copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

A dubious state: police power and cinematic resistance in
Bangladeshi popular films of the 1990s

by Md Hasan Ashik Rahman

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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However, despite such direct criticism of the state, the film won three national awards—Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay—in the 19th Bangladesh National Film Awards in 1994, a prestigious event for local cinema. The awards show that instead of getting embarrassed by the film’s harsh criticism, the state appreciates the film. Whereas the film-within-the-film receives such coercive censorship, the actual film seems to fit well with the current state ideology. Contrary to the ‘reel’ state, the real state appears to be modern, secular, and democratic by being able to accommodate and acknowledge such a ‘dissenting’ film. A dubious position is thus created outside the film’s narrative world.

This dubious role may be further explained through Lotte Hoek’s valuable insights about the role of the Bangladesh state, specifically, of its film censorship board. Hock offers a rigorous engagement with the rise of ‘obscenity’ in FDC films in the late 1990s-2000s. She shows that the ‘modern’ state, instead of dealing with the issue of sexually explicit scenes more effectively and respectfully[6], rather enjoys its gatekeeper role on behalf of urban civil society, led by a middle-class intelligentsia with conservative outlooks. Hock postulates the state seems to benefit from such ‘obscene’ vs. ‘healthy’ discourses as through these it creates legitimacy for its own existence. Instead of offering productive contributions to the production and distribution of such films,[7] the state is more eager to participate in the public discussions, which often engender a process of otherization for these films.[8] Deshpremik’s national award seems attest to this state interest to create ground for its cultural legitimacy.

Several other contradictory issues within the film’s narrative world further contribute to the impression of a dubious state. First of all, the film critiques the government, politicians, and state system of the previous decade, with a setting sometime in the early 1980s.  In the 1990s a parliamentary democracy under an elected political party was hard-gained by a mass uprising against the military autocracy under Hussain Muhammad Ershad that had ruled the country from 1982-1990. [9] Thus, the film shows that the harassment Alam and his film faced came from the bureaucrats, politicians, and the police of an earlier political regime, whereas the present political regime (both its government officials and its politicians) seem sincere and pro-people. Therefore, the film apparently poses no threat to the current government. Rather, by incorporating the finished film into the dominant state ideology through prestigious national awards, the political regime took the chance of declaring itself as modern, secular, and democratic (i.e., respecting freedom of speech). Whatever the past state looks like in the film, the present state hardly looks dubious if it offers such an overt reading of the film.

However, the film’s narrative techniques open up several covert layers within this apparently propagandist interpretation. First, the script plays with a delayed-revelation technique. Information is withheld from the audience till the last moment so that the audiences have little clue as to whether they are watching a film within the film or a story of past or present society. An early hint of such a technique is given in the opening sequence of the film. We see a politician shot while delivering a speech in a public gathering. As the attacker runs away, a policeman fires a pistol into his leg, and he is arrested. The shooter, then, in dramatic direct address to the audience, claims that he killed two of his friends upon instructions from that corrupt politician and asks people to be aware of the evil intentions of such leaders. Only after this, do we see a director saying, ‘Cut,’ and then understand that we have seen a film-within-film, a film sequence just shot by our filmmaker Alam. What this opening sequence does by withholding information about the film-within-film is to create confusion between fiction and reality. It makes a strong statement against politicians’ malpractice but also neutralizes it by claiming it is mere dramatic cinema. The film plays another round of this tactic in the middle as well.

There is almost no clue in the film that the first 35 minutes of the film are actually events of the last decade. The film did not play with narrative chronology (e.g., using flashbacks, etc.) and only when Alam is sent to prison and is released from there after 10 years does the audience come to know that what they have seen so far were events from the past. The differences between the mise-en-scene of the 1980s and 1990s are also very minimal—whether or not due to production limitations. The consequence of this delayed revelation is that the severe criticism of the political regime in the first 35 minutes of the film may be ‘misunderstood’ by many as a criticism of the current state and its malpractices. That is, instead of the personnel of the past regime, the police, bureaucracy, and politicians of the present regime may seem to be critiqued in the initial 35 minutes of the film. Whether this ‘misunderstanding’ is carefully crafted or not, it certainly creates confusion.

