Second, a large capital was required to produce a film and Bengali Muslims did not have that. First, Bengali Muslims’ non-participation in the performing arts for centuries resulted in making Muslim actors and actresses nearly non-existent. There are probably two reasons of this exclusion. Thus, Bengali Muslims simply became the captive audience of Bengali cinema. There were very few films which had Muslim characters, and there was no representation of Muslims in Bengali film-making. The process of excluding Bengali Muslims continued till the late 19 th century and the trend was reflected in Bengali film industry.īengali Hindu bhadralok-led Calcutta film industry and Hindu Bengali culture became a common narrative in the pre- and post-independence films. As Bengali Muslims are often called yavan (foreigners), they are never considered as the natural brother of the Hindus and are not accommodated in the Bengali-Hindu public sphere. These two words have different connotations but both are used in a derogatory sense. It becomes evident even in the writings of the most prominent novelists like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay, who attributed the term nere to describe Muslims. H.: 2015).īengali Muslims are often called yavan (outsiders) or nere (inferiors) by Bengali bhadralok Hindus. As a result, they acquired the position of the intellectual Bengali bhadralok (Raju. Middle class Hindus did not have the equal status and position like the western bourgeoisie, but renaissance politics stabilized the status of middle-class Bengali Hindus. Thus, the middle-class that developed in Bengal by the end of the nineteenth century was composed almost entirely of the Hindus.
Ramkrishna Mukherjee referred to the 1871 census report of Bengal that noted, “the Mussalmans form a very large majority of the cultivators of the ground and of the day labourers” (Cited in Raju. One of the primary reasons for the invisibility of the Bengali Muslims from the public sphere is the absence of a large enough English-educated middle-class among them. Andy and Azad point out, “for too many Hindu bhadralok, the Muslims did not exist except as objects of occasional high-minded concern” (Cited in Raju. The exclusionist nature of the bhadralok (gentleman) public sphere as a Bengali-Hindu arena made the Bengali Muslims of colonial Bengal almost invisible. To analyse this trend, we need to look at the status of Muslims and the Hindu-Muslim relationship in Bengal from a historical point of view.Īmerican historian Broomfield rightly described the Bengali Muslims of colonial Bengal as “the forgotten majority” (Cited in Raju. In this piece, I want to locate the reasons behind the under-representation of Bengali Muslims and the changing pattern of representing them in Bengali cinema.
However, they only showcased the hardships of the ordinary Hindu citizens of the country ignoring the people of other communities, especially Muslims who constituted a majority of the population. They were internationally acclaimed because of their neo-realist approach which made them to portray reality and struggles of ordinary human beings. Though the post-independence era is considered as the golden era of Bengali cinema where international auteurs like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Bimal Roy and Mrinal Sen delivered their most remarkable works, there is hardly any film by them where Muslims are represented. However, there are films which were released in later years, such as Ghare Baire (directed by Satyajit Ray, 1983), Padma Nadir Majhi (directed by Goutom Ghosh 1993), Rajkahini (directed by Srijit Mukherjee, 2015), which were set in the backdrop of Partition and the narratives demanded some Muslim protagonists in those films. If we look back, Muslims did not share any screen space with majority Hindus during the post-independence era. Nevertheless, the representational format of Bengali Muslims started changing during the course of time intertwining with the changing socio-political situations. Bengali Muslims never acquired a prominent space on Bengali silver screen, unlike Hindi cinema where Muslims were represented adequately and also involved actively in making those visuals.
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