Opinion: What about cultural development?

When it comes to the idea of Bangladesh's development many stakeholders make ambitious claims and leave aside any blame. Economists and policy-readers may rightly hail the Prime Minister for setting the goals, which are, by and large, about better gross domestic products, income generation, and human development indices. Newspapers and television shows are filled with abundant praise and little critiquing that is needed to make sense of the complexity of the issue under question. From the outline and assessment of the policies, there seems to have been an ominous mishap in the scheme of thinking about Bangladesh's development. The mishap is related to the way development is being understood. Could income generation, leading to possible facilitation of basic amenities, alone guarantee holistic and sustainable development? Umpteen questions surface underlining the way development is imagined and discussed in Bangladesh today. Would the presence of chaotic concrete jungle of multistoried apartments alone be markers of development? Are the streets of cities in Bangladesh bursting with traffic congestion not due to an allegedly flawed idea of development?

The reason why these questions are crucial for ordinary citizens in Bangladesh today is not just due to the crises of stark income-disparity, various kinds of hazards lurking in the surrounding, or the set of inconveniences that may compel upwardly middle class to frown upon the model of development. The reason why a critical rethinking on development should be the norm in Bangladesh is a potential decline at the front of culture. Indeed there is a soft and almost subjugated cultural outcry, not audible enough to reach the pundits of development. A hyperbolic, but forceful realisation is that crass commerce seems to have taken over the cultural constitution of Bangladesh. Ideally, commerce and culture could have flourished in intimate unity, which does not seem to be the case. And hence, the much-needed holistic notion of development inclusive of the cultural aspect is conspicuous by absence in Bangladesh today.

Let's look at some of the visible instances and try to hear the soft sobs amid the high decibel traffic noise in the city of Dhaka.

Bangladesh has had a glorious cultural history in the region of South Asia ever since its inception. Not only folk performances, mostly known as indigenous in contemporary Bangladesh, but also modern theatre played a crucial role in the country's socio-political struggles. It delivered people's cultural narratives in the face of political upheavals. The group theatre movement persisted with progressive ideas and endeavoured to nourish a cultural imagination of post-liberation Bangladesh. Many of the theatre artists and activists worked in solidarity with their counterparts in various parts of the region including India and Pakistan. They frequently showed up in National School of Drama, worked with well-known theatre personalities, and engendered a sign of dynamic theatrical practices. They performed adaptations of scripts penned by European theatre masters as well as original plays written by Bangladeshi writers, emitting an unparalleled theatrical cosmopolitanism. If at any point in the political history the proscenium theatre came under the dictatorial surveillance, the artists took to the street performing in the midst of masses. One can never forget the vibrant street theatre during the troubled times in the political history of Bangladesh. 

But where is modern theatre today, with group theatre almost sliding under the shadows of concrete bureaucratic offices? Israfil Shahin, a teacher of dramatic arts at Dhaka University, made a critical comment worth mentioning, "Groups have become redundant as theatre itself is going through tough times." This is not an exceptional pessimism. The renowned thespian Ramendu Majumdar informs about the institutional crises in the theatre scene in Bangladesh too. He observed, "Some groups are struggling to stay in the picture with a few performances bringing the audience to the proscenium."

This occasions a volley of questions hard to answer. Why is modern theatre not in the reckoning of the developmentalist imagination of Bangladesh today? What new plays dealing with contemporary issues of people and politics are on offer for the audience? What are the arrangements to promote relatively new theatre groups striving to emerge to the cultural forefront? And what is the audience doing in the wake of modern theatre slipping away?

Are they watching popular cinema? Not really. Popular cinema in Bangladesh could never reach a satisfactory status despite the efforts of some pioneers in the early days, and some exceptional filmmakers trying to deliver good works in recent times such as Aynabaji last year. A glimpse of the disturbing absence of Bangladeshi films is available in the streets of various cities where public walls are smeared with political posters alone. Seldom does a cinema poster greet one in the public space in Bangladesh. 

Allegedly, Bangladeshi cinema had been poor clones of Bollywood. Notwithstanding, they exist and hence one cannot dismiss them entirely from the developmental scheme of thinking. Even though it may appear to be a daunting challenge for development experts with a deterministic mindset, it must be acknowledged that cinema is an important means in the developmental planning, initiatives, and meeting the goal posts. There are reams of works to inform about the relation between popular culture and development in any modern society. If popular cinema is in poor shape, as history of cinema in Bangladesh informs, it is also due to a systematic and sustained neglect of the industry by the state and highbrow cultural puritans. The diminishing number of cinema halls is just one small fragment indicating the decline of public culture in contemporary Bangladesh.

If this is so, where are the audiences, in the abysmally thought out cultural development in the country today? Apparently the audiences have turned to television. And most of the time they watch Bollywood movies or television soaps dished out from nooks and corners of India. There has been some noise recently on the growing popularity of Hindi and Bengali series produced in India. The government had to interfere asking the televisions not to air any Indian shows with advertisements from the Bangladeshi corporates. In the past, there was a strange fear in the air that Indian culture poses a threat to Bangladesh, and hence banning Indian television channels was mooted a few years ago. This was not new since the audience in Bangladesh had witnessed similar propagations about Bollywood in the past. But then, the Bangladeshi audience generously consumes both Bollywood and Indian soaps. They have not metamorphosed into any non-Bangladeshi alien but public opinion remains divided. Particularly, some menfolk feel that Indian television series corrupt Bangladeshi girls and women in terms of fashion as well as social behaviour. Curiously enough, menfolk in India have similar ideas about the impact of television serials on Indian women whereas women seem to believe in the freedom of choice of cultural consumers in Bangladesh. While these are big issues for researchers in sociology and anthropology in Bangladesh, as well as in other parts of South Asia, they offer strength to the key proposition of this article that is the imperative of factoring in culture in the scheme of development. Would it not be conducive for the mutual growth in culture and commerce to have a flourishing television entertainment industry in Bangladesh outdoing the Indian popular productions? A good example is the immense popularity of the serials of Pakistan's Zindagi channel among women in small towns across India.

The state, policy pundits, and development agencies ought to critically rethink, and accordingly shift gears, when they discuss the developmental goal posts for Bangladesh. This calls for an active involvement of cultural activists and ranks and files of the culture industry in the developmental rethinking of the country. On the whole, civil society needs to take a cultural turn in Bangladesh. 

The writer heads the Department of Sociology at South Asian University governed by SAARC in New Delhi, and is currently researching on theatre in Bangladesh.