8: MADRASA AND MUSLIM IDENTITY ON SCREEN
Nation, Islam and Bangladeshi art cinema on the global stage
Zakir Hossain Raju
This chapter demonstrates how Bangladeshi art cinema, a national-cultural institution developed in a post-colonial nation-space in South Asia and addressed to a global audience, represents and interacts with Islamic education and Muslim identity. Here I deconstruct the cinematic representation of Islam and Islamic learning in Bangladesh within the larger framework and continuous process of identity formation of Bengali Muslims. I understand that Islamic learning is not only practised inside madrasas and maktabs in Bangladesh. Many informal ways of Islamic learning have played a more important role in the indigenization of Islam in rural Bangladesh during the last few centuries. The British anthropologist David Abecassis identifies various means of Islamic learning in rural Bangladesh. He lists: the Islamic and Arabic instructions in public schools; the imam’s speech (khutba) after the Friday prayer (juma namaz); the milad (prayer in commemoration of special events, e.g. a birth or death); prayers in the shrines of pirs (the Muslim saints); the yearly cycle of Islamic festivals; and the retelling of biographies of Islamic personalities and of popular folktales (Abecassis 1990: 41). When I refer to Islamic education and learning in the context of Bangladesh, I include these various modes of Islamic practices alongside structured institutions like madrasas and maktabs.
I argue in this chapter that Bangladeshi art cinema is ambivalent in representing Muslims as well as madrasas and other Islamic learning practices. This instability emanates from the ambiguities inherent in Bengali Muslim identity. It is enhanced by the contradictory ways of evaluating the place of Islam in the everyday life of ordinary Bangladeshis. On the one hand, the culturalnationalists see Islam as an alien culture, a ‘foreign’ religion that entered Bangladesh through political-military aggression. Believing in an authentic version of Bengali culture, they complain that Islam posed certain threats to the development and dissemination of indigenous cultural practices. On the other hand, opposing this ‘anti-Islam’ culturalist approach, the ‘pro-Islam’ syncretistic approach sees Islam as part of the indigenized cultural practices of the majority population. Thus, the Bengali Muslims of Bangladesh are formulating new, emerging and conflicting versions of Bengali-ness and Muslim-ness, which are not pure concepts, rather they are always on the move. Within this theoretical framework, this chapter demonstrates how the cinematic texts produced and circulated as the art cinema mode are engaged in constructing and reconstructing different identities for Bengali Muslims in contemporary Bangladesh.
Following the cultural-nationalist pro-Bengali approach, the major tendency of Bangladeshi art cinema is to be anti-Islamic. Western-educated, urban-based, cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims who produce, watch and critique Bangladeshi art films utilized the discourse of art cinema to form a contrast between Islam and Bengali culture. This tendency appears most visible when, later in this chapter, I analyse some of the well known films of Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel, two major authors of Bangladeshi artcinema, that
were produced and circulated during the 1980s–2000s. These art cinema films, targeted to both national and global viewership, repeatedly show Islam as a singular and monolithic orthodoxy and demonstrate how obsolete and restrictive the madrasas and other forms of Islamic learning are. These films theatricalize and exoticize Islamic practices as something ancient in contemporary Bangladesh, a rapidly modernizing and commercializing nation-state in the face of globalization.
These cinematic texts position Muslims and madrasas as arcane and orthodox because this mode vehemently creates and maintains a clear-cut dichotomy between Islam and Bengali culture. The dominant thrust of Bangladeshi art cinema is, then, to represent madrasas and Islamic practices as out-of-date and stereotypical spaces and rituals. This discourse shows Islamic learning as a weapon in the Islamic-fundamentalist attempt at turning the nation against modernist developments and taking it back to a pre-modern state. In other words, most art cinema films are committed to a definitive national-cultural modernity prescribed by cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims, a modernity that normalizes the ‘Bengali’ identity as modern and secular, and locates the ‘Muslim’ identity of Bengali Muslims only as a religious category.
However, the cinematic representation based on a Bengali–Islam dichotomy is not the full picture of the relationship between art cinema and Islamic learning in Bangladesh. Going against such homogenizing notions of both Islam and Bengali identity, at least one of the major contemporary authors of Bangladeshi art cinema alongside Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel has depicted Islam, Muslim identity and madrasas as within heterogeneous discourse(s). His name is Tareque Masud. In order to locate this kind of ‘pro-Islam’ syncretistic representation of Islamic learning, I present a close analysis of one of the key art cinema texts, Tareque Masud’s The Clay Bird (Matir Moina, 2002). This film won a Critics’ Award in the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 2002 and was released and/or broadcast in Europe, Australia, Canada and the US during 2003–5. Focusing on the world of a young madrasa student in 1960s East Pakistan, this autobiographical film of Masud visualized and presented Bangladeshi madrasas on the global stage. Providing a close reading of The Clay Bird, I position this film against the mainstream representational mode of art cinema based on the Bengali–Islam dichotomy as visible in the texts created by Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel. Unlike these art cinema films, The Clay Bird follows an uncertain itinerary in developing and neutralizing the conflict between Bengali culture and Islam and represents Islam as heterogeneous and Islamic education as a humane and gentle means of learning heterogeneity, not as a fierce homogenizing force working towards Islamicizing Bangladeshi society.
