bengali cinema. In opposition to the cultural-
national modernity that these identities propagated, the commercializing, popular
film industry that developed under the guidance and protection of the Bangla-
desh state of the recent decades largely advocated for what I termed nation-state
modernity. So this cinema, by constructing “Bangladeshi” identity as the one-
size-fits-all umbrella for all Bengali Muslims as well as non-Muslims and non-
Bengalis living in Bangladesh, worked towards imagining the sense of a
Bangladeshi modernity.
This pro-state process of forming political identity as the identity towards
nation-state modernity frustrated the pro-Bengali cultural nationalists. They
identified popular cinema as unsuitable and damaging to the flourishing of a cul-
tural modernity that they had envisaged for Bengali Muslims since the early
twentieth century. So, the cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims in 1980s to 2010s
Bangladesh—in opposing the formation of “Bangladeshi” modernity by popular
commercial cinema and its adjoining industry-based ‘art cinema’—patronized a
discourse of independent cinema, taking up notions of modernity and art cinema
from the West. Through various streams of independent cinemas, they utilized
the notion of art cinema to propagate a Bangladeshi art cinema on the world
stage—a “global cinema” that was successful in visualizing, producing and
4 Introduction
p romoting a certain “Bangladesh” for the westernized middle class in Bangla-
desh as well as for the art-house audience in the West.
In this way, during last hundred years or so, the interactions between cinema
and national modernity—in cultural-national or state-national forms—gave rise
to a large, vernacular national cinema called “Bangladesh cinema” in
postcolonial South Asia. From the 1960s, in terms of annual film production, it
turned out to be the larger of the two Bengali-language film industries in the
world (the other one is, of course, the Calcutta industry in India, which started
film production in the 1920s alongside other major South Asian film industries).
Addressing a Bengali-speaking “national” audience in a rapidly urbanizing
Bangladesh, the late-1970s Bangladesh film industry went on increasing its
annual production of films almost geometrically. For example, between 1979
and 1989, its annual production rose almost 60 percent (from 50 films in 1979 to
78 films in 1989).8 It registered 20 percent growth in next eight years, as the

annual film-production rate reached 92 in 1997 and again in 2000.9 If we take
1979 as the base year, the rate of annual film production exactly doubled in
2005, when the Bangladesh film industry reached the century mark and thus pro-
duced the highest number of films (100)10 in a given year. During the 1990s and
2000s, this industry produced 90 feature films on average each year. This annual
filmic crop positions Bangladesh cinema as a strong contender to the three major
South Asian cinemas—Hindi, Tamil and Telugu—each producing 150–200
films annually.11
More importantly, such a level (90 films) of annual film production marks
Bangladesh cinema as the most prolific South Asian cinema outside India—far
ahead of Pakistani and Sri Lankan national cinemas.12 This annual film-
production number also easily makes the Bangladesh film industry one of the ten
major national and regional film industries in Asia, if not in the world. However,
it did not excite as much discussion as might be expected.
Though Bangladesh cinema is one of the largest and most vibrant cinemas in
Asia and in the world, this is still one of the least studied national cinemas; it is
never researched in a scholarly manner utilizing contemporary methods and the-
ories of Film Studies. Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity is, then, the first
major effort that presents academic scholarship on multiple contours of this
cinema as a national cinema. This study on a non-Western, Asian vernacular
cinema can be seen as an early step towards fulfilling a long-standing gap. It is
the first endeavour to situate Bangladesh national cinema within the con-
temporary academic–theoretical context of cinema and media studies—espe-
cially within the ongoing debate on how to think about cinema and identity
formation in non-Western, Asian nation-spaces. Let us, then, take a short detour
to position this study on cinema and national identity in/of Bangladesh within
the context of Asian and South Asian Cinema Studies.
Introduction 5
Bangladesh cinema within Asian and South Asian Film
Studies
In global film and media studies, the study of Asian or non-Western national
cinemas is still an emerging area of research. Film cultures in the non-West, as
the “other” of Hollywood, started to be studied in Western academia from the
1980s. Monographs on Asian cinemas also started to appear during this period.
These include, Noel Burch’s To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in
Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), Barnouw and
Krishnaswamy’s Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Libera-
tion (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI press, 1982), Roy Armes’ Third World Film-
making and the West (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987) and
Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).
Scholarship of non-western or “Third World” national cinemas also got pub-
lished as edited volumes around the same time. These include Jim Pines and
Paul Willemen’s Questions of Third Cinema (BFI, 1989), Wimal Dissanayake’s
Cinema and Cutural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India and China
(University Press of America, 1988), John Downing’s Film and Politics in the
Third World (Praeger, 1987), Chris Berry’s Perspectives on Chinese Cinema
(BFI, 1985/1991) and Michael Chanan’s Twenty-five Years of the New Latin
American Cinema (BFI/Channel 4 Television, 1983). John Lent’s The Asian
Film Industry (Christopher Helm, 1990) and Dissanayake’s second volume,
Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1994)
furthered this trend of anthologising Asian national cinemas.
As a result of these pioneering efforts in the 1980s, Western academia saw an
increasing surge of scholarly monographs on Asian national cinemas in the
1990s and 2000s. However, it is possible to locate a “David and Goliath” trend
within these studies. In other words, the studies on Asian national cinemas can
be demarcated into majority and minority groups depending on their objectives
and spatial-temporal coverage. The small-to-medium film-producing nations
such as Bangladesh, which host vernacular-language cinemas and largely depend
on “national” audiences for their continuity, received much less attention than
the larger nations with older film industries that had been serving as transnational
popular culture. Researchers of Asian film culture seemed to be more interested
in analyzing the larger national cinemas of East Asia as well as major popular
industries such as Hong Kong and “Bollywood,” that is, the Indian, Hindi-
language popular film industry based in Bombay (now Mumbai).
One can easily locate a number of studies that deal with the two larger and
older national cinemas of East Asia: the cinemas of Japan and the People’s
Republic of China. A select list of books in this category may include, Rey
Chow’s Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Con-
temporary Chinese Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1995), Darrell William
Davis’ Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese
6 Introduction
Film (Columbia University Press, 1996), T. Weisser and Y. Weisser’s Japanese
Cinema Essential Handbook (Vital, 1998), Jerome Silbergeld’s China into Film:
Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Reaktion, 1999), Mark
Schilling’s Contemporary Japanese Film (Weatherhill, 1999), Donald Richie’s
One Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema (Kodansha International, 2001), Peter
High’s The Imperial Screen (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), Poshek Fu’s
Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford
University Press, 2003), Chris Berry’s Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China:
The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 2004),
Yingjin Zhang’s Chinese National Cinema (Routledge, 2004), and Chris Berry
and Mary Farquhar’s China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2006).
The other group in Asian Film Studies highlights the transnational popular
film industries of Asia: Bollywood and the Hong Kong film industries. This
group consists of an enormous number of academic projects as developed in last
two decades. Some of these are: Chidananda Das Gupta’s The Painted Face:
Studies in India’s Popular Cinema (Orient Longman, 1991), Sumita Chakravar-
ty’s National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–87 (University of Texas
Press, 1993), Bey Logan’s Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan, 1995),
Stephen Teo’s Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997),
Ackbar Abbas’ Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Madhava Prasad’s Ideology of the
Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Oxford University Press, 1998), Gokuls-
ing and Dissanayake’s Indian Popular Cinema: Narrative of Cultural Change
(Staffordshire, UK: Trentham Books, 1998), Fareed Kazmi’s The Politics of
India’s Conventional Cinema: Imaging a Universe, Subverting a Multiverse
(London and New Delhi: Sage, 1999), David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong:
Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2000), Fu and Desser’s edited volume The Cinema of Hong Kong:
History, Arts, Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Vijay
Mishra’s Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (London: Routledge, 2002),
Dwyer and Patel’s Cinema India: the Visual Culture of the Hindi Film (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), Lalitha Gopalan’s Cinema of
Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI,
2002), Yingchu Chu’s Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self
(London and New York: Routledge, 2003), Jyotika Virdi’s The Cinematic Imag-
ination: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2003), Manjunath Pendakur’s Indian Popular Cinema: Indus-
try, Ideology and Consciousness (New Jersey: Hampton, 2003), Tejaswini
Ganti’s Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (London and New
York: Routledge, 2004), Rajinder Dudrah’s Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the
Movies (London and New Delhi: Sage, 2006), Rachel Dwyer’s Filming the
Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema (Abingdon: Oxon and New York: Routledge,
2006) and Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From
Bollywood to the Emergency (Tulika, 2009).
Introduction 7
While the works in these two groups represent the majority of the category
called “Asian cinema,” in the process, the study of vernacular-market, younger
Asian national cinemas (like Bangladesh cinema) have been pushed to the
margin of Asian Film Studies. Only a handful of Asian cinema books have been
published so far that peek beyond the heavyweights like the cinemas of Japan,
China, Hong Kong and India/Bollywood. These books comprise the “third
stream” that focuses on the workings of younger and smaller national cinemas
that have, in most cases, bordered, vernacular “national” or regional markets
with limited global existence. Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity is thus
to be added to this emergent current of national cinema studies. The examples of
this trend include, Emmanuel Reyes’ Notes on Philippine Cinema (Manila: De
La Salle University Press, 1988), Karl Heider’s Indonesian Cinema: National
Culture on Screen (University of Hawaii Press, 1991), Sara Dickey’s Cinema
and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Krishna
Sen’s Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order (London: Zed Books, 1994),
Theaodore Baskaran’s The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema
(Chennai: East West Books, 1996), Mushtaq Gazdar’s Pakistan Cinema:
1947–1997 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), Hyangjin Lee’s Con-
temporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 2000), Dissanayake and Rathnavibhushana’s Pro-
filing Sri Lankan Cinema (Colombo: Asian Film Center, 2000), Van Der Heide’s
Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), Richard Tapper’s The New
Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London: I.B. Tauris,
2002), Fran Martin’s Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese
Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2003), Hamid Reza Sadr’s Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2006), Gaik Cheng Khoo’s Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian
Film and Literature (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006),
Selvaraj Velayutham’s (edited volume) Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of
India’s Other Film Industry, (Routledge, 2008), Bhaskar Sarkar’s Mourning the
Nation: Indian Cinema in Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009) and
S.V. Srinivas’ Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao
(Oxford University Press, 2009). Sharing the “third space” created by these
studies on vernacular-based, mostly youthful national and regional cinemas,
Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity—in conversation with these works on
approach and methodology—presents an informed and theorized portrayal of
another such cinema from South Asia.
Within South Asian Film Studies, this study again represents a marginal
stream—a smaller group of works that deal with non-Bollywood cinemas. There
is no doubt that the publication of a huge number of books on Bollywood in
recent years made this Indian–Hindi cinema the “global” cinema of South Asia.
This has created a situation where only a few national cinema books that deal
with non-Bollywood or non-Hindi film cultures in South Asian national/regional
contexts get published. This induced Srinivas, to comment—a bit sarcastically—
8 Introduction
that in August 2008, when he searched online book distributor Amazon.com for
Bollywood as well as Telugu cinema, he found 2,700 entries for Bollywood and
only 30 for the latter.13 Velayutham, when introducing his edited volume Tamil
Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, rightly notes that:
“the idea of Indian cinema is profoundly determined, reproduced and articulated
through the lens of Bollywood.”14 In order to emphasize Bollywood’s dominance
over Tamil and other South Indian cinemas, he terms Tamil cinema as “India’s
other film industry” in the title of the book itself. While Bollywood is defined as
the Indian cinema in many cases, the term “Indian cinema” sometimes includes
a host of cinemas from/within the nation-state and thus may enlist the South
Indian cinemas and the Bengali cinema of West Bengal. However, sometimes
the term stands for the “South Asian cinema,” effectively pushing the cinemas of
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal out of the margin of South Asia.
Such an overwhelming centrality of Indian cinema within South Asian

cinema is quite visible in many anthologies of “world cinema,” in which, quite
often, India is the only entrant from the whole of South Asia. Sometimes if the
other cinemas of South Asia are represented, these are provided with little space
and some piecemeal discussion, only focusing on some noted art cinema films.15
As a result, quite misleadingly “Indian Cinema” is in vogue as shorthand for
“South Asian cinema(s),” especially in the metropolitan West. Many people con-
sider Indian cinema, or more misleadingly, only Bollywood cinema or Hindi
cinema, as the South Asian cinema. Opposing such homogenizing tendencies,
this study represents a step towards diversifying the notion of South Asian
cinema, alongside the studies like Pakistan Cinema and Profiling Sri Lankan
Cinema, which were published more than a decade ago.
Approach and structure of the book