In the contemporary part of the film (the part that starts after Alam’s release), the film continues its criticism of contemporary society but this time in a more surreptitious way. Instead of social confrontation with the dominant status quo, the film uses allegory to convey its message. In this case, the script activates an often-used melodramatic trope in South Asian cinemas of the disintegration and reintegration of a family to convey the message. It focuses on Alam’s pain of separation from his only daughter, an event that can be seen as an allegorical representation of the pain he suffers for not being able to complete his dream film.

When Alam is imprisoned, his wife with their only daughter, Baby, leave the country. Alam’s wife then dies in a road accident in the UK, and he is denied any further communication with his daughter by the evil maneuvers of his arrogant father-in-law. Upon release from prison, Alam fails to find his daughter. He lacks the consolation of family. Moreover, he has also lost any zeal to fight the system and takes refuge in drink. Both the unfinished film and the lost daughter make him deeply pessimistic about life.

Here, melodrama invites audiences to feel the pain and suffering of a father for his lost daughter, and through that, they are also provoked to feel the pain of a filmmaker who cannot complete and release his ‘child-like’ film. It can be noted that several times in the film Alam has proclaimed that an artwork is an offspring of its artists while emphasizing an affectionate spiritual connection between the art and the artist that goes beyond mere materialism. Thus, Alam’s suffering for not being able to complete the film—subtly presented through his alienation and pain from missing his daughter—becomes an allegory of the lack of freedom of speech under the present state system. It can also be read as a critique of the neoliberal policies and ‘illiberal democracy’ of Bangladesh[10] which cannot measure things beyond their material significance.

Altogether, there is hardly one stable image of the state in the film. Establishing the meaning of the state seems always an ongoing process. Whereas the film seemingly ‘praises’ the status quo and gets praised and awards in return, an unpacking of its cinematic techniques reveals several layers within the film where each layer seems to cancel the other. We find an oscillation between past and present, between appearance and reality, and between what is appreciated and what is critiqued, the result of which, as I argue, depicts a dubious state. Like most other popular cinema, the film ends with restoring the equilibrium—the alcoholic, lonely father finally dies an epic death—but the pain he has endured lingers as a criticism of whatever has happened so far. Alam completes his film, and it becomes an instant success. Instead of harassing him for the film, the current reel government appreciates it very much by providing it with logistical support and sending it to international festivals to represent the country. Making the character even more tragic, the script has Alam die on the very day of receiving a foreign accolade for his film. Audiences are invited to leave the film feeling sorry for this suffering fighter-artist. Thus, the ending, too, offers a double-sidedness.

Shanto Keno Mastan (Why Is Shanto a Hooligan?)

Whereas Deshpremik critiques the state machinery, it arguably tries to align itself with the urban, middle-class intelligentsia of the country. The central characters, good or bad, are formally educated, speak in ‘standard’ Bangla language, dress well like city people, and are motivated by high cultural practices (e.g., they listen to Tagore songs, a middle-class favorite). The need for an award from an international film festival to prove the caliber of Alam’s film at the end further extends this middle-class fantasy. The film tries to speak for the masses while carefully distancing itself from them on cultural high grounds. In the film, when an unsophisticated alcohol seller asks Alam about his paper files, Alam replies that the seller could not understand their value. Alam also corrects that man’s wrong tune of a popular song. In the film, he seems to be a self-appointed guardian of the ‘helpless’ masses of Bangladesh. He fights for them. The film thus reasserts a middle-class intellectual leadership over the masses in Bangladesh; and the real national award for the film further attests to the hegemony of this leadership in the local politics and state machinery.

I would now like to address a film which more openly speaks from a marginal position to further look at cinematic representation of the state. Shanto Keno Mastan (Why is Shanto a Hooligan? 1998), a remake of the Bollywood film Ziddi (1997), is an example of an ‘extreme action genre’ film. This is a genre that Raju has identified as resulting from the massification of the industry in the 1990s. The film was a huge box-office success, and in it is a ‘hero’ who willingly abandons a compromised middle-class life accepting the status quo and becomes a violent, working-class leader. Comparing the two films, we see a shift from Alam’s intellectual dissent to Shanto’s violent rebellion. The state’s sovereignty is challenged through Shanto’s self-proclaimed right to commit violence as resistance and to run his own state within the State.

The film’s script introduces Shanto as a young man who refuses to keep quiet in the event of any crime and injustice and who resorts to violence as his way of protesting. His father, a middle-class lawyer and dutiful citizen, tries to derail Shanto from this dangerous habit which sets up a father-son conflict. That intrafamily conflict then allegorizes a ‘law vs justice’ theme, where discrepancies between the existing laws and the real requirements of justice can be shown. In that way, the film can critique the modern state and its failure to rescue people in distress, especially the working-class masses.

