Abstract
We often predominantly understand the idea of ‘popular’ as evolving in an organic way. Manosh Chowdhury’s Making of the Popular: Production of Culture and Discourses in Bangladesh interrogates that idea and critically unravels the intricate dynamics of how ‘popular’ can be produced in the political and cultural spheres as state-led political projects. In this book, through an anthropological lens, Chowdhury investigates the idea of popular culture, particularly in the context of Bangladesh and its national identity. The book’s core argument is that popular culture, as a national consciousness, was deliberately manufactured by the state and other-than-state agents, rather than understood as an organic development. This book theoretically heavily depends on Gramsci’s idea of ‘National-Popular’ and his quest for popular culture. Following that conceptual framework, Chowdhury offers a fresh understanding of popular culture and its various state-centric projects in the context of Bangladesh. Drawing on the idea of ‘popular’, Chowdhury offers a way to show how the idea of ‘popular’ is constructed, how various agents participate in alliance with a mission of ‘popularizing’ cultural products and discourses and finally how it in turn manifests and overrides a sense of ‘national-popular’ culture. This book provides a framework for understanding the contemporary rise and practices of the idea of ‘popular’ in the cultural and political spheres, particularly in Bangladesh and across South Asia.
In the first chapter, Chowdhury introduces the scope of this book by defining the ‘popularizing project’ from the perspective of Bangladesh. He explores a brief transition of popularising projects, spanning from post-independence to satellite television to the massive expansion of the advertising industry in contemporary Bangladesh. The author examines how various agents of the government, corporate groups and media work in alliance to propagate certain cultural products as ‘popular’, which are manufactured as ‘national-popular’ culture.
The second chapter deals with the regime of Ziaur Rahman (1977–1981), which is often treated as a political era of an ‘engineered project’ of political image construction as a popular figure. This post-independence era has been a crucial time for understanding contemporary Bangladesh, particularly the making of a popular leader. This chapter broadly focuses on the cultural meaning of a political regime and ways of manifesting Zia’s statesman’s image. Zia’s manifestations are precisely signified by the style of representation of a political icon, in that case revolving around Zia’s image. For instance, wearing a military uniform with Ray-Ban glasses intentionally implants a ‘hero’ image in the public psyche that eventually exists long after his assassination. The author showed that political image constructions in the case of Zia were a systematic iconisation with a popularising mission foregrounding a doctrine, what the author called the ‘Zia doctrine’. The author argued that the popularising mission of the Zia doctrine was built upon three significant pillars: first, constructing India as the ‘other’, a harmful enemy of the Bangladeshi ‘self’; second, constructing America as the most imaginable locale for lifestyle; and third, constructing the military as the image of the ‘brave and powerful’ of the nation.
Chapter three concerns consumption, and the author investigates how consumerism constantly orients and reorients the meaning of national identity. Chowdhury shows that the early transformation from the ‘durability discourse’, which highlighted local (swadeshi) products, to the modern ‘taste discourse’, which characterises the consumption of prestigious international brands in a time of thriving shopping malls. Chowdhury analyses that the sense of belonging to a nation is primarily defined by the ability to consume global products. He argued that,
The idea of nation, in the process of consumption, seems to be located in the narrow corridor provided by the consumer goods … fabricated through the convenience of the availability of foreign goods … Nation appears to manifest the prosperity, the availability of certain kinds of goods—that is to say, comfort and pride. (pp. 36–37)
The fourth chapter unveils the complex binary between religion and secularism. Chowdhury examines how the use of religion has been the ‘decisive category’ that intentionally masks the deeper political network and corporate power plays. By analysing a case study of the removal of President Badruddoza Chowdhury in 2002, the author argues that the collective middle-class self and the mass media often ignore the ‘undercurrent power plays’ by reducing complex political events to a binary of ‘secularism’ versus ‘fundamentalism’. Eventually, such a simplistic binary and overemphasis on ‘fundamentalism’ reduces every possibility of the play of diverse power networks in Bangladesh.
In chapter five, Chowdhury analyses the evolution of the heroic image and masculinity in popular Bangladeshi cinema, mostly consumed by the working class. This chapter primarily explores how the heroic image is popularly constructed through mainstream cinema. Initially, the portrayal of the action hero often fought to protect the idea of ‘desh’ (the nation), highlighting social justice for the people. However, the transformed hero image has been sanitised as a ‘legally authorized’ figure, popularly propagating the idea of a ‘good citizen’ of the nation. The author broadly highlighted how the desired citizens are manufactured by the idea of lawful heroes propagating through the cinema.
In chapter six, the author critically examines the environmental policies that led to the popularisation of the project of environmental consciousness in Bangladesh. Banning tobacco advertisements and polythene bags, he argued, is a ‘garrulous move’. Because such strategic moves are purposefully set to achieve global environmental credibility while masking the arbitrary environmental actions of promoting the ecologically devastating shrimp industry and eco-parks that evict indigenous communities from their land.
Chapter seven primarily focuses on higher education, especially the rise of private universities in Bangladesh. He argues that privatisation is not merely a tangible way of establishing education but instead undermines the idea of public educational institutions and popularises private ones. Eventually, the projects of popularisation of private education sectors subscribe to the global ‘development and trade’ system in local contexts.
In the concluding chapter eight, the author synthesises the diverse themes of the book and conceptualises the idea of ‘popular’ in Bangladesh. He argues that the concept of the popular, as popularising projects across diverse sectors, seems to be an ‘oligarchic’ manufacture shaped by the shared purposeful mission of corporate groups, the media and the state. Nonetheless, making the ‘popular’ has been a central project of the contemporary power network in Bangladesh, spanning diverse fields such as politics, consumption, fundamentalism, cinema, education and the environment.