I study Bangladesh cinema here within a theorized framework. I believe that this
cinema merits a well-devised framework, one adequate to its cultural and polit-
ical complexity that can position this cinema with and alongside the major meth-
odological and theoretical concerns of contemporary film and media studies. In
Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity, therefore, I utilize an interpretive
mode of national cinema study. By relating my analysis with the positions articu-
lated by well-known scholars of modernity and nationalism, I formulate a theor-
etical framework in which such a cinema in relation to the national can be
situated and comprehended as a distinct cultural practice.
For the methodology of the project, I combine textual analyses, library
research and field-level primary research that enable me to merge theoretical
concepts with empirical findings. For example, I present textual readings of
films, combined with analyses of the social and political parameters of film pro-
duction and reception in Bangladesh. This is because, drawing on Elsaesser, I
believe that a film is constructed on both the intratextual and extratextual level.
A film exists in the text itself as well as outside the text in other discourses like
exhibition, publicity, journalism, or even laws and parliamentary affairs.16 While
Introduction 9
I am deconstructing these texts, I am not analyzing them as transcendental texts,
instead focusing on their contexts of production and circulation as well as their
intra- and intertextual relationships; I also provide interdiscursive interpretations
of these texts.
I understand that such interpretations primarily rely on my subject position as
researcher and the discourses to which I have access and through which my sub-
jectivity is created. In other words, I interpret these responses through my own
subject position as well as the theoretical frameworks within which I attempt to
situate this study of Bangladesh cinema. Placing textual analyses of various
kinds of texts within a larger context, I go against the empiricist–teleological
trend of researching Asian film industries. In this way I present an engaged cul-
tural history of Bangladesh cinema, combining film texts, film-makers, audi-
ences and film institutions along with social, political and cultural events and
trends. This history is built on the dialog between the data I came across, my
own discursive practices and the texts and discourses of Bangladesh cinema and
other Asian film industries. While at first glance these may appear disjointed, at
a deeper level I articulate them to form a study that can make visible the para-
doxes inherent in a postcolonial national cinema of South Asia that developed in
interaction with a non-Western sense of national modernity. In order to accom-
plish this, I draw upon the academic literatures of cinema and cultural studies,
media and communication studies, Asian studies, South Asian history and post-
colonial theory as well as on popular writing and journalism of/on Bangladesh
cinema.
So, I examine Bangladesh cinema not only through its texts, but also through
its institutions and spectators in interaction with nation, state and modernity. I
analyze the cinema in/of Bangladesh as a vehicle of national modernity and
show how slippery and constructed the “national” of a non-Western cinema and
its history can be. Therefore, I identify the tensions between and within the
national and the transnational of this Asian cinema. On the one hand, I decon-
struct the nation-building discourse of the Bangladeshi state and its relationship
with the film industry. I identify the fissures and gaps in the “nationalization”
process of the film industry led by such a nationalist discourse. On the other
hand, I strengthen the idea that the study of Asian national film industries needs
to be “de-nationalized” as/in a trans-Asian frame. We need to look at these
national cinemas as transnational discourses beyond immediate temporal and
spatial borders.
Following up on this framework, Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity
through seven chapters explores how the conflict among different social groups
turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities throughout the
twentieth century and thereafter. Looking from various spatial and temporal
vantage points, these chapters identify the ways in which I rethink the relation-
ship between cinema, nation and modernity in Bangladesh. In the process, this
study illustrates the deep connections between film production and reception in
Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim
identity.
10 Introduction
I build the conceptual and methodological paradigm of the study in the first
two chapters. I review several methodological and theoretical stances linked
with film-historiography and national cinema in Chapter 1. This chapter includes
an appraisal of major film-historiographic modes as well as of the existing liter-
ature on Bangladesh cinema. This body of work includes historical surveys, crit-
ical appreciation and popular writing about cinema. Here, I analyze the major
methods of film-historiography as developed in the West and then situate Ban
gladeshi film-historiography within the international practices of cinema histo-
ries. I critique linear, teleological and empiricist histories of national cinemas
and present my rationale for an interpretive and non-linear history framed by
wider contextual discourses largely ignored in the nationalist and aestheticist
histories of cinema and nation. Thus I begin by clarifying my position as a his-
torian of non-Western national cinema as well as the particular kind of history of
Bangladesh cinema that I am presenting in this book.

The second chapter lays out a conceptual framework for studying a non-
Western national cinema like Bangladesh cinema. By questioning, problematiz-
ing and reframing concepts like nation and cinema, it continues as well as
deepens and widens the critique presented in Chapter 1, of the empiricist and
nationalist modes of film-historiography. I examine the possible ways of under-
standing both cinema and Bangladesh and thus position Bangladesh cinema as a
social institution, which is part of successive colonial and postcolonial public
spheres. To situate Bangladesh cinema as a public sphere, I draw on the discus-
sions on this concept by Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Miriam
Hansen and other contemporary scholars. Here I establish my main argument
that Bangladesh cinema work towards the construction and revision of modern
identities for Bengali Muslims as well as for the nation called Bangladesh
throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century. This cinema, as a social
practice, then became engaged in the imagining of certain versions of national
modernity operating within various time frames.
In the rest of the study, from Chapter 3 to Chapter 7, I demonstrate how
cinema in Bangladesh—under different political and cultural conditions—has
been engaged in the construction of various identity frameworks as well as in the
shaping of different templates of national modernity for Bengali Muslims and
Bangladesh.
Chapter 3 starts this journey by analyzing the early efforts of Bengali
Muslims in indigenizing a Western import like cinema. I revisit the early-to-mid-
twentieth century, a time when Bangladesh was the eastern part of Bengal under
British India. I review here how cinema emerged as a cultural institution in East
Bengal society by re-reading its negotiations with dominant national-historical
constructions. In particular, here I interrogate why and how a specific event of
Bangladesh cinema history has been taken for granted and repeatedly used as the
beginning of this national cinema by Bangladeshi film historians. This happened,
as the film historians en masse believed in a certain notion of cultural identity for
Bengali Muslims and also in a particular kind of national modernity for the
Bangladesh nation-state. They start their histories with The Face and the Mask,
Introduction 11
the “first” sound feature produced by a Bengali Muslim in East Pakistan in 1956.
They unanimously highlight The Face and the Mask as the “beginning” of the
Bangladesh film history. No scholar substantially analyzed what happened
before that and how Bengali Muslims of the Bengal delta appropriated cinema as
a vehicle of cultural-national modernity during the early twentieth century. I re-
evaluate the importance of The Face in relation to the broader socio-political and
cultural agenda of that time. I identify that Bangladeshi film historians over-
looked or undermined earlier efforts at producing, distributing and exhibiting
silent and sound shorts locally as well as of the exhibition of foreign films, as
these efforts did not meet the demands of imagining their version of modernity.
Only if we can look beyond the governing conditions and circumstances especially
tailored by such cultural identity and national modernity, can we find a number of
under-appreciated early efforts in the history of Bangladesh national cinema. I re-
read these other alternatives and point out that any of these also could be seen as
the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh, provided these are considered from dif-
ferent national/historical vantage points.
In order to add a spatial dimension to Chapter 3, in Chapter 4 I demonstrate
the tension between Bengali cultural modernity and emerging middle-class of
Bengali Muslims in early twentieth-century Bengal. Film-making in the 1920s to
1940s Calcutta film industry, the only Bengali-language film industry at that
time and one of the two leading film-production centers in colonial India, was
affected by a modernity that was initiated by the reformist bourgeois Hindu
Bhadraloks in nineteenth-century Calcutta. I examine here the relationship of the
Bengali cinema of that time to this Bengali/Hindu cultural modernity as
developed in Bengal between British colonialism and Muslim modernism. I
demonstrate how this cinema, by producing and circulating reformist “social”
films and mythologicals, represented a Hindu bhadralok public sphere and mar-
ginalized the rural-based Bengali-Muslim identity both at the textual level of
films and labor practices in the film industry. Here, I also show how such a delta-
focused identity struggled and vied for some visibility in the Bhadralok-led
Bengali cinema of Calcutta of the 1930s and 1940s.
Chapter 5 takes the issue of such identity construction further. Here, I illus-
trate how the same identity of Bengali Muslims that is connected to the ethos of
the Bengal delta drove the creation of the second Bengali cinema in post-1947
East Pakistan. In order to get to the core of the chapter, that is, how this ver-
nacular cinema developed a Bengali-Muslim modernity, I first probe the strug-
gles of the rural-born Bengali Muslim middle class toward the formation of a
distinct Bengali-Muslim identity in the early-to-mid-twentieth century in opposi-
tion to Bengali-Hindu cultural identity and pan-Indian Muslim nationalism.
Here, outlining how the rural Bengali Muslims in the early twentieth century
developed a vernacular middle class among themselves, I analyze the efforts of
this middle class to use cultural forms such as Bengali periodicals and novels in
propagating a Bengali-Muslim identity in the 1900s–1940s. I then go on to
investigate how the development of a Bengali cinema in East Pakistan con-
tributed to the formation of the cultural-national modernity of Bengali Muslims
12 Introduction
in the 1950s and 1960s. Here, I first locate the context for the development of a
vernacular film industry of/for Bengali Muslims. After detailing the debates and
desires around how such institutionalization happened, I look into the textual
worlds of two of the earliest films produced in this industry. These films are,
Mukh o Mukhosh (The Face and the Mask, 1956) and Asiya (Asiya, 1960).
Analyzing these texts, I propose that the early films of the East Pakistani film
industry were committed to visualizing a rural, idyllic East Bengal contributing
towards a cultural modernity focused on the Bengal delta region.
In the later part of the study, I move to the “Bangladesh” phase of Bangladesh
cinema. In the last two chapters, I locate the role of cinema in post-1971 Bangla-
desh. During the last four decades of independent Bangladesh, the idea of nation
has been in negotiation with three identities—Bengali, Bengali-Muslim and
Muslim—a process that began in early twentieth-century East Bengal, as out-
lined in earlier chapters. I contended that the idea of “Bengaliness” was strongly
incorporated into a rural-linked, delta-focused version of Bengali-Muslim iden-
tity during the early-to-mid twentieth century. The creation of Bangladesh as a
nation-state also brought in a new identity—Bangladeshiness. The continuous
contest and overlap of these identities in different ways led to the formation of a
certain national modernity in which the Bangladesh nation-state played an
important part. Therefore, in the industrialization of popular cinema, the role of
the nation-state was quite visible.
The role of the nation-state was so central in shaping a Bangladeshi popular
film industry that, in Chapter 6, I position this popular cinema as part of state/
national modernity during the late 1970s to early 2010s. Here, I identify how
this cinema, amid rapid urbanization, globalization and commercialization,
turned itself into a vernacular, but profit-making, popular-culture industry. In
order to demonstrate the relationship between this industry and nation-state mod-
ernity, I take a strategy of going from the institutional context to the textual
mechanisms of the Bangladesh film industry. Beginning with the analysis of the
political and economic contexts in and through which this industry functioned
and expanded in recent decades, I assess the homogenizing efforts of the state
and local capitalists directed to devise a national, popular cinema in 1970s–
2000s Bangladesh. I identify three different initiatives on the part of the nation-
state that transformed this cinema into a “Bangladeshi” popular cinema. These
are: a ban on the screening of South Asian films in local cinemas, the imposition
of a taxation system that helps film exhibitors and the seed-funding of popular
films through the state-run Film Development Corporation (FDC) studio. How
these state/national drives shaped and maintained the vernacular nature of this
cinema for the last four decades constitutes the core of my analysis here. I end
Chapter 6 by assessing how the texts of this cinema respond to the state’s nation-
alizing efforts. Utilizing representative texts of the major genres of this cinema, I
focus on how these contemporary texts at once standardize as well contest the
notion of Bangladeshi nationhood on screen.
In Chapter 7, the very last part of the book, I move towards art cinema dis-
course and its globalizing attempts. Here I outline the genealogy and workings
Introduction 13
of the notion of art cinema that developed in various forms and shapes in post-
1971 Bangladesh. With no visible support from the state, or sometimes opposing
its wishes, this recent discourse took an ambitious turn to reach the audiences of
“international” art cinema, sometimes called “world cinema.” I ask how the
cultural-modernist middle classes here produced and circulated an independent
cinema during the 1980s to 2010s, and also succeeded in taking a version of it to
the global arena. I then demonstrate how these cinemas represent different
methods of Western-educated, cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims in creating a
discourse of art in the realm of cinema. More importantly, I position the devel-
opment of such cinemas in contemporary Bangladesh as being in the process of
indigenizing the understanding of art cinema from the West. I therefore trace
how these independent cinemas, embody the cultural-national aspirations of the
national middle class, the cultural-modernists who used the “Western” notion of
art cinema. I identify two different, but interconnected and sometimes over-
lapping, trends of independent cinema in Bangladesh that I detail in the course
of my analysis. The first one, that I call “artisanal” art cinema, developed as and
through what has been termed the “Short Film Movement” in 1980s and 1990s
Bangladesh. The other trend that developed out of this artisanal mode during the
last two decades or so may be called a global Bangladeshi cinema. I outline how
this trend successfully appropriated the textual and institutional norms of “world
cinema,” as privileged in international film festivals, as well as how it achieved
its presence on the global stage, especially showcasing a new ethnography of
“Bangladesh.”
Notes
1 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), p. xxv.
2 Annette Hamilton, “Cinema and Nation: Dilemmas of Representation in Thailand,” in
Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 141.
3 Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere,”
in Linda Williams (ed.) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1994), p. 140.
4 Miriam Hansen “Foreword,” in Oskar Negt and Alexandar Kluge, Public Sphere and
Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Classical-bourgeois and Proletarian Public
Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Edition in English 1993/First
Published in German 1972), p. xxvii.
5 Van Schendel (2009) p. 38.
6 East Bengal was officially renamed “East Pakistan” in 1956.
7 Van Schendel (2009) pp. 183–4.
8 Mirza T. Quader, Bangladesh Film Industry (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), p. 211.
9 Manik Zaman, “Now We Are All Waiters in the Film World,” Jai Jai Din 14.13
(December 30, 1997): 29; Juton Chowdhury, “Bengali Cinema: Annual Review
2001,” Weekly 2000 4.33 (January 4, 2002): 78.
10 “The Film Business in 2005,” Prothom Alo (December 29, 2005) p. 23.
11 Velayutham claims that annually 150–200 Tamil films are produced in Madras only,
and Tamil and Telugu film industries together produce 70 percent of the films annu-
ally produced in India. See “Introduction,” in Selvaraj Velayutham (ed.), Tamil
14 Introduction
Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry (London and New
York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 2 and 13. Srinivas also claims that “the Telugu film
industry is the second largest in India.” See S. V. Srinivas, Megastar: Chiranjeevi and
Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009),
p. xviii.
12 Chaudhuri mentions the annual film production in Pakistan as numbering 80. See
Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005), p. 151. She and other commentators on Sri Lankan cinema did not
present such numbers for the annual production of Sri Lankan cinema films. See
Wimal Dissanayake, “Sri Lanka: Art, Commerce and Cultural Modernity,” in Anne
Ciecko (ed.) Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006) pp. 108–19. In a personal communication, the
founder of the Asian Film Center in Sri Lanka, Ashley Ratnabhibushana, mentioned
that the annual production of Sri Lankan cinema was 20–25 films each year.
13 S.V. Srinivas, Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxv.