Construction of identities and Bengali–Muslim dichotomy in Bangladesh
A glance at the colonial and post-colonial trajectory of Bangladesh and its people demonstrates that the identity formation of Bengali Muslims was never a linear process. Alongside the indigenization of Islam and continuous transformations of local cultural practices, British and Pakistani colonialism as well as the post-colonial State of Bangladesh played a crucial role in constructing community identities in East Bengal/Pakistan and in Bangladesh. The sociologist Tazeen Murshid states, ‘The history of the region demonstrates that the process of identity selection was not constant; the cultural markers adopted were not fixed. . Here, nationhood has been defined and re-defined three times within a quarter of a century’ (Murshid 1997: 7). Though large-scale conversion to Islam started in Bengal in the thirteenth century, the conflict between Islam and Bengali identity started only in the late nineteenth century. This dichotomy strengthened because of the success of Islamic reform movements in rural Bengal as well as the subsidies provided by the British to Indian Muslims in order to turn them into a ‘community’. The historian Asim Roy argues that the comprehensive outcome of the Islamic reform movements in nineteenth-century Bengal was
to create a chasm between Muslim’s ‘Islamic’ and ‘Bengali’ identities . the persistent and vigorous insistence on a revitalized Islamic consciousness and identity, with its corresponding denigration of Islam’s local roots and associations in Bengal, sapped the very basis of the syncretistic tradition and of the Bengali identity in general. (Roy 1983: xvi–xvii)
Another major inducement in strengthening the Islam–Bengali dichotomy was the so-called pro-Muslim steps the British colonial regime took after 1857. The British directly supported the Indian Muslims to become and act like a community, as if the Muslims of various parts of the Indian sub-continent could easily get rid of their other differences, such as language and ethnicity. By consolidating the Indian Muslims as a religious community, they could implement their strategy of treating them as a political community, so that the other large community, the Indian Hindus, could be put in check. Rafiuddin Ahmed lists the special incentives the British handed to the Indian Muslims in the late nineteenth century.
These included support for madrasa education, introduction of Arabic, Persian and Urdu as ‘Islamic’ languages in schools and colleges, special reservations in jobs and finally, in 1906, the acceptance of a separate electorate for Muslims (Ahmed 2001: 19).
Through such special efforts of the British and also of the Muslim reformers, and, with the active campaign of the non-Bengali Urdu-speaking urban Muslim elite, something like a Muslim identity started to consolidate in late-nineteenthcentury Bengal. This identity put emphasis on the affiliation of Bengali Muslims with the ‘original’ version of Islam and considers Islamic education, including the learning and practice of Arabic, as much more important than the learning of English and indigenous Bengali. The proponents of this pro-British, anti-Bengali and anti-Hindu trend of ‘Muslim’ identity in colonial Bengal promoted the incompatibility of Bengali-ness and Muslim-ness and enforced a pan-Indian Islamic brotherhood upon Bengali Muslims. The upper-class, non-Bengali and Urdu-speaking Muslim leaders of Calcutta like Nawab Abdul Latif and Amir Ali led the process of identity formation of Bengali Muslims in this way in the late nineteenth century. The geo-ethnic and cultural identity of Bengali Muslims that is Bengali-ness became negligible in this process, especially in its bid to get rid of the hegemonic umbrella of Bengali-Hindu identity. In a way, this notion of Muslim identity for Bengali Muslims accepted the hegemonic notion that Bengali identity can accommodate Bengali Hindus only, and not the Bengali Muslims, a notion established by modernist Bengali Hindus in colonial Bengal.
However, the emergent middle-class Bengali Muslims in the late nineteenth century were linked not only with the agricultural lands, but also with the indigenized version of Islam in rural East Bengal. The Arab-looking, Urdu-speaking elite Muslims with a pan-Indian Islamic view did not accept these Bengalispeaking rural Muslims as their ‘real’ brothers, though they wanted to accommodate them under the umbrella of Muslim identity. Opposing the Bengali-Hindu cultural modernity and the pro-Arab pan-Indian Muslim identity, the middle-class Bengali Muslims worked towards defining a modern cultural identity of/for Bengali Muslims. They felt strong affinity with their cultural root, that is Bengali-ness principally and visibly expressed through the Bengali language as well as with their religious affiliation that is indigenized Islam. In this way, by the beginning of the twentieth century a category called ‘Bengali Muslim’ identity came under discussion.
Muslim-ness and Bengali-ness, the two conflicting identity discourses, then served as crucial markers for Bengali Muslims in different historical junctures of the twentieth century. This conflict in different forms served as constituent to the Pakistan State in 1947 and also as the driving force for establishing the State of Bangladesh in 1971. The basis of the formation of Pakistan – the discourse of Muslim nationalism – lost its legitimacy in the wake of the counter-discourse of Bengali cultural nationalism in the 1950s. It is said that, apart from Islam and the PIA (Pakistan International Airlines), there was no bond between the populations of West and East Pakistan. The ethnic-cultural differences of various groups of Pakistanis, especially between the Bengalis of East Pakistan and the non-Bengali West Pakistanis (that is to say, Punjabis, Sindhis and other minority groups), became increasingly evident through the 1952 language movement and the 1954 elections. In the 1960s, Bengali Muslims made a radical shift from the religious to the cultural domain in terms of defining their identity. The culturalist discourse helped to unite the Bengali-Muslim middle-class of East Pakistan in the 1960s under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and fostered the popular protest against the West Pakistani military rule that was using the banner of a pan-Pakistan Muslim brotherhood. Thus, the Bengali identity was used as a powerful weapon by the Bengali-Muslim middle classes to mobilize the 1971 liberation war for Bangladesh against the (West) Pakistani, non- Bengali Muslim oligarchies and bourgeoisie.
