Unruly Puppets: Producing the Urban Poor in a Bangladeshi Television Idol Competition

Din M Sumon Rahman

doi:10.21315/ijaps2021.17.2.8

Abstract

Magic Tin Chakar Taroka (Magic Three-Wheeler Star) or Tin Chaka (Three- Wheeler) is a reality competition to find music talent exclusively from the urban poor of Dhaka city. This programme was shown on Bangladeshi satellite television in 2008. The present article is an ethnographic exploration of the Tin Chaka event which demonstrates how the cultural identity of the urban poor in Dhaka has been performed by the production of ordinary celebrities in the visual media. In doing so, a combination of on-screen and off-screen observations were undertaken for a period of six months which was complemented by semiological interpretation of adverts, jingles and other visual materials. In this article, I argue that, despite its admirable inclusivity and thereby remarkably instant acceptance by the audience, the reason behind the discontinuation of Tin Chaka in following years lies in the inscriptions of the show as a charitable undertaking, an act which has often been performed in the reality television programmes in the name of “democratisation”.

Highlights

On 25 October 2008, a rickshaw-puller named Omar Ali was awarded as the first Tin Chakar Taroka of Bangladesh in the final event of the music reality show named Tin Chaka (Three-Wheeler)
The audience of Tin Chaka was concerned about the “accuracy” of the performance”. This is the reason why Tin Chaka was more popular among the urban middle-class households, because this programme provided them with the moral advantage of measuring the poor according to the yardstick of the rich
The case of Tin Chaka displayed a failure in understanding the cultural formation of the city’s urban poor and instead produced the elite’s perception of what the urban poor should be; the exclusion of urban folk music from this competition reinstates this. It decodes the hegemonic inscription of the cultural elite in a specific manner, and this has happened in the format of a television reality show which has often been seen as an example of the democratised media

Summary

INTRODUCTION

On 25 October 2008, a rickshaw-puller named Omar Ali was awarded as the first Tin Chakar Taroka (the idol of the Tin Chaka show) of Bangladesh in the final event of the music reality show named Tin Chaka (Three-Wheeler). Since the 1980s, an emerging trend of popular music, sometimes called “urban folk”, has been dominating the audio media and a new generation of artists and musicians has come into the scene by dint of, among other factors, the decentralisation of the music industry itself In its lyrics, this new hybrid often deals with issues to do with the urban poor and in its melodies appropriate traditional folk tunes. This article focuses on how the urban poor, being perceived mostly as nonviewers of pay TV programmes in Bangladesh and a potential consumer group to address, has been represented as an entertainment subject through the television production of a music idol competition, and how the prevailing social relations in the city have been morally inscribed and culturally negotiated in this process. The pop idol format has been used in a smaller context, neither to ignite any nationalistic sentiment nor to create any greater-regional identity, but to commercially appropriate the cultural identity of the most marginalised community of a Third World city that constitutes half of its population

METHODOLOGY

CONCLUDING REMARKS