14 Selvaraj Velayutham (ed.) Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film
Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 1.
15 For example, see Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Here two chapters (out of eight) are devoted to
South Asian cinema, namely, “South Asian Cinema” and “Indian Cinema.” Other
than a separate chapter on Indian cinema, the 18-page chapter on South Asian cinema
(pp. 137–55) also discusses Indian cinema, allocating a total of four pages for the
three non-Indian national cinemas of South Asia (Sri Lanka, Pakistan and
Bangladesh).
16 Thomas Elsaesser, “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema,” in Patricia
Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (eds.) Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices (Frederick,
MD: University Publications of America, 1984) p. 52.
1 Methods in film historiography
Towards an interpretive history of
Bangladesh cinema
This study investigates how cinema as a social institution functions in a post

colonial society, namely Bangladesh. In this study my attempt is to rethink the

history of Bangladesh cinema in a new frame. This chapter is the first step
towards such rewriting. The reframing that I propose here lays the foundation
for an interpretive history of Bangladesh cinema that emphasizes change over
continuity.
The project of writing a history of a non-Western national cinema like Bang
ladesh cinema encompasses a number of theoretical problems at different levels
of its inquiry. As Philip Rosen puts it,
. . . the study of a national cinema would always have to be based on three
conceptualizations:
1 . . . how a large number of superficially differentiated texts can be asso

ciated in a regularized . . . intertextuality in order to form a coherency, a
“national cinema”;
2 a conceptualization of a nation as a kind of minimally coherent entity . . .;
3 some conceptualization of what is traditionally called “history” or “his
toriography.” 1
In the present study I attempt to articulate the three conceptualizations Rosen

proposes. I work through these in a reverse order. In this chapter I deal with the
third problem Rosen forwards: the ways to conceptualize a history of Bangla
desh cinema. I shall address the second and first problems—conceptualizations
of nationhood and national cinema—in Chapter 2.
The kind of history of Bangladesh cinema I propose here attempts to
combine theoretical and empirical methodologies that are usually utilized quite
separately in Film Studies. As I see this history as a discourse, it is certainly not
a definitive picture of the past of Bangladesh cinema. This study is rather a por
trayal of my interaction with the past and the present of this cinema. It repres
ents the dialog I was able to build between the data I came across and my own
discursive practices, my mode of inquiry and other histories and narratives of
Bangladesh cinema.
I try to look at the cinema of Bangladesh in its entirety, from the production
to the reception of films and their relationships and interactions with other social
institutions and discourses. Therefore, I combine textual, intertextual and con
textual analyses of this cinema. Here I attempt to delineate the complex role of
cinema in constructing, disseminating and interacting with contested notions of
cultural identity and national modernity for Bengali Muslims. I approach this
cinema—borrowing the words of Moran and O’Regan—“as a series of different
discursive constructions, . . . the discourses occupying a series of different insti
tutional sites.”2
This history of Bangladesh cinema emphasizes discontinuities, recognizing that
historical cause is non-linear and change is non-evolutionary. For this reason, I
focus on a number of key film texts, institutions, personalities, trends and events in
Bangladesh cinema history rather than imposing a linear model of evolution of this
cinema. Situating these various “cases” and “moments” within a suitable theoret
ical framework, I intend to make visible what were either invisible or beyond the
reach of simple continuities illustrated in most film histories produced in Bangla
desh and elsewhere. This history of Bangladesh cinema that covers the whole of
the twentieth century as well as the first decade of the twenty-first century, demon
strates that Bengali-Muslim middle classes within the nation-state frameworks of
East Bengal/Pakistan and Bangladesh utilized cinema to define various identities
towards forming particular kinds of “national” and/or cultural modernities.
I begin this chapter with a review of different modes of perceiving and think
ing about cinema in various junctions of nation and modernity in Bangladesh
through the literatures published on cinema during the last eight decades. I
examine how film scholarship began here and why a trend of Bangladesh film
historiography began as late as the 1970s and 1980s. I first critique the survey
histories of Bangladesh cinema assessing their strength and weaknesses. In order
to situate Bangladeshi film-historiography within the international practices of
cinema histories, I then review the major ways of producing film-historiography
in the West—looking at practices both for “Western” and non-Western/Asian
national cinema. In this way, I clarify my position as a film-historian and outline
the particular kind of history of Bangladesh cinema presented in this book.
Three discourses of film scholarship

Film scholarship is still an underdeveloped field in Bangladesh. Even today there
is no well-equipped formal place to study cinema. While a few scattered attempts
at film-making training are visible, Film Studies as such is largely absent in
Bangladesh. Nowhere in Bangladesh is there a film institute or Film Studies
department capable of delivering fully-fledged training on film production or
film research at a contemporary global standard.3 Still, film scholarship has a
long history here. Cinema has been studied here since the late 1930s through
various informal means.
Film scholarship was published in Bangladesh as various kinds of literatures
on cinema during the last eight decades. These literatures on cinema of/in
Methods in film historiography 17
angladesh—published mostly from Dhaka and in Bengali—record lively evid
B
ence of how the local population in a nationalizing and urbanizing non-Western
setting appropriated this “Western” medium. These publications cannot be con
sidered as academic scholarship per se. Because most publications on Bangladesh
cinema make data presentations in the simplest manner, some are opinionated texts
full of claims and without evidence. However, these works’ importance lies in the
fact that, together, they established a vibrant forum of discussion on cinema in a
society where cinema has largely been seen as mere entertainment that never can
attract any serious, scholarly attention. Over the last eight decades, writing and
publication on the cinema of/in Bangladesh took the shape of three different
modes: popular journalism, critical appreciation and empiricist histories. Though
there are some overlaps, these three trends of film scholarship developed in Bang
ladesh in a fairly chronological manner.4 The early mode—journalistic writing and
publishing on cinema—began in the late 1930s. It continues today, in most cases