In the search for a modern identity for Bengali Muslims, middle-class Bengali Muslims not only used the Bengali–Muslim dichotomy differently in different times, they also went beyond this dichotomy in order to construct or accommodate new identities. They propagated different notions of identity for Bengali Muslims in different historical conditions. Identities such as ‘Bengaliness’, ‘Muslim-ness’, ‘Bengali-Muslim-ness’ and ‘Bangladeshi-ness’ have been constructed, questioned and redefined within a short period of time. These identities were imagined as natural and homogeneous identity-frameworks, but there were (and are) always overlaps and fissures between, and within, the identities.
The historian Rafiuddin Ahmed says,
The experiences of the Muslims of Bangladesh . point to the uselessness of trying to identify a fixed criterion for a definition of the cultural boundaries of such a community: a Bengali Muslim may have seen himself primarily as a ‘Muslim’ the other day, as a ‘Bengali’ yesterday, and a ‘Bengali Muslim’ today. (Ahmed 2001: 3–4)
Below I identify the ‘uselessness’ of such fixed notions of Bengali/Muslim identity by analysing some key texts of three major authors of Bangladeshi art cinema produced in 1990s–2000s Bangladesh.
Islam and Bangladeshi art cinema: Bengali/Muslim conflict on screen
The art cinema as a national-cultural institution has rigorously participated in the identity debate of Bengali Muslims during the last few decades. Drawing on certain realist idioms the modernist Bengali Muslims shaped the discourses around Bangladeshi art cinema, an art cinema that is quite different from what is normally considered art cinema in the West. The art cinema of Bangladesh then works as their vehicle, in Habermas’ words, ‘to generate subcultural counterpublics and counterinstitutions, to consolidate new collective identities’ (Habermas 1996: 370). The non-industrial mode of production, promotion and circulation of art films further re-confirm the characteristics of Bangladeshi art cinema as a counter-public sphere. However, there is an obvious paradox. The art cinema as counter-public sphere, because of its Western-modernist engagements, cannot be expanded to accommodate the majority of the population (that is the non-middle-class, less educated and less Westernized population) in rural Bangladesh. Rather, by recording and representing the cultural-nationalist essence of Bangladesh through Euro-American cinematic narration, the Bangladeshi art cinema addresses the art-house audiences and critics in the West (the ‘global’ audience) and the Westernized middle-class Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This art cinema is thus not (expected to be) appreciated by the ordinary, average cinema-goers in Bangladesh, some (if not most) of whom are strong Islamic believers and live in small towns and rural areas where indigenized Islam is very much part and parcel of their everyday lives.
The construction of a modern cultural-national identity for Bengali Muslims through a homegrown cinema industry became possible only in the mid-1950s, the heyday of Bengali nationalism. The Bangla-language films produced in East Pakistan during the 1960s served as tools in developing the Bengali-Muslim counter-discourse against the Calcutta-produced Bengali-Hindu modernity and pan-Indian Muslim identity. From the 1970s onwards, the Bangladesh State started highlighting the Muslim identity as the cultural marker for Bengali Muslims through various means. One major method of emphasizing Muslim identity in 1970s–80s Bangladesh was the expansion of Islamic learning and education. The die-hard Bengali-nationalist government of Mujib in the early 1970s retained the madrasa system of Islamic education and even increased state grants for Islamic education (Rahim 2001: 248). The pro-West military government of General Ershad established 1,845 new madrasas and proposed the establishment of another 4,451 mosque-based learning centres during 1986–8 (Rahim 2001: 260). Such ‘Islamicization’ attempts of the state clearly contested the view of the cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims. Such marginalization of Bengali identity in the political/public sphere mainly propagated by the post-colonial state and also the absence of Bengali-ness in Bangladeshi popular cinema shattered the modernist vision of the cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims. They started considering both the post-colonial state and the popular film industry as ominous genies against the formation of the cultural-national modernity they were envisaging. In these circumstances during the 1970s–80s, the notions of national-cultural modernity and Bengali identity as an opposition to Islam and Muslim identity acted to develop a ‘national’ art cinema in post-colonial Bangladesh. The first example of such Bangladeshi national art cinema appeared in the late 1970s.
This film, Surya Dighal Bari (The Ominous House, 1979), was directed by Shaker and Ali, two veteran film-club activists of the 1960s–70s. The film was made with a state grant and based on a renowned novel of the same title by a respected Bengali-Muslim novelist. The film received critical admiration from a number of European film festivals. It was awarded in Mannheim, screened in London, Berlin and Karlovy Vary and was invited to the Locarno film festival (Hayat 1987: 159). The Ominous House portrayed the sufferings of Jaigun, a poor Bengali-Muslim divorced mother in rural East Bengal/Pakistan in the 1940s–50s when the Muslim identity discourse became strong and worked towards establishing the Muslim-nationalist State of Pakistan. This film represents the dichotomy between Islam and Bengali rural lifestyle using a neorealist narrative mode. Jaigun represents a strong female figure fighting Muslim patriarchy in rural East Bengal. She travels to the nearby town by train and sells rice in a bid to earn enough to feed her two children. The pro-Islam village guardians find her mobility and visibility in the male public sphere unsuitable for a Muslim woman and decree that she should stay at home and follow the rule of purda (seclusion of women/veiling). Jaigun continues to disobey them by asking, ‘will they [village guardians] feed my children?’ However, she also follows what can be termed the indigenized Islam of rural Bengal. She asks a Muslim folk-healer to ‘shut’ her house to get rid of bad spirits in the night. When her chicken lays its first eggs, Jaigun sends them to the village mosque; however, the imam of the mosque and the village guardians return them saying that, since she does not follow purdah, the eggs of her chicken are haram (polluted) and cannot be received by the mosque. Chicken eggs thus become the symbolic site of contest between Bengali culture and Islam in The Ominous House.
The production and circulation of The Ominous House and the genealogy of Bangladeshi art cinema as a cultural institution closely linked to Western modernity confirms that this cinematic discourse mainly reconstructs and reinforces the Bengali–Islam dichotomy on cinema screens. Most of these films represent Islamic learning as anti-modern and arcane using the identity question of/for Bengali Muslims as the basis. By discussing a number of the globally-circulated films of Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel, I demonstrate below the tendency of this cinematic mode in negating Islamic practices.
Both these filmmakers entered filmmaking in the mid-1980s through what has been marked as the ‘short film movement’ in Bangladesh. This discourse comprises short features and documentaries on 16 mm and video, produced in artisanal mode with low budgets outside the popular film industry. Amid rapid globalization and the strengthening of Muslim identity through state mechanism, the film-club activists fostered this cultural-nationalist stream of visual culture in 1980s–90s Bangladesh. The short films were shown outside cinema theatres: among friends, local groups, and especially among college students and cultural activists. Two short features on the failed expectations of the 1971 liberation war, Agami (Towards, 1984) by Morshedul Islam and Hulyia (Wanted, 1984) by Tanvir Mokammel, started the ‘short film movement’ in Bangladesh. The cultural-modernist leaders of this film movement like M. Islam and T. Mokammel received their education on film appreciation and production through watching European and American film classics. In an informal setting such as within the film clubs, they watched and discussed classic films from Europe and the US as well as Indian art films following the Euro- American method of cinematic narration. The films they produced during the 1980s–2000s therefore followed the textual forms of these foreign cinemas, especially of Indian art cinema and Italian Neo-realism. Using theseWestern(
-derived) cinematic-textual norms, the films of Islam and Mokammel severely criticized the pro-Islam position of the post-colonial state in Bangladesh.
The 1971 liberation war and its cultural-nationalist ideals opposing the pro- Pakistan discourse of Muslim identity appear as a recurring theme in the films of these two authors. The first of these films,Towards
, started this trend. Morshedul Islam here visualizes the agonies of a liberation war veteran in 1980s Bangladesh using flash-back scenes. He juxtaposes how the Bengali-Muslim guerrillas forgave and let the captive Razakars (pro-Islam Bengali-Muslim supporters of the Pakistani army) flee during the 1971 war and how the Razakars punish the liberation war veterans in the 1980s. Morshedul Islam’s later films – The Beginning (Suchona, 1988), The Wheel (Chaka, 1993) and The Rain (Bristi, 1999) – continued such cultural-modernist rewriting of the contested history of nation and identity in Bangladesh. The conflict between Islamic practices and the Bengali nationalist spirit of the liberation war became a recurrent theme in his films.
Morshedul Islam’s Chaka (The Wheel, 1993) enjoyed global circulation, including critical acclaim in Europe. It won three awards in the 1993 Mannheim film festival and another three at the 1994 Danqirque Film Festival in France.
The Wheel also enjoyed theatrical release in global metropolitan centres like Paris and Tokyo (Majumder 1996: 8). This film narrates the tale of two bullockcart drivers who had to carry the corpse of an unnamed young man and to travel from one village to another in search of the young man’s family who can bury the corpse. Finally, being unable to locate the village of the young man, they themselves bury him beside a river. Through numerous extended long shots of the bullock-cart going through unpaved roads in rural Bangladesh, The Wheel depicts the rural landscapes and, in a subtle manner, the role of Islamic learning in the everyday life of ordinary Bengali Muslims. At the beginning of the film, the cart drivers reluctant to carry the corpse agree to take it only because ‘Allah will reward them’. However, the corpse, when taken to different villages, receives hostile treatment. When the cart drivers request the imam of a village mosque to allow them to bury the corpse in the graveyard administered by the mosque, the imam poses an elementary question, ‘How do you know if he [the corpse] was a Muslim or Hindu?’ The hardcore Islamic position of the imam is contrasted sharply when, at the end of the film, the cart drivers themselves bury the corpse in a riverbank with no janaja (Islamic funeral rituals).
A few years after producing The Wheel, Morshedul Islam produced The Rain. Among his works, this film can be read as the key text to understand how he positions Islam in contemporary Bangladesh. For this film, Alauddin al-Azad, a renowned cultural-nationalist Bengali–Muslim author, penned the original short story during the Pakistan era. The story centres on a reverent Muslim old man in rural Bangladesh, his young bride and a young man he adopted as his ‘son’. The old man is called Hajji Shaheb as he has accomplished the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), a rare feat for most rural Bangladeshis. Hajji Shaheb has considerable holdings of land and his religious and economic achievements have made him powerful in the village. So nobody questions when he marries for the fourth time and brings a young bride. However, a clandestine love affair develops between the young bride and Hajji Shaheb’s adopted son, a young man who also follows Islamic learnings like his father. He also wears a beard, a Muslim cap and a longpunjabi
(traditional garment) with pyjamas understood as Islamic attire in Bangladesh. There is a drought in the village and Hajji Shaheb concludes that Batashi, a poor divorced woman who recently became pregnant is responsible for the long-lasting drought in the area. He presides over a village court on the matter and, as per the ‘Islamiclearning’,
he puts forth the verdict that Batashi should be stoned to death for her extra-marital relationship. When the village meeting adjourns, the rain comes and Hajji Shaheb takes it as Allah’s quick appraisal and returns home happily. He finds that his young bride is happily taking a shower under the rain. He cannot realize that she just had a sexual encounter with her lover, the adopted son of Hajji Shaheb, a message the viewers have received through parallel editing during the scene of the village court.
The Rain reminds the viewers of Morshedul Islam’s first filmic endeavour:
Towards.
Though Islam made that film in 1984, almost 15 years before he made The Rain in 1999, his portrayal of Islam andits
opposite, Bengali culture, are identical in both films. The appearance, attire and mannerism of Hajji Shaheb and the leader of Razakars (the pro-Islam supporters of the Pakistani junta during liberation war) inTowards
are almost the same. Indeed, the same actor was cast for both roles. More importantly, we also find a similar village court inTowards
where the Razakar leader imposes cruel verdicts on poor women accused of adultery using the rhetoric of Islamic learning. Similar to the suggestion of sexual intercourse between the young bride and the son of Hajji Shaheb in The Rain, Morshedul Islam also presented a playful love-making scene between a Bengali guerrilla and his wife in a jungle in Towards.
Similar to films by Morshedul Islam, Tanvir Mokammel’s films also contributed to sharpen the Bengali–Muslim dichotomy on screen. These films also portrayed, using different plots and narrative strategies, the conflict between the secular-modern and communal-Islamic forces in rural Bangladesh. Mokammel’s Modhumati, the Name of a River (Modhumati, 1995) reveals this conflict in the form of a familial conflict between a hardcore Islamic father and modernist son, while his In the Bank of Chitra (Chitra Nadir Pare, 1999) portrays the migration of bitterly disillusioned Bengali Hindus of East Pakistan to West Bengal in India in the 1960s amid the increasing Islamicization of the Pakistani State.
In 2001 Mokammel made A Tree without Roots (Lal Shalu), a feature film based on the highly respected Bengali novel of the same title, a novel that has been on the syllabus of secondary and higher secondary schools in Bangladesh for many years. This film was also globally circulated like Morshedul Islam’s The Wheel. It was shown in film festivals in London, Rotterdam, Friebourg (Switzerland), Cinema Novo (Belgium), Delhi and Fukuoka (Japan). The film depicts the rise and fall of Majid, a hypocrite mullah (Islamic priest) who creates a false mazar (shrine) of an imagined pir (Muslim saint) in order to collect money and gifts from the villagers. Jamila, his second wife, a playful rural girl, rejects his authority imposed in the name of Islamic wisdom. Her rebellious acts make Majid unsettled and display his vulnerability and powerlessness that he covered up by preaching Islam to the ordinary rural Muslims. Mokammel used many symbols in A Tree without Roots that show Islamic practices as medieval.
For example we see theshalu, that
is the red coverings on the top of the false burial site of the so-called pir in many shots (including some close shots) in this film. Like The Rain, here also we see the marriage between an aged Islamic practitioner (Majid) and a young playful woman (Jamila) who is unwilling to receive Islamic pedagogy. The Islamic ‘court’ at the village level (for punishing unruly villagers) that we saw in both The Rain and Wanted is also present in A Tree without Roots.
The madrasa and the conflict between Islam and modern education are visibly present in A Tree without Roots. We see that Majid teaches Arabic language and Islamic norms to village children in his maktab (Islamic sessional school). So he feels threatened when a young man wants to establish a Western-model school in the village. Majid harshly scolds the man in the village court he presides over for such an un-Islamic action.
The above glimpse at the major representational tendency of Bangladeshi art cinema discourse through the works of two major authors demonstrates that middle-class Bengali Muslims utilize art cinema repeatedly to stage and screen Islam and Islamic learning as arcane practices opposing the modern identity of Bengali Muslims. Cultural-modernist art cinema authors like Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel adamantly believe in a straightforward separation of the Muslim and Bengali identity of Bengali Muslims. In their films they took a clear position on the side of the Bengali identity and even tested its boundary by emphasizing issues like sexual intercourse, an issue normally treated as taboo even among modernist Bengali Muslims. These films repeatedly use the appearance of Islamic fundamentalists as a stereotype, imposing the same mannerisms and dress code on them. These films also repeatedly show us the innocent, powerless, female victims trapped in the so-called village court where they are subjected to the rhetoric of Islamic learning against which they can express no objection. Indeed, the character of the Islamic fundamentalist as a middle-aged or oldish man, wearing a beard and Islamic dress (e.g. longpunjabi
and pyjamas with cap), who cheats the ordinary villagers in the name of Islam, is omnipresent in the films of Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel. The Razakar leader in Towards, Hajji Shaheb in The Rain, the Muslim folk-healer and village guardians in The Ominous House, the imam in The Wheel, Majid, the hypocrite mullah and his opponent, another pir, in A Tree without Roots – all these characters basically represent an Islamic fundamentalist in different guises. These characters are built, in most cases, not as human characters with limitations and virtues. Rather they are shown as monsters who only plan and perform coercion, deceptions or evils to ordinary villagers using their Islamic clout.
