Zahir Raihan: Filmmaker and Novelist of the Liberation War

Zahir Raihan was the novelist who taught Bengali cinema to speak about power. In a working life of barely fifteen years he wrote some of the most durable fiction of East Pakistan, directed its most famous political film, and then, in 1971, turned his camera on a genocide while it was still happening. Six weeks after Bangladesh won its independence, he walked into the Dhaka suburb of Mirpur looking for his abducted elder brother — and never came back. No body was ever found. His disappearance, on 30 January 1972, remains one of the unresolved wounds of the new country, and his two great works, the feature film Jibon Theke Neya and the documentary Stop Genocide, still define what Bangladeshi cinema can do.

Early life and education

He was born Mohammad Zahirullah on 19 August 1935 in the village of Majupur, in the Sonagazi area of Feni, then part of Noakhali district in the Bengal Presidency of British India. His father was a professor, and the boy's early schooling followed the family's postings: he studied at the Mitra Institute and at Calcutta Alia Madrasa, where his father taught. After the partition of 1947 the family was in East Pakistan; Zahir passed his matriculation in 1950 from Amirabad High School, took his intermediate examinations at Dhaka College, and went on to a BA (Honours) in Bangla at the University of Dhaka.

Two influences shaped him early. The first was his elder brother, Shahidullah Kaiser, already an eminent writer and journalist, who encouraged the younger man's turn to literature. The second was politics: as a student Zahir gravitated to the left and to the gathering Bengali nationalist movement, associations that would mark everything he later wrote or filmed.

The Language Movement and the young writer

On 21 February 1952, when the government banned processions in Dhaka under Section 144 and students decided to defy the ban, Zahir Raihan was among the first ten students to march out. He was arrested with many others and taken to prison. The Language Movement became the moral centre of his life: it is widely reported that he wrote his novel Arek Falgun — a story of the students of February 1952, taking its title from the Bengali month in which Ekushey falls — while in jail after that arrest. The day at the heart of that struggle is now marked worldwide as International Mother Language Day, and Raihan's fiction is among its earliest literary monuments.

His first book, Surya Grahan, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1955. His first novel, Shesh Bikeler Meye, followed in 1960. But it was Hajar Bochhor Dhore (A Thousand Years Hence), published in 1964, that secured his place in Bengali literature: a novel of village life, superstition and quiet exploitation in rural Bengal, carried by some of the finest prose of its generation. It won the Adamjee Literature Award, then one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Pakistan. Other novels — Trishna, Borof Gola Nodi and Ar Koto Din — followed in the later 1960s, alongside journalism; in 1970 he was also one of the initiators of the English weekly Express.

Into cinema: Jago Hua Savera and Kokhono Asheni

Raihan entered the film world in 1956, but his real apprenticeship came when the Lahore director A. J. Kardar arrived in Dhaka to shoot Jago Hua Savera (The Day Shall Dawn), a neo-realist drama about the fishermen of the Meghna written by the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Kardar chose the young Dhaka writer as his assistant director — Dawn's film history calls him the film's chief assistant director — and the production, shot at Saitnol near Dhaka and released in 1959, taught Raihan the craft on one of the most celebrated films ever made in Pakistan.

His own directorial debut, Kokhono Asheni (Never Came), was released in 1961, and through the 1960s he built a body of work that repeatedly broke new ground. Sonar Kajol (1962, directed jointly with Kalim Sharafi) was followed by Kancher Deyal (The Glass Wall, 1963), a drama of women and sacrifice that brought him the Nigar Award for best direction — Pakistan's leading film honour of the time. In 1964 his Urdu film Sangam became the first colour film made in Pakistan; the next year, Bahana was the country's first CinemaScope production. Behula (1966), drawn from the great Bengali folk epic of Behula and Lakhindar, showed the same director working comfortably in the folk tradition. No other filmmaker in the eastern wing combined popular success, technical innovation and literary standing as he did.

Jibon Theke Neya: a household becomes a country

Raihan's masterpiece arrived at the most charged possible moment. Jibon Theke Neya (Taken from Life) was made in 1969, the year of the mass uprising that forced Ayub Khan from power, and released on 10 April 1970. On the surface it is a family melodrama: a middle-class household ruled by an autocratic elder sister, Apa, whose bunch of keys — the keys to every cupboard and store in the house — is the emblem of her power. Her husband is forbidden even to sing at home; her younger brothers cannot marry without her leave; the servants are bullied daily.

Every Bengali viewer in 1970 read the allegory instantly. The house was the country, and Apa, as the critic Alamgir Kabir noted at the time, was modelled on Ayub Khan. The keys were the state itself. When the family finally rebels — pasting protest posters on the household walls, marrying in defiance of her orders — the film is replaying the street politics of 1969, and its scenes of the family observing 21 February, complete with a dawn procession, root the revolt in the Language Movement. When Apa is at last jailed for her crimes, her husband delivers the line that audiences carried out of the cinema with them: "You committed a mistake. Hitler committed a mistake too."

