Ananta Jalil: The Bangu also rises

Once a year, expatriates like me return home to spend some time with family and friends. We like to eat Bangla food, visit new places to see, suffer traffic jams and as it has been happening nowadays — go and watch an Ananta Jalil movie. I wasn't aware of him much though I had heard of his "You pom Gana?" episode. I had not paid much attention but this time cousins, nephews and nieces all ganged up and I went to see "Nishartho Bhalobasa" (What is Love ?). It wasn't just fun but was also a great learning and a rather unexpected one too. As we left the hall with my giggling battalion and headed to an ice cream parlour, I wondered if we were laughing at Ananta or his class and culture? Or is it a reaction partly based on the anxiety that traditional upper-class strongholds are crumbling and men like Ananta are emerging as social leaders as most of the conventional English medium students or those who study abroad are losing space as they go on to an anonymous life abroad or face competition from the Anantas of this world.

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I am saying this because apart from the outrageous scenes and dialogues, most laughter was evoked by his accent and manner of speaking the Queen's English. Everyone I spoke to seems to find this very funny and that includes a number of people whose English is not particularly better. I saw a YouTube video which literally transliterates his accent on the clip and those who did it also distorted his voice and thus made fun of him. For someone who has spent nearly two decades abroad it came as a shock because nobody is allowed to make fun of accents in the West nowadays. If you did and were caught, you would be officially admonished and fined even. It's 'accentism' — accent based discrimination — and those who study the matter put it as a close relatives of racism. So why are we being racist with Ananta Jalil?

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English language has become the great borderline of this society I realise and since many claim to know English, the new border is accent. The more you sound like a Westerner the better you are. In some ways, it's the same with the new migrants in the West where parents, debarred from jobs due to their poor language skills, ensure that their kids speak English like a White man and often forget their mother language. It's pushed by the desire to survive in a world which they can't control and many of the parents are from a cultural base which rarely spoke in English while in Bangladesh. If that is about reversing language discrimination by the lesser class, it should be the same but in reverse when it comes to Ananta Jalil. He is not allowed into the club unless he speaks English like those who laugh at him.

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But it's also something more. His cultural background is constructed in the hues of the villages or the districts and he came to Dhaka to work at his brother's/cousins RMG factory. He has not followed the conventional path of a business executive and with his un-sophistication quite intact he has made it. He is not part of the crowd who go to the University, to the West to study. He has done those things but he is still an outsider, doesn't belong to the so-called Dhaka crowd. Such a man shouldn't succeed according to received wisdom. Yet he has arrived and made it big. People really don't know what to do with him except to laugh and I felt a bit nervously. The upper-class don't know him and it's the devil they don't know, the stranger at the door, knocking, knocking…

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Ananta Jalil has defended his accent on a BBC interview and after mentioning that he was right on pronouncing Ghana as Gana, he doesn't think much of who thinks what. He is totally confident about his future and knows the critics are just that, critics. He essentially discards them. He knows he sits on a strong foundation and lots of money and a big crowd. What else does he need? Not much and making fun of his accent goes only so far. There is nothing stopping him. And none of us like that.

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So when we laugh at his movies, we don't laugh at his accents, or the fact that how a man without a 'posh' education could arrive where he has, or that he doesn't mingle with the 'posh', or follow a lifestyle that the 'posh' do but at the fact that he doesn't give a damn about things that are 'posh' or care a tiny bit about the laughter aimed at him. We are unused to have those whom we exclude so obviously excluding us by ignoring us. He scares us because in the world that we constructed and hoped to limit access, Ananta Jalil has not only broken through, but also has thumbed his nose at us.

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I asked people around and they tell me that he is also popular amongst the rural audience who watch his movies not to laugh at him but enjoy his absurd histrionics, the special effects, the very absurdity that makes him a laughing stock in Dhaka and abroad. "He has Bollywoodised BD movies. In many ways, he resembles the Mumbai heroes. No Bangla hero has done that before. He has made his movies larger than life, an event that the audience don't have to believe but enjoy. He has brought back many to the hall."

So Ananta Jalil is an entrepreneur of our times. He should be respected for what he is which is much more than any of his silly critics. He is, to put it aptly a personification of the rise of the "Bangu", as we are used to say. Loud, preposterous and successful, one hopes the future looks like him rather than those who look lost in both Dhaka and New York.

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Samia R. Karim is a professor of politics and policy. She writes from Australia.