Zakir Hussein Raju is Professor and Head of the Dept. of Media and Communication and the Director of the Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR) at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) where he also serves as Dean of Social Science. He is author of Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity: In Search of the Modern? (Routledge, 2015) and Bangladesh Liberation War in Mass Media (Jagrity). He has published many research articles in refereed journals and volumes from academic publishers in US, UK, Australia, India, China and South Korea. Raju currently serves on the boards of two journals—Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies (Sage) and Journal of South Asian Film and Media (Intellect). A recipient of the Jury award for his film Beyond the Borders at European Anthropological Film Festival (1997), Raju served as Jury president/member in Rotterdam, Melbourne, Vesoul (France), Tallinn (Estonia), and Bucheon (South Korea) film festivals.
This paper aims to investigate the inter-Asian and inter-medial cinematic journey of Phani Majumdar, an almost forgotten but truly transcultural filmmaker of colonial Asia who ventured filmmaking both in South and Southeast Asia during 1930s-60s. I propose to excavate Majumdar out of historical amnesia of Asian national cinemas. This paper is therefore a very first attempt to investigate the inter-Asian cinematic travel of and between South and Southeast Asia. Majumdar represents a classic ‘forgotten’ case here as he worked in multiple of Asian screen media industries during 1930s-60s. I therefore aim in this paper to bring him out of such condensed ‘national’ and nationalist brackets by investigating how he has brought inter-Asian and inter-Medial filmmaking experiences and perspectives both in and from Mumbai and Malaya industries. Most of Majumdar’s films made in Calcutta and Mumbai constructed a romantic, popular vision of Indian nationalism on screen in the period before and after 1947—the partition and independence of India. Majumdar was invited to join Shaw Brothers’ studio in Singapore in the 1950s. Despite (or because of?) his inter-medial movement from Indian to Malayan film industry, here too he directed films with nationalist underpinnings. Malayan films such as Hang Tua and Anakku Sazali, both featuring the legendary star P. Ramlee were inter-Asian directorial ventures of Mazumdar in mid-1950s Singapore. It is striking that Majumdar and his works were not much explored in Bengali and Hindi film discourses of Indian national cinema study. On the other hand, his filmic contributions were also not featured in Malaysian or Singapore film histories with due importance. Most histories of Southeast Asian cinemas bring forth his Malay-language films in a way as if he is a Malayan film-author whose works can be easily interpreted and positioned with/in a Malay nationalist framework. By unearthing Majumdar’s cinematic journey from Calcutta/Mumbai to Singapore/Malaya, I wish to interrogate the reasons why and how the filmic contributions of Majumdar—an itinerant inter-Asian film-author are largely absent and sidelined in Classical Indian film culture as well as Malayan cinema’s Golden Era. I wish to raise the question (and answer)—may this ‘invisibility’ and silencing of an inter-Asian like Majumdar be linked to the symptomatic inability of national(ist) historians of the national cinemas of South and Southeast Asia. The inter-Asian (let alone inter-medial) filmmakers are not well-suited in and for the histories of national cinemas—they create anomalies in the easy and direct relationships in between the nation (-state) and ‘national’ screen media industries. Here, by closely studying an inter-Asian, inter-Medial cultural producer like Majumdar, I aim to unpack such gaps and fissures in the narration of both South and Southeast Asian national cinemas.