The military government understood the film perfectly well. Shooting had been obstructed by the police, the censor board held up its release, and after protests forced the film out, it was banned; it survived a special screening for General Rao Farman Ali, who is reported to have told Raihan, "I let them approve the film, but I will see to you." During the Liberation War the film was screened in Calcutta to packed houses. Film scholars have since described it as perhaps the first true work of Bangladeshi national cinema — a revolution filmed, uniquely, before the revolution came. Its reputation travelled beyond East Pakistan, too: Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha and Ritwik Ghatak, the commanding figures of Bengali cinema in Calcutta, praised the film — an unusual honour for a Dhaka production of the period — and at home audiences treated its family quarrel as the nation's own argument, conducted in the only public language the censors had left open.

The Liberation War and Stop Genocide

When the Pakistan Army launched its crackdown on 25 March 1971, Raihan was serving as general secretary of the Bangladesh Liberation Council of Intelligentsia and was at work on Let There Be Light, his first English-language feature. He abandoned the feature, crossed to Calcutta, and took up the camera as a weapon. The result was Stop Genocide (1971), a twenty-minute documentary that remains the most famous film of the Liberation War.

Planned from about May 1971, the film opens not with a Bengali nationalist slogan but with Lenin: a sketch of Lenin's face and his words on the right of nations to self-determination — whoever accuses supporters of self-determination of encouraging separatism, the commentary argues, is like someone accusing advocates of divorce of destroying the family. The commentary, written and spoken by Alamgir Kabir, Raihan's fellow filmmaker and close collaborator on the project, then walks the viewer from peaceful village Bengal to the refugee columns and the killing fields, comparing Yahya Khan with Genghis Khan, Hitler and Lieutenant William Calley of My Lai. The film was shown in India and abroad to build the case that what was happening in East Pakistan was genocide, and it closes on its title as a demand. Raihan also directed a second wartime documentary, A State Is Born, and produced Kabir's Liberation Fighters and Babul Chowdhury's Innocent Millions. The Lenin opening troubled some in the wartime leadership — one producer even demanded a ban — but the film's argument, that Bangladesh's cause belonged to the world's oppressed and not to one party, was exactly Raihan's own.

The disappearance

Victory came on 16 December 1971, but not for Raihan's family. Days before the surrender, his elder brother Shahidullah Kaiser — the writer who had first turned him towards literature — was taken from his home at Dhaka University by Al-Badr, the paramilitary force that murdered Bengali intellectuals in the war's last days. Kaiser was never seen again.

Raihan spent the first weeks of independence searching for him. On the morning of 30 January 1972 he left home for Mirpur, the Dhaka suburb that remained a stronghold of armed Bihari collaborators and hiding Pakistani soldiers, accompanying security forces who had gone there to recover arms and look for the missing. Fighting erupted. An East Bengal Regiment soldier caught in that battle later recalled seeing Zahir Raihan lying shot on the road in Mirpur-12; the area was so contested that Mirpur was only finally freed the next day, 31 January, at a cost of more than a hundred lives.

What can be said with certainty ends there. His body was never recovered — nor were the bodies of many of the soldiers and others killed in Mirpur that day. Journalist Julfikar Ali Manik's long investigation, published in Bhorer Kagoj in 1999, concluded that Raihan was shot dead in Mirpur on 30 January 1972 while searching for his brother; other accounts have differed in detail, and no official investigation ever established his fate. Dhaka's newspapers were already reporting him missing by 3 February 1972, and the battle in which he is believed to have died still has no official recognition as part of the Liberation War — one reason the families of the Mirpur dead have kept pressing the state for a formal accounting. His son Onol Raihan retraced the search in print in 1999, the same year as Manik's investigation, keeping the case in public memory long after the trail had gone cold. He is therefore recorded not with a death date but with a disappearance: 30 January is observed in Bangladesh each year as the Disappearance Day of Zahir Raihan, an ending left open in a way that mirrors the unfinished reckoning of 1971 itself.

Honours and legacy

The state honours came posthumously: the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1972, the Ekushey Padak in 1977 and the Independence Day Award in 1992, alongside posthumous National Film Awards. But Raihan's real monument is the work, and the place it holds. Hajar Bochhor Dhore remains a fixture of Bengali reading; Jibon Theke Neya is routinely named the greatest Bengali film of its era; and Stop Genocide is still screened wherever the history of 1971 is taught, its twenty minutes carrying an evidentiary force that longer films rarely match. He was thirty-six years old when he disappeared — a novelist and filmmaker at the height of his powers, lost not to the war he had filmed, but to the search for his brother in the war's last unliberated street.