Shanto kills a local goon who tries to sexually harass his sister and is convicted to four-year imprisonment. But upon returning from prison, unlike Alam in Deshpremik, he decides to be an outlaw and consciously picks a path of violence to ensure justice for some slum-dwellers whom the state has failed to protect. In the film, we see Shanto dealing with many dishonest businessmen and goons: a real estate businessman who tries to grab land coercively from the migrant workers, a drug lord and adulterer who mixes harmful elements in baby food for more profit, and several male sexual assaulters. At the same time, with the consent of the local people, he runs his own court in the slum and metes out retributive justice. Thus, very much like the narrative worlds of Godfather or Nayakan, we see Shanto running a shadow state within the state of Bangladesh.

Despite having a directly subversive message, the film was not hindered by the state agencies like the censorship board. Though this film did not receive any awards, it was a record hit in the history of Bangladeshi cinema. It must be mentioned that, like most other cinemas, the film ends with restoring the equilibrium. The Bangladesh police arrest Shanto at the end, and a suggestion is made that he will go through due legal proceedings. Not only that, within the film’s narrative world, we see ‘sincerity’ from the desks of the Home Minister of State Affairs and the Inspector General of Police, and through them, a suggestion is made that the corruption shown in the film is more due to individual cases than a fault of the entire state system. The judiciary too seems to work properly following legal procedure. Thus, the plot does not risk any overt confrontation with the entire state system.

However, the film poses its criticism by offering a bottom-up view of the state, a look from the margins. Though top state officials are shown as ideologically committed, the film shows that the marginal people (i.e., poor, slum-dwelling working class of the city) hardly get the benefit of such commitment. By showing the oppression and violence done to them along with the failure of state mechanisms (i.e., the police) to protect them, the film depicts the precariousness that these people face in their everyday life. It not only questions the effectiveness of the trickle-down mechanism of the neoliberal state but also attempts to generate empathy for counter-violence as a form of protest. Thus, in the film, we see that the slum-dwellers themselves request Shanto to be their savior and pledge all kinds of support for him. Shanto, on the other hand, becomes a one-man army for this vulnerable community, fighting against all evils in the absence of any effective state mechanism. The state here becomes ‘dubious’ through its simultaneous presence from a top-down view and absence from a bottom-up view, and the suggestion of a shadow state run by Shanto further complicates its legitimacy.

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A meeting point of these two opposing views of the state seems to be visually represented through the character of Jafar, who is at the same time a well-reputed police officer and a crime lord of the underworld. He seems to serve the state in public, but he is actually the boss of all local goons and corrupt businesses in private. Thus, in the guise of serving the country, he utilizes state power to protect the interests of anti-social elements. Very much like the case of Deshpremik, in this film the pain of Jafar’s betrayal is represented through the disintegration of Shanto’s family. Only after losing his two siblings could Shanto finally realize Jafar’s true nature. Shanto’s failure to decipher Jafar seems to allegorically represent the confusion the common people feel about the role of their state. Consequently, the script’s developing Jafar as a state employee can be seen as the film’s visual embodiment of the complexity that marginal people feel when thinking about the state they are living in. The high ideology found in the state’s official discourse is here connected to the grounded reality of its failure and villainy. Thus, the film ties this character’s success to the people’s precarity. Moreover, Jafar’s association with the criminal world might symbolize the amalgamation of the state with a profit-driven economy working against the interest of the masses, reminding one of Ruud’s suggestion of Bangladesh as ‘polycracy’ as well as Jackman and Maitrot’s framing it as a ‘party-police nexus’.