to meet the everyday need of filling the pages of newspapers and magazines with
popular items. The second mode—critical appreciation—started in the early 1960s
and is most visible in film club periodicals and anthologies authored by film club
activists. Empiricist research and historical works on Bangladesh cinema form a
newer trend, with such works being published only from the late 1970s. In the
absence of a well-developed institutional structure of cinema study in Bangladesh,
these three modes of publication made possible a certain kind of film scholarship
here. Below, I appraise these texts on cinema published in Bangladesh (and East
Bengal) in the last eight decades. After analyzing two early discourses, namely
journalism and critical appreciation, I move on to investigate how and when the
trend of film-historiography began here.
Popular journalism
Popular journalism discourse on cinema was introduced in Chitrakala (lit. picture
art), the first film monthly of the then East Bengal, first published in 1933, from
the famous Rooplal house of old Dhaka.5 Before that, in the 1920s, a number of
such film magazines, published from Calcutta and in Bengali, enjoyed a good cir
culation in East Bengal under British India.6 After East Pakistan was established,
journalistic writing flourished quickly through a number of film magazines like
Cinema, Chayabani, Udayan, Rupachaya and Chitrali, published from Dhaka,
Chittagong and Bogra in the early 1950s.7 Cinema was the first film monthly that
also survived the longest among these cine monthlies. Fazlul Huq published this
magazine first from Bogra in 1950, and then from Dhaka during 1951–1957.8 The
Observer Group, publisher of the Daily Observer—a reputable English daily of
East Pakistan and Bangladesh—started publishing Chitrali in 1953, the first film
weekly of (then) East Pakistan. For next few decades it served as the foremost
film magazine here. The Ittefaq Group, publisher of the widely circulated Bengali
daily Ittefaq, started publishing another film weekly—titled Purbani—in 1965.
During the 1970s and 1980s, it turned out to be a true rival to Chitrali in popular
ity and layout. Alamgir Kabir, one of the most able commentators of Bangladesh
cinema during the 1960s to 1980s, noted the approximate circulation of Chitrali
to be 80,000 in 1979. He claimed a figure of 70,000 for Purbani.9 In Bangladesh,
even in the last decade, the total readership for the ten most circulated newspapers
is less than 1.5 million10 and the circulation of the most popular daily is around
0.20–0.45 million only.11 In the circumstances, the circulation figures of these two
film weeklies (0.15 million in total) in the late-1970s indicate a popular trend of
cinema appreciation fostered through journalistic writing. We also need to con
sider that these film magazines were well read, being shared not only among the
members of a family but also their neighbours. Thus Chitrali and Purbani led
popular journalism on Bangladesh cinema throughout the 1950s to the 1980s. A
few other strong film magazines joined the band wagon—Jhinuk in 1970, Nipun
in 1975, Tarokalok in 1982, Anandabichitra in 1986, Anandabhuban in 1996 and
Anandadhara in 1998. The early 2000s saw the emergence of three new fort
nightly magazines on cinema and popular culture: Anando Binodon (2000), Bion-
odon (2002) and Ananda Alo (2004).12 Today, thus a host of such Bengali
magazines (weeklies, fortnightlies and monthlies) on popular cinema and tele
vision are published and circulated in and around the cities and small towns.
All the national dailies in Bengali and English also devote one or more sec
tions to gossip and news about the film and television industry, a trend that also
started in the early 1950s. Quader has listed 17 Bengali and six English dailies in
1993 that were publishing a special “entertainment” section focusing on cinema
and popular culture.13 Gayen and Bilkis found in a 2007 study that film reporting
occupies more than 26 percent of the entertainment pages of four leading
Bengali dailies.14 While the dailies have become important sites of popular
journalism on film and television, magazines on popular culture are also well
read, especially in rural areas. The 1998 National Media Survey placed two
magazines on popular visual media, Chitro Bangla (lit. the pictures of Bengal)
and Ananda Bichitra (lit. entertainment varieties), among the five most popular
magazines of Bangladesh alongside three political magazines.15 In 2008,
researchers found that three of the most widely read magazines in rural areas are
those that are about film and television (namely Binodon Bichitra, Ananda Alo
and Tarokalok).16
The popular-journalism mode of writing on Bangladesh cinema attempts two
tasks. First, it reviews newly released feature films and, second, it reports on the
overall situation or particular aspects of film production and, sometimes of film
exhibition in Bangladesh. Alongside film reviews and reports on film production,
the trivial happenings of film and television stars and other important personal
ities also cover significant space in newspapers and magazines. Thus the popular-
journalism mode records anecdotes—at first sight insignificant events in
Bangladesh film industry—that can be analyzed in relation to the larger context in
order to illuminate larger questions, as is sometimes attempted in this book. The
reviews, reports and anecdotes on popular cinema at home and abroad (e.g. Bol
lywood and Hollywood) still cover a substantial portion of the “entertainment”
pages of the numerous Bengali and English dailies, as well as of popular culture
magazines published in Bangladesh today. Though this trend of journalistic
writing presents a superficial glimpse of Bangladesh cinema, it has succeeded in
reaching the ordinary readership and thus reflects the popular notion of perceiving
and indigenizing cinema.
Critical appreciation
As an alternative to the popular-journalism mode, a more serious and critical
mode developed in relation to, if not as a result of, the development of what I
would call “the film club discourse” during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the situ
ation in most countries, the cine club movement here took upon itself the task of
initiating a serious mode of cinema study, alongside creating a sizeable clan of
discerning audiences. The discourse developed through a number of events
related to the appreciation of cinema as an art medium that happened in Dhaka
in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the establishment of the first film club of
Pakistan—the Pakistan Film Society (PFS)17 in Dhaka in 1963 and the establish
ment of the Dhaka Film Institute, a short-lived, small-scale private film institute
by London-returned Alamgir Kabir in the late 1960s, helped to start a film appre
ciation discourse. Later, the development of a number of new film societies
during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the founding of the Bangladesh Film
Archives in 1978 and film workshops run here in the early 1980s led by Alamgir
Kabir, strengthened this discourse. The film clubs, in the absence of a state-
funded film academy or institute during last five decades, served as settings that
can be seen as small film study centers. Through sporadic film appreciation
courses organized by film societies between the 1970s and 2000s, young and not
so young cineastes could watch European and American film masterpieces. In
this way, the film club discourse created an aestheticist perspective on local and
international cinema through various means. The film club activists, a part of the
westernized, English-educated middle class in Bangladesh, sought ways of dis
seminating such aesthetic–critical commentary on cinema, especially to high
light the art cinema films of European origin throughout the 1960s and 1990s.
They started publishing their aestheticist thoughts on cinema on at least three
fronts. First, they started writing film reviews in daily newspapers and weekly/
fortnightly magazines and second, they published specialized but irregular film
(club) periodicals. Third, some noted film club activists authored and published
anthologies that discussed some aspects of Bangladesh cinema and the work of a
select group of film-makers of Western (largely European) art cinemas.
A handful of film critics trained in film club settings started using film review
sections of popular newspapers and magazines as sites of critical exploration of
cinematic aesthetics in the 1960s. These reviewers largely felt their mission to
be the harsh criticism of popular films and the sympathetic praising of art cinema
films. Alamgir Kabir, the veteran art cinema film-maker and film-historian-critic
initiated this small but distinct stream in the late 1960s by reviewing con
temporary popular films in Weekly Holiday, an influential English-language
newspaper of that time. Later, some other film critics used newspaper pages to
produce serious reviews and critiques. Two of these are Sheikh Niamat Ali and
Mahmuda Chowdhury. Ali, a well-known art cinema film-maker of the 1980s
and 1990s, wrote reviews of local and foreign films in the, then, famous Daily
Sangbad in the 1970s. Chowdhury, one of Alamgir Kabir’s students at the short-
lived Dhaka Film Institute, continued reviewing popular films, mostly from an
art cinema perspective, in the pages of Weekly Bichitra, the leading Bengali
weekly during the 1970s and 1990s. She, like Kabir and Ali—but in a harsher
tone—regularly rebuked popular films for being “unrealistic” and for not being
sensitive to the artistic power of the film medium. For around two decades, her
weekly film reviews effectively voiced the middle classes’ aestheticist percep
tion of cinema and their concerns about the “degradation” of the local film indus
try, as being published in Bichitra that was “very influential in forging a
self-confident and enlightened national middle class.”18
The Bangladesh Film Society (BFS) pioneered the second stream of critical
commentary on cinema in the form of serious film periodicals when it began

publishing Dhrupadi (lit. Classic), an intellectually ambitious volume on cinema
in Bengali in East Pakistan in 1968.19 Its latest and sixth issue has been pub
lished in 2006, a 700-page volume covering local, European and some non-
Western cinema. In 1969, Alamgir Kabir also joined this critical periodicals
stream with his English-language film periodical, Sequence.20 Sequence con
tinued, albeit irregularly, into the late 1980s. According to Kabir, Sequence had
an approximate circulation of 3,000 in 1979.21 Other influential, but sometimes
irregular and short-lived, film periodicals published by film clubs include: Film
Bulletin (Chalachitrapatra) by the Bangladesh Film Society; Cinema (Chalachi-
tra) by the Cinepol Film Society; Filmmaker (Chalachitrakar) by the Bangla
desh Film-makers’ Society; Intercut (Intercut) by the Chittagong Film Society;
Cinematic (Chalachitrik) by the Chitron Film Society; Celluloid by the Rainbow
Film Society; Look Through by the Chittagong Film Society; Montage by the
Ritwik Film Society; Chalachitram (Chalachitram) by the Chalachitram Film
Society and New Wave by the Chittagong Film Center.22 All these periodicals
were published in Bengali, except Celluloid, which had been transformed into an
English periodical in the mid 1990s. While all these film club periodicals—
except Dhrupadi, New Wave and Celluloid—stopped publishing by the late
1990s, newcomers have joined the caravan. The Dhaka University Film Society
has published Flash Back regularly since 1996, and the Gono Viswavidyaloy
Film Society published 16 mm in 2001–2004.23 In the early 2000s, film club vet
erans Manzare Hasin and Mahmudul Hossain published a few issues of Driswa-
roop (lit. Image-representation) focusing on film and allied visual media. In
2011, Mahmudul alone edited and published a similar anthology—Dekha (lit.
Seeing). A newly established film club, Moviyana Film Society came up with
their first issue of the periodical Moviyana in 2009 and with Chitraroop in 2010.
In 2008, the Bangladesh Film Archive started its annual periodical, the Bangla-
desh Film Archive Journal, which published its fifth issue in 2012. Though this
is published by a government department, the content in these issues is similar to
the film club periodicals, and most editorial and authorial roles are taken up by
former film club activists.
These semi-scholarly periodicals on cinema, mostly published, read and dis
cussed by film club activists themselves, mainly provide critical commentaries
on art-film masterpieces and film-makers of Europe, India and the US. Some
times they discuss some African and Latin American films with similar merits.
They also sometimes discuss Bangladeshi films, especially those that were can
onized because of their innovative visual aesthetics following international art
cinema or those that achieved entry in some international film festivals. For
example, the huge sixth issue of Dhrupadi presents three sections. The 320-page
main section is termed the “Bangladesh phase.” It houses a good number of
pieces on early cinema in East Bengal/Pakistan—as the films of that period are
highly canonized—alongside two pieces on “the role of film societies.” Though
the section is focused on Bangladesh, it also includes two pieces, one each on
Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, two of the Bengali greats, who made major
contributions to Indian cinema. This issue of Dhrupadi also presents two “sup
plements” on Latin American and Malayalam cinema, each running for around
200 pages. Both sections contain translated pieces on and by renowned film-
makers of these two regions: ranging from Solanas, Gettino, Fernando Birri and
Glauber Rocha, to G. Arvindan and Adoor Gopal.24
Film club activists busily dissecting Euro-American and Indian art cinema in
the pages of film periodicals have also contributed some commentaries on local
art films, especially outlining the need for the establishment of an art cinema in
Bangladesh. They believe that these periodicals are of such a serious scholarly
nature that they can be considered as “journals” that “remain the only hope of
serious cine-criticism” in Bangladesh.25 These activist-critics feel that in “a
society governed by corrupted politicians, black money and foolish administra
tors,” a serious film periodical is “a weapon of protest” that “makes the people
think about the invisible link between life and art.”26 The writers of these film
periodicals criticize the popular-journalism mode of cinema for creating a
“tragic” situation where the cinema is treated as “mere entertainment,” whereas
it has become “an object of research around the world.”27
A similar seriousness towards understanding cinema from an aesthetic per
spective becomes visible in the anthologies sole-authored by some renowned
film club activists during last three decades. These anthologies were the
bookended form of a number of articles published in film-club periodicals by a
single author. Veteran film club activists of the 1970s and 1980s started this
practice of anthologizing their articles on film history and aesthetics. Tanvir
Mokammel’s Film Aesthetics and Twelve Directors (Chalachitra Nandantatwa
O Barojon Director) and Anwar Hossain Pintu’s About Cinema (Chalachitra
Proshonga)—both published in 1985 respectively from Dhaka and Chittagong—
were two such early anthologies.28 The 1990s saw six such anthologies, includ
ing Mokammel’s The Aesthetics of Cinema (1998) (Cinemar Shilporoop) and
this author’s Understanding Cinema (Chalachitrer Chalchitro), which can be
considered as prototypes of film anthologies of this kind.29 At least another
dozen anthologies by noted film club activists, including Sajedul Awwal and
Tareque Masud, were published in Dhaka in the last decade or so.30 The mission
of these anthologies along with the film club periodicals—that is, of the dis
course of critical film appreciation—is to promote film as art and advocate for a
home-grown art cinema that will follow European art cinema narration, coupled
with a pro-people political agenda.
Towards a Bangladeshi film-historiography

The third and last group of literature on cinema published in Bangladesh is most
directly linked with the current study. This is a recent stream developed during
last three decades, while two other streams of film literatures—popular journ
alism and critical appreciation—started much earlier. The histories of Bangla
desh cinema that have been composed so far represent a primary phase in
Bangladeshi film-historiography. The reason for the late start of this trend, which
is still in its early phase, is twofold. The historiography stream as a serious mode
of film study demands scholar-authors with some institutional support and, more
importantly, a postcolonial nation-space within which such film-historiography
can be articulated and sponsored. Therefore one cannot but note that the Bangla
desh nation-state only came into being in 1971 and during next three decades,
the historiography stream of Bangladesh cinema received considerable support
from the postcolonial state. The journalism and criticism streams flourished
rather independently despite indifference (and antagonism, in the case of film
club discourse) from the state. In particular, the state-owned cultural bodies
engaged in constructing and circulating the national culture of Bangladesh by
promoting Bengali-language literature, the performing arts and cinema encour
aged the writing and publishing of Bangladesh cinema history in recent decades.
For example, the three state-run, national-level institutions—the Bangla
Academy, the Bangladesh Shilpokala Academy (lit. Bangladesh Arts Academy)
and the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC)—together produced
nine—out of total a dozen or so—of the historical works on Bangladesh cinema
published so far.
These recent efforts at writing the “history” of Bangladesh cinema, which can
be seen as contributions towards the rewriting of the national history of postco
lonial Bangladesh, took mainly three directions: survey histories covering major
areas and eras of Bangladesh cinema, area-specific histories focusing on a par
ticular aspect of this national cinema and biographies and memorial volumes of
film pioneers. The first group—historical surveys of Bangladesh cinema—is the
most relevant for the current study. This group consists of five major book-
length, survey-history works on Bangladesh cinema published between 1979 and
2008. Apart from one study—Film in Bangladesh (1979) by Alamgir Kabir—all
other works are in Bengali. These are: History of Bangladesh Cinema (Bangla-
desher Chalachitrer Itihash) (1987) by Anupam Hayat, Social Commitment in
Bangladesh Cinema (Bangladesher Chalachitre Shamajik Ongikar) by Chinmoy
Mutsuddi, Bangladesh Film Industry (Bangladesher Chalachitro Shilpo) (1993)
by Mirja Tarequl Quader, and The Cinema of Bangladesh: Socio-economic
Backdrop (Bangladesher Chalachitra: Arthoshamajik Potobhumi) (2008) by
Ahmed Aminul Islam. Proclaiming themselves research projects, these historical
monographs sought to perform a critical survey of Bangladesh cinema history.
Though non-critical and non-theorized in their very nature, these historical
surveys of Bangladesh cinema enthusiastically describe the textual characteris
tics of the films and the major tendencies of the film industry in Bangladesh.
They occasionally recognize the roles of the state and spectators in developing
the discourses around film production, distribution and exhibition. Thus, they
have provided important landmarks that enabled the primary mapping of this
research and helped sharpen my focus on specific aspects of Bangladesh cinema.
They also serve as a storehouse of raw data on the film-production industry of
Bangladesh for me and future researchers to draw upon.
Film in Bangladesh by Alamgir Kabir—published in 1979—was the first
survey-history of Bangladesh cinema. This is a revised “Bangladeshi” version of
Kabir’s earlier work, Cinema in Pakistan, published in Dhaka a decade back.

