The panopticon in the parlour

George Orwell’s Oceania has an address for its fear. The telescreen on the wall, the Thought Police listening from the shadows, the Ministry rewriting yesterday’s newspaper before lunch…all of it traces back to one source. 

Winston Smith at least enjoys the clarity of knowing his enemy. Big Brother might be a fiction, a face that nobody has actually seen up close, but it is a single face, repeated on every poster and screen.

Osman Gani is denied such certainty. As the unraveling central figure of Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s seminal novel, Chilekothar Sepai, set in Dhaka during the months leading up to the 1969 uprising against Pakistani military rule, his struggle refuses to settle into a neat conflict between a citizen and a monolithic state. 

There is no telescreen bolted above his bed in that cramped attic room, no microphone wired into the plaster. Yet he watches himself exactly the way Winston does—second-guessing every thought before it finishes forming, flinching at judgements nobody has voiced. 

The difference is that no singular authority issues the verdict. It arrives via a neighbour’s glance through a window, an uncle’s disapproving silence at dinner, or the thousand unