Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022. 242 pp. (B&W photos.) US$33.00, paper; US$111.00, cloth; US$33.00, ebook. ISBN 9781439922255.
Ethical Encounters by Elora Halim Chowdhury is a provocative feminist analysis of cinema about the 1971 Bangladesh independence war. Chowdhury grew up in post-independence Bangladesh steeped in the proud history of the country’s independence struggle, reproduced through national literature, songs, cinema, TV dramas, and theatre, and memorialized through annual national events.
Bangladeshi cultural production memorializes the war as a story of national triumph, employing tropes of masculine heroism and feminine victimhood. Chowdhury critiques this narrative of national cinema using human rights, cinematic, and feminist lenses. Her critical lens, which uses transnational feminist theory and black feminist theory, adds complexity to the historiography of Bangladeshi national identity by reimagining the struggle for independence from the margins through the work of women filmmakers.
The prologue examines the genocidal history of 1971 by recounting the colonial relation between West Pakistan and East Pakistan and the economic, political, and justice issues that formed the basis of the conflict, as well as the racism of Pakistanis against Bengalis, which was rooted in a failure to understand Bangladeshi identity as both Bengali and Muslim. Here, Chowdhury discusses Tareque and Catherine Masud’s film The Clay Bird (Matir Moina in Bengali), which grapples with the question of Bengali Muslim identity in pre-independence Bangladesh—a pluralistic, inclusive Islam shaped by social and historic forces unique to Bengal and inseparable from Bengali identity—as distinct from Muslim identity in West Pakistan.
Despite its critique of Bangladeshi war cinema, the book stands out as a powerful memorialization of early national cinema about the independence war and as an important addition to the thin scholarship on national war cinema. In the early chapters, Chowdhury discusses the work of early filmmakers Alamgir Kabir and Zahir Raihan, talented and patriotic directors influenced by left-wing politics, human rights, and justice. Drawing on the genre of human rights cinema, Chowdhury describes the ambitious project of Muktijuddho cinema (liberation war cinema) to challenge established history by creating a different visual, historical record and breaking silences. The first Muktijuddho films, made during the war, raised world awareness of the atrocities being committed in East Pakistan. The filmmakers, acting as witness, were committed to human rights and social justice and constructing a secular Bengali identity.
While paying homage to early Muktijuddho cinema, Chowdhury questions the erasures of women’s stories in these films, especially where these stories would challenge a national narrative that seeks to co-opt and subsume all identities under a patriotic, collective project. Studying the thin body of scholarship on Bangladeshi national cinema, Chowdhury demonstrates the problem of how women are represented in national cinema. Women appear in marginal roles in prewar films. Post-independence films feature women more centrally, but their representation is constrained to their sexual victimization as a representation of the plunder of the motherland.
In later chapters, Chowdhury turns to recent war cinema centering women, often made by women filmmakers, that reimagines the struggle for independence from the margins. In discussing each film, Chowdhury considers how it aims to break the tropes of accepted narratives. The film Shongram 71 (2019) by director Munsur Ali foregrounds personal relationships, where early national cinema eclipsed individual concerns in the service of collective uprising and sacrifice for the nation. Another film that Chowdhury analyzes, Shameem Akhter’s Itihaash Konna (2000), casts social activists interviewing a woman survivor of the war. Deploying the lenses of intimate histories, empathy, and friendship with the Other, the film reimagines the feminine space as a site of reconciliation with the Other and aims to bring healing to victims of the war.
While admiring recent war cinema for its attempt to broaden the lens on national war cinema, Chowdhury critiques the new films through the multiple lenses she deploys throughout the chapters. One such film, Guerilla (2011) by director Nasiruddin Yousuff, features a young woman who becomes a freedom fighter and plays a central role in defeating the Pakistani army. In the final scenes of the film, the woman decides to commit suicide rather than be captured by the Pakistani army. While praising the film for centering a woman freedom fighter as its heroine, thereby expanding the representation of women in war cinema, Chowdhury criticizes the director’s portrayal of the woman character as being sacrificial in the interest of the nation. Here, Chowdhury employs a feminist lens to critique the film for being unable to imagine women’s agency outside of patriarchal norms or to separate woman from nation, while acknowledging that the film’s narrative strategies nevertheless disrupt the traditional masculinist narrative of war by centering a young woman who comes into her own identity during a war.
Chowdhury takes up other recent films, often by women directors, that question the monstrosity of the Other or highlight minority identities that do not fit within the national narrative. Leesa Gazi’s Rising Silence (2019) and Farzana Boby’s Bish Kanta (2015) centre the perspectives of survivors of rape as a disruption to the national narrative of the rape victims of the war, while Shabnam Ferdousi’s documentary Jonmo Shathu (2016) centres on a juddhoshishu, a child of war born out of rape to a Bengali mother and a Pakistani father, who has never been accepted in Bangladeshi society. All the films Chowdhury analyzes in this chapter tell the stories of women who faced violence during the war, thus giving agency to the women to present their own experience outside of trauma narratives in service of the nation.
The lasting quality of the book lies in the theories deployed to understand national war cinema, including cinematic critique, transnational feminism, and black feminist theory. With this important book, Chowdhury places the independence struggle of Bangladesh in world historiography and leaves us with new ways of understanding national cinema, healing, identity, and justice, through such powerful concepts as friendship in feminist theory, women’s agency and subjectivity, the separation of woman from nation, memory and eyewitness in cinema, and narrative strategies that can disrupt dominant national narratives.
Gemini Wahhaj
Lone Star College, Houston