South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters
Edited by Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De
Oxford University Press, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9697343768
312pp.

To understand the power of cinema and its use as a platform for political aspirations and as a reflection of the socio-economic and cultural aspects of individual nations, one must always keep in mind that film was the most important art form of the 20th century. Indeed, the great Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray regarded the global expansion of cinema as one of the most important developments in recent history.

It’s not hard to see why this was so. Films were, and still are, the ultimate form of escapism for audiences who wish to leave their everyday trials and tribulations and live vicariously, if only for a few hours, in front of a large screen with characters and stories that transport them to a world far from their own.

The power of films to shape public opinion and mould people’s minds was understood well by political dictators. The Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin made good use of director and screenwriter Sergei Eisenstein and Germany’s Adolf Hitler had plenty of propaganda created by director and actress Leni Riefenstahl.

In the ‘democratic’ world, the presidency of the United States’s Franklin Roosevelt had Hollywood’s support to lift the American public from the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s and to rally round the Allied cause during the Second World War.

A collection of scholarly essays is intellectually stimulating and enlightening in explaining the cross-cinema influences in relation to South Asia’s geopolitics

In the aftermath of that war, as Europe’s colonial empires collapsed and former colonies became free, independent states, cinema again played its role as a platform for national consciousness and became a reflection of the confidence and aspirations of newborn countries basking in the sunlight of newly acquired freedom.

Reading the essay collection South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters, edited by academics Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De, I was struck by how countries such as Pakistan, India and Bangladesh understood so well that cinema was simply a new addition to their own rich cultural heritage and civilisations, which highly valued aesthetic achievements and artistic expression as a form of national consciousness.

During the closing decades of the British Raj, the colonial authorities understood that the new medium of cinema was playing an important role in shaping the masses in the growing Indian nationalist movement. So much so that Raj officials conducted surveys and set up committees in which cinema owners were called upon to testify about what films the theatre-going public was watching.

From one of the book’s most striking essays, ‘The Public in the Cities: Detouring Through Cinemas of Bombay, Calcutta and Lahore (1920s-1930s)’ by Madhuja Mukherjee, we learn how different classes in the Subcontinent had different tastes for film genres — a reality that still exists today. The wealthy and intellectual classes preferred American fare with romance and melodrama, based on classic works of Western literature, as opposed to the working masses, who favoured films with elements of comedy, adventure and mythological themes.

The diverse themes of the essays in South Asian Filmscapes deal with patriarchy, religion, nationalism, sexuality, ethnic identity and class consciousness that resonate throughout the South Asian cinemas of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. However, considering that India is the biggest film industry in the world, in terms of the sheer number of films produced, it is striking that it has the least number of essays in this collection. The lion’s share of attention is given to Bangladeshi cinema, while Pakistani cinema also gets its due share.

Kamran Asdar Ali’s ‘Female Friendship and Forbidden Desire: Two Films from 1960s’ Pakistan’, which tackles cinema during Gen Ayub Khan’s dictatorship and focuses on two classic films Saheli (1961) and Neela Parbat (1969), is an outstanding read, as is Gwendolyn S. Kirk’s ‘This is London, Not Pakistan!: Articulations of the Diaspora in Pakistani Punjabi Film’. Both help readers understand the progressions and eventual deformation of cinema in Pakistan from the 1960s to the ’90s, which reflected the country’s political fortunes.

As mentioned above, Bangladeshi cinema is the prime focus of South Asian Filmscapes, the essays replete with the theme of Bengali nationalism in former East Pakistan, which eventually led to its separation and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Bengal is, perhaps, South Asian’s most unique region. It endured three partitions within a span of just 70 years — rejecting the first of 1905, accepting the second in 1947 and forcefully achieving the third in 1971.

Bengali people led the Subcontinent through its dynamic renaissance of the late 18th-20th centuries, with individuals such as social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, mathematician Satyendra Nath Bose, poet Rabindranath Tagore, nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, poet Kazi Nazrul Islam and the Suhrawardy family standing out for their contributions to South Asia’s social and political development.

Not surprisingly, four of the past century’s most distinguished South Asian filmmakers — Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwak Ghatak and Tapan Sinha — were all Bengalis.

Bangladeshi film is, perhaps, the most political and nationalist of any of South Asia’s other cinemas. To understand why this is so, the bloody separation of 1971 and the events surrounding the creation of Bangladesh must be understood. The trauma and bloodshed mounted upon decades of discrimination by West Pakistan on its eastern wing sowed the seeds of a nationalist theme in Bangladesh’s cinema.

Even though they shared the same faith — which was the basis for the new, two-winged country of Pakistan — Bengalis faced discrimination from their West Pakistani brethren and made to recognise that they were linguistically and culturally different. It is an irony of history that the Muslim League, which led Pakistan’s freedom and independence, had its roots in Bengal, not in what is now Pakistan. And yet it was Bengal that wanted to separate from Pakistan in 1971.

Bangladeshi cinema has long reflected this chain of events, which the national government in Dhaka has always encouraged, especially under its rabidly anti-Pakistan Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed. Two essays, ‘Zahir Raihan’s Stop Genocide (1971): A Dialectical Cinematic Message to the World’ by Fahmida Akhter and ‘Ethical Encounters: Friendship and Healing in Contemporary Films about the Bangladesh Liberation War’, by the book’s co-editor Elora Halim Chowdhury, are must-reads to understand the tragic and tormented relations between Pakistan and Bangladesh.

South Asian Filmscapes is intellectually stimulating and enlightening in explaining the cross-cinema influences in relation to South Asia’s geopolitics. Though the tone of the essays is scholarly — understandable, considering all the contributors are academics — it is nonetheless an excellent endeavour to explain to casual readers how cinema offers a mirror that reflects the labyrinth of South Asia’s numerous ethnic, linguistic and national groupings, each with their own unique historical experiences that are interconnected and cross-pollinate with each other.

One drawback is that the book can, at times, get a bit dry and repetitive, especially with essays related to Bangladeshi cinema. That aside, it is a book to be read by anyone with an interest in South Asian cinema.

The reviewer is a writer and journalist. His interests include history, politics, music, literature and cinema.

He can be contacted at rsayeed1984@gmail.com and tweets @razmat

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 23rd, 2023