The Rise of OTT Platforms in Bangladeshi Cinema: Reimagination of Female Representation and Phasing Out of “Shabana Syndrome”

 

The Rise of OTT Platforms in Bangladeshi Cinema: Reimagination of Female Representation and Phasing Out of “Shabana Syndrome”

 

Nusrat Jahan Sonia

Department of English

Jagannath University

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract: This paper examines the transformation of female representation in Bangladeshi cinema following the rise of Over-the-Top (OTT) platforms. Historically, mainstream cinema was dominated by the male gaze, which reduced women to passive spectacles and fragmented objects for male pleasure. In the Bangladeshi context, this manifested as the Shabana Syndrome, a trope defining the "ideal" woman through perpetual sacrifice, domestic piety, and silent martyrdom. However, modern OTT platforms like Chorki, Hoichoi have encouraged the new wave of filmmaking focused on ‘character studies’ rather than superficial entertainment. By adopting a female gaze and prioritizing agency, these platforms allow women to openly discuss life choices, careers, and complex relationships. Focusing on works like Rehana Maryam Noor, Guti the study explores how modern narratives subvert traditional archetypes and the female characters are ‘morally gray’ rejecting the silent and invisible roles previously rewarded by patriarchal systems. Drawing on Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze, bell hooks's concept of the oppositional gaze, this paper argues that OTT platforms have not merely updated female representation in Bangladeshi cinema but have fundamentally altered its industrial and aesthetic conditions; displacing, though not wholly erasing, the Shabana Syndrome.

Keywords: Bangladeshi cinema, OTT platforms, Shabana Syndrome, Evolution, Female representation.

 

Introduction

In the history of Bangladeshi cinema, no figure looms larger over female representation than Shabana, who reigned as Dhallywood's undisputed queen from the early 1970s until her retirement in 1998. Appearing in 299 films, co-starring with actor Alamgir in 130 of them, and winning eight Bangladesh National Film Awards for Best Actress, Shabana became the iconic figure of the Bangladeshi film industry. Her presence consolidated a template of femininity which is melodramatic, rural, victimized, morally pure.

This paper focuses on the term "Shabana Syndrome" to describe this hegemonic representational model: a patriarchal cinematic grammar in which female characters are narratively passive, domestically confined, and defined primarily through their suffering and their relationships to men. The syndrome outlasted Shabana herself, shaping Dhallywood's female archetype through the 2000s and into the 2010s, when theatrical commercial cinema continued to rely on variants of the same formula.

The arrival of OTT platforms, most significantly Chorki, launched in Bangladesh in 2021, and the Indian-Bangladeshi platform Hoichoi, has signalled a visible representational shift. Freed from the constraints of theatrical box-office economics and oriented toward urban, educated, and diasporic Bengali audiences, these platforms have made space for female characters who exercise agency, inhabit moral ambiguity, and resist spectacularization. Works like Rehana Maryam Noor (Abdullah Mohammad Saad, 2021) and Guti (Shanka Dasgupta, 2023) alongside Chorki originals that have been called boundary-breaking in their portrayal of female desire and criminality, represent a qualitative break from the Shabana template.

Shabana Syndrome:

Shabana's screen persona across her 299 films was defined by a consistent representational grammar. Her roles like the grief-stricken mother of Janani (1977), the rural woman of Bhat De (1984) confronting poverty and gender dynamics, the suffering heroine of Moroner Pore (1990) share a common structure: female virtue expressed through endurance of suffering, moral purity preserved through passivity and narrative resolution dependent on male action or divine intervention. She represented the ideal wife, the sacrificing mother, and morally pure. In  Ekti Sangsarer Golpo (1998), Ghorer Shuk (1991), Shabana has portrayed a typical devoted Bengali wife.

