Cinema and the
Making of Bhadralok Culture: Constructing Bengali Identity through Bengali
Cinema
Tamal Nag
Lecturer,
Center for Language and Cultural Studies,
Green University of Bangladesh
Purbachal American City, Kanchon 1460,
Bangladesh
Abstract: This article
examines the role of Bengali cinema as an institution that actively
participated in manufacturing, legitimizing, and naturalizing the cultural
values of the bhadralok — the educated, largely upper-caste urban middle class
that emerged under colonial modernity in Bengal — as the dominant
representation of Bengali identity writ large. Departing from approaches that
treat cinema primarily as a reflective or documentary medium, the article
argues that Bengali film production from the New Theatres era of the 1930s
through the internationally celebrated auteur cinema of Satyajit Ray, and into
the formally experimental work of Mrinal Sen, consistently transformed a
historically contingent class formation's aesthetic preferences and domestic
ideals into what was received, both domestically and internationally, as the
authentic expression of Bengali culture. The analysis draws on Pierre
Bourdieu's theorization of cultural capital and distinction, Antonio Gramsci's
account of cultural hegemony as a process of consent-manufacturing rather than
coercion, and Stuart Hall's framework of representation as a productive rather
than reflective practice. The article situates itself in relation to existing
scholarship — particularly the work of Sharmistha Gooptu, Moinak Biswas, Sumita
Chakravarty, and Partha Chatterjee — while arguing that none of these studies
has sufficiently addressed the question of how bhadralok taste came to function
as a hegemonic norm that marginalized lower-caste communities and the urban poor.
Close readings of specific films and sequences attend to cinematographic and
mise-en-scène choices as ideological practice, not merely aesthetic preference.
The concluding section considers whether the post-2000 Bengali cinema of
filmmakers such as Kaushik Ganguly genuinely unsettles this formation or
whether it negotiates with it from within a framework whose fundamental
evaluative criteria remain bhadralok in origin.
Keywords: bhadralok;
Bengali cinema; cultural hegemony; Satyajit Ray; Uttam Kumar; cultural capital;
caste and film; Mrinal Sen; representation
Introduction
When Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) was screened
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that May, the reviews that followed
were generous in ways that are worth pausing over. What critics found in the
film — an unhurried interiority, an attentiveness to gesture and domestic
texture, a sense of cultivated feeling subdued rather than performed — were the
markers of a specific aesthetic formation. Whether or not this was recognized
at the time, it was a formation with a social address: the film spoke with the
aesthetic and moral sensibility of the bhadralok, the educated, largely
upper-caste Bengali middle class that had been Bengal's self-appointed cultural
custodians since the reform movements of the nineteenth century. That the film
was received as an expression of Bengali culture — not a bhadralok version of
Bengali culture, but the thing itself — is precisely the problem this article
examines.
The word 'bhadralok' (literally, 'gentle people' or
'people of quality') names a social formation that is difficult to define with
sociological precision, partly because its boundaries shifted over the century
and a half of its cultural ascendancy, and partly because the imprecision was itself
ideologically functional. At its most specific, the term refers to educated,
upper-caste, urban Bengalis tied to professional employment under colonial and
postcolonial state structures, sharing a distinctive relationship to the
Bengali literary tradition and to a version of religious and cultural life
shaped by the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance. But the bhadralok's most
significant cultural achievement was precisely the effacement of the term's
social specificity: the transformation of the particular into the general, of
class position into cultural heritage. This article argues that Bengali cinema
was one of the primary sources by which this was created.
The article proceeds written like this. Main analysis, a
brief account of the bhadralok's historical formation. Then its introduction to
the field of early Bengali cinema. The central section’s examine specific films
and filmmakers in terms of the formal and ideological work. The discussion of
excluded communities — lower-caste Bengalis, the urban poor — is necessarily
partial given the state of the scholarship, a limitation explicitly
acknowledged. The concluding sections address the post-liberalization period
and the question of contemporary Bengali cinema's relationship to its bhadralok
inheritance.