As I have discussed above, their victims are mainly female and in most cases they are represented as innocent, youthful and playful girls who revolt against the restrictions imposed on them in the name of Islamic learning. Hajji Shaheb’s young wife and Batashi, the girl to be stoned to death in The Rain, Jaigun, the struggling divorced mother in The Ominous House and Majid’s second wife Jamila in A Tree without Roots represent these kind of woman-as-victim-andrebel characters. Unlike the Islamic fundamentalist men, these women characters are created more delicately and resemble humane characters in the real world: they are people who feel love and hatred and wish to live their life according to their free will. Such opposition between Islamic fundamentalist men against freedom-aspiring women-victims is played out in Bangladeshi art cinema films so recurrently that I would argue that this opposition is actually used to establish the Bengali–Islam dichotomy on cinema screens. In this sense the womenvictims symbolize the vulnerable state of Bengali cultural practices in 1980s–2000s Bangladesh amid the pro-Islam turn of the state power and the elite. However, this kind of oppressor–victim situation brings medieval feudalism to the cinema screen that easily rebukes Islam and Islamic learning for being anti-modern and outmoded. Bangladeshi art cinema then, mostly abstains from portraying the multiplicities of Islamic learning and how Islam has been localized and become a part of everyday Bengali cultural practices in the life of the Bengali Muslims. However, there is another side to this coin too, as there is another of the three major art cinema authors in Bangladesh who actually goes against this black-and-white anti-Islam tendency and through his films presents a discursive analysis of the indigenization of Islam in rural Bangladesh on cinema screens around the world. Below I analyse Tareque Masud’s Matir Moina (The Clay Bird, 2002), a Bangladeshi feature film that can be taken as an example of alternative representation of Islam and Islamic learning. This film advocates the multiplicity of Islam and its attachment to Bengali identity.
Madrasa, Masud andThe
Clay Bird: Bangladeshi art cinema towards heterogenizing Islam
The Clay Bird is one of the rare Bangladeshi art films that visibly and delicatelyrepresents
Islamic education in/through the madrasa system in Bangladesh. The scriptwriter and director of the film, Tareque Masud, an important Bangladeshi art cinema author alongside Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel, contributed to the critique of Muslim nationalism and the formation of culturalnational modernity among Bengali Muslims through his documentary films in the 1980s–90s.Masud’s first film, a video documentary, The Chains of Gold (Shonar Beri, 1985) looks at the everyday subordination of women under the Islamic regulations in Bangladesh society.
His Inner Strength (Adam Surat, 1989) follows S.M. Sultan, one of the most controversial secular-modernist painters among Bengali Muslims well known for his Bengali-nationalist artworks and liberal humanist lifestyle. Masud’s feature-length documentary Song of Freedom (Muktir Gaan, 1995) is a reconstructed narrative of the tour of a cultural troupe around refugee as well as guerrilla camps along the India–Bangladesh border during the Bangladesh war of liberation in 1971.
All these short and documentary films by Masud demonstrate that his filmmaking career and vision are also linked with the art cinema discourse and its clear-cut opposition against Islam and Islamic learning in contemporary Bangladesh. But we do not find black-and-white rivalry between Islam and Bengali identity in Masud’s The Clay Bird. What we get is a discursive take on Bangladeshi madrasa education that he represents through cinema aesthetics mostly learnt from Western films. The film is an autobiographical journey that took Tareque Masud down memory lane as he himself studied in the madrasa in 1950s–60s East Pakistan. The madrasa-educated filmmaker Masud, with the collaboration of his American-born partner, Catherine, created a film that urges the viewer to see the divide between Islam and Bengali culture as minimal and proposes alternative perceptions of Islam in rural Bangladesh.
At the production stage, The Clay Bird received a grant from the French Ministry of Culture under the South Fund and secured a commitment for international distribution from MK2, the renowned French distributor. The finance and crew sent from France to Bangladesh contributed in the shaping of the film as a sophisticated visual commentary on the relationship between Islam and cultural nationalism in rural Bangladesh. It became the opening film at the directors’ fortnight of the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and there it received the FIPRESCI award (along with the Palestinian film Divine Intervention and the Mauritanian film Waiting for Happiness), the highest international recognition earned by a Bangladeshi film. The Clay Bird was the official Bangladeshi entry for the 2003 Academy Awards in the US. It also won an award for the best screenplay in the Marrakesh Film Festival in Morocco in September 2002 and as the best film in the Karafest Film Festival in Karachi in 2003. In the same year, The Clay Bird was shown in 35 cinemas in the US. It also had a commercial release in France, the UK, Japan, Italy, Canada and Australia (Farooki 2004: 5–6). Ironically, the film did not receive such good gestures on the home front.
Rather, the Bangladesh Film Censor Board banned the film for being ‘sensitive’ in May 2002. After a few months of playing cat-and-mouse, they lifted the ban and asked Masud to make some ‘corrections’ to the film in order for it to be released in Bangladesh.