Film in Bangladesh was advertised in International Film Guide as a “compre
hensive storehouse of information on Bangladesh’s thriving film industry.”31
Professor Kabir Choudhury—in his foreword to the book—called it “an
important reference book . . . at home and abroad.”32 Probably because it is the
only book-length survey-history of Bangladesh cinema in English to date, the
major encyclopedic ventures on non-Western cinemas or Asian cinemas drew
upon this work extensively. For example, Roy Armes’ Third World Filmmaking
and the West (1987) and John A. Lent’s The Asian Film Industry (1990) use this
book as their key source on Bangladesh cinema.
Most Bengali-language survey histories of Bangladesh cinema also take Film
in Bangladesh as their basic model. Kabir discusses the films produced in Bang
ladesh straightforwardly, dividing them into two periods using the 1971 libera
tion war as a demarcation line. While Quader also uses this periodization,
Mutsuddi goes for a decade-wise division and Hayat uses no periodization as
such. But all of them use the taxonomy of Bangladesh cinema established by
Kabir with only limited modifications. Islam also followed decade-wise periodi
zation (as his monograph focuses on Bangladesh cinema during the 1970s and
1980s) and utilized Kabir’s mode of demarcation (the independence of 1971) as
he talks about post-independence Bangladeshi cinema.
The second group of historical works—the area-specific studies of Bangladesh
cinema—consists of few historical texts such as The Torn Pages of ‘The Face and
the Mask’ (Mukh O Mukhosher Chera Pata) (1995) by Shoraful Islam, Cinema
theke Chitrali (From Cinema to Chitrali) (2011) by Khandakar Mahmudul Hasan
and Digital Film in Bangladesh: Call for a New Cinema? (2011) by Fahmidul
Haq, published by an Internet-based publisher from Germany. The Torn Pages
delves into the history of and around a particular film—the 1956 film, The Face
and the Mask, which is presumably the “first” East Pakistani sound feature. Hasan
in Cinema to Chitrali focuses on film magazines of the 1950s to the 1980s, while
Haq locates digital film production in 2000s Bangladesh.
Alongside the survey-histories of Bangladesh cinema and area-specific histories
as discussed above, several book-length biographies of local film personalities can
be located in the film-historiography stream. These were published in the 1990s
and no film biographies were seen before this point. The first of these biographical
works is The Memorial Volume on Alamgir Kabir (Alamgir Kabir Sharok
Grontho) (1991).33 This volume compiles articles, both in Bengali and English, on
Alamgir Kabir, who died in a car accident in January 1989, and whose untimely
death certainly prompted the publication of this biographical volume.
Bangla Academy—the national organization for promotion of Bengali lan
guage and culture—which published Kabir’s and Quader’s historical works, also
published three film biographies. These were part of their biography series,
which featured biographies of many other literary and cultural personalities of
East Bengal/Pakistan origin. The three film biographies were: Hiralal Sen (1993)
and Abdul Jabbar Khan (2002)—both by Shaikat Ashgor—and Fateh Lohani
(1994), by Anupam Hayat.34 Both Ashgor and Hayat made straightforward
attempts at collating and narrating the achievements of Sen, Khan and Lohani,
three important cinema personalities of Bangladesh—all of whom worked during
‘pre-Bangladesh’, that is the East Bengal/Pakistan period.35 Sen can be credited
for importing cinema, a Western invention, into the rural East Bengal of the
early twentieth century by initiating film screening and production in Dhaka, just
after such film activities began in Calcutta in which Sen also participated. Abdul
Jabbar Khan scripted and directed the first “talkie” feature film produced in
(then) East Pakistan in 1956. Lohani worked as an actor–director of art cinema
films in the early phase of the East Pakistan film industry in the 1960s. It is diffi
cult to appreciate why Bangla Academy chose only Sen, Khan and Lohani, while
a number of other film pioneers remain mostly unknown. Probably as a reply to
this query, in the late 1990s, Hayat, the author of Fateh Lohani, authored an
anthology of biographies entitled Some Film Activists of Yesteryears (Shekale
Bangladesher Koyekjon Chalachitrakormi) (1999).36 It records the lives and
works of 22 Bengali film personalities who worked for the development of
Bengali cinema as an art medium both in Dhaka and Calcutta during the early-
to-mid twentieth century. Almost in a similar vein, Leaquat Hosain Khokon
authored The Sad Tales of Film Stars (Chalachitra Tarokader Bedonar Kotha)
(2010).37 Khokon compiled brief sketches of numerous film stars of South Asia
in this huge volume. The most recent biographical work published is Tareque
Masud: Life and Dreams (2012) edited by Catherine Masud and necessitated by
Tareque’s untimely death in a road accident in August 2011.38 This bilingual
memorial volume recorded the deliberations offered at a gathering of film and
social activists that took place on August 26, 2011, immediately after Tareque’s
demise.
All seven biographies and memorial volumes discussed here are important for
sketching the works of film personalities from East Bengal or Bangladesh.
However, none of these claim to be well-researched historiographic works;
rather, most authors or editors have gathered and presented the available data on
a film pioneer in a simple, presentable manner. Since these are biographies or
memorial volumes, not researched historical monographs, the straightforward
method of data presentation seems appropriate here.
Bangladesh film histories: data presentation and academic
mode
The tendency to present a large amount of data (sometimes, not so relevant) can
easily be located in the survey-histories of Bangladesh cinema. Such a trend of
data presentation without conceptual backing points to a recurring weakness in
the historiography of this cinema. In this way, though the survey-histories posi
tion themselves in opposition to the fragmentary data presentation of journalism
discourse, they essentially tend to primarily function as a “storehouse of
information.” I find that displaying huge amount of data with no analysis is a
general shortcoming in historical works on Bangladesh cinema. For example,
each of the four major histories of Bangladesh cinema published in late twenti
eth century append a “complete” list of feature films produced annually in the
Dhaka film industry since 1956.39 Film historian Ahmed Aminul Islam, who
published the fifth history of 1970s–1980s Bangladesh cinema as late as 2008,
also followed this trend by showcasing year-wise lists of films produced in
Bangladesh between 1972 and 1989.40
Kabir and Mutsuddi present data with some analytical opinions and judg
ments; Kabir, in particular, divides his chapters, marking out “descriptive” and
“critical analysis” sections clearly. Hayat, Quader and Islam are more enthusias
tic about collecting and recording large amounts of data. Hayat states that all the
data in his book were sourced from people and printed documents and that he
has only collected and compiled these. Throughout half of The History of Bang-
ladesh Cinema, he describes the “Who’s Who” of the film industry, ranging
from pioneers to cameo actors. The 700-page Bangladesh Film Industry by
Quader also seems a huge but disorganized body of data on Bangladesh cinema.
While the first chapter starts with “film as a mass medium and art medium,” the
last chapter ends with “the film society movement.” Altogether, the nine chap
ters –with no conceptual framework, which is also true for Hayat and Islam—
describe many a topics relating to Bangladesh cinema. These range from “the
film pages of the dailies” to “film exhibition through VCRs.” None of the histo
rians—Quader, Hayat or Islam—covers the depth, breadth or larger contexts of
the issues, or brings out their interconnections.
Similar comments can be made regarding The Torn Pages of Shoraful Islam
on The Face and the Mask, the first sound feature film produced in Dhaka. It
does present the script of the film and even tidbits remotely connected to the
film; however it does not really attempt to analyze why and how this film could
be produced only in mid-1950s East Pakistan, not before or after, and not in any
other social or cultural context.
In this way, I find that Bangladesh film historians’ obsession with presenting
as much data as possible attempts to disguise the absence of a theoretical frame
work within which all these data can be properly analyzed. In fact, all these
survey-historical works combine, in the words of the renowned film scholar
Edward Buscombe, “ ‘facts’ with idiosyncratic aesthetic judgements and gener
alizations of doubtful value.’41
In this section I have looked at three groups of texts on Bangladesh cinema
published between the 1930s and 2010s. The popular journalism discourse initi
ated the discussion on cinema for the first time in 1930s East Bengal, when no
other avenue existed for the exchange of views on cinema. Critical and historical
literatures in the form of film-periodicals, anthologies, biographies and historical
works have been published during late-twentieth to early-twentyfirst century.
The characteristics of the three published modes of cinema appreciation, espe
cially the film-historiography mode, demonstrate that Bangladesh lacks a par
ticular discourse of film study: the academic mode.
So far, no academic researcher has studied the cinema in/of Bangladesh with
due theoretical and methodological rigor as followed in contemporary Cinema
Studies. There are only two historical surveys published that were done as aca
demic studies—one as a PhD and another as an MA. However, both these lack the
established norms of research in Film and Cultural Studies. The Cinema of Bang-
ladesh: Socio-economic Backdrop (2008) by Ahmed Aminul Islam was done as a
Doctoral dissertation at Jahangirnagar University near Dhaka during the early- to
mid-2000s. Islam reviewed a huge number of articles, books and films in the book
in order to write about the films of 1970s–1980s Bangladesh. However, he did not
attempt to develop a suitable methodological and theoretical framework in which
he could place and discuss the cinema of Bangladesh, as has been done with other
Asian cinemas for some decades now. The bibliography lists some canonical texts
of Film Studies—the authors listed range from Bazin and Bordwell (spelt as Brod
well) to Nichols and Nelmes.42 However, nowhere in this thesis-turned-book does
Aminul Islam demonstrate his conceptual conversations with such key scholars of
Film Studies. On the other hand, Islam, who was trained in Drama and Dramatics
at a leading Bangladeshi university, makes good use of Bengali-language sources
in all the six chapters. At the end, similarly to the survey histories by Hayat and
Quader, it becomes a descriptive, data-presentation history of 1970s and 1980s
Bangladesh cinema, in which nearly a quarter of the book is taken up by photos as
well as a list of films produced in that period.
The other academic work—Quader’s Bangladesh Film Industry (1993)—orig
inated as a minor thesis for the partial fulfilment of his MA degree in the Depart
ment of Mass Communication and Journalism at Dhaka University in the 1980s.
Quader terms this work as “descriptive research with an emphasis on historical
approach” and admits the absence of a proper methodological framework in his
project by stating that “no single specific method was fully utilized, because of
the magnitude and diversity of the area of the study.” Still, he claims that “it was
appreciated as one of the best pieces of research done in the department while
undoubtedly, it was the first fully-fledged research on Bangladesh cinema and its
history” (my emphasis).43 Similarly, both Kabir and Hayat44—working from
outside academia—termed their projects as research works too. Similar to the
“academic” works of Islam and Quader, these works also never outlines the
theory and methodology relevant to their discussion and data presentation.
On the other hand, Fahmidul Haq, a media academic at Dhaka University,
explained methodology of his study Digital Film in Bangladesh published by an
Internet-based publisher in 2011. Funded by Bangladesh Film Archive, this
45
small-scale research sketches digital developments in the Bangladesh film indus