Crucially, the Shabana Syndrome is not reducible to Shabana herself rather it is a systemic representational frame that her dominance consolidated and that the Dhallywood industry reproduced long after her retirement. The archetype was commercially rational: rural and semi-urban male audiences constituted the primary theatrical demographic, and female suffering provided both spectacle and moral reassurance. The actress functioned, in Mulvey's terms, as bearer rather than maker of meaning, her image circulating as a sign of femininity rather than an expression of female subjectivity (Mulvey 15). She is simultaneously a co-star and an object of gaze. She is meaningless without her male counterpart, and she treats her husband as the ultimate ‘savior’; she is dim-witted, silly, passive and an object of interest rather than an individual. The rural melodrama, romantic and divine morality in Bangladeshi cinema of Moushumi along with Shabnur, Babita replicates this suffering-virtue framework.

The syndrome's persistence into the 2000s and 2010s reflects the structural inertia of theatrical distribution in Bangladesh, where declining cinema hall attendance and a shrinking middle-class theatrical audience paradoxically intensified rather than loosened the industry's dependence on proven commercial formulas. The female archetype of passive suffering, romantic melodrama, and domestic virtue is termed as Shabana Syndrome in this paper, which remained the default setting of Dhallywood's imagination for a very long period.

 

Conceptual Framework

Laura Mulvey's foundational essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) establishes the male gaze as the structuring logic of mainstream narrative cinema, in which woman is coded as spectacle "to-be-looked-at", while man drives the narrative forward (Mulvey 11). Mulvey argues that mainstream cinema is structured to satisfy a patriarchal society, positioning the camera and the audience as a male subject who gazes at a female object. Within this gaze, men are the active protagonists who command the stage, while women are relegated to secondary, passive roles as romantic interests or victims. So Mulvey’s framework establishes that Shabana Syndrome is deeply rooted in the patriarchal system.

To understand the defiance seen in modern works like Rehana Maryam Noor, Guti, the framework utilizes bell hooks’ “Oppositional Gaze’’ (1992). This gaze is a gesture of resistance against being turned into a passive object or a negative stereotype. It involves critical awareness. By claiming the power to “look back” at a system that expects them to be silent and invisible, female characters gain agency to challenge social corruption and inequality.

Unlike traditional commercial cinema which may prioritize cheap entertainment, OTT platforms provide space for filmmakers to experiment with genres and tell raw, resilient stories about women’s existence. Streaming services allow for open discourse on choices, relationships, and careers, moving beyond the restrictive censorship of the past to reflect the evolving reality of the Bangladeshi middle class.

Primarily this paper deals with Shabana’s movie Ekti Sangsarer Golpo (1998), Ghorer Shuk (1991) and Rehana Maryam Noor (2021) and Guti (2023) as primary sources. Primarily sources were viewed and analysed to understand the evolution of female representation across time and space. Secondary sources like cultural theories, film theories, contemporary views and opinions are used to understand the cinema narrative and perspective.

Discussion

Ekti Sangsarer Golpo (1998) offers perhaps the purest distillation of the syndrome. Its heroine, played by Shabana herself, is constructed entirely through domestic devotion: a typical Bengali housewife, full-time devoted to taking care of the wellbeing of her husband and other members of the family, whose most important task is keeping everybody happy at the cost of all her own comforts. Her daily labor cooking, serving, dressing her husband, tending her mother-in-law is filmed not as labor but as devotion, each gesture confirming her virtue (Uddin, 119). Crucially, she believes that after a girl's marriage, her husband's home is like her heaven that she should never leave even if she is humiliated and molested. This is the ideological register of the syndrome at its most explicit: suffering is not merely endured but theologized, reframed as sacred duty rather than injustice. The film offers her interiority as we see her exhaustion, her sacrifice but never her will. She has feelings without agency, exactly the asymmetric focalization the syndrome depends on.

Ghorer Shuk (1991), again starring Shabana opposite Alamgir, operates within the same domestic-melodrama register, its title itself  “the happiness of home” signalling that female narrative function is to secure domestic equilibrium rather than to pursue an independent trajectory. Read alongside Ekti Sangsarer Golpo, it confirms that the syndrome was not a single film's framework but an industrial template: the same actress, the same spatial confinement to household interiors, the same narrative logic in which the woman's only legitimate action is self-effacement.

