The Book "State, Identity and Diaspora in Tanvir Mokammel's Films" authored by Muhammad Ullah has been published by the Bangladesh Film Archive, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
Jul 31, 2022

The book is a result of the research on refugee diaspora depicted in two films by Tanvir Mokammel ‘The Border Line’ (Seemantorekha) and ‘The promised Land’ (Swapnabhumi). The research was conducted under the Bangladesh Film Archive fellowship 2020-2021. The vulnerability of the diasporic situation presented in these two documentaries is analyzed by contemporary political philosophical theory. The issues of statelessness, identity crisis, and diasporic condition of the displaced people as visualized in the films are also the major concerns in contemporary global politics. Due to the partition in 1947 many people had to leave their homeland under cruel violence and massacres. A huge number of the Bengali Hindu population left the then East Bengal and took refuge in many places in India. Similarly, many Biharis and Bengali Muslims migrated from India and came to the then East Pakistan which is Bangladesh now. Seventy years have passed since then.  How are these people now? And how the political boundaries of barbed ware have affected people’s lives and relations? All these have been presented in these two films. The book attempts to understand the eternal human relationship with one's motherland under the new structure of political identity as depicted by the state boundaries.

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