Most commentators believed that the portrayal of Bangladeshi madrasa education, a key objective of The Clay Bird, made the current pro-Islam political-nationalist government nervous and sensitive. The centre-right government (that includes the Jama’at-i-Islami, the party which resisted Bangladesh’s liberation in 1971) readily concluded that the film highlighted madrasas as a breeding ground for terrorism and may develop further hatred against the madrasas. However, when one looks at the film’s narrative, it does not seem so simple and one-sided. The film is set in rural East Pakistan in the late 1960s. Kazi, the deeply religious father of young Anu, sends him to study at a madrasa amid the protests of Ayesha, Anu’s mother. Kazi is afraid that his college-going brother Milon and Hindu rituals in the village will ‘pollute’ Anu. In the madrasa, Anu finds Rokon, another young outcast and Ibrahim, a sympathetic teacher. At home, Anu’s sister Asma becomes very ill. Kazi does not permit Ayesha to treat her with Western medicine and eventually Asma dies. Rokon gets an ear infection (probably because of beating by Bakiullah, the madrasa headmaster, though the censored version of the film never shows that) and hears a noise continuously. In order to get rid of the ‘bad spirit’, Rokon is exorcised in the pond in front of all the boys. Bakiullah puts him in the store-room. Anu decides to leave the madrasa. This was the time of the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971. Anu reaches home at a time when the Pakistani army is coming to attack their village. He and Ayesha escape to the nearest jungle with other villagers, but Kazi stays at home in the belief that ‘Muslim brothers from Punjab’ will do no harm to Bengali Muslims. Milon joins the guerrillas fighting the Pakistani army and dies while protecting the bridge on the outskirts of the village. Ayesha and Anu return home and find a disillusioned Kazi sitting in front of the burnt pages of the Holy Qur’an. They leave home, leaving Kazi behind.
The story of The Clay Bird is presented in a textual structure that is similar to European art cinema. Here we find psychologically complex characters functioning within an ambiguous narrative. The Clay Bird is not committed to following narrative logic, linear storytelling based on a cause–effect chain.
Through the ambiguous and complex narrative of The Clay Bird, Bangladeshi madrasa education is represented and certainly this representation is not a simplistic one. Rather it leads us to no clear climax and we do not even see some of the key events of the narrative. The film opens with a scene of the madrasa students doing wazu (ablution) in a huge pond early in the morning. Here the teacher Ibrahim shows Anu, the newcomer boy, how to brush his teeth properly.
Starting from this point, this film realistically depicts the mundane practices of Islamic education in this East Pakistan madrasa until the end of the film (though the narrative in the meantime moves towards the political upheaval and liberation war of 1971).
Why had such a complex cinematic representation of madrasa education been attempted for the first time in Bangladeshi cinema? While the madrasa is readily linked with the development of so-called Islamic terrorists wishing to impose an Islamic homogeneity on all kinds of people, Tareque Masud finds the madrasa as a special place for unlearning homogeneity:
Madrasas force you to learn how to adapt, how to accept differences. They are truly an unlearning process . you unlearn all the notions of homogeneity and prejudice that life otherwiseteaches
you. . You learn to see the world from perspectives other than your own. . (Z.A. Khan 2002: 20)
Then, within the madrasa in the film, Masud shows us heterogeneous modes of Islamic education. Two of the teachers in Anu’s madrasa, Bakiullah and Ibrahim represent two versions of Islamic learning. Bakiullah, the headteacher, is a follower of a strict Islamic regulatory regime that he also establishes in the madrasa. No boy can have long hair here. They cannot play with any foreign object, say, a football (so we see Anu and Rokon play with an ‘invisible’ ball).
He rules that every student has to learn self-defence techniques. They, with their right hands, have to learn to write Arabic, the ‘language of Allah’, and because of that even the left-handed Rokon has to practise Arabic writing with his right hand. The teacher Ibrahim advocates a moderate way of Islamic learning for the madrasa students. He dislikes the exorcization of Rokon and organizes Western medicine for him. Ibrahim recalls his young daughter he left in the village who likes to dive in the pond (we see a mid-close shot of the girl having a dip in a pond full of flower petals). He dislikes Bakiullah’s way of bringing politics in the madrasa: ‘it is not fair to include these innocent boys [madrasa students] into the political game’. Ibrahim claims that ‘Islam was established in this land [Bengal] not through the Sword. It was the numerous local sufis [mystics] who popularized Islam here.’ So, his (and Masud’s) version of Islam for Bengali Muslims is more akin to local culture and lifestyle and sympathetic to the creative and emotional faculties of Bengali mind.
In The Clay Bird, therefore, Masud uses Bengali folkloric materials to develop what he calls ‘bahas’ (debate) on Islam: ‘it is important to bring back this dialogue between different interpretations of Islam’ (Aziz 2002: 5). So he uses Bengali mystic songs in the film to expedite such dialogue between Islamic learning and Bengali culture, even though sometimes these songs block the film’s narrative progression. These songs, mostly presented through contesting male–female pairs of folk-singers performing for ordinary rural Bangladeshis, also represent the debate between the fundamentalist/extremist and liberalhumanist view over Islam and Islamic learning. Masud states the reason for using Bengali mystic songs in the film in the following way:
In contrast to the written tradition of Sufism in Iran . in Bangladesh, mysticism took on the oral and musical forms of rural Bengali society. Although in the stricter sense of Shariah music is forbidden, in Bangladesh, mystical vocal music has become a powerful . form of protest. . This genre of local folk music is a confluence of Muslim Sufism, Hindu Vaishnavism, and Buddhist mysticism. (Masud 2002)
Both the confluence of various mystical trends in Bengali music and the tone of protest against Islamic orthodoxy and its education are present in the film’s songs. The theme song, a Bengali mystical song clearly signifies the humane yearnings to liberalize orthodox Islam and its learning practices:
The bird is trapped in the body’s cage
Its feet are bound with worldly chains. . .