Guti (2023) detonates this template from within a structurally similar premise where a woman is defined by family, but inverts its moral architecture entirely. Sultana, played by Azmeri Haque Badhon (notably, the same actress who plays Rehana), is a drug carrier and mother associated with a local drug trafficking network, who has earned wealth but lost relationships, faith, and hope. Where the Ekti Sangsarer Golpo heroine sacrifices comfort for family harmony within the bounds of sanctioned domesticity, Sultana transgresses the law itself for her family's survival, carrying drugs concealed inside her own body in service of a future for her daughter. This is maternal sacrifice rewritten as criminal agency rather than domestic submission; the same affective structure (mother enduring for family) is retained, but its expression is no longer passive suffering rather it is calculated risk, transgression, action with consequence. Badhon's own framing of the role is telling: she described it as a character she had been “carrying inside her for a long time” and explicitly pushed back against the industry assumption that female leads do not work in Bangladesh. The casting choice and the actress's public discourse around it confirm that Guti was conceived as a deliberate representational intervention, not an incidental plot device. Significantly, Guti was not produced in isolation. It emerged from Chorki's broader pattern of complex female-centred narratives, including Myself Allen Swapan's Shayla, a middle-class homemaker who places her sexual and financial needs above conventional morality, suggesting an industrial strategy rather than a singular artistic outlier. Platform executives explicitly frame this as honest storytelling about previously unspoken social realities rather than provocation. This reality has more moral complexity that theatrical melodrama could not accommodate.

 Rehana Maryam Noor (2021) extends this inversion into institutional space. Whereas the Shabana heroine's domain is the household and her conflicts are familial, Rehana's domain is the medical college and her conflict is structural and institutional cover-up of sexual harassment. This is the most decisive break from the Shabana template. There are no song sequences, no scenes composed for the pleasure of looking at Rehana. The camera invites the viewer as witness to her state of mind rather than as a consumer of her image. Her conflicts are not melodrama or romantic but these are structural and against authority.

Mulvey's central claim that mainstream narrative cinema structures the female image around “to-be-looked-at-ness,” freezing narrative momentum into moments of erotic or sentimental contemplation (Mulvey 11) operates with near-diagrammatic clarity in Ekti Sangsarer Golpo and Ghorer Shuk. In both films, the camera does not merely follow Shabana's character; it exhibits her. Domestic labor itself becomes a spectacle: cooking, serving, and dressing her husband are filmed as a sequence of devotional tableaux rather than as functional action. The camera lingers on her movements with the same visual grammar Mulvey identifies in the musical number or the glamour shot, except here the eroticism is sublimated into sentimentality. The spectator is not invited to desire Shabana sexually so much as to admire her, but the structural position is identical: she is offered to the gaze, her function is to be seen rather than to see.

If Mulvey explains the construction of the domestic melodramas, bell hooks’ oppositional gaze helps explain what is structurally foreclosed in them. hooks's argument is that the possibility of looking back critically and resistantly constitutes a form of power, and that cinema can be read for whether it permits this possibility to its female subjects at all (hooks 115-18). In Ekti Sangsarer Golpo and Ghorer Shuk, this possibility is not merely undeveloped; it is narratively foreclosed by design. The films do not simply fail to show the heroine looking critically; they actively construct her ideology so that critical looking becomes morally unthinkable to her. She does not look back at her oppression because the film has not given her the conceptual resources to recognize it as oppression. This is hooks's argument inverted into prescription: where hooks describes spectators developing oppositional reading strategies despite dominant cinema, these films are engineered to make such a position unavailable even in potential.

In Rehana Maryam Noor, Rehana herself occupies the position Mulvey reserves for the male protagonist, she is the bearer of the look, the investigator, the one whose seeing drives the narrative forward. The harassment incident itself is constructed around what she witnesses and chooses to act on; her gaze is causally central to the plot in precisely the way Mulvey argues female gazes structurally are not. Here the gaze is reversed. Shabana is looked at while Rehana looks. The film's tension is generated by what she sees and chooses to act on.

hooks's oppositional gaze is not just present here but is arguably the film's organizing principle. Rehana's entire narrative function is to refuse not-looking — to refuse the institutional pressure to look away from what she has seen. Rehana's alienating intensity, her strained relationships, her imperfect motherhood, are not failures of characterization but a faithful rendering of what hooks suggest resistant looking actually costs a subject within a hostile structure.