try by interviewing four directors who attempted to make “digital films” in the
2000s. Though many scholars in Film Studies have taken various philosophical
angles in order to understand digital cinema around the world, Haq, unfortu
nately, does not develop a detailed theoretical framework to understand the
digital film culture in Bangladesh. Rather, he takes a piecemeal approach—using
Walter Benjamin’s and Samira Makhmalbaf ’s articles as only “instructive in
guiding this study.”46 On the other hand, this descriptive study includes stand-
alone textual reviews of four selected films and discusses the present trends and
future possibilities of the digital medium, using one-fifth of the study to do so.47
Overall, this work lacks a detailed and in-depth view of the production, distribu
tion and exhibition contexts of digital cinema in Bangladesh and elsewhere.
It seems clear that the Bangladeshi film histories lack certain principles of
contemporary film-historiography as exercised in the academic West and as fol
lowed in parts of Asia and the non-West too. In the next section I identify and
elaborate upon the methodological problems inherent in Bangladeshi film histor
ies through the perspective of national cinema historiography. I analyze the two
major modes in contemporary film-historiography as well as their methodo
logical and theoretical concerns which shape the historiographic presentation of
a national cinema. I conclude by clarifying what kind of history of Bangladesh
cinema I attempt to present in this book and why.
Approaches in the historiography of Asian cinemas vis-à-vis

my approach
While books on Asian national cinemas vary widely in terms of methods and
outcomes, the theoretical approach divides the works into two major clusters.
The first and more popular approach is to follow an empiricist and teleological
way of presenting a national cinema—in most cases, as a modernist endeavour.
The early anthologies and some monographs represent this kind of empiricist
survey of various non-Western national cinemas, done from a political or
cultural-nationalist viewpoint. These survey works of Asian national cinemas
narrate the achievements of individual film-makers mostly from an aesthetic
angle, and review the artistic signatures in their films. Some scholars take an
industrial angle too. They delve into the industrial and financial aspects of a
national cinema, mostly to denote the state of underdevelopment of the film
industry in question. Dividing into various periods and locating the birth, devel
opment and decline of a national film industry, these surveys describe the indus
try in the form of a human biography. Such story-like histories never detail the
larger social and political context of film production, exhibition and reception in
an Asian nation. While survey works are valuable in understanding the general
aspects of Asian national cinemas, these political or cultural-nationalist works
take a nation as a monolithic, taken-for-granted entity and see the cinema only as
part of a national culture and/or as a nation-building tool. Most empiricist
surveys on Asian national cinemas have thus ended up in taking either an aes
theticist or an industrial angle.
Since linear, sometimes organic, narratives of Asian national cinemas do not
present the complexities and intricacies inherent in such cinemas and in turn dis
appoint scholars of Film and Media Studies or Asian Studies, a critical approach
developed in the 1990s and 2000s. This approach questions the simplistic narrat
ives of national cinemas as presented in survey works, and takes a more critical
and theoretical look at cinema and nation in Asia. It may be termed as the inter
pretive social-history approach.
Interpretive studies on Asian national cinemas include books like National
Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, Primitive Passions, Picturing Japaneseness,
Ideology of the Hindi Film, Reclaiming Adat: Malaysian Film, China on Screen
and few other books published in last decade or so. These works exemplify a
non-linear mode of narrativizing national cinemas of Asia. They situate the

cinemas of Asian nations as complex and elusive entities interconnected with
identity categories such as ethnicity and sexuality as well as interacting with
many other discourses, ranging from the nation-state to visual aesthetics. These
works recognize that the nationhood of Asian or non-Western nations is not con
stant or naturally given; it is always in the making. For these scholars, nations
are hybrid communities that must not be named too easily and positively. The
film industry’s interaction with the political-cultural agenda of the nation-state,
and the process of identity formation, is evident in this trend of contemporary
academic research on Asian cinemas.
I follow this interpretive social-history mode in the current study. Avoiding
the simplistic and piecemeal approach of the linear surveys of Asian national
cinemas, I delineate the complex role of Bangladesh cinema in constructing
notions of nationhood, modernity and cultural identity. Going against the aes
theticist/industrial critiques of Asian national cinemas presented in a “bio
graphy” format, I understand Bangladesh cinema as a discourse produced,
circulated, and received/consumed alongside (and interacting with) many other
discourses within a discursive field, a postcolonial nation-space called Bangla
desh. The history of Bangladesh cinema I propose is an engaged history that
recognizes that historical cause and effect is non-linear and change is non-
evolutionary. I intend to make visible what is invisible in the simple continuities
found in most national film histories, and indeed in most histories of South Asian
nations.
Bangladeshi film histories and traditional historiography

Looking at the contemporary film histories published in the West and elsewhere,
one can identify two major trends of historiography: the traditional and revision
ist modes. In traditional film histories, including those done on Bangladesh
cinema, a linear and empirical approach is readily visible. These histories create
a continuity that ends in the present, indicating the inevitability of the present.
They outline only those links that can be established with documents or facts.
Therefore, these histories can be termed as teleological and empiricist. Further
more, the traditional-mode historians of Bangladesh cinema tend to take their
ideological frameworks for granted. These are the film histories which take
“film” and “history” in their most common sense of the words, as Elsaesser
noted, as if a basic and unproblematic agreement is already developed on the
relationship between these two entities.48
As is so often the case with other cinemas, the traditional historians of Bang
ladesh cinema find no difficulty in believing that they can provide an objective
depiction of the past through the collection and organization of historical evid
ence. They find and use these materials as objective documents that speak for
themselves, providing a true depiction of the “real world.” This “common sense”
notion of empiricist historiography is led to be teleological by an organic and
linear narrative similar to human evolution, i.e. birth–growth–death.49 This
history is presented in a narrative that includes an easily determinable beginning,

middle and end, just like a story. Branigan calls this type of “neo-Aristotelian”
history “nineteenth-century history writing,” and he further observes that:
Such histories are structured as dramas of disclosure, with a stress on con

flict and climax. . . . The linear narrative is always looking back, repeating
itself, summing up grandly, reducing; and most importantly, preparing the
climax. . . . Change in such histories often takes the form of an organic evo
lution. The source of this evolution is, again, located in a point: a decisive
event, the genius of an individual, a revolutionary invention.50
All the survey histories of Bangladesh cinema unquestioningly follow this empiri
cist and teleological approach. They are intended to provide an unproblematic
seamless history of Bangladesh cinema depending on available data. In the
previous section, I focused on their concern with collecting and presenting data.
All these authors believe that there is only one history of Bangladesh cinema and
that each of them is engaged in writing that history. The fact that they all recollect
the same events and follow a common chronology proves that they all share a true,
common history of Bangladesh cinema. In this way they construct a descriptive
and linear-chronological history of Bangladesh cinema characterized by a simpli
fied cause–effect chain mostly attached to some pioneers.
The major historians of Bangladesh cinema, Kabir, Hayat, Mutsuddi, Quader,
Islam and Zaki,51 follow a common chronology starting from The Face and the
Mask, the first feature produced in Dhaka in 1956. They take it for granted that
this is the beginning of Bangladeshi cinema and then most of them enthusiasti
cally portray the adventure story of producing this first feature in (then) East
Pakistan. They describe how Abdul Jabbar Khan, the director-scriptwriter-
producer of the film, in a meeting of cultural activists in Dhaka in 1953, accepted
the challenge of Khan Bahadur Fazal Ahmed Dosani, a key film personality of
the Calcutta film industry. Dosani “suggested that even East Bengal’s weather
was unsuitable for film-making not to mention the absence of suitable techni
cians, equipment and artistes.”52
Each of the traditional histories of Bangladesh cinema depicts the production
and distribution of The Face and the Mask as a perfect adventure story with con
flict and climax. Hayat devotes a full chapter entitled “The Face and the Mask:
the birth of a history,” while Mutsuddi says that “there is a story behind the film-
making of Abdul Jabbar Khan” (my emphasis).53 Kabir and Quader elaborate
how Khan, with no training or experience in film-making, bought a second-hand
camera, used a home tape recorder for sound recording and collected the per
formers, especially the female actors. They also tell the readers how the film was
finally released and screened while all the film distributors of East Pakistan were
panicked that the audience would damage the theater seats upon seeing the dev
astating shortcomings of this maiden venture.54 After the tale of The Face and
the Mask, Kabir begins his next section—appropriately entitled—“birth of an
industry” (my emphasis).55
With The Face and the Mask, the historians of Bangladesh cinema assume
that the Dhaka film industry is now born, and then through the rest of their
histories they deal with the maturation (and sometimes the decaying) process of
this industry. In this way, all these historians present an “organic” history
depending on some key events and of course, some “great men” who made the
landmark events like The Face and the Mask happen. For example, almost all of
them recognize the establishment of the Film Development Corporation (FDC)
studio in Dhaka in 1957–1958 as the “beginning” of the Bangladesh film
industry.
Thus the traditional-mode historians of Bangladesh cinema un-problematically
present the past as a clear-cut story using the structure of human evolution and
highlighting the achievements of certain individuals. The emphasis on indi
viduals and their achievements in these film histories clarifies how the historians
here believed in traditional historiography, which views changes in history as
having always been brought by some “great” individuals. This kind of traditional
historiography mostly involves the events (what happened) and the actors (who
did what), sometimes accompanied by cause–effect explanations. More impor
tantly, these story-like histories are built on and centered around historical data
or material evidence only; they are histories based on available data. The histor
ians do not take time to analyze and interpret the data they present within the
larger context of society and culture, though that kind of exercise could give the
readers a more comprehensive view. Bangladeshi historian Professor Sirajul
Islam noted the presence of this tendency in the writing of social histories of
Bengal. He terms this type of historiography “calendar method” historiography
and remarks that in this way, we can come to know a lot of detailed information,
but we cannot see the whole clearly.57 Going against this calendar method, he
suggests that a historian should carefully detect the central tendency inherent in
the development of various kinds of events.
In this way all the published histories on Bangladesh cinema aim to be tele
ological and empiricist portrayals of its past. Therefore they do not, or cannot,
locate the various possible forces at work underlying the production and exhibi
tion of The Face and the Mask and the establishment of the Film Development
Corporation studio in Dhaka, other than the contributions of few individuals.
They seem to be engaged in collecting and furnishing data as per the most
common pattern of continuity they believe in, rather than in interpreting the data
to draw out the broader and deeper meanings underlying the observable
phenomena.
Revisionist mode in international film-historiography

Among the historians of Bangladesh cinema, Hayat seems more ambitious and
energetic in regard to collecting data. Hayat compiles some primary findings to
illustrate the history of the early decades of Bangladesh cinema, from the first
screening in Dhaka in 1898 to the establishment of the Film Development Cor
poration (FDC) studio by the government of East Pakistan in 1957. Hayat has
worked hard to discover primary data and check the details of events, moving
around places like brothels and old palaces in Dhaka.58
This kind of rigor in collecting data, associated with the belief that new data
has to be discovered to illuminate some dark chapters in history, is the major
feature of the other discourse that can be most widely found within contemporary
international film-historiography. This mode of film history is not used much
with Bangladesh cinema, other than some attempts located in Hayat’s work. It is
exemplified in the work of David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Robert Allen,
Douglas Gomery, Tino Balio and others through their contributions to the history
of American cinema during last few decades. These histories, mostly North
American, which have recently been termed “revisionist,” reject the traditional
histories “as unscholarly, short on empirical data, and founded on unreliable
hermeneutics.”59 The “revisionists” set their mission as the revision of traditional
historiographic modes, and this has become a dominant trend of historiography
in contemporary Film Studies.
The revision offered by revisionist historians has had two main targets: histor
ical investigation and narrative representation. In regard to investigation, they
have focused on the vast archives of primary materials generated by the film
businesses or companies which were hitherto unexplored, as argued by Gomery
in the preface of his history of film exhibition in the US.60 They have also made
the optimum use of trade journals, which the traditional historians did not gener
ally perceive as something worth investigating.61 In this way, the revisionist
historians tend to put emphasis on the discovery of new material data, which
they treat as necessary to ask new questions and draw new conclusions.62 The
belief in the objectivity or truthfulness of material data, associated with the
understanding that the discovery of new data means new light in unknown areas
of film history, effectively de-emphasizes the work of interpreting data in writing
a history.
Revisionist studies are concerned with the collection and presentation of as
much data as possible on a specific “national” film industry, based within a par
ticular nation-state. One can argue that these scholars are obsessed with presenting
the surface realities of a film industry through the collection of “facts and figures.”
They almost unanimously use quantitative analysis based on statistical methods
mainly privileged in the business and social science disciplines. These histories
normally focus on the norms of operation of/within a film-production industry.
They might discuss some general audience behavior or government legislation
related to film distribution and exhibition, only if those are somewhat related with
the development or decline of the film-production industry in question.
For example, Gomery writes a history of film exhibition in the USA com
pletely depending on verifiable material data, derived mostly from business
documents and trade papers.63 He presents here only those aspects of film exhi
bition that can be concretely known and evidenced. So, not only does he discuss
the evolution of film theaters and screening technologies along with the roles
entrepreneurs play in these changes, but also all his illustrations in the book are
only of theaters in the USA. There are no pictures of the people who occupied
the seats in those theaters. He never mentions the spectators’ attitudes to the
films or the film-exhibition system, as that cannot be studied through material
data alone.64 Similar to the empiricist tendency inherent in the traditional histor
ies, the revisionist historians’ dependency on material evidence demonstrates
their emphasis on observable phenomena as well as their indifference to the
unobservable mechanisms for which there is no material data readily available.
In regard to narrative presentation, revisionist film history is uncomfortable
with the hero–villain dichotomy and the “organic” or evolutionary narrative—
the modes that lead the traditional history approach to be teleological. As Allen
and Gomery put it:
we cannot afford to be seduced by the story being told as history so that we

