Indigeneities and Heterophoties

Elective Affinities in the Film My Bicycle by the Bangladeshi Rakhine Director Aung Rakhine

Abstract

This paper explores the nexus between indigeneity and cinema in Bangladesh, with a particular focus on the first feature film written and directed by the Bangladeshi Rakhine director Aung Rakhine: Mor thengari (My Bicycle, Bangladesh 2014). Taking Rakhine as an example, it examines how the cinematic interventions carried out by filmmakers who do not self-identify as indigenous (ādibāsī) might notwithstanding mobilize indigenous solidarities and transethnic forms of belonging to oppose or hybridize the fixed and discriminatory national categories of “sub-national” (upojāti), “ethnic minority” (kṣudra nr̥-gōṣṭhī), or “immigrant” (abhibāsī) employed by the government and the mainstream media to define non-Bengali and/or non-Muslim people in Bangladesh.
By creating complex and alternative “filmscapes” that challenge the cultural dynamics of representation on national and international screens, filmmakers belonging to minoritized groups (Chakma, Rakhine, Marma, etc.) have been engaging in a battle over images that create new processes of becoming and assert more complex ways of belonging in a transethnic and multilingual cinematic movement that is paving the way towards the emergence of what I tentatively call “heterophoties,” visual histories of the other told from an emic perspective where indigeneity is strategically employed to debunk stereotypical representations and convey pluralistic and multicultural narratives of being “indigenous.”