Bangladesh Cinema And National Identity

This book explores the relationship between cinema and modernity in Bangladesh, and how the film industry has played a role in constructing national identity. It examines the interactions between cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims, and how different social groups have influenced the development of Bangladesh cinema. The book also challenges traditional ideas about Bangladesh and cinema, and places the cinema within a global context. It is the first major academic study on Bangladesh cinema and will be of interest to scholars and students in Global Film and Media Studies and South Asian Studies.

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been 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 identity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyses 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 postcolonial notion of formation of the Bangladesh nation, interactions between cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims in different social and political matrices are analyzed. The author explores how the conflict among different social groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities. In particular, he illustrates the connections between film production and reception in Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim identity. 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 language cinema in colonial Bengal, the author completes the investigation by identifying 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.