A dubious state: police power
and cinematic resistance in
Bangladeshi popular films of the 1990s
The Dhaka films produced at the facilities provided by the state-funded Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC), popularly known as FDC or mainstream films, are often critically treated as providing ‘entertainment’ only (i.e., lacking serious commentary about society) and driven by commerce exclusively. Such films sell what the public ‘eats’ (e.g., sex, glamor, and action) and are critiqued for unrealistic tropes (e.g., song and dance sequences, epic heroes, popular genres, etc.). These ‘unrealistic’ films seem the least capable cultural elements for any productive understanding of the Bangladesh state. However, critical discourse often underestimates the growing popularity of these films among lower and lower-middle-income working classes since the 1980s.
Following Stuart Hall, if we accept that these people have agency, a decoding power, and are not ‘cultural dupes’, then these films can also be looked at as potential sources for understanding how the working-class feels about the state and negotiates their relation to it. In this light, I wish to use cinema to examine certain questions. I here focus on the decade of the 1990s when the Dhaka film industry along with the country’s economy was going through significant ideological and infrastructural changes to suit the contemporary neoliberal paradigm. I ask:
- How did the state then appear to the working-class people of Bangladesh?
- Can the popular films of that time provide some clues about citizen-state negotiation?
- How and when did these FDC films overcome dominant ideology and vocalize some pro-people concerns, if they did that at all?
By looking at two different films—Deshpremik (The Patriot, 1993) and Shanto Keno Mastan (Why is Shanto a Hooligan? 1998)—I argue that we find a “dubious state” depicted onscreen. Whereas the films in an overt way usually comply with statist requirements, they also often covertly subvert them through various cinematic techniques. Thus, contrary to popular film criticism, these films are multi-layered and equivocal. In them, the state seems to promote both welfare and authoritarianism. In their effect, these films re-evaluate popular understandings of democracy and freedom of speech as they depict the modern state’s contradictory monopoly on violence along with its accompanying concepts of justice, crime, and legitimate protest.
Social and political context
Authoritarianism has been a persistent feature of the states in the Bengal delta, where access to and control of economic resources have often motivated a concomitant struggle for political power. Scholars like Tony Lynch have identified the British East India Company as an early incarnation of transnational corporations and the colonial British state as a neoliberal one that privatized an entire native state for the sake of financial gains. Later, though nationalism and democracy were imagined as a remedy to that kind of colonial monopoly and capitalism, postcolonial states often operated under a hegemonic nationalism that principally served a certain class interest and could hardly deliver the desired social result (Chatterjee). In their detailed readings of the post-Partition Pakistan state, for example, Hamza Alavi, Raunaq Jahan, and Ayesha Jalal have shown how the military-bureaucratic authoritarianism of a certain elite cornered the entire population so as to ensure financial benefits for itself. In independent Bangladesh, too, the state has been ruled mostly by civilian and military autocracies up to 1990, and then, through an ‘illiberal democracy’ from 1991 onwards.[1] [open endnotes in new window]
When this authoritarian state of Bangladesh goes through neoliberal economic changes, along with the common scenario of adversely affecting the lower economic strata most severely, we find a complex state structure. In Bangladesh, the post-1975 military regimes moved policy away from the previous goal of economic socialism and followed the path of a mixed economy ‘in line with the demands of business elites and donors’ (Lewis 83). Not only did the state increase its dependency on foreign aid from the West and oil-rich Arab countries, but also it tried to denationalize industries and deregulate local markets, following the requirements of structural adjustment loans by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). However, none of these developments led to any significant industrialization of the country.
As Nuruzzaman shows, the emerging Bangladeshi bourgeoisie lacked the skills and experience to invest money in new industries, and they preferred to remain dependent on the state for more financial benefit, utilizing patron-client networks. The civil and military authoritarian regimes were also somewhat unwilling and slow to execute neoliberal policies. On the one hand, they needed the donor/loan money to sustain the country’s weak economic situation and hence agreed to implement the internationally imposed reforms. On the other hand, they were worried over their regimes’ appearance of legitimacy and so were keen to form new grassroots party bases, mostly by populist endeavors and generous grants. As a result, their experiments and compromises with neoliberal policies ended in mass unemployment, unrecovered debt, and the flooding of local markets with foreign consumer goods, among many other consequences (Nuruzzaman 52). Explaining this relation between the authoritarian state and a neoliberal economy further, Hassan claims that Bangladesh represents an instance of ‘political capitalism,’ where ‘political logic still dominates capital logics’ and ‘political actors use political power to achieve economic gains’ (229).
During this time, the population underwent a ‘penalization of misery,’ as Jinkings calls it, in which increasing police power was needed to discipline mass protests. Growing politicization of the security forces and demands for the creation of new forces (Ruud) became constant features in the country’s politics. In this regard, Jackman and Maitrot posit that a strong ‘party-police nexus’ now sustains the most recent Awami League (AL) authoritarianism in Bangladesh (2009-2024). They argue,
“the ability to use violence and coercion…is not then marginal to the country’s political life, but central…[A]ll regimes have ultimately fallen in part due to their inability to manage their coercive organisations to control rivals” (1519).
