To counter Indian narratives, Bangladesh should exert ‘soft power’ through cinema

Illustration : TBS

Whenever someone mentions Pakistan or Afghanistan, why does the image of a "terrorist state" readily appear in many people's minds? These associations do not emerge naturally. They are produced through repeated images, familiar plotlines, news frames, security discourse, and popular entertainment. 

Cinema is one of the most powerful tools through which such visual and psychological biases are built.

We should therefore ask some important political questions: What role does Indian popular cinema play in the regional politics of representation? What role have Indian films and web series been playing in normalising associations between particular countries, Muslim identities, borders, and terrorism? How have repeated security-thriller narratives shaped a cinematic language in which Muslim-coded bodies and South Asian border spaces become legible primarily through suspicion? 

And what are the long-term costs of repeatedly framing Bangladesh through terrorism, crime, and border insecurity — and thereby constructing it as a regional "terrorist other"?

Films such as Gudachari, Gunday, Khufiya, Faraaz, War 2, Raktabeej 2, and Indian Police Force, among many others, should prompt a broader public conversation about representation, security, and cultural power. 

The issue is not that cinema must never portray violence, militancy, criminality, or cross-border conflict. Nor is it a call for censorship or nationalistic denial. The issue is repetition: When particular national identities and Muslim-coded characters repeatedly appear as threats, suspects, infiltrators, or sources of instability, these fictional conventions can become part of the public's "common sense".

Cinema is often treated as harmless entertainment. It is not; it can influence public assumptions about who belongs, who is dangerous, which countries are trustworthy, and whose security concerns deserve sympathy. 

It can shape the habits through which audiences interpret a beard, a language, a border, a refugee, a religious practice, or a national flag. In that sense, cinema operates as a form of soft power: it does not command audiences directly, but it helps define what feels plausible, normal, and emotionally credible.

Bangladesh should take this reality seriously.

Representation is a strategic issue

Bangladesh has invested heavily in physical infrastructure, connectivity, and economic development. But a country entering the middle-income stage cannot rely on hard power and infrastructure alone. 

In the geopolitical environment of 2026, national power also depends on narrative capacity: the ability to represent oneself to the world before others define the country on one's behalf.

This is particularly important for Bangladesh. It is a country with a complex political history, a large and dynamic population, a global diaspora, a vibrant cultural tradition, and a record of social achievements that are often underrepresented in international popular culture. 

Yet Bangladesh is still too often reduced to a narrow set of images: poverty, climate catastrophe, garment factories, migration, political instability, or security anxiety.

Those stories are not entirely invented. Every country has real problems and must confront them honestly. But no country should be reduced to its vulnerabilities. When outsiders control the dominant images through which Bangladesh is seen, the country loses more than cultural prestige. It loses influence over how its people, institutions, interests, and future are understood.

The contest over representation is therefore not superficial. It is political.

The risk of cinematic othering

The problem is not simply that a film includes a Bangladeshi character, a Muslim character, or a cross-border plot. The problem appears when these categories become predictable shorthand for threat.

A repeated cinematic formula can work like this: A Muslim-coded body is made visually suspicious; a neighbouring country becomes a convenient location for conspiracy, infiltration, or violence; the "heroic" security state is framed as the sole defender of order; cross-border complexity is simplified into a moral story of innocence and threat; audiences are invited to identify emotionally with surveillance, suspicion, and punitive action. 

The repeated image of the Muslim or Bangladeshi "infiltrators" can then convert cross-border anxiety into electoral capital, exclusionary citizenship, and legitimizing surveillance and border violence.

Over time, such conventions can make politically charged assumptions feel natural. This is how cultural hegemony works: not necessarily through direct propaganda, but through the slow normalisation of particular ways of seeing.

For Bangladesh, this creates a serious concern. If Bangladesh is repeatedly incorporated into fictional security threats, criminal networks, border anxieties, or terrorist plots, audiences across the region may begin to absorb these portrayals as background knowledge. Fiction does not become fact automatically, but it can influence the emotional environment in which facts are later interpreted.

This matters for tourism, trade, diaspora relations, diplomacy, investment, cross-border mobility, and regional public opinion. It also matters for Bangladeshi citizens themselves. A nation that repeatedly sees itself represented through others' fears may eventually internalise those frames.

Soft power is not propaganda

The answer is not to produce simplistic state propaganda or films that merely celebrate official institutions. That approach will not create durable cultural influence. Audiences can recognise hollow messaging immediately.

The goal should instead be to build an ecosystem capable of telling sophisticated, compelling, and internationally accessible Bangladeshi stories.

Bangladesh has no shortage of material: the Liberation War and the continuing political struggle towards democratization, sovereignty, and freedom from regional domination; our distinctive secular and plural cultural traditions, shaped by linguistic nationalism, religious coexistence, folk practices, and a long history of cultural exchange; and women's achievements in education, entrepreneurship, sports, public health, and community leadership. 

There is also our scientific innovation and achievements of our global diaspora and young minds; the country's role in peacekeeping, counterterrorism, disaster response, humanitarian action, and climate adaptation; the moral and political complexities of border life; and the experience of Rohingya displacement, told with ethical sensitivity and without turning suffering into spectacle.