Historical Origins
of the Bhadralok: A Condensed Account
The scholarship on the bhadralok's historical formation
is substantial enough that any brief account risks misrepresentation. Sumit
Sarkar's Modern India (1983) traced the paradoxes of a class simultaneously
indebted to colonial structures and committed to a cultural nationalism that
required transcending them. Partha Chatterjee's The Nation and Its Fragments
(1993) offered the most theoretically sophisticated account of how the
bhadralok negotiated this paradox through a division of the social world into
'material' and 'spiritual' domains: the former open to Western modernization,
the latter reserved as the site of authentic Bengali (and implicitly Hindu,
upper-caste) culture (Chatterjee 6–11). More recent scholarship, particularly
the work of historians engaging with Dalit and Scheduled Caste history in
Bengal, has complicated this picture by demonstrating that the bhadralok's
spiritual domain was constituted through the active exclusion and subordination
of lower-caste cultural practices — a process of cultural enclosure rather than
organic development.
The Namasudra community, the largest Scheduled Caste
group in Bengal, provides a useful counter-history. As Sekhar Bandyopadhyay's
research on caste politics in Bengal demonstrates, Namasudra leaders in the
early twentieth century mounted a sustained challenge to bhadralok cultural and
political authority, articulating an alternative vision of Bengali identity
that rejected the bhadralok's brahminic cultural frame (Bandyopadhyay 71–89).
Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital helps explain how the
bhadralok turned their familiarity with Tagore's songs, Sanskrit-rooted
literary language, raga music, and classical poetry into a kind of inherited
social authority. This authority felt genuinely aesthetic while quietly drawing
lines between who belonged and who didn't. The crucial point, which Bourdieu's
analysis of distinction in French society makes explicit, is that this capital
was never experienced by its possessors as a class advantage: it presented
itself as a natural sensitivity, an innate refinement, that distinguished the
cultivated from the 'coarse.' Cinema provided a new arena in which this
distinction could be publicly staged.
One further historiographical note is warranted. The
bhadralok formation was not static. The social composition of the Bengali educated
middle class shifted significantly across the late colonial and early
postcolonial periods, and the cultural norms associated with bhadralok identity
were continuously revised, contested within the formation, and inflected by
regional differences between urban Calcutta and the mofussil towns of Bengal.
The cinema this article examines is primarily the product of Calcutta's film
industry, and its 'Bengali' identity should be understood as Calcutta-centric
in ways that already excluded significant portions of Bengali-speaking
populations.
The Emergence of
Bengali Cinema and the Question of Cultural Authority
The history of Bengali sound cinema begins,
institutionally, with the New Theatres studio established in Calcutta in 1931
by Birendra Nath Sircar. The studio's significance lies not only in the films
it produced but in the cultural positioning it achieved: New Theatres
consciously located itself within the prestige economy of the Bengali literary
public sphere, adapting celebrated novels, employing singers trained in
classical and Tagore traditions, and cultivating a self-image as a maker of
'artistic' cinema that distinguished itself from what its promotional materials
described as the vulgarity of the popular Hindi film industry centred on
Bombay. Sharmistha Gooptu's Bengali Cinema: 'An Other Nation' offers the most
detailed account of this positioning (Gooptu 45–62), and her argument that New
Theatres constructed Bengali cinema as a culturally autonomous national
formation — an 'other nation' — is persuasive as far as it goes.
Moinak Biswas's work on early Bengali sound cinema,
distributed across several essays and collected interventions, has explored the
relationship between the emergence of the film sound space and the construction
of a new Bengali public. Biswas argues that the talkie's introduction of the
voice — specifically the middle-class educated voice, its pronunciation, its
musical register — was a key mechanism of cultural differentiation, producing a
cinematic address that constituted a particular kind of Bengali listener-viewer
as its ideal subject (Biswas, 'In the Mirror of Tagore'). This argument,
developed in the context of Hindi cinema, has direct application to the Bengali
case: the vocal culture of New Theatres cinema, saturated with classical music
and the cadences of sahitya Bengali, was simultaneously a public address and a
social filter. To be the ideal spectator of this cinema was to possess, or to
aspire to, a particular kind of cultural ear.