In addition, in the case of Bangladesh, police power must be understood as both the institutional police power of maintaining security and the workings of other regulatory agencies (e.g., the Film Censorship Board), and also the ‘muscle power’ of the political parties at the local level. As Ruud explains, Bangladesh developed into a ‘polycracy’, where instead of the state having a monopoly in using violence, such power is shared at various tiers of the power structure.
As a result, such a state, neither thoroughly neoliberal, pro-market, and pro-reform, nor intimately conservative with traditional values and structures, appears ‘dubious’ to the masses, those living at the political margins. In such a state, the use of coercive force in the name of law and the exercise of political muscle by the power elites produce precarity as an everyday experience. Within this context, I look here at two popular films of the 1990s to explore how in popular culture the state is understood and negotiated from these marginal perspectives.
Both Deshpremik (The Patriot 1993) and Shanto Keno Mastaan (Why Is Shanto a Hooligan? 1998) are FDC films. They have ‘mainstream’ characteristics, such as the use of melodrama, star actors, love plots, song and dance sequences, and violence. Between the two films, Deshpremik seems to speak to a middle-class audience and received a national award for the best film, whereas Shanto Keno Mastan, one of the highest-grossing films in Bangladesh, seems to speak for and to a working-class audience. Content-wise, both films seem to dissent against the current state, but at the same time, they had to pass the censor board certification, which meant they could not be overtly subversive. Within these conditions, both films have utilized a multilayered and equivocal narrative structure where, under the guise of employing common cinematic tropes and offering mere entertainment, they allow spectators multiple ways of decoding the films. Delayed revelations in the plot, melodrama, and spectacular violence are just some of the mechanisms through which the films present a portrait of a dubious state.
Deshpremik (The Patriot)
Deshpremik (The Patriot, 1993) is a fiction film about a conscientious filmmaker, Alam, whose current film project criticizes local political malfeasance. Though others warn him about the challenges in making such a film, he proceeds with this project since he considers himself committed to the welfare of his people. The film shows the challenges he faces one by one. First, the possible producers (investors) of the film decide not to invest any more money in the film, fearing retribution from the government. Second, a minister from the current government offers Alam another government-funded film project in return for abandoning this film. Third, a chief officer of the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation informs him that they will not allow any more work on this film using FDC logistics. Finally, as he continues with his project, he is taken into custody by the security officials of the Detective Branch, brutally tortured, and falsely accused of smuggling. The judiciary, too, fails him, and he is sentenced to 10-year imprisonment.
Thus, the first 35 minutes of the film directly show how the political regime uses various state mechanisms (i.e., state-funded FDC infrastructure, government-funded film projects, bureaucracy, police, and judiciary) to control dissenting voices. We find here a state mechanism invested in its political elites, and hence it can police a dissenting voice in various direct and indirect ways. In the film, Alam talks about his right to critique corrupt politicians as part of his democratic rights, his freedom of speech. Thus, the dialogue directly questions the country’s existing ‘democracy’ with lines about how the state is supposed to function. Moreover, by the plot’s showing how the state’s monopoly on violence is misused, the action itself questions state structures.
Although it is fiction, the film seems to carry some bitter truth about the Bangladeshi film industry in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, the production and distribution networks of Bangladeshi cinema, as discussed by Zakir Hossain Raju (Bangladesh Cinema) and Lotte Hoek, are cinematically exemplified in this film. Raju identified the changes in this period as moving towards a market economy (“Rickshaw Puller’s Dreams”). According to him, the FDC-based Dhaka film industry partook of the major ideological and infrastructural changes that the state of Bangladesh went through since the 1980s. That is, the same changes in economic and social structure that resulted in urbanization, pauperization of the peasantry, village-to-city migration, and the rise of garment industries, also resulted in the rise of a new ‘uneducated menial worker’ class. This was the new film audience. At the same time, since 1979, the pro-market state permitted the import of video films from neighboring countries. So, there was a rise of a video culture which removed the affluent middle classes from the local cinemas[2]. Furthermore, the imported videos gave rise to illegal exhibition businesses showing such video films in the rural areas, cutting further into revenue for local films.
Though the 1983 changes in the taxation system from pay-per-view to capacity-tax[3] made the film business more profitable, it mostly empowered the exhibitors. Producers and distributors did not get their due share of the extra profit, and the exhibitors became the key stakeholders in the industry. These shifts resulted in a significant rise in the number of cinema halls around the country and in the annual rate of film productions.[4] Raju claims all these factors in the political economy of the commercial film industry—i.e., new audience, more demand for films due to more number of halls, more profit made chiefly by the exhibitors, and loss of middle-class audiences—resulted in a ‘massification’ of the industry and a homogenization of the film content.[5]
In the film Deshpremik, then, Alam seems to encounter these cultural and economic changes by trying to make a dissenting film challenging the transformation of cinema into just an entertainment platform. Therefore, his suffering from a lack of available producers and getting no cooperation from the FDC authority can also be seen within such an industrial-political context. Whereas his producers were afraid of incurring financial and reputational losses, the FDC authority as well as the police seem neither ideologically interested in nor functionally capable of serving as neutral state machinery. By blindly obeying the unofficial commands from the political elites, their depiction within the film indicates how the role of the state and the interests of its political leadership have become intertwined.
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| Alam endures brutal torture under police custody. | |
