Toward the Research Problematics
My husband and I visited my aunt in Canada in June 2013. We were there for 12 days. During that period, I watched four Hindi movies in Canadian cinema halls. My husband was saying, “Have you come to Canada to visit the country or to watch Bollywood cinema? You go back to Dhaka where you can watch those films on DVD or download them from the net.” I said no, no; I want to watch films in the cinema hall. It feels different to watch films in a hall.
This statement from an educated, young married woman in Dhaka could be read as nothing more than the enthusiasm of a film buff, but closer consideration evokes more profound questions. For instance, what made the woman so interested in watching Bollywood 1 films instead of Hollywood or even Bangladeshi films? Or, instead of suggesting that back in Bangladesh she could watch the films in cinema halls, why did her husband suggest that she watch them on DVD or download them from the Internet? The woman is typical of many middle-class audiences in Dhaka who watch Indian films 2 instead of Bangladeshi ones. Her husband’s reference to viewing films on DVD or downloaded from the Internet points to what is common practice in Bangladesh.
Indian films were banned in Bangladeshi theatres after Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971. This ban, however, was unable to prevent the Bangladeshi audience from watching Indian films after the arrival of videocassette technology in the late 1970s and 1980s. The ban became almost completely irrelevant after the arrival of cable television in the early 1990s (Masud, 2011; Raju, 2011). With the later arrival of the video compact disk, followed by the DVD and the Internet, the circulation and consumption of Indian films have become so ubiquitous in Bangladesh that it seems quite an inescapable phenomenon for the Bangladeshi audience.
The aim of my research is to explore how films connect Bangladesh with other South Asian nation-states and define its position within the wider socioeconomic, political and cultural contexts. More specifically, repositioning Bangladesh in the South Asian context, I investigate the way middle-class audiences in Dhaka consume Indian films. I also examine how the consumption of films reinforces cultural hegemony and social inequality. To achieve these aims, I identify the following objectives:
- 1.To map out the circulation and viewership of Indian films in Bangladesh and the media infrastructure that has enabled these.
- 2.To investigate the commoditization process and marketing strategies employed by those engaged in selling the experience and ownership of Indian films in Bangladesh.
- 3.To explore how a culture of copying enables the circulation and consumption of Indian films in Bangladesh.
- 4.To understand the way cultural consumption reinforces class disparities and Indian cultural hegemony over Bangladesh.
- 5.To assess the ways in which Indian films and their circulation and viewership are negotiated and contested in Bangladesh.
- 6.To understand the effect of Indian films on the Bangladeshi culture industry.
Since Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, only a handful of studies have been carried out on the history of Bangladeshi cinema. Chronologically, these studies are Film in Bangladesh (1979) by Alamgir Kabir, History of Bangladeshi Cinema (1987) by Anupam Hayat, Social Commitment in Bangladesh Cinema (1987) by Chinmoy Mutsuddi, Bangladesh Film Industry (1993) by Mirja Tarequl Qader, Film in Bangladesh: Socio-economic Background (2008) by Ahmed Aminul Islam, The Film Industry of Bangladesh: Popular Culture in Crisis (2008) by Gitiara Nasreen and Fahmidul Haq, Film in Old Dhaka (2009) by Anupam Hayat, Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (2014) by Lotte Hoek, and Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity (2015) by Zakir Hossain Raju. Apart from Kabir, Hoek and Raju, all these works are in Bengali. Before writing Film in Bangladesh in 1979, Alamgir Kabir wrote The Cinema in Pakistan in 1969, which covered the history of film in East and West Pakistan.
While most of these works are based on the historical survey and evolution of Bangladeshi cinema, Hoek’s is an ethnographic work based on following a Bangladeshi commercial film from production to exhibition. She investigated how Bangladeshi filmmakers attempt to make their films appealing to their audience by inserting pornographic scenes known as “cut-pieces” into the films. She demonstrated the formation of East Pakistani films as “sanitized cultural forms and bhodro (respectable) styles” (2014, p. 20) promulgated by the vernacular elite. She stated that initially East Pakistani films had to compete with Hindi, Urdu and West Bengali films, but growing nationalist sentiment, increasing valorization of folk-oriented stories and a ban on Indian films in 1965 boosted East Pakistan’s film production.
She explained that in post-1971 Bangladesh, production values and the genres of films changed with a change in the system of taxing cinema halls, the influence of foreign films, non-theatrical means3 of film viewership and the alienation of the middle-class audience from Bangladeshi films and cinema halls. She argued that all these factors influenced Bangladeshi filmmakers to produce “cheap films, produced with tight production schedules, low production values, stock footage, minimal editing, and simple camera work. For extra selling power cut-pieces may be added to such films” (2014, p. 25). Given that Hoek’s characterization of Bangladeshi films and audiences aligns with my own argument, I elaborate on them in detail in Chapter 9.
Raju (2015) recounted the historiography of Bangladeshi film that evolved in the mid-1950s, creating national and cultural markers and deliberately distinguishing itself from Hindu Bengali nationalism and Pakistani Islamic nationalism. Raju maintained that the Muslim middle class in East Bengal fought against the hegemony of Kolkata’s Bengali middle class in the colonial period to construct “Bengali-Muslim identity.” He contended that films produced in Kolkata in the first half of the twentieth century reinforced Hindu ideology, thus alienating the “Bengali Muslims.” With partition in 1947, the middle-class “Bengali Muslims” developed a culture industry 4 in East Pakistan and set up a “vernacular cultural modernity” against the “Muslim nationalism” promoted by the West Pakistani regime. He reasoned that this “vernacular cultural modernity,” which had had a rural link and was focused on the Bengal delta, was distinct from both the Hindus in Kolkata and Muslims of West Pakistan. Raju also discussed that after independence in 1971, Bangladeshi films projected a “nation state modernity” in the context of rapid urbanization, globalization and commercialization (2015, p. 12). Because of their connections with my argument, I explore all these hyphenated identities more thoroughly in Chapter 2.
All the works cited above are limited to the Bangladeshi cinema; no works have undertaken any comparative analysis of the domestic and foreign films that are circulated and viewed in Bangladesh. They also do not examine the role or meaning of Bangladeshi films in Bangladeshi culture. My research fills this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of the circulation of Indian films in Bangladesh and their impacts on Bangladeshi society and the Bangladeshi culture industry. Admittedly, while archival materials such as distributors’ records, newspaper coverage and official policy concerning the circulation and distribution of Indian films during the colonial and Pakistan era could deepen my narrative, because of their unavailability in repositories such as the Bangladesh Film Archive I mostly relied on secondary sources for the historical aspects of this book.
Conceptual Scheme
My book primarily contributes to the field of anthropology of media. I find that the circulation and viewership of films are not homogenous across society; instead, they vary in terms of geographical location, socioeconomic conditions and social hierarchy. To me, film circulation and viewership ar...