Uploaded 1 November 2000
Introduction
Like most other places in the world, film exhibition began in Bangladesh (in the then East Bengal) at the end of the 1890s; like much of Asia, silent film production began here during the 1900s and sound film production in the 1950s (in the then East Pakistan). The establishment of film theatres began here in the 1910s, but the production of theatrical features started as late as the 1950s. It took a whole half-century for film to be assimilated into the then East Bengali cultural environment. The reasons for such a long period of film/culture adaptation in East Bengal are not the concern of this article. Rather, the aim in this piece is to examine possible starting points of Bangladesh film history. This can help us get an idea how East Bengalis appropriated cinema in the early decades of this century as well how the survey historians of cinema of Bangladesh re-constructed this period using their conventional understandings and methods of writing the history of a national cinema.
The cinema of Bangladesh is one of the least discussed Asian cinemas, so debates about issues such as its originating moment are still in their infancy. As part of a broader endeavour of articulating a framework within which Bangladesh cinema can be analysed, this article asks: “When did Bangladesh(i) cinema begin?” Previous historians of Bangladesh cinema, who are generally concerned only with theatrical feature film production, are in consensus in answering this question: they locate the beginning of Bangladeshi cinema with the making of The Face and the Mask in 1956, and call this the “first” theatrical feature produced in the then East Pakistan/East Bengal. However, there are other less-celebrated “beginnings” of cinema in Bangladesh, in the early decades of the twentieth century. I wish to suggest that these were not found suitable as the starting point of the history of cinema in this land, because these events could not be appropriated within the dominant discourse of national history in contemporary Bangladesh, the nationalist-heroic strand propagated since the emergence of the idea of an independent nation-state called “Bangladesh” in the late-1960s. This article will attempt to unveil the ideological stances which have dictated that choice of innocent-looking “beginning” of this non-Western “national cinema”.
1. The history of the nation of Bangladesh
The project of writing Bangladesh national cinema history began with the realisation that cinema existed in this land before there was any “Bangladesh” at all: unlike most other nation-states, cinema history in Bangladesh begins before the beginning of national history. Exhibition and the shooting of actuality footage began in the geo-political area now called Bangladesh at the end of the 1890s, as in most other places in the world: at that time, it was the eastern part of the then Bengal province of British India.
The textbooks tell us that the British East India Company took over the rulership of India in 1757, winning a mock-battle against the army of Nawab Sirajuddoulah, the then ruler of the conglomerate of three provinces: Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This group of British merchants achieved political authority over the subcontinent through diplomatic and economic manoeuvering and a few battles during the first half of the eighteenth century. Before this British invasion, the Delhi-based Mughal emperors held supreme but distant political authority, while the local feudal lords and kings of the large number of small states directly ruled and collected taxes from the ordinary citizens of the then Indian subcontinent. Most of these rulers were Muslims, so later Muslim historians argued that the British invasion uprooted the Muslims from their crowns, while the Hindus welcomed the British. By the 1890s the British had developed a strong and efficient colonial machinery both at the federal and local levels in India. An English-educated, mostly-Hindu middle class developed, while the Muslims considered that the English language and education were anti-Islamic so they avoided the political and cultural spheres.
By the 1890s, the large Muslim peasant community comprised the majority of the population of rural East Bengal, while the minority Hindus were rich landlords, well-connected with the British rulers and the urban centres. W. W. Hunter observed in 1871: “it was almost impossible for a well-born Mussalman in Bengal to become poor [in 1701], at present it is almost impossible for him to continue rich.” [1] This became the key-slogan for the Bengali Muslim elite migrating to the towns and entering politics during the 1880s and the 1890s. [2] In 1905 the British rulers divided Bengal into East and West, created a new province called East Bengal and Assam and made Dhaka its capital. The emerging Bengali Muslim middle class encouraged the development of Dhaka as the cultural and educational hub for Bengali Muslims. However, especially due to the protests of Bengali Hindus, in 1911 the partition of Bengal was withdrawn: Calcutta again became the capital for an undivided Bengal, while the capital of India was transferred from Calcutta to Delhi.