A similar kind of duality can be found in the character of Mirza Shahib, Shanto’s father. A conscientious supporter of middle-class values and a firm believer in the redemptive power of the modern state, Mirza Shahib further articulates the dilemma that marginal people face in such a state. As a law-abiding citizen and as a lawyer himself, he cannot support Shanto’s physical violence, while as a father, he understands the daily realities which compel Shanto to take such a stand. In a courtroom scene, in defense of Shanto’s crime, he requests that the Judge acknowledge the limitations of the law to protect its people; while at home, he rebukes Shanto for his deeds and asks him to choose the path of a decent life.[11] Thus, through this character, a synthesis is sought between two extremes that the modern system has created while verbally articulating the existing discrepancies between them. It can be added that the film takes a clear side for Shanto's case in the climactic scene when the father Mirza Shahib comes out of his state of confusion and kills Jafar and declares that Shanto was not guilty of any crimes.[12]

In the narrative techniques of the film, the dubiousness of the state is represented by two main aesthetic choices. Very much like Deshpremik, a delayed revelation technique is used to reveal the ‘true’ identity of Jafar. For up to the first 92 minutes of this 158-minute film, Jafar remains a good police officer. However, an affective sound clue used at Jafar’s entrance and the extra-diegetic baggage of this actor, Humayun Faridi, surely create an aura of suspicion for the regular cinema audiences.[13] Thus, for a significant period of the film, regular audiences of FDC films are encouraged to embark on a journey of suspicion regarding the true nature of this character. Dubiousness thus becomes a message that the film delivers through emotion.

The other significant aesthetic choice used in the film is to use spectacular violence. Unlike Deshpremik’s middle-class, intellectual dissent and its philosophy of persistent resistance against the ruling elites, Shanto Keno Mastan promotes confrontational resistance and highlights an aesthetic of spectacular violence. The pleasure of the spectacle emotionally challenges the sovereign power of the state as the sole arbitrator of violence and thereby empowers the masses through affect. In the film, Shanto not only protests crimes, but also protests them with extreme violence. In the beginning, when a local goon assaults his sister, he beats the goon to death. The film makes a spectacle of that fighting scene as audiences are shown in detail how Shanto literally rips off one hand from the assailant. The amputated hand and the dead body of the opponent are even shown in separate shots. Interestingly, even after this daylight murder and his subsequent imprisonment for 4 years, Shanto keeps saying that he did not do anything wrong. It seems Shanto is simply unable to acknowledge any excess in his violent protests, and audience sympathy for him is established. Viewers can cherish what Shanto did as something appropriate to the situation. Upon release from his imprisonment, Shanto accepts his derogatory title ‘haat kata Shanto’ (roughly translates as ‘Shanto who amputates hands’).  Then, in several other action sequences, Shanto twists, knifes, and chops down his opponents’ hands.

This excess in Shanto’s revenge is made part of the entertainment package that this popular film offers. Indeed, for such exploitative use of violence, such films are often categorized as ‘vulgar’ in middle-class intellectual discourse about Bangladeshi cinema. Thus, this film seems to be a good example of what Raju claims as the ‘massification’ of the industry and a specimen of the ‘extreme action genre’. It may also be seen as the result of the ‘ghettoization’ of the local film industry, as claimed by Rahman.[14]

However, the use of spectacular violence in such films can be further excavated for understanding its connotations and affect. For example, the film shares characteristics with pornography as a ‘body genre’ film. In several sexual assault and song-dance sequences, the female body is objectified, and audiences are offered voyeuristic pleasure. Similarly, the fight sequences are lengthy, and they go beyond the mere purpose of serving the plot. Audiences are invited to participate in Shanto’s chivalry that justifies the pleasure of watching his violent outbursts. In other words, the film very clearly aims to produce affect and expects audiences’ ‘projection’ (Plantinga) into the character of Shanto, performed by highly popular film star Manna.

For example, consider a fight sequence in the middle of the film where Shanto is attacked by two top goons who intend to kill him. However, instead of carrying guns, they have come with swords. Shanto responds to their aggression by fighting physically. He does not seem to have a gun at that time, though in an earlier sequence, audiences see that he has a revolver and is not hesitant to use it if needed. Why is it sword and physical fighting instead of gun firing then? In fact, the film prefers physical fighting over shooting as the former allows more screen time to display violence. In the lengthy fighting sequences, the film gets sufficient time to create suspense with the details of each punch and each kick that Shanto delivers or endures. In the process, audiences are welcome to connect affectively with Shanto’s heroism and empathize with the zeal inside him. Amid such violence, Shanto’s occasional twisting or cutting of his opponents’ hands not only awes his audience but also makes them cherish this brutality. Violence is thus aestheticized and legitimized as a form of protest from the working-class masses.

