Acclaimed filmmaker and former interim government cultural affairs adviser Mostafa Sarwar Farooki has said major political change in Bangladesh cannot be sustainable unless the country challenges what he described as its “hegemonic cultural status quo.”

Writing on his verified Facebook page on the birth anniversary of writer and politician Abul Mansur Ahmad, Farooki argued that the roots of Bangladesh’s contemporary cultural struggle were identified by Ahmad decades ago.

Farooki cited Ahmad’s criticism of writers in East Bengal who regarded the language of West Bengal as more “authentic, correct, refined and suitable for literature” than their own.

“Their model, too, is the spoken language of West Bengal. Mentally, they too live in West Bengal, not East Bengal,” Farooki quoted Ahmad as writing.

He also cited Ahmad’s observation that the “literature of East Bengal has not achieved independence” because its literary figures had failed to adjust to a new political environment.

“Now replace the word ‘literature’ here with ‘culture,’ and you will see that he had already identified the fundamental reason behind the cultural struggle we are witnessing today,” Farooki wrote.

The filmmaker said debates over the use of Bangladesh’s own language, voice and cultural expressions had continued for decades.

He drew a parallel with cinema, saying Bangladeshi filmmakers once tended to imitate Kolkata art-house cinema or Bombay and faced criticism when they attempted to move away from those traditions.

“The abuse we faced when we tried to break away from those models was itself a consequence of subservience to this cultural colonialism,” he wrote.

Farooki argued that generations of cultural elites had failed to adequately celebrate thinkers such as Ahmad and had instead embraced what he called a “false reality” in the name of modernity and progressivism.

He said artists emerging after the 1990s increasingly began using “our own language, our own voice and our own sounds,” but were often dismissed or placed into limiting cultural categories.

Farooki said locally rooted music was labelled “folk,” contemporary rock was branded oposhongskriti, or degenerate culture, while others were called “language terrorists” and their films dismissed as insignificant.

But the emergence of Bangladesh’s Bengalis with a distinct cultural identity was “inevitable,” he said.

Farooki linked that evolution directly to the July political upheaval, arguing that its cultural foundations had been developing for years.

“The cultural work behind the political manifestation of today’s July has been under way for many years,” he wrote.

Farooki also recalled Ahmad’s opposition both to hostility towards religion in the name of secularism and to the use of religion as an instrument for political power.

He said Ahmad did not consider religious and national identities inherently contradictory.

Farooki also recalled launching the “Celebrating Bangladeshi Legends” initiative while serving in the interim government, saying he had instructed officials to prepare a year-long calendar and specifically included Ahmad among the figures to be commemorated.

“A country produces the kind of people it chooses to celebrate,” he wrote.

Farooki said the initiative was intended to challenge and disrupt Bangladesh’s prevailing cultural order.

“As long as a hegemonic cultural status quo remains intact, you cannot expect any major political transformation,” he wrote. “Or, more precisely, such a transformation cannot be sustainable.”

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