These are not merely "national image" stories. They are human stories with local depth and global relevance. The strongest soft power does not come from denying complexity; it comes from presenting complexity with artistic confidence.

A policy agenda for cultural power

The new Bangladesh needs a long-term national strategy for film, television, streaming, animation, documentary, and digital storytelling. This should be treated as cultural infrastructure — not as an afterthought to development policy.

A serious policy agenda could include the following.

Establish a Bangladesh screen and storytelling fund: The government should create a multi-year public fund for film and audiovisual storytelling, governed by an independent board of filmmakers, scholars, producers, critics, legal experts, and cultural workers.

The fund should support: feature films; documentary projects; animation and children's content; television and web series; screenwriting development; subtitling, dubbing, and international distribution; research-based historical drama; regional productions outside Dhaka; and first-time directors and producers.

A long-term allocation in the range of Tk1,000 crore, phased over several years and protected by transparent selection rules, could become a serious foundation for the industry. The money should not be distributed through partisan loyalty or bureaucratic discretion. 

It should be awarded competitively, publicly, and independently.

Create a young filmmakers incubator: Bangladesh has talented young filmmakers who understand contemporary politics, global media, identity, and technology. What many lack is sustained institutional support.

A national incubator could offer: paid script-development residencies; mentorship from experienced filmmakers and international collaborators; training in research, ethics, archives, production management, and global distribution; seed grants for politically and socially relevant projects; legal and security support for filmmakers working on difficult subjects; and partnerships with universities, film societies, studios, and streaming platforms.

The purpose would not be to instruct young directors what political message to deliver. It would be to give them the institutional freedom and professional resources to develop ambitious work.

Build a national screen archive: Bangladesh needs a modern archive for film, television, photographs, radio, oral histories, news footage, Liberation War materials, regional folklore, and cultural documentation.

Without archives, national storytelling becomes dependent on partial memory, imported narratives, and recycled clichés. A public archive can support filmmakers who want to make historical drama, documentaries, crime fiction, political thrillers, biographies, and educational content grounded in research.

It would also preserve the work of earlier generations of filmmakers before it disappears.

Support international distribution: A film does not become soft power merely because it is produced. It must travel.

Bangladesh should invest in: high-quality English and multilingual subtitles; festival strategy and international sales support; co-production agreements; diaspora screenings and cultural diplomacy programmes; partnerships with global streaming platforms; film-market participation; translation of Bangladeshi scripts and screenplays; and regional distribution across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America.

The objective should be to make Bangladeshi stories visible in global cultural circuits—not only at elite festivals, but also to broad audiences.

The film industry needs patronage

Bangladesh's most accomplished directors often face an economic reality: advertising work pays reliably; independent filmmaking often does not. This is not an individual failure. It is an industry failure.

When filmmakers cannot make a living from long-form storytelling, the country loses creative capacity. When directors must spend their best years producing corporate advertisements, political and cultural cinema becomes harder to sustain. When producers see only remakes, formulaic commercial films, or poverty-centred festival narratives as financially viable, the range of national storytelling narrows.

Bangladesh needs an industry in which a filmmaker can build a career through serious cinema without choosing between artistic ambition and economic survival.

That requires policy support, private investment, predictable regulation, stronger cinemas, fairer revenue systems, professional unions, film education, public broadcasting reform, and international market access.

Counter with stories, not only slogans

There is no need to answer every propaganda or hostile representation with anger. The loudest and most effective response is often a better and counter story: more authentic, complex, more humane, more artistically accomplished, and more memorable.

Normalising racialised majoritarian cultural politics is never our cultural goal. The task of Bangladeshi cinema is not to imitate the security-driven, majoritarian imagination increasingly visible in parts of Indian popular culture. 

It is to tell stories that defend dignity without erasing differences, portray national pride without manufacturing enemies, and make Bangladesh legible to the world in all its complexity.

A Bangladeshi spy thriller can be intelligent without being jingoistic. It can confront unequal regional power, cross-border coercion, and the human costs of security politics without reducing entire peoples to villains. 

It is time to tell stories about the political and cultural domination exercised by larger regional powers. It is time to show the world the violence of militarized borders and the lives damaged by them. It is time to share stories about cases such as Felani Khatun's and thousands of others killed to expose the devastating consequences of militarised borders. 

It is also time to tell stories about unequal transboundary-water arrangements: how control over shared rivers can generate slow and systemic deaths, cumulative forms of harm by undermining livelihoods, agriculture, ecosystems, food security, and human dignity across the country.

That is how cultural power works. It does not emerge from slogans or from manufacturing (counter) enemies. It emerges from the ability to make the world care about your stories and characters.

The choice before Bangladesh

The question is not whether Bangladesh should prioritise infrastructure or culture. It needs both.

Bridges, flyovers, parks, ports, and industrial zones can connect a country physically. Culture connects a country to its own imagination — and to the imagination of others. A nation that leaves the representation of its identity entirely to outsiders eventually finds itself speaking through images it did not choose.

Bangladesh is approaching a stage of development at which it must decide whether it will remain primarily an object of other people's stories or become a confident producer of its own.

The time to develop a serious cultural-power strategy was at least a decade ago. The next best time is now or never.

Nazmul Arefin is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer in the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Alberta. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies (CIFRS). He can be reached at marefin1@ualberta.ca.