During the 1920s the anti-Hindu discourse of the Bengali Muslim middle class contained strong anti-British sentiment. Muslims joined in the Pakistan Movement based on a religious nationalist view propagated by the North Indian (and non-Bengali) Muslim feudal lords and leaders including Mohammad Ali Jinnah during the 1930s and the 1940s. In 1946-7, after a series of riots, protests, famines and meetings, the subcontinent was divided into “India” and “Pakistan”, imagined as two separate national sanctuaries for Hindus and Muslims respectively. Bengal province was divided again, with East Bengal becoming a part of Pakistan and re-named East Pakistan.
It is said that, apart from its Muslim allegiance and the PIA (Pakistan International Airlines), there was no bond between the populations of West and East Pakistan. The ethnic differences of various groups of Pakistanis, especially between the Bengalis of East Pakistan and the non-Bengali West Pakistanis (that means Punjabis, Sindhis and other minority groups), became more and more evident through the 1952 language movement and the 1954 elections. In the 1960s, the idea of a nation for the Bengali Muslims made a radical shift from the religious to the cultural domain. This discourse of cultural nationalism, based on the supremacy of Bengali language and culture coupled with a somewhat secular (read non-Islamic) worldview, fostered the birth of Bangladesh as a nation-state. This birth happened through a bloody war between the Pakistan army and the Bengali guerillas backed by the Indian army during March to December 1971.
This short summary of Bangladesh national history demonstrates that the nation-state came into being more than seven decades after the arrival of cinema in this land. More importantly it becomes clear that Bangladesh is very much an imagined and constructed nation. The basis of the formation of Pakistan – the discourse of religious nationalism – lost its legitimacy in the wake of the counter-discourse of cultural nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s that led to the formation of Bangladesh. However, a new discourse of political nationalism seems quite evident and strong in Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore,
The history of the region demonstrates that the process of identity selection was not constant; the cultural markers adopted were not fixed. … Here, nationhood has been defined and re-defined three times within a quarter of a century. [3]
2. The traditional view of the beginning of cinema in Bangladesh
The “starting point” of a history of a national cinema always denotes the historian’s “principles” or implicit understandings of key concepts such as “history”, “nation” and “cinema”. Let us then consider which principles are taken-for-granted in deciding upon a time for the beginning of cinema in Bangladesh. Professor Abu Sayeed, the minister who carries cinema in his portfolio in the present Bangladesh Government (1996-2001), provides a clue. While inaugurating a Film Festival in Dhaka on 22 August 1998, he said: “film production in this part of the subcontinent began with the release of The Face and the Mask in 1956.” [4] The newspapers quote him as saying: “we have started this venture against many hurdles both in social and state-life” (my emphasis). [5]
A group of leading film directors of the 1990s held a rally at the compound of Bangladesh Film Development Corporation studio (the only full-service film production studio in Bangladesh) in Dhaka on 3 August 1998. They demanded that the government should declare 3 August as “(National) Cinema Day”, because “the first cinematic protest of the nation”, The Face and the Mask,was released on this date in 1956. [6]
Finally Syed Salahuddin Zaki, one of the most well-known art cinema filmmakers and promoters of the country, in a paper presented to the National Seminar of the1997 Dhaka International Short and Alternative Film Festival, compared the release of The Face and the Mask in 1956 with the moving images created and projected by the Lumière brothers in France in 1895. [7]
These three examples are typical of claims for The Face and the Mask as the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh, and they are supported by most historians of Bangladesh cinema so far, including Kabir(1979), Hayat(1987), Mutsuddi(1987), Quader(1993) and Zaki (1997). [8] All of these (and several others not listed) describe this milestone event in detail, spending much time and energy to illustrate the “hurdles” faced by Abdul Jabbar Khan, the director-scriptwriter-producer of the film, in his effort to make this “first cinematic protest”. He accepted a challenge laid down by Khan Bahadur Fazal Ahmed Dosani, one of the key film personalities of the then Pakistan film industry based in West Pakistan, or to be more precise, in Lahore. In a meeting of cultural activists in Dhaka in 1953, Dosani “suggested that even East Bengal’s weather was unsuitable for filmmaking not to mention the absence of suitable technicians, equipment and artistes”.[9]
Each of the survey histories depicts the production and distribution of The Face and the Mask as an adventure story, complete with conflict and climax. Hayat devotes a full chapter to the subject, calling it ” The Face and the Mask: The Birth of a History ” while Mutsuddi refers to the ” story behind the filmmaking of Abdul Jabbar Khan” (my emphasis). [10] Kabir and Quader elaborate how Khan, with no training or experience in filmmaking, bought a second-hand camera, collected the talent, especially the women, used a home tape recorder for sound recording and finally released and screened the film while all the film distributors of East Pakistan were panicked that the audience would damage the theatre seats upon seeing the devastating shortcomings of this maiden venture. [11] After narrating this tale of the beginning of cinema in Bangladesh, Kabir titles his next section “ birth of an industry” (my emphasis). [12]
3. Re-reading the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh
It is striking how unproblematically all the survey historians of Bangladesh cinema present the making of The Face and the Mask as a story of human evolution, highlighting the achievements of individuals. This history only involves the event (what happened: the production and release of the film), the main actor (who did this: Abdul Jabbar Khan), sometimes accompanied with simplified cause-effect explanations (Khan wanted to meet a challenge, in protest against the comments of that West Pakistani film-producer). In this way all of these histories present a teleological and empiricist portrayal of the past, ignoring other possible forces at work.
