Notions of Nation: A Review of John W. Hood’s The Bleeding Lotus

John W. Hood’s book The Bleeding Lotus on the history of Bangladeshi nationalism on film is one of the few overviews on Bangladeshi cinema available in English. Hood chooses to reconstruct an audience’s perspective of this cinema and its narratives—avoiding the study of production histories as well as industrial and material shifts in film technology. In this manner, its scope could arguably be seen as somewhat narrow. However, the book will orient any casual reader looking to find their bearings about approaching the national narratives of Bangladesh since its liberation in 1971. It allows for a discussion to emerge on the various ways in which national traumas, mythic narratives of national origin and questions about its subsequent memorialisation have been tackled by this cinema specifically.

Significantly, as Hood points out, a study of this subject presents us with the opportunity of considering films that have strong claims toward being authentic first documents of their national history—almost as witnesses that can provide us with transparent access to its brutal as well as romantic moments of creation. He writes,

“In Bangladesh… most of the filmmakers whose works are discussed here have registered in their films a direct personal response to actualities that they have, indeed, lived through. Their films, therefore, have a remarkable immediacy and a persuasive force given that the subject is organic to the filmmakers’ own lives.”

In other words, life and film occupy a proximity that cannot always be usefully separated while discussing many of the early films of Bangladesh. The indeterminate but almost sacred nature of these early films is aided, rather than contradicted, by their adoption of a wide variety of film styles and genres—including the documentary and docu-fiction—using staged re-enactments, realist dramas, essay films, short films and non-fiction propaganda films that were used to influence international opinion against West Pakistani oppression in collusion with the United States of America. (Elsewhere, Tanvir Mokammel has argued that the short film genre, practised by artists like Zahir Raihan and Alamgir Kabir, has been significant enough to constitute a “parallel cinema” of its own, often in opposition to the industrial melodramas of the day.) Several strands of difference were constructed to justify their own claims for separation—like the issue of language, where Bengali was preferred over Urdu in East Pakistan, to the problem of economic imperialism by which West Pakistan imposed colonial conditions on their eastern wing’s capacities of production. As becomes clear quickly, the story of this book closely follows the development of national sentiment in the films of Bangladesh.

The book is structured by a discussion of Tanvir Mokammel’s “Epic, 215-minute documentary, 1971” which was produced in 2011. As the author writes, “While the major focus of the film is… the Bangladesh War of Liberation, it also provides a clear and adequate treatment of the salient features of the subcontinent’s troubled history, starting from the Muslim League’s 1940 Lahore Resolution calling for the creation of Pakistan.” Thus, the purpose of an overview of the cinemas of Bangladeshi nationalism is served by anchoring the book in a film that presents a comprehensive narrative of the emergence and culmination of that movement in the context of South Asian politics. Mokammel’s 1971 is divided into a series of chapters, like branches of related enquiries, that allow Hood to discuss how other films have developed the ideas expressed by each chapter. For instance, “Operation Searchlight” depicts the gruesome events that took place at Dhaka University (and elsewhere in East Pakistan too) on 25 March 1971, presenting documentary evidence in the form of photographs and interviews with survivors. This chapter allows Hood to write about other films that have used different methods to represent the same events either “as they happened” or in terms of their significance in national memory, like Shameem Akhtar’s “docudrama” Itihas Konya (Daughters of History, 1999) or Chashi Nazrul Islam’s Ora Egaro Jon (Those Eleven Men, 1972). The latter used a mix of file footage and fictional re-enactment to claim its place as “…the first fictional film to be made on the Liberation War.” Other films like Shei Rater Kotha Bolte Eshechi (Tale of the Darkest Night, 2001) by Kawsar Choudhury “…further corrobora(te) the nature and extent of the atrocities…” In the nature of such corroborative documentation, the films use photographs—especially those published by international newspapers of the time—to emphasise the traumatic reference they make to a real event that birthed the nation. Family photographs provoke a different emotional response to these events, confirming their “essentially human dimension,” according to the author.                     

Hood’s method is useful for a reader attempting to trace the ways in which early ideas and methods of practising national difference get complicated by developments in their post-liberation histories. This is a result of other themes asserting their equal importance—like the evolving imaginations of desh in a postcolonial setting, rooted in its specific landscape of Bengal, the struggle between secularism and religious fundamentalism in state policy and the role of non-Bengali speaking, or non-Islamic minorities and citizens in the new country. The thrust of these new questions were taken up by the films that reflected on the many-sided legacy of the Liberation struggle, made increasingly from the 1980s onwards.

To read more about the Nationalist cinema of Bangladesh, click here.