The construction of the ‘new Bengali woman’ in Nasiruddin Yousuff’s Guerrilla (2011)

Abstract

Four decades after the end of the Liberation War of 1971, Guerrilla (2011), directed by Nasiruddin Yousuff, is the first war film of Bangladesh to tell the story of a female combatant, Syeda Bilkis Banu. The Liberation War was a people’s war, in which Bengali civilians from all walks of life, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religious affiliation, participated. Despite this reality, cinematic representations of the War have always portrayed the combat experience as an exclusively masculine enterprise. By contrast, the films’ encoding of femininity has tended to situate it in opposition to such heroics, with women constructed as passive victims. Guerrilla subverts these widespread, stereotypical gender norms by centering on a female freedom fighter. Despite its drive to redeem the female from its repressed position in the history of the Liberation War, this film, however, cannot avoid re-enacting the patriarchal ideological framework of Bangladesh; in particular, its conception of a woman’s sexual chastity as the dominant notion of femininity. In this paper, I argue that the female protagonist of Guerrilla represents a construction and ideological negotiation within a melodramatic aesthetic. Bilkis, I claim, as a figure combining elements of both tradition and modernity, is an embodiment of the ‘new Bengali woman’. She is thus a product of both the historical context of 1971 and the desires, fantasies, and perceptions of woman in present day Bangladeshi society.