This simplistic “common sense” notion of empiricist historiography is built upon an organic and linear narrative, based upon human evolution as birth-growth-death. So the history of The Face and the Mask is presented as a story that includes an easily determined beginning, middle and end. Such stories are “structured as dramas of disclosure, with a stress on conflict and climax” while “the source of this evolution is, again, located in a point: a decisive event, the genius of an individual, a revolutionary invention.” [13]
All the survey histories of Bangladesh cinema set out to provide an unproblematically seamless history of Bangladesh cinema that starts with The Face and the Mask. They find this event useful as the starting point of a descriptive, chronological, and linear history of Bangladesh cinema characterised by simplified cause-effect structures and hero/villain dichotomies.
As they do with “history”, the national film histories tend to consider concepts of “cinema” and “nation” also at their simplest and most common sense level, as if a basic and unproblematic agreement is already developed on the relationship between these. Essentially the historians, critics and promoters of Bangladesh cinema are concerned only with theatrical feature film production. One of the historians says explicitly: “only with a story and sound, that means the dialogue can be heard by the viewers, a film can be a complete film.” [14] In other words, the dominant discourse around “cinema” is limited to sound feature films which are made to be shown in commercial cinemas. As The Face and the Mask is appropriate to this specific understanding of cinema, they place it with no hesitation as the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh.
Similar to the concept “cinema”, the historians of Bangladesh cinema aspire to fit The Face and the Mask unquestioningly and unproblematically within the dominant discourse around the idea of Bangladesh as a “nation”, the discourse of cultural nationalism based on the distinctiveness and greatness of Bengali language and culture, incorporating also a flavour of socialism and a secular worldview. This is the discourse that helped to unite the Bengali Muslim middle-class of East Pakistan in the 1960s under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and fostered the popular protest against the West Pakistani military rule that ended with the liberation war of 1971.
The writers of Bangladesh national cinema histories sharing this kind of Third World nationalist and anti-colonialist viewpoint, worked hard to place The Face and the Mask within this already-circulated and well-accepted myth, which served as a populist counter-discourse in 1960s East Pakistan against the official discourse of Pakistani nationhood propagated by state machinery largely based in West Pakistan. These historians value Khan and The Face and the Mask only so far as they can be incorporated within this nationalist-heroic rhetoric. This is why they highlight the tremendous efforts taken by Khan in producing and releasing The Face and the Mask as a Bengali nationalist mission in response to another strong figure (Dosani). They conclude that Khan made The Face and the Mask in 1956 as part of an anti-colonial struggle against the West Pakistani elite rulers (represented in this battle by Dosani).