Very much like the acknowledgment and satisfaction of repressed desires in pornographic films, the spectacular violence empowers the working-class audience, at least for the time being, by providing them the power to commit violence at a spectacular level against all the odds that they have to face in their everyday life. In the process, such films also normalize violence and drag it outside the sole territory of the sovereign state. It can be seen as an onscreen acknowledgment of the ground reality that violence is not the state’s monopoly, and the film subversively claims a ‘legitimate’ right to its use as self-defense by the precarious viewers. Violence thus is set loose, and cinema’s aesthetic of violence as a survival technique becomes a representation of popular fantasy.

Conclusion

According to major scholarship on Bangladeshi cinema (e.g., the works of Raju, Hoek, and Rahman), the local film industry has experienced significant changes in production, distribution, and exhibition infrastructures along with changes in its viewership from the 1980s onwards. This period overlaps with the one in which the political elites were experimenting with neoliberal policies in the local economy and state affairs. Thus, the denationalization of local industries and deregulation of local markets are linked to the emergence of a new working class at the urban peripheries. At the same time, policy changes in media regulation, like the 1979 permission for video import and the 1983 taxation system, explain how the local film industry was asked to change in correspondence to the infrastructural changes. Though such changes in the narrative content and cinematic style of the films are often described pejoratively as ‘Bollywoodization’, ‘ghettoization”, ‘massification’, etc., along with frequent use of adjectives like ‘vulgar’, ‘obscene’, and ‘unhealthy’, we can go beyond such aestheticist evaluations and attempt to read what the onscreen narrative worlds tell us about the fantasy of these working-class masses and their understandings of the state.

I argue that the changes were two-way. Far from being a mere superstructural phenomenon solely controlled by the economic basis, the FDC films sent back to society new ways of conceptualizing the present State, especially from the perspectives of its new working-class audiences.[15] Close readings of the narrative worlds of such films show that the moral and ethical values of the society were being re-evaluated, and the traditional images of the state, civil society, and various institutions were questioned. Considering the precarity imposed on these masses when the state and the capital merge under a neoliberal economic policy further alienating labor, such bottom-up views can give us alternative, counter-hegemonic discourses about the state.

Whether through the story of Alam or Shanto, in these films we see an acknowledgment of the state, at least at the surface level. Whether to comply with the demands of different regulatory agencies or not, the films pay lip service to the top authorities of the state. As M. Madhava Prasad explains the arrival of the police at the end of most Hindi films, these Bangladeshi films also ensure restoration of the equilibrium at the end. Thus, they are not directly subversive. But before such compromised endings, the films register that the sincerity of top state officials is often nullified by the corruption at the bottom. Thus, the films inscribe the failure of the state to reach its people and the resultant precarity.

Moreover, the films incorporate other elements to resonate with the experience and fantasy of its working-class audiences. In this regard, two distinct feelings are recorded in both of the films, suffering and anger, and both are shown to be due to the failure of the state. Here, South Asian cinematic tropes are often used to cinematically convert those feelings as ‘moods’ (Plantinga). Motifs of disintegration of family and the suffering that ensues–a recurring plot in many South Asian cinemas—are used in both these films to imply multiple layers of meanings. Whereas such a plot may echo the situation of lonely migrant workers in the city, it also represents the pressure of modernization on traditional values.

Such plot developments can also be seen as contributing obliquely to a new understanding of the modern state. That is, the failure of the police and other regulatory agencies often disrupts the harmony of life at the bottom and thereby causes intense pain and suffering. The disintegration of the family members can be seen as a cinematic and affective rendering of such disappointment with the state. The ensuing anger is represented through another South Asian cinematic trope–the law versus justice. By challenging the ability of existing laws to ensure justice at the ground level, the films point out the superficiality of such ‘universal’ laws as mostly hegemonic discourses, while contrasting them with the existing inequalities and inadequacies at the bottom. Furthermore, spectacular violence is used to dispense an affective articulation of such anger. Other narrative techniques of melodrama, such as delayed revelation and ambiguous characters are also applied to represent the themes affectively.

Thus, these FDC films, having to tread a fine balance between top-down impositions of the state and bottom-up fantasies of resistance, often offer multilayered and equivocal narratives to their audiences. Using familiar cinematic tropes, they attempt to accommodate heterogeneity within a narrative polysemy. As a result, the authoritarian, neoliberal, party-state of Bangladesh with its intervening police power is simultaneously acknowledged, formally appreciated, and cinematically critiqued in these films, which ultimately contribute to the depiction of a dubious state on screen.

Notes

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