In short, Shabana from Ghorer Shuk (1991) and Ekti Sangsarer Golpo (1998) is fetishized through suffering and in a foreclosed view, she has no textual capacity to look back. Badhon from Guti and Rehana Maryam Noor, has inverted the role of woman as the bearer of image and activated her body as a site of anxiety. What this trajectory suggests theoretically is that Mulvey and hooks are not simply two lenses applied externally to these texts rather they describe an actual historical movement in Bangladeshi screen representation, from an apparatus that produces woman as image (Mulvey's diagnosis) toward narrative structures that produce woman as the one who sees, judges, and acts (hooks's aspiration).

Mulvey's theories of ‘to-be-looked-at’ and ‘male gaze’ has been overcome in the contemporary texts is not fully established. In Guti, the gaze does not disappear so much as shift register: Sultana's body remains a site of narrative anxiety, now coded through abjection (concealment, danger, transgression) rather than eroticism. This is a transformation of the visual economy surrounding the female body, not its dissolution. So it is a mutation within that framework rather than completely liberating the characters. Also the present audience is still reluctant to watch female centric movies or series. The mainstream cinema still operates for the male audience and still the camera angel views from the male perspective. Closer attention finds the Shabana Syndrome has been displaced, but that it has been reorganized and split across a stratified media landscape in which urban, OTT-subscribing, largely middle-class audiences encounter morally complex women terrestrial and theatrical. At the same time, Dhallywood, oriented toward broader and poorer audiences, may continue to circulate older templates largely unchanged. In interactive digital environments, "romance mechanics" can still treat female characters as objects to be won or owned, suggesting that the "normative male gaze" is still embedded in the architecture of many digital products. The syndrome's disappearance from this analysis may, in other words, be partly an artifact of which screens this study has chosen to examine.

Conclusion

What ultimately emerges from this analysis is not a clean narrative of progress in which the Shabana Syndrome is defeated and superseded, but a more modest and more honest claim: that Bangladeshi screen femininity has become stratified rather than uniformly transformed. The oppositional gaze hooks theorizes  is now available not only to resistant spectators reading against dominant texts, but to protagonists themselves, within a particular, classed, urban-oriented segment of the country's media landscape. Whether this oppositional capacity will extend beyond OTT's relatively narrow subscriber base into the wider field of Bangladeshi visual culture, whether the rural, working-class femininity the Shabana Syndrome claimed to represent will find its own oppositional reimagining. Therefore, the progress seen in Bangladeshi cinema must be met with continued critical engagement. Ultimately, by reclaiming the woman as an active individual subject, Bangladeshi filmmakers are not just telling new stories; they are challenging the very foundations of how gender is performed and perceived, ensuring that the resilient reality of the female experience remains at the center of the frame.

 

Works Cited

Dasgupta, Shankha, director. Guti. Performance by Azmeri Haque Badhon, Chorki, 2023.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992. 

 Kashem, S. A., director. Ghorer Shuk. SB Cinema Hall, 1991.

Khondokar, Adiba. "Beyond the stereotype: Bangladeshi films representing women in a men's world." The Business Standard, 8 Mar. 2026.

Khokon, Mohammad, director. Ekti Sangsarer Golpo. Sunflower Movies, 1998.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.

Saad, Abdullah Mohammad, director. Rehana Maryam Noor. Performance by Azmeri Haque Badhon, Metrocom Studio, 2021.

Sampreety, Afra. "Rehana Maryam Noor: An Ethically Complex Study on a Culture Inherently Sexist and Corrupted." Shuddhashar, 13 Dec. 2021.

Uddin, Md. Momin. "Gender Inequality in the Films of Bangladesh: A Study on Some Selected Dhallywood Films." Jagannath University Journal of Arts, vol. 13, no. 02, Part-2, July-Dec. 2023, pp. 116-125