But this heroic view is only part of the story: the film can even be appropriated within the official discourse of pan-Pakistani nationalism of the 1950s. For example, the shooting of The Face and the Mask was inaugurated and formally blessed by the then governor-general of Pakistan, a West Pakistani military leader, at a dinner party in the most expensive hotel in Dhaka in 1954 when most of East Pakistan was inundated by flood water. [15] The film was advertised as the “first Bengali picture of Pakistan”, clearly denoting that it is a part of the Pakistan film industry alongside Urdu films. [16] At the time, it was not hailed as the first feature film produced in East Pakistan or East Bengal, even by the director-producers themselves. Moreover, later in the 1960s both Khan and Dosani made Urdu films in the Dhaka studios, films which directly go against the essence of Bengali nationalism. [17] In the same period, Khan served as a leader of the all-Pakistan Film Producers’ Association and even attended international conferences as a member of the official Pakistan delegation. [18]
4. Alternative “beginnings” of cinema in Bangladesh
I have attempted to demonstrate that the use of The Face and the Mask as the “beginning” of Bangladesh National Cinema tends to serve the dominant discourses of “history”, “nation” and “cinema” in Bangladesh: most historians mention few earlier films, as they do not think these are of any central importance. It is now my concern to challenge this “beginning” and to propose, as alternative starting points, some events which can not so easily be appropriated within those dominant discourses.
For example, if we stick to the understanding of “cinema” as text and “cinema history” as the history of film production only, as accepted by most of the historians of cinema in Bangladesh and elsewhere, but approach the meaning of “nation” differently, we can enlist a number of beginnings from the years between 1898 and 1955. This period in the development of Bangladesh cinema remains largely unexplored to date, but it is a period full of “great men” and their achievements. Most of these are still “unsung heroes”, waiting to be picked up and colourfully illustrated by the film historians, sharing the limelight with Khan.
From among a long list of pioneering achievements in the film production sector of Bangladesh cinema, I wish to present two case studies from the early decades of the twentieth century.
Case Study 1: Silent one-reelers produced by Hiralal Sen
According to some film historians Hiralal Sen, a famous Hindu photographer from the then East Bengal started filming actuality footage in Calcutta and Dhaka during 1898-1901. It is believed that his Dancing scenes from ‘The Flower of Persia‘, shot in Calcutta in 1898, is the earliest example of a film shot by a Bengali and an Indian. [19] His Royal Bioscope Company is also the first film exhibition and production company in the undivided Bengal, established in Calcutta on 4 April 1898 [20] or in 1899. [21] Sen also shot the first film in the then East Bengal at Manikganj sub-district, near Dhaka, during 1900-1. [22]
Hiralal Sen, then, can be credited with a number of “first” or early achievements in the history of Bangladesh cinema. In spite of this, there are survey histories which do not acknowledge his efforts, including Kabir (1979) [the only book-length history of Bangladesh cinema in English], Mutsuddi (1987) and Zaki (1997), none of which mention Hiralal Sen and his films at all, though both Mutsuddi and Zaki mention The Face and the Mask as the “beginning” of Bangladesh cinema in the very first sentence of their histories. [23]
There is another group of writings which acknowledges Sen and his efforts as a valuable part of the pre-history of Bangladeshi and Indian cinema. However, these do not credit him as the “beginning” or the “beginner” of Bangladesh cinema, but rather they refer to him within the ongoing debate about who should be given the prestige of being identified as the first filmmaker-exhibitor of Bangladesh, and – more importantly – of the whole Indian subcontinent. Two important survey histories of Bangladesh cinema (Hayat 1987, and Quader 1993), and Willeman and Rajadhyaksha’s Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (1994) recognise Hiralal Sen in such a contested manner.
This can be accounted for within the dominant discourses of “cinema”, “nation” and “history” as I have outlined.
Firstly, within the discourse of “cinema”, Hiralal Sen did not produce and exhibit theatrical feature films: he shot actuality footage, such as the arrival of a new British ruler in Calcutta, segments of stage-plays etc. It is not only in the history of Bangladesh cinema that the production and exhibition of this kind of recording of real -life happenings is not considered to be at the same level as theatrical features (or even as the documentaries!).