The Cinematic
Construction of the Bhadralok: Genre, Form, and Social Imagination
The bhadralok class in Bengali cinema is social reality
in real life than just a cinematic creation. This class shaped through
recurring visual and narrative techniques that make it appear as the natural
character of a film. This representation gives the bhadralok a privileged
position within the cinematic world. This is not specific to Bengali cinema, of
course; the Hollywood close-up performs similar work. But in Bengali cinema the
close-up is consistently organized around a particular model of emotional
refinement — feeling that is deep precisely because it is controlled — those
contrasts with the more demonstrative emotional performances associated with
the 'lower' registers of Bengali cultural life. The gayen (singer) at the
village festival, the weeping of the women at the cremation ground: these, when
they appear in Bengali cinema, tend to appear at the edges of the frame, as
context rather than subject.
The second convention is spatial: the systematic privileging
of the domestic interior as the primary space of cinematic meaning. This is
related to what Chatterjee identifies as the bhadralok nationalist project's
investment in the domestic sphere as a zone of cultural sovereignty — the space
where Bengali identity was to be maintained against the colonial intrusion of
the 'material' domain (Chatterjee 120–30). In film after film of the 1950s and
1960s — regardless of whether the surface subject is romance, professional
crisis, or family conflict — it is the domestic interior that grounds emotional
authenticity. The camera dwells on bookshelves, on the harmonium, on the ritual
objects of the bhadralok household (the tulsi plant, the brass lamp), not as
decorative detail but as the mise-en-scène of a particular kind of cultural
being. What is missing from these interiors — and this is equally significant —
is the presence of domestic labour: the cook, the maidservant, the
water-carrier. They pass through the frame but are not of it.
Uttam Kumar and the
Ideal Bengali Gentleman: Star Persona as Ideological Form
Uttam Kumar became the most powerful cinematic embodiment
of the bhadralok ideal. He became this through his acting and a carefully
constructed star image. His popularity helped normalize a particular model of
educated, cultured, and respectable Bengali masculinity ideal bhadralok.
Through soft lighting, close-up shots, and an emphasis on emotional
sensitivity, the film presents refinement, artistic taste, and deep feeling as
markers of cultured Bengali masculinity.
Saptapadi (1961), again directed by Ajoy Kar and
co-starring Suchitra Sen, extends this construction into the domain of conjugal
life and cross-cultural romance. The film — in which an upper-caste Hindu man
falls in love with a Christian Anglo-Indian woman against the resistance of his
family — has been read as a liberal endorsement of inter-community romance, and
at one level it is that. But the film's resolution, in which the couple's union
is achieved through the woman's effective absorption into a bhadralok domestic
framework, is equally significant. Suchitra Sen's character must demonstrate
her capacity for the emotional refinement that the bhadralok domestic space
demands; the film's final sequences, in which she is accepted by the family, are
organized around signs of this capacity. The 'liberal' message of
cross-community love is thus delivered within a frame that leaves the cultural
norms of the bhadralok household essentially unchallenged.
Nayak (1966), in which Satyajit Ray directed Uttam Kumar,
is the most complex case and demands extended attention. Ray's decision to cast
the iconic star as a fictional film actor was already a formal strategy: he was
working with and against the star image simultaneously, using the cultural
knowledge that Bengali audiences brought to Uttam Kumar's presence to
destabilize the very persona they expected to see celebrated.
The film’s critique of stardom ultimately stays inside
the bhadralok world it seems to question. Even its moral judgment comes from
the same cultivated values of education, self-reflection, and “authentic”
seriousness. The film locates genuine virtue in the journalist's quiet
professional integrity and in the actor's capacity for painful
self-recognition, both of which are legible as virtues only within the
framework of bhadralok cultivation. That Nayak is a self-reflexive film about
Bengali cinema does not make it a politically radical one; it is, rather, an
unusually sophisticated expression of the bhadralok's tendency to critique its
own formations from within premises it does not subject to examination.
