Paper short abstract:

Tareque Masud is one of the most well-known film directors of Bangladesh who had captured the cultural landscape of the nation during the events of the 1971 War. This paper analyses the films of Masud as a cinematic archive capturing personal and collective memories and his own artistic positioning.

Paper long abstract:

Bangladeshi film director, Tareque Masud, has been recognized as one of the most important cultural-political voices in Bangladesh, documenting the post-Partition cultural landscape of the nation through his camera. His first film, "Muktir Gaan" (Songs of Freedom) (1995) shows the travails of the members of the Bangladesh Mukti Shangrami Shilpi Shangstha (Bangladesh Freedom Struggle Cultural Squad) across the landscape of war-time Bangladesh, trying to fathom the rootedness of Bengali cultural existence in common people's homes and refugee camps. The cultural movement bears remnants of memories of its predecessor—the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA)—in the 1940s that saw an artistic assemblage and mobility between the two Bengals prior to the Partition. Masud's other films, "Matir Moyna" (The Clay Bird) (2002), "Ontorjatra" (Journey into the Soul) (2006) and "Runway" (2010) explore the personal against the backdrop of political upheavals, the diasporic entity in search of "homeland" and the individual descent to radical Islam respectively. This paper analyses the films of Tareque Masud as an archive of the cultural heritage of post-Partition, post-War Bangladesh, and how each of these representations uphold the collective and individual memories. For each of these films, the larger cultural identity of Bangladesh (once entwined with its other half in current West Bengal) is a reference frame through which this cinematic archive can be understood. This paper will use the films, interviews of the director, his writings and memoirs in order to understand a cultural milieu he recreated in his films, coming from a pre-Partition socio-cultural geography.