neglect to ask those historiographic questions the fictional storyteller can so
neatly avoid. . . . the transformation of historical personae into narrative
characters glosses over complex problems of historical causality.65
In order to overcome these problems associated with presenting history as a

story (as seen mostly in the traditional mode), the revisionist historians propose
to utilize a non-narrative format normally used in reporting natural science
experiments.66 Klenotic points out that though the revisionist historian considers
this presentation structure as more verifiable than the story-like narrative, this
arrangement is also concerned to organize data in a seamless pattern within the
format. He notes that, in the end, this also becomes another narrative presenta
tion of the past, similar to the type found in traditional histories.67 Back in 1979,
Branigan had already identified that revisionist histories rely upon an “economic
cycle (invention, innovation, diffusion).”68 Using such “cycles,” revisionist his
torians create their own continuous past that is as teleological as the traditional
histories, even though they are methodologically more serious and sophisticated.
However, it would not be correct to suggest that the revisionist historians are
innocent of the problems of interpretation. They call for “a film history in which
‘interpretation’ is wedded firmly to evidence.”69 Allen and Gomery advocate a
“realist” approach as an alternative to the either/or binarism established between
evidence and interpretation by traditional historians. Although this “realist” his
toriography struggles to create a delicate balance between the two extremes of
objectiveness or truthfulness and multiple interpretations of historical evidence,
in the end it asserts that there is a “real” world independent of the historian.70
Klenotic observes that through this “realism,” the revisionist historians:
want to carve out . . . a position that recognizes facts of history as empiri
cally knowable and yet variable depending on the historian’s theoretical and
ideological bent . . . . But the evidence remains the factual foundation upon
which an argument can be built.71
On the other hand, they acknowledge that as there is no unadulterated documen

tary evidence available in this world, the historian has to search for the “least
mediated” material. The conclusions developed on the basis of such evidence need
to be verified by the most non-contradictory position, or positions, supported by a
number of investigators.72 In this way, they attempt to create a “correct” version of
the past, which is itself an empiricist or “objectivist” proposition.73 But the ques
tion remains of, as Richard Allen puts it: “why historians should in principle
achieve similar conclusions as to the significance of past events.”74
Towards an interpretive history of Bangladesh cinema

It seems that the revisionist historians try to portray film history as a chain of
past events that can be reconstructed through correct research methods.75 Allen
and Gomery identify film history as one of the three major branches of Film
Studies along with Film Theory and Film Criticism.76 In this way, they place
film history on a par with, but also separate from, theory and criticism. From
their overtly empiricist and also teleological position, they understand historical
investigation as a “scientific” inquiry, and mark the task of interpretation out as
a quite different activity—to be done as part of Film Theory or Criticism. Patrice
Petro points out in this regard that:
a certain division of labour has come to characterize film studies as a discip

line in which “historians” pursue the realm of the empirical, and quantifi
able, the concretely known (the realm of history proper), and “feminists”
explore the more intangible realm of theoretical speculation (the realm of
interpretation).77
I reject this division, maintained by the revisionists, as an unproductive concept.

No history can be written without interpreting the data, even if the historian does
not intend to do so in a conscious manner. Butler, E. P. Thompson and E. H.
Carr have pointed out the crucial importance of interpreting data by the historian
using a coherent and suitable theoretical framework. Taking the data as objective
is a trap. As all data are shaped by interactions among various discourses, there
are always contested inner meanings masked behind the face of “innocent” data.
Only analysis can make these visible. The historian and his/her interpretive
framework is the most important aspect in understanding what is underneath or
suppressed by the presentation of data. Therefore, the reconstitution of the past
in the historian’s mind is not dependent upon collecting and displaying empirical
evidence alone. On the contrary, as E. H. Carr puts it, this process relies on the
selection and interpretation of the facts by the historian and his/her theoretical
position.78
Therefore, I take an interpretative stance here, as I believe this determines how
pieces of data are related in this history. In order to “read” or interpret the data
within a broader context, I study Bangladesh cinema within a theorized framework
(Chapter 2 makes this framework more explicit). The history of Bangladesh
cinema proposed here is an engaged history that recognizes that historical cause
and effect is non-linear and change is non-evolutionary. Following the kind of
cinema history proposed by Edward Branigan, the temporality in this history of

Bangladesh cinema—made up of discontinuities between elements—will signify
an overall manifold order that itself has no beginning or end point.79
In this way, I intend to make visible what is either invisible in or beyond the
reach of the simple continuities found in most film histories, and, indeed, in most
histories. I do not pretend to portray an objective and comprehensive “past” of
Bangladesh cinema that ultimately ends in the “present” following a neat, sim
plistic and continuous cause–effect chain and using material evidence as a deter
minant. Rather, a dependency on teleology and empiricism is a shortcoming that
this study intends to avoid. I reject the traditional histories of Bangladesh cinema
which are, in Buscombe’s terms, characterized by “a complete innocence of his
toriography.”80 I deconstruct these “innocent” histories, especially to locate
crucial methodological issues like the nature of the investigation, including the
status of the evidence as well as the relationship of the historian to these docu
ments and the pattern of the narrative implicit in these. I note how all these pre
suppositions make the teleological and empiricist nature of these traditional
histories quite obvious.
Drawing upon Thomas Elsaesser, I rely on discourses that are always com
peting and corresponding with each other, not on determinants that work as com
ponents in the conventional historical narrative built up on the cause-and-effect
chains.81 My version of Bangladeshi film history is explicit in demonstrating the
concepts underlying historical investigation and presentation. This demonstra
tion includes the crucial conflict assumed to exist between data and interpreta
tion, as I outlined above when discussing the limitations of revisionist histories.
In writing this history, I became engaged in a constant process of shaping the
facts to my interpretations and again framing the interpretations to the facts, not
assigning supremacy to one over the other. In this way, I involved myself in
what E. H. Carr terms “an unending dialogue between the present and the past”82
of Bangladesh cinema.
In order to develop this kind of interactive history, I drew on the “dialogic” or
“conversational” model of history proposed by Dominick LaCapra. This model
recognizes that historiography is a complex mode of discourse “in which an
exchange with the past is always bound up with a present dialogue.”83 This
implies that when writing this history of Bangladesh cinema, I was not only
engaged in “dialogues” with the past, but also with my own subject position, my
modes of inquiry and the discourses to which I had access, as well as with other
historians and their histories. This practice enabled me to displace, as Klenotic
puts it, the authoritative position offered to evidence-based accounts privileged
by most histories.84
Only by using certain interpretive frameworks in this “dialogic” history of
Bangladesh cinema, can I create a picture of the past that is linked with the
present. For this reason, by focusing on a number of separate case studies about
different aspects of Bangladesh cinema, I emphasize discontinuities inherent in
the development of this cinema. For example, when I focus on The Face and the
Mask in later chapters, I not only compile the literal meaning of the available
data around the film, but also look for the meanings of the data within a much
wider context. I did not take the production and exhibition of this film only as an
adventure of Mr Khan. Rather, I raised questions like why and how this is the
beginning of Bangladesh cinema, what else happened before this and why those
are not considered as important as this event (see Chapter 3). I also re-evaluated
the content of The Face and the Mask within the backdrop of the struggle for
Bengali-Muslim cultural identity in the social, political and economic spheres of
(then) East Bengal/Pakistan (see Chapter 5). In this way, I located the particular
political and historical juncture that fostered this event as well as what roles
other discourses played in order to make this happen. I focused on the interplay
of these discourses in order to present wider functions of the film within the
social and cultural context of 1950s East Pakistan.
In this chapter I presented an appraisal of the existing literature on cinema in/
of Bangladesh as well as of the major film-historiographic modes. The analysis
makes it clear that Bangladesh cinema is a cinema that is not yet addressed with
proper theory and methodology. No serious historian or researcher informed by
the contemporary theory and methodology available for studying the cinema of a
non-Western postcolonial nation-space, such as Bangladesh, came forward to
study the cinema of/in Bangladesh. This book is a step towards fulfilling such a
gap in the existing works on Bangladesh cinema as well as on contemporary film
studies. Here, I intend to take a step towards the demarginalization of Bangla
desh cinema, offering an engaged social history of this cinema. Therefore, I
approach this study from several theoretical stances linked with film-
historiography and national cinema. This chapter clarified the major methodo
logical and theoretical concerns that shape the historiographic presentation of a
cinema and the kind of history of Bangladesh cinema I propose throughout this
study. In the next chapter, by questioning concepts like nation and cinema, I lay
out a conceptual framework for studying a non-Western national cinema like
Bangladesh cinema.
Notes
1 Philip Rosen, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch, and Some Problems in
the Study of National Cinemas,” Iris 2.2 (1984): 70–1.
2 Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, “Two Discourses of Australian Film,” The Austral-
ian Journal of Screen Theory 15/16 (1983): 163.
3 Since 2001, few film modules have been introduced in Mass Communication/Media
Studies programs at the University of Dhaka and Independent University, Bangladesh
(IUB), two leading universities in the public and private sectors respectively. IUB
started film and television specializations for undergraduates in 2007 and from 2010,
at Master’s level. Stamford University, Bangladesh (SUB), a younger private univer
sity, started Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in “Film and Media” in 2004. During
2012, a Department of Television and Film Studies was established at the University
of Dhaka. In 2013–14, the Bangladesh government made efforts to establish a film
institute. As emerging institutions, most of these places are not academically well-
armed and need to go a long way to be able to offer the study of film at a world
standard level.
4 Interestingly, Ashish Rajadhyaksha finds that scholarly writing on the cinema in India
also developed chronologically: “1970s Film Appreciation, 1980s Film Theory and
1990s Film Studies.” See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Cellu-
loid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (New Delhi: Tulika, 2009), p. iix.
5 Khandakar Mahmudul Hasan, Cinema theke Chitrali (From Cinema to Chitrali)
(Dhaka: Oitijjhyo, 2011), p. 40; Anupam Hayat Cinema in Old Dhaka (Dhaka: Ityadi
Grantha Prokash, 2009), p. 62.
6 Mirja Tarequl Quader, Bangladesh Film Industry (Bangladesher Chalachitro Shilpo)
(Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), pp. 597–8.
7 Titles of these magazines in Bengali denote the visual and illustrative nature of
cinema (for example, “image and shadow,” “shadow and word,” “imageries” etc.).
8 Hasan (2011) p. 40.
9 Alamgir Kabir, Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1979), p. 129.
10 Md. Asiuzzaman et al. Study on Media Availability in Bangladesh, Unpublished
report, Dhaka: BCDJC, 2008, p. 7.
11 The most popular daily (Prothom Alo) claims its circulation to be 0.45 million, see
https://www.facebook.com/DailyProthomAlo/info (accessed June 22, 2012). Back in
the early 2000s, it was 0.20 million; see Nasir Uddin Khan, “Communication Scene:
Bangladesh,” in Asian Communication Handbook 2003 (eds.) Anura Goonasekera,
Lee Chun Wah and S. Venkatraman (Singapore: AMIC, 2003), p. 13.
12 For details on the film magazines, see Hasan (2011) pp. 71–82.
13 Quader (1993) p. 634.
14 Gayen, Aditi F. and Humaira Bilkis, Mutual Influence between Popular Cinema and
Cine Journalism in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Archive, 2009), p. 50.
15 Khalid Hasan, National Media Survey 1998 (Dhaka: Org-Marg Quest Ltd., 1999),
p. 47.
16 Md. Asiuzzaman et al., Study on Media Availability in Bangladesh, p. 55.
17 Some film activists, including veteran Mahbub Jamil, claim that they formed the Stu
dents’ Film Society (SFS) at the University of Dhaka some months before PFS
started. SFS, however, survived for only a short while. For details, see Mahbub Jamil,
“Dhaka University led Film Club Movement Too,” Montage 4 (1992): 73. PFS was
renamed the Bangladesh Film Society (BFS) in 1972 and its existence is still evident,
especially through its scholarly and voluminous journal, Dhrupadi, edited by veteran
Muhammad Khasru. Throughout the 1970s to the 1990s BFS produced a number of
younger offshoots, as many of its former activists went on to organize new film clubs.
18 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), p. 187.
19 Hasan (2011) p. 76. On p. 234.
20 Anupam Hayat, History of Bangladesh Cinema (Bangladesher Chalachitrer Itihash)
(Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Development Corporation, 1987), p. 145.
21 Kabir (1979) p. 129.
22 Quader (1993) pp. 629–31. Hasan (2011) p. 224.
23 Hasan (2011) pp. 222–23.
24 Muhammad Khasru (ed.), Dhrupadi, Volume 6 (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Society,
2006).
25 IFCAB “State of Cine Criticism,” Celluloid 18.1 (1996): 63.
26 Rafique Kaiser, “Letter,” Chalachitrapatra 10.1 (1986): 107. This and all other trans
lations are mine, if not indicated otherwise.
27 Shamol Dutta, “What is the Magic of Film Entertainment,” Chalachitrapatra 10.1
(1986): 81.
28 Tanvir Mokammel, Film Aesthetics and Twelve Directors (Chalachitra Nandantatwa O
Barojon Director) (Dhaka: Suborno Prokashoni, 1985); Anwar Hossain Pintu, About
Cinema (Chalachitra Proshonga) (Chittagong: Look Through Prokashoni, 1985).