Satyajit Ray and
the Globalization of Bhadralok Aesthetics
The scholarly literature on Satyajit Ray is large enough
to require some navigation. The celebratory tradition — from Chidananda Das
Gupta's early monograph to the substantial body of international criticism Ray
attracted from the 1960s onward — tends to treat his films as humanist works
whose ethical and aesthetic authority transcends their social context of
production. A revisionist strand of criticism, represented most forcefully by
Fareeduddin Kazmi's essay 'How Angry is the Angry Young Man?' and by aspects of
Moinak Biswas's work, has challenged this by pointing to the class-specific
assumptions embedded in Ray's humanist universalism. The argument developed
here is closer to the revisionist position, but it differs in emphasis: rather
than evaluating Ray's films as ideologically adequate or inadequate, it asks
how their international circulation produced a particular image of Bengal — and
what that image required to suppress.
Pather Panchali shows
the life of a very poor rural Bengali family with great sympathy and detail,
which seems different from typical bhadralok stories. But the way the film is
made — its slow shots, beautiful images, and calm observation — still reflects
a cultivated, educated way of looking at the world. Instead of fully entering
the suffering, the film turns poverty into something carefully seen and
artistically framed, shaped for a bhadralok and art-cinema audience. Charulata
shows a rich but enclosed world where the heroine moves through beautiful rooms
but never fully escapes them. Even when she looks outside, the world remains
distant, making her life feel both privileged and quietly confined.
This spatial analysis is not merely aesthetic commentary;
it maps the film's ideological terrain. Charulata's confinement is a
specifically bhadralok confinement: she is not poor, not uneducated, not
without resources. What she lacks is a legitimate outlet for her intellectual
and creative capacities within the cultural formation to which she belongs.
Ray's film is in this sense a critique of bhadralok gender norms, and a
perceptive one. But the critique operates within terms that the bhadralok
cultural framework itself supplies: the values through which Charulata's
situation is recognized as a situation — interiority, literary cultivation, the
right to creative self-expression — are bhadralok values. The film does not
imagine a world outside this formation; it examines, with great formal
delicacy, the costs it imposes on the women who are its most faithful
inhabitants.
The international reception of Ray's work consolidated a
globally legible image of Bengal that has received less critical scrutiny than
it warrants. Ravi Vasudevan's introductory essay to Making Meaning in Indian
Cinema notes the tendency of international film criticism to position Ray's
cinema as representative of 'Indian' film, a metonymic substitution that
effectively erased the Bombay mainstream from the critical map (Vasudevan).
What Vasudevan's argument does not extend to — understandably, given the
volume's different focus — is the further substitution within the Ray canon
itself: the tendency of international audiences to take Ray's bhadralok subjects
as representative of Bengali culture in general, producing a globally
circulating image of Bengal as a civilization of cultivated feeling, literary
seriousness, and aesthetic restraint. This image not only excluded the urban
poor and the Dalit communities; it also made them difficult to see, because the
framework of intelligibility through which 'Bengali culture' was understood had
been so thoroughly shaped by the bhadralok aesthetic.
Situating the
Argument: Literature Review and Scholarly Context
The argument pursued in this article has several distinct
strands of existing scholarship to contend with, and the relationship is one of
productive engagement rather than simple extension or correction. Each of the
major studies in this field has made contributions that the present argument
depends upon; what it adds is, more precisely, a reorientation of focus rather
than a discovery of entirely new ground.
Sharmistha Gooptu's Bengali Cinema: 'An Other Nation'
(2010) remains the most comprehensive institutional history of Bengali cinema
available in English and constitutes an indispensable resource for any
subsequent argument. Gooptu's central thesis — that Bengali cinema constituted
itself as a culturally distinct national formation against the dominance of the
Bombay mainstream — is important for establishing the terms in which Bengali
film culture understood its own project. Her account of New Theatres's
self-positioning within the Bengali literary public sphere is historically
detailed and analytically productive. Where the present article differs from
Gooptu is in emphasis and in the direction of the analytical question. Gooptu
is primarily interested in how Bengali cinema claimed a distinctive cultural
identity; this article is interested in how, in the process of making that
claim, it naturalized a particular class culture as the ground of that
identity. These are related but distinct projects, and the present argument
would not be possible without Gooptu's groundwork.