Hiralal Sen, son of a Bengali Hindu landlord whose family migrated from their ancestral home at Manikganj (a sub-district, around eighty kilometres away from Dhaka) to Calcutta in West Bengal well before the independence of Bangladesh, was certainly not a member of the Bengali Muslim elite and middle class who imagined and supposedly fought for the nations called “Pakistan” in 1947 and “Bangladesh” in 1971. Therefore Sen’s film works can be valued neither within the religious-nationalist discourse of Pakistan nor within the cultural-nationalist discourse of Bangladesh, though the latter shares a somewhat secular worldview, at least officially, and therefore, theoretically, it should be able to accommodate Sen’s achievements in some way. However, the early decades of the twentieth century are not directly relevant for Bengali nationalism, as this strand came into its peak through the anti-Pakistani struggles during the 1950s and 1960s. Besides, though they like to wear a “secular” label, in practice Bengali nationalists would prefer to voice the achievements of Muslim Bengalis, rather than of a Hindu Bengali like Sen. More importantly, in Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s, they have no time to spare on an issue like celebrating the films of Hiralal Sen. Bengali nationalism is busy in a head-to-head struggle against both the remnants of religious nationalism and the counter-discourse of political nationalism (popularly called Bangladeshi nationalism) that gained currency in a military-ruled, pro-Islamic state environment since 1975 when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the “father” of Bengali nationalism, was assassinated. So, the time-period (i.e. the first years of the 20th century) when Sen was involved in his heroic achievements are considered as even more backward than the pre-history of the “Bangladeshi” nation. In this way, Sen becomes unsuitable and problematic for all the three discourses of nationalism which were born and contested during the last few decades in the land now called Bangladesh. Sen can not be assimilated and rationalised within any of these nationalist-heroic strands.
Thirdly, from the viewpoint of understanding “history”, the survey historians of Bangladesh cinema rely mostly on material data. In the case of The Face and the Mask, they can readily access such data: the film print is still in use and most of the cast and crew including Mr Khan was alive and active till the late-1980s. In the case of Sen, not only did he die in 1917 after facing a devastating loss in his film production and exhibition business, but also his films are not locatable either in India or in Bangladesh and it is very difficult to find even a few living people who have watched them. There are some newspaper-reports and biographies available on Sen’s film initiatives from as early as 1898, but most of the writers of Bangladeshi and Indian film histories can not access these easily because of locational, logistic and linguistic barriers. Those historians of Bangladesh cinema who have looked at these materials, I believe, do not find these documents substantial.
Case Study 2. Silent short and feature films produced by the Nawabs in Dhaka
The young members of the Nawab family of Dhaka (one of the leading Muslim feudal landlord families who held local political authority during the pre- and early-British era) started making films as early as in 1927. [24] After completing a silent short Sukumari (The Good Girl) in 1928, [25] they started the feature project The Last Kiss in 1929. This silent feature was released in Mukul Theatre in Dhaka in 1931. [26] Like The Face and the Mask, local talents were used, and not only was the shooting done in Dhaka, but the post-production work was done in Calcutta. The Last Kiss was made in three languages, with intertitles in Bengali, English and Urdu. [27]
Despite the similarities of the production stories of The Last Kiss and The Face and the Mask (except that The Last Kiss was silent), it is never picked up as a “beginning” of Bangladesh film history. I believe the reasons are similar to the problems film historians faced in applauding Hiralal Sen. The film print is lost, and there is almost no living heir of the Nawab family in Dhaka (though there may be a few of them elsewhere in India and Pakistan). More importantly the Nawab family could not be appropriated within the currently popular nationalist-heroic discourses in Bangladesh, neither through its cultural nor its political nationalist strands. The Nawab family was one of those few elite families in Dhaka who led the Pakistan movement against the British and the Indian Hindus during the 1930s and the 1940s and always belonged within the discourse of religious nationalism. They were also very supportive of, and closer to, the ruling cliques of Pakistan (for example, the West Pakistani military and state leaders). Moreover one of the Nawabs (Khaja Nazimuddin) served as the first governor-general and the chief minister of East Pakistan during the early years of Pakistan, and played one of the most-cited roles in opposition to the popular protest of the Bengali nationalists through the language movement of 1948-52.
Conclusion
These two case studies are only examples. They indicate that because the film historians are operating from within a nation-building discourse, they do not seem able to evaluate other possibilities for beginning the history of cinema in Bangladesh, and so earlier decades are seen only as a pre-historic phase.