29 Zakir Hossain Raju, Understanding Cinema (Chalachitrer Chalchitro) (Dhaka: Chal
achitram Film Society, 1990/Second revised edition, Jagrity, 2012a); Ayub Hossain,
Alternative Film Movements (Prothabirodhi Chalachitra Andolon) (Dhaka: Shilpotaru
Prokashoni, 1991); Mahbub Jamil, Subject: Cinema (Proshonga: Chalachitra)
(Dhaka: Shanondo Prokash, 1994); Tanvir Mokammel, The Aesthetics of Cinema
(Cinemar Shilporoop) (Dhaka: Agami Prokashoni, 1998); Tareque Ahmed, Patriotic
Thoughts in Cinema (Chalachitre Swadesh Bhabna) (Dhaka: Porag Prokashoni,
1998); Shaibal Chowdhury, At the Backdrop of Cinema (Chalachitrer Potobhumikai)
(Chittagong: Chittagong Film Center, 1994).
30 Muhammad Khasru, Film Club Movement of Bangladesh (Bangladesher Chalachi-
tra Sangshad Andolon) (Dhaka: Parua, 2004); Mahbub Alam, Films I Watched
(Amar Dekha Chobi) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Society, 2008); Nurul Alam Atique,
Towards a New Cinema (Notun Cinema, Shomoyer Proyojone), (Dhaka: Pandulipi
Karkhana, 2009); Mahmudul Hossain, Cinema (Cinema) Dhaka: Mahmudul
Hossain, 2010); Sajedul Awwal, Film Art (Chalachitra Kala) (Dhaka: Bangla
Academy, 2010); Tareque Masud, In A Film Journey (Chalachitra Jatra) (Dhaka:
Prothoma, 2012).
31 International Film Guide (1981): 74.
32 Kabir (1979) “Foreword.”
33 Kabir Chowdhury (ed.) The Memorial Volume on Alamgir Kabir (Alamgir Kabir
Sharok Grontho) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Federation of Film Societies, 1991).
34 Shaikot Ashgor, Hiralal Sen (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993); Shaikot Ashgor, Abdul
Jabbar Khan (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2002); Anupam Hayat, Fateh Lohani (Dhaka:
Bangla Academy, 1994)
35 See Chapters 3 and 4 of this study for my detailed assessment of Sen, Khan and Loha
ni’s role in Bangladesh film history.
36 Anupam Hayat, Some Film Activists of Bangladesh of the Yesteryears (Dhaka: Bang
ladesh Arts Academy, 1999).
37 Leaquat Hosain Khokon, The The Sad Tales of Film Stars (Chalachitra Tarokader
Bedonar Kotha) (Dhaka: Anindya Prokash, 2010).
38 Catherine Masud (ed.) Tareque Masud: Life and Dreams (Dhaka: British Council and
Prothoma, 2012).
39 Kabir (1979) pp. 136–42; Hayat (1987) pp. 276–84; Mutsuddi (1987), pp. 180–93;
Quader, Film Industry, pp. 185–206.
40 Islam (2008) pp. 337–49.
41 Edward Buscombe, “Introduction: Metahistory of Film,” Film Reader 4 (1979): 11.
42 Islam, The Cinema of Bangladesh, pp. 354–6.
43 Quader (1993) p. 14.
44 Kabir (1979) “Preface”; Hayat (1987) pp. i, iii and iv.
45 Fahmidul Haq, Digital Film in Bangladesh: Call for a New Cinema? Germany: LAP,
2011.
46 Haq (2011) p. 15.
47 See pp. 74–93 of Haq (2011). The monograph runs for 100 pages.
48 Thomas Elsaesser, “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema,” in Patricia
Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (eds.) Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices (Frederick,
MD: University Publications of America, 1984) 48.
49 Edward Branigan, “Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History,” Film
Reader 4 (1979): 29.
50 Branigan (1979) pp. 17–8.
51 Syed Salahuddin Zaki, “Bangladesh Cinema: A Brief Review” ((Bangladesher Chala
chitra: Ekti Sankhipto Porjalochona) Celluloid 20.1 (1997).
52 Kabir (1979) p. 22.
53 Hayat (1987) p. 43; Mutsuddi (1987) p. 20.
54 Hayat (1987) pp. 43–55; Mutsuddi (1987) pp. 20–2; Kabir (1979) pp. 22–4; Quader
(1993), pp. 96–7, 103–19; Mofidul Hoque, “The 21st February (the language martyrs’
day) and Bangladesh Cinema,” Intercut 4 (1989): 97.
55 Kabir (1979) p. 24.
56 Kabir (1979) p. 25; Hayat (1987) p. 58; Quader, Film Industry, 323–4; Huq, (1989)
96.
57 Sirajul Islam, “Introduction,” The History of Bangladesh 1704–1971, Vol. 3 (Social
and Cultural History), ed. Sirajul Islam (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1993)
9–10.
58 Hayat (1987) “Preface”.
59 Alison Butler, “New Film Histories and the Politics of Location,” Screen 33.4 (1992):
414.
60 Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United
States, (Madison, USA: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. x–xi.
61 Tom Gunning “Review of The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960,” Wide Angle, 7.3 (1985): 74.
62 Gomery (1992) p. xii.
63 Gomery (1992) pp. xxii and 303–56.
64 Gomery (1992) pp. v–viii and 3–302.
65 Allen and Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985),
pp. 45–6.
66 Allen and Gomery (1985) pp. 47–8.
67 Jeffrey F. Klenotic, “The Place of Rhetoric in ‘New’ Film Historiography: The Dis
course of Corrective Revisionism,” Film History 6 (1994): 50.
68 Branigan (1979) pp. 21 and 29.
69 Stephen Bottomore, “Out of This World: Theory, Fact and Film History,” Film
History 6 (1994): 21.
70 Allen and Gomery (1985) p. 14.
71 Klenotic (1994) 50.
73 Klenotic (1994) 45–55.
74 Richard Allen, “Review of Film History: Theory and Practice,” Wide Angle 8 (1986):
56–8.
75 Butler (1992) 413.
77 Patrice Petro “Feminism and Film History,” Camera Obscura, no. 22 (1990): 9.
78 E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1961; second ed. 1987), p. 14.
79 Branigan (1979) p. 24.
80 Buscombe (1979) 11.
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Bangladesh Cinema and National

adopted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh. At the same time, this

Zakir Hossain Raju is Professor in Media and Communication and Dean of

1 Pakistan 8 Regionalism in South Asia

Social and cultural transformations Negotiating cooperation,

2 Labor, Democratization and 9 Federalism, Nationalism and

3 China–India Relations 10 Human Development and Social

6 Indian Literature and Popular 13 Himalayan Frontiers of India

7 Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh 14 India’s Open-­Economy Policy

16 India’s Energy Security 24 Culture and the Environment in

17 Globalization and the Middle 25 The Rise of Ethnic Politics in

neoliberal reforms Susan I. Hangen

33 Political Islam and Governance 42 Development-­induced

37 Building Bangalore 45 Islamic Revival in Nepal

52 Non-­discrimination and 61 Everyday Ethnicity in Sri Lanka

Vidhu Verma 62 Ritual and Recovery in Post-­

55 Bollywood Travels 64 Regional Economic Integration

56 Nation, Territory, and 65 Architecture and Nationalism in

70 Water, Democracy and 79 Indian Arranged Marriages

71 Capitalist Development in 80 Writing the City in British

87 Corporate Social Responsibility 89 Bangladesh Cinema and

Zakir Hossain Raju

any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing

ISBN: 978-0-415-46544-1 (hbk)

1 Methods in film historiography: towards an interpretive

2 National cinema and non-­Western modernity: framework

3 National cinema study and beginning of Bangladesh film

4 Bengali cinema and cultural modernity in colonial Bengal 91

5 The Dhaka film industry and Bengali-­Muslim modernity

6 Popular cinema: between nation-­state and market forces in

7 Cultural modernity and art film discourses: towards a

This book—an attempt of writing a history of Bangladesh cinema—holds a

workplace in Dhaka since 2000—Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB)

Following this proposition, I look at the “relation between representation and

reception”3 of Bangladesh cinema. In order to analyze this cinema as a social

78 films in 1989).8 It registered 20 percent growth in next eight years, as the

Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation

Such an overwhelming centrality of Indian cinema within South Asian

Approach and structure of the book

Bangladesh cinema that I am presenting in this book.

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxv.

This study investigates how cinema as a social institution functions in a post­

colonial society, namely Bangladesh. In this study my attempt is to rethink the

1 . . . how a large number of superficially differentiated texts can be asso­

In the present study I attempt to articulate the three conceptualizations Rosen

Three discourses of film scholarship

publishing on cinema—began in the late 1930s. It continues today, in most cases

commentary on cinema in the form of serious film periodicals when it began

Towards a Bangladeshi film-­historiography

Kabir’s earlier work, Cinema in Pakistan, published in Dhaka a decade back.

small-­scale research sketches digital developments in the Bangladesh film indus­

Approaches in the historiography of Asian cinemas vis-­à-vis

non-­linear mode of narrativizing national cinemas of Asia. They situate the

Bangladeshi film histories and traditional historiography

history is presented in a narrative that includes an easily determinable beginning,

Such histories are structured as dramas of disclosure, with a stress on con­

Revisionist mode in international film-­historiography

we cannot afford to be seduced by the story being told as history so that we

In order to overcome these problems associated with presenting history as a

On the other hand, they acknowledge that as there is no unadulterated documen­

Towards an interpretive history of Bangladesh cinema

a certain division of labour has come to characterize film studies as a discip­

I reject this division, maintained by the revisionists, as an unproductive concept.

7 Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh 14 India’s Open-Economy Policy

33 Political Islam and Governance 42 Development-induced

52 Non-discrimination and 61 Everyday Ethnicity in Sri Lanka

Vidhu Verma 62 Ritual and Recovery in Post-

2 National cinema and non-Western modernity: framework

4 Bengali cinema and cultural modernity in colonial Bengal 91

5 The Dhaka film industry and Bengali-Muslim modernity

6 Popular cinema: between nation-state and market forces in

This study investigates how cinema as a social institution functions in a post

1 . . . how a large number of superficially differentiated texts can be asso

Towards a Bangladeshi film-historiography

small-scale research sketches digital developments in the Bangladesh film indus

Approaches in the historiography of Asian cinemas vis-à-vis

non-linear mode of narrativizing national cinemas of Asia. They situate the

Such histories are structured as dramas of disclosure, with a stress on con

Revisionist mode in international film-historiography

On the other hand, they acknowledge that as there is no unadulterated documen

a certain division of labour has come to characterize film studies as a discip

Jahangir, Borhanuddin Khan (1977) The Experience of Modernity and Post-modernity,