Moinak Biswas's body of work — distributed across essays
in Bioscope, Framework, and edited volumes — represents the most theoretically
demanding engagement with Bengali cinema within the Indian film studies field.
Biswas's attention to the psychic dimensions of cinematic modernity, his careful
readings of melodramatic form, and his situating of Bengali sound cinema within
a broader account of modernity, the voice, and the public sphere have produced
arguments of genuine originality. The present article is directly indebted to
Biswas's attentiveness to form — his insistence that the ideological work of
cinema is performed through aesthetic structures, not merely through
represented content. However, Biswas's primary concerns are philosophical and
formal rather than sociological: his engagement with Bourdieu's sociology of
culture or with the questions of caste and subaltern representation that have
become central to South Asian film studies more broadly is limited. It is this
dimension that the present argument attempts to develop.
Sumita Chakravarty's National Identity in Indian Popular
Cinema (1993) provides the most directly applicable theoretical model from
adjacent scholarship. Chakravarty's analysis of how popular Hindi cinema
domesticated social contradiction through melodramatic form — her account of
the 'moral occulted,' a genre that manages political crisis through the
affective economy of family drama — translates directly to the Bengali case and
has been extensively drawn upon here. Her attention to the politics of what
counts as 'national' representation, and to the social constituencies excluded
from that representation, anticipates several of the questions this article
develops in the context of Bengali cinema
Partha Chatterjee’s work, especially The Nation and
Its Fragments (1993) and Lineages of Political Society (2011),
provides the key framework for understanding the bhadralok formation that
Bengali cinema continues to inherit and reproduce. His idea of the “spiritual
domain” — the domestic, feminine, cultural space protected from colonial
modernity — closely matches the emotional and spatial logic of Bengali domestic
films. His later distinction between “civil society” and “political society”
also helps explain how cinema centers the educated bhadralok as the ideal
subject while leaving other social groups outside its dominant cinematic
imagination.
This article argues that the real gap is not lack of
research on Bengali cinema, but the lack of a unified explanation of how
bhadralok values became culturally dominant. It asks how these values came to
feel natural rather than imposed. Using Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, it shows
that power works through “common sense,” not force or propaganda (Gramsci
323–33). Bengali cinema helped make bhadralok life feel like the normal way of
being human in Bengali culture.
The Excluded
Bengal: Lower Classes and Caste
The Lower Classes
and the Politics of Urban Visibility
Bengali cinema does show working-class life, but only in
limited, background ways that keep it from becoming an independent or fully
developed voice. The structuring principle is one that anthropologists of
representation have termed the 'objectifying gaze': the lower-class figure is
available to be seen but is not organized as a seeing subject, a locus of
interiority, a perspective from which the film's events might be differently
understood. Mrinal Sen's Calcutta trilogy — Interview (1970), Calcutta 71 (1972),
and Padatik (1973) — constitutes the most sustained attempt within Bengali
cinema to challenge this structure of visibility. Interview is formally
startling in ways that its plot synopsis (a young man cannot afford to rent a
western suit for a job interview) does not convey: Sen employs direct address
to camera, documentary inserts, and self-consciously artificial staging to
break the continuity conventions through which mainstream Bengali cinema
produced its spectatorial comfort. The effect is not simply Brechtian in a
schematic sense; it is specifically aimed at the particular compact between the
bhadralok viewer and the bhadralok protagonist that constituted mainstream
Bengali cinema's address. By refusing the codes of psychological interiority — the
meaningful close-up, the expressive lighting — Sen refuses to produce his young
job-seeker as an object of educated sympathy; he produces him, instead, as a
social symptom.