I do not propose a single, alternative and more suitable starting point for the history of cinema in Bangladesh. Rather, through discussing a few possible “beginnings”, I wish to suggest that articulating an engaged framework for the study of the early years of a non-Western national cinema like Bangladesh cinema needs a re-orientation within the discourses of “history”, “cinema” and “nation”. By changing the bases of understanding these concepts, we can build different notions of the same event. In this way we can see a more complex, diverse and in-depth picture of the past of a national cinema, including how cinema was incorporated into the social and cultural matrix of the then East Bengal/East Pakistan. Khan, Sen and the Nawabs and their filmmaking efforts signify the attempt to absorb the cinema into the local cultural arena. We could say that film has gone through an indigenisation process from the 1910s to the 1950s in East Bengal/East Pakistan and these people and their ventures are important parts of that process.
Footnotes:
[1] Sirajul Islam (ed.), The History of Bangladesh 1704-1971 (First part: political history) (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1993), 575.
[2] Islam, 576.
[3] Tazeen M. Murshid , “State, nation, identity: the quest for legitimacy in Bangladesh”, South Asia 20, no.2 (1997): 7.
[4] “British-Bangla Film Festival opens in city”, Daily Star (Dhaka), Internet Edition 2 no.11, 23 August 1998: 4 (www.dailystarnews.com/199808/23/n8082306.htm), viewed 24 August 1998; “Call to portray life, realities of country in films”, Independent (Dhaka) Internet Edition 367, 23 August 1998: 8 (www.independent-bangladesh.com/news/aug/23/230898mt.htm), viewed 24 August 1998.
[5] “Call to portray life”.
[6] “The demand for ‘Cinema Day'”, Anyadin 3, no.15 (16-31 August 1998): 48.
[7] Syed Salahuddin Zaki, “Bangladesh cinema: a brief review”, Celluloid 20, no.1 (December 1997): 20-3.
[8] Alamgir Kabir, Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1979), 22-4; Anupam Hayat, The History of Bangladesh Cinema (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Development Corporation, 1987), 43-55; Chinmoy Mutsuddi, Social Commitment in Bangladesh Cinema (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 1987), 19-22; Mirja Tarequl Quader, The Bangladesh Film Industry (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), 96-7, 103-19; Syed Salahuddin Zaki, “A brief review of Bangladesh cinema”, unpublished paper in Bengali, key-note paper at the seminar of the Fifth International Short and Alternative Film Festival, Dhaka, 2-9 January 1997.
[9] Kabir, 22.
[10] Hayat, 43; Mutsuddi, 20.
[11] Kabir, 22-4; Quader, 96-7, 103-19.
[12] Kabir, 24.
[13] Edward Branigan, “Color and cinema: problems in the writing of history”, Film Reader 4 (1979): 17-8.
[14] Khondokar Kamruzzaman Feroz (1983), “Historical perspective of Bangladesh cinema” (in Bengali), Celluloid 3, no.3 (1983): 24.
[15] Quader, 105; Hayat, 45.
[16] Quader, 109; Hayat, 49.
[17] Quader, 119; Hayat, 53.
[18] Quader, 119; Hayat, 53.
[19] Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (London: British Film Institute and Oxford University Press, 1994), 17 and 195.
[20] Hayat, 1; Quader, 9.
[21] Rajadhyaksha and Willeman, 17, 195.
[22] Hayat (1987) , 1; Quader, 45; Anupam Hayat, “Silent era of Dhaka cinema”, Dhrupadi 5 (August 1985): 14; Anupam Hayat, “The cinema of Bangladesh” (Dhaka: unpublished essay, 1994), 3.
[23] Zaki, 20; Mutsuddi, 19.
[24] Quader, 12; Jahangir Alam Khan, “The development of the Bangladesh film industry” (in Bengali) Chinta 19 (June 1995): 39-40; Mahmudul Hossain, “Mainstream cinema: a brief introduction” View from Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangladesh Federation of Film Societies, 1991), not numbered.
[25] Hayat (1994), 1; Quader, 73; Mutsuddi, 19; Hayat, “Silent era of Dhaka cinema”, 19.
[26] Hayat (1994): 1; Quader, 76; Mutsuddi, 20; Hayat, “Silent era of Dhaka cinema”, 20.
[27] The Daily Pakistan, Special issue on cinema, radio and television (1967), as mentioned in Mutsuddi, 19-20