The bird pines with longing
It yearns to spread its wings. . .
The clay bird laments:
‘Why did youinfuse
My heart with longing
If you didn’t give my wings
The strength to fly?’
(The Clay Bird publicity flyer 2002)
The Clay Bird thus goes beyond the micro-level story of the madrasa student Anu who sees (and shows us) the world around him. Embodying Anu’s subjective angle, this film participates in the ongoing battle of rewriting Bangladesh’s national history and of the identity conflict of Bengali Muslims. Tareque Masud questions and reinterprets how the Bengali-Muslim middle class struggled (and somewhat failed) to apprise and accommodate their other self, Muslim identity, towards the formation of their cultural-national modernity. Drawing on the Chinese-American scholar Rey Chow’s argument on Chinese Fifth Generation films, I want to point out that here Masud is actually busy in an ‘exhibitionist self-display. . It turns the remnants of orientalism into elements of a new ethnography. .the
Orient’s orientalism is first and foremost a demonstration’ (Chow 1995: 171). I find that the cinematic depiction of Islam and Muslim identity in The Clay Bird equates to an ‘exhibitionist self-display’ and thus it can be taken as the demonstration of a new, ongoing ethnography of Bengali Muslims. Here we find a close look at various streams of Islamic learning in Bangladesh that does not place Islam only as a homogeneous genie against Bengali culture, as portrayed in other Bangladeshi art cinema films.
The Clay Bird cleverly avoids becoming another example of black-and-white portrayal of Islamic learning as anti-modern, arcane and monolithic in Bangladesh. Let us consider the adversaries like Kazi and Milon. Kazi always wears Islamic dress, has a beard and believes in the Islamic way of life. Milon wears shirt and trousers and debates Western political trends including Marxism.
However, the film presents the conflict between Kazi and Milon quite humanly, gently and credibly. Like European art cinema films, we see no highly motivated goal-oriented protagonist in The Clay Bird. The protagonists seem to be suffering being caught between opposite ideals. For example, Kazi did not permit Western medicine for Asma’s treatment, but gives money to the boatman to take his sick wife to a doctor in the town. Therefore, neither Kazi nor Milon are characters chanting ideological slogans; they look and act like ordinary people with their own emotions and beliefs. Though Kazi represents the orthodox trend of Islamic learning, his character is not one-sided like the middle-aged fundamentalist men portrayed in other Bangladeshi art films. Again, Ayesha is subordinated by Kazi and she may look like the women-as-victim-and-rebel characters noted before, but the oppressor-victim schema normalized in those films does not suit well to clarify their relationship. Similarly, we can never be sure about the nature of the relationship between Ayesha and Milon, the sister-in-law and brother-in-law who were childhood friends and were always fond of each other.
In this way, The Clay Bird takes a different cinematic approach towards identifying the half-tone areas between Islam and Bengali identity as well as of the various streams of Islamic learning. Knitting together the realistic visuals and a soundtrack representing Bengali Muslim folk music, it argues that Islam has become indigenized and popularized in rural Bangladesh in the last few centuries. The Clay Bird, in this way, destabilizes the cultural-nationalist mission of Bangladeshi art cinema and brings to the forefront the concept of ‘Bengali Islam’. This film questions the homogeneity of Islam and Islamic learning and also of the Bengali/Bangladeshi identity and thus demonstrates the ambiguities and syncretism inherent in Islam.
Conclusion
This chapter argues that the cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims urged the development of a modern national/cultural identity of Bangladesh during last few decades through Bangladeshi art cinema. In other words, they envisaged a ‘national’ art cinema that can create a certain kind of cinematic representation of Bengali Muslims and work towards their cultural modernity. In this way, Bangladeshi art cinema became overtly committed to the cultural modernity of middle-class Bengali Muslims, a modernity that emphasizes the secular notion of ‘Bengali’ cultural identity and opposes the ‘Muslim-ness’ of the Bengali Muslims.
This condition fostered the representation of Islam and Islamic learning as primitive practices in Bangladeshi art cinema. I analysed exemplary films of three major art cinema authors in contemporary Bangladesh to focus on how art cinema represents Islam and Islamic learning and thus relate to the disjunctive identity of being a Bengali Muslim in Bangladesh. As the art cinema authors are busy in the act of orientalizing Bangladesh for the global audience and Westernized Bengali-Muslims, in most cases, their representation of Islam and Islamic education deepens the Islam–Bengali dichotomy. However, The Clay Bird, a globally circulated Bangladeshi art film of the contemporary period, goes against this trend and forwards a discursive analysis of madrasa education in Bangladesh. It presents the possibility of merger between Islam and Bengali identity and the need to debate various trends of Islamic educational practices.
In this way, through questioning, reframing and othering Islamic learning and education, Bangladeshi art cinema largely affirms that Islamic education and learning is ambiguous. It is not always incompatible with Bengali cultural practices, and indigenized Islam can also be seen as part of the Bengali-Muslim identity.
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Author: Jamal Malik