Yet, as several critics have noted, Sen's formal
radicalism operated within limits that complicate its politics. The
protagonists of the Calcutta trilogy are educated, often college-graduate young
men whose marginalization is a product of unemployment and economic crisis
rather than structural caste subordination. Sen's cinema is, in this sense,
cinema about bhadralok declassification rather than cinema from outside the
bhadralok framework entirely. The discovery of the urban poor in Interview and
Calcutta 71 is organized through the experience of educated men who find
themselves stranded at the boundary between the middle class and the laboring
poor — a boundary crisis that is politically charged but that remains legible
within bhadralok categories of experience. The jute mill worker who appears in
Calcutta 71 as one of several 'portraits of a city' is presented
sympathetically; but he is presented, from outside, and the film does not
imagine his perspective as a viewing position.
Caste, Namasudra
Communities, and the Silence of Representation
The systematic silence of Bengali cinema on the question
of caste is not easily explained without reference to the specific ideological
formations of Bengali nationalism and the bhadralok's self-understanding.
Unlike in Maharashtra, where the Dalit literary and cultural movement produced
writers, intellectuals, and eventually filmmakers who developed an articulate
counter-tradition from the early twentieth century, Bengal's lower-caste
communities — particularly the Namasudra, who constituted a significant
proportion of the population in the eastern districts — did not generate a
comparable cultural infrastructure within the colonial period. The reasons for
this difference are complex and debated; what is clear is that the absence of a
strong lower-caste counter-tradition within Bengal's cultural field meant that
the bhadralok's claim to represent Bengali culture encountered less internal
challenge than it might otherwise have done.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay's research on Namasudra political
mobilization in early twentieth-century Bengal documents the community's
sustained and sophisticated engagement with questions of cultural
representation and political rights (Bandyopadhyay 71–89). Namasudra leaders
challenged the bhadralok's claim to speak for Bengal in explicitly cultural
terms, articulating an alternative vision of Bengali identity that drew on
vernacular religious practice — the Matua movement associated with Harichand
Thakur — rather than on brahminic high culture. This challenge was effectively
defeated within the structures of colonial and early postcolonial politics, and
its cultural dimension — the question of whose aesthetic sensibility, whose
domestic rituals, whose modes of musical expression constituted 'Bengali
culture' — was never resolved. Bengali cinema, arriving and consolidating itself
precisely in the decades when this challenge was being absorbed, simply
replicated the outcome: the bhadralok's cultural framework became the cinematic
framework, and the Namasudra world remained outside the frame.
Contemporary
Bengali Cinema: Disruption or Renegotiation?
Post-liberalization Bengali cinema has clearly changed.
These movies bring new stories, spaces, and social groups that older films
often left out. It is not same as the bhadralok-centered cinema of the past.
However, these changes still operate within older systems of taste, value, and
recognition shaped by the bhadralok tradition. So even when the content shifts,
the way “good cinema” is defined and circulated still carries traces of that
earlier cultural formation. Kaushik Ganguly’s Nagarkirtan (2019) seems
to move away from bhadralok cinema by centering a transgender protagonist and
marginal urban spaces like streets, stations, and red-light areas instead of
middle-class domestic interiors. It shifts attention to lives that were largely
invisible in earlier Bengali film traditions.
Ganguly's formal choices register this break in several
ways. The cinematography (by Gopi Bhagat) favors a mobile, handheld aesthetic
that contrasts with the static, contemplative framings of classical Bengali
cinema: the camera moves with Puti through spaces rather than establishing them
as legible environments. The film's use of kirtan — devotional music in the
Vaishnava tradition, associated with the streets and the lower-caste devotional
communities rather than with the classical music of the bhadralok drawing room
— as its primary musical idiom represents a deliberate claim for a different
sonic register of Bengali cultural life.
And yet Nagarkirtan's formal language also reveals the
limits of its departure. The film's emotional structure — the tragic love
story, the sacrifice of the vulnerable female figure, the final isolation of
the protagonists — is deeply indebted to the melodramatic tradition that is
itself a bhadralok aesthetic inheritance. Puti's story, told as a narrative of
romantic devotion and social martyrdom, is legible as a film about dignified
suffering partly because it transposes the affective conventions of the
domestic melodrama — the refined interiority, the depth of feeling that exceeds
circumstance — onto a new social subject. The film asks the viewer to recognize
in Puti a subjectivity worthy of sympathy precisely by producing her through
the emotional codes of the tradition it appears to challenge. Whether this
constitutes a genuinely expanded representational politics or an extension of
the bhadralok gaze to newly visible social subjects is a question the film does
not fully resolve — and perhaps cannot, given the institutional frameworks
within which it was made, distributed, and received.
