The wicked and the sacred in popular culture: Cinematic myth and memory in between Islam and globalisation in Post-9/11 Bangladesh

Summary: Bangladesh, often dubbed as a moderate Islamic society, has gone through various opposing constructions of nation and identity during the mid- to late-twentieth century. In these anti-colonial and nationalist constructions Islam played a crucial role. In 1947, a resurgence of pan-Islamic brotherhood gave momentum to the construction of Pakistan state and creation of East Pakistan within it. In 1971, advocating an anti-Islam secular Bengali identity, East Pakistan moved to become independent nation called Bangladesh. In 1975, Sheikh Mujib, the ‘father of the nation’ who led the cultural-nationalist movement and liberation war against the Pakistani, pro-Islam junta, was killed. This event started a turn-around for the secular-modernist Bangladesh state towards being ‘Islamic’ state under both Zia and Ershad who optimally utilized various forms of Islamic resurgences during the 1970s-80s. So Islam has been a defining factor for (de)constructing the national and cultural identities for Bengali Muslims, the 85% population of Bangladesh. How do the cinematic media locate, record and reconstruct Islam and Islamism in such national/cultural formations, especially in post-9/11 Bangladesh? What kind of visual-cultural approaches been appropriated in order to understand and outline the modes of Islamic resurgences? These are the key questions I ask in this paper. As a way to answer these questions I focus on the filmic discourses of 2002, the year when, in the aftermath of 9/11, the world was reconfiguring the relationship between Islam and modernity. At the same period Bangladesh nation-state went through rigorous Islamicisation under the rule of Khaleda Zia who came into power in October 2001 by making a coalition with the Islamist forces including the Jama’at-e-Islami Bangladesh, the largest and most active body propagating Islamic resurgence in Bangladesh since the Pakistan days that got banned in the early 1970s because of its role against Bangladesh liberation war. I dissect two major films of 2002 in order to identify the role of cinematic processes in creating myths and memory for or against Islam in a globalizing Bangladesh. These two films: Fire and the Clay Bird represent the two cinemas of Bangladesh. Fire is one of the popular genre-based films that draw large crowds in urbanizing Bangladesh, while The Clay Bird that received a Critics’ Award in the 2002 Cannes Film Festival is an ideal example of Bangladeshi art cinema discourse: the arty, anti-establishment short and feature films that have followings among the Westernized elite in the major cities as well as among the global civil society.