The critical and festival infrastructure through which
Nagarkirtan has circulated — national film awards, international festival
screenings, celebration in the cultural journalism of West Bengal — is itself
substantially bhadralok in composition and in the evaluative criteria it
applies. The film's recognition as 'important' Bengali cinema was produced
within a framework in which the criteria of importance — formal innovation,
humanist depth, social seriousness — remain continuous with the bhadralok
aesthetic tradition even when the social subject has changed.
The nostalgia around Bengali cinema’s “golden age” keeps
the bhadralok world alive as something to both celebrate and mourn. It also
treats older films and stars as the standard against which today’s cinema is
judged. In doing so, it strengthens the idea that bhadralok culture represents
the “real” tradition of Bengali cinema, even as society has changed. This past
is now less a living reality and more a cultural memory that signals status and
taste.
Conclusion: The
Hegemonic Imaginary and Its Discontents
This argument developed throughout this paper is not, at
its core, a simple one, and it is important to clarify both what has been said
and what has not. What has been suggested here is that Bengali film has represented,
in a certain way, a form of cultural hegemony, in terms of neither an active
attempt at ideological control nor any conscious class-based strategy, but
rather through the structural nature of the cultural field wherein the
assumptions of bhadralok culture, bhadralok aesthetics, and the experience of
bhadralok life constituted the basis of cinematic meaning-making. The films
that were produced by this system, even the films of artistic accomplishment
and moral weight, helped to reproduce the view of the world from one class's
point of view as the perspective from which all others could be understood.
It is important to distinguish this argument from cruder
versions that might be entertained. The argument is not that Bengali cinema was
simply propaganda for class interests, or that its aesthetic achievements are
diminished by the social formation that produced them, or that the bhadralok's
cultural self-expression was without value. Bourdieu's account of the field of
cultural production insists on the relative autonomy of the aesthetic — its
capacity to generate values, satisfactions, and truths that exceed the
interests of the class that produces it — while simultaneously arguing that
this autonomy operates within structural conditions that are never fully
escaped (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production 38–40). Ray's films are not
reducible to bhadralok ideology, but neither are they outside it; the more
interesting question is precisely how their formal achievements and their
ideological determinations are entangled.
The contemporary Bengali cinema that has begun to bring
non-bhadralok subjects into representation faces a version of this problem that
is structurally similar to the one its predecessors faced. The critical
infrastructure through which its significance is recognized remains
substantially bhadralok in its criteria of evaluation; the melodramatic and
humanist conventions through which it renders non-bhadralok subjects
intelligible are themselves the legacy of the formation it departs from. This
does not make the departure meaningless — cultural hegemony is always
contested, always imperfectly maintained, always generating the resistances
that may eventually transform it — but it does suggest caution about claims of
decisive rupture.
Lastly, it must be said that there are clear limitations
to the argument made in this article. It has been constructed through research
on secondary sources and on a select set of films, which themselves are limited
by the secondary sources available, and thus shaped by the biases of those
critics. Films that were outside of the recognized canon of mainstream Bengali
cinema, that targeted the working class or rural audience, that circulated in
circuits that remained invisible to the film society, these are largely absent
from the current discussion. Any full account of the interaction between the
social formation and its cinema must take into consideration such a wider set
of production, which would only serve to add complexity to the present
narrative. The dominance of the bhadralok in matters cultural was real enough
and influential; it was, however, not absolute, and more study of what was
outside or resistant to it must be done.
Works Cited
Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. Caste, Politics and the Raj: Bengal 1872–1937. K.P. Bagchi, 1990.
Banerjee, Himani. Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism.
Anthem Press, 2001.
Biswas, Moinak. 'In the Mirror of Tagore:
Modernity, Nationalism and the Bengali Cinema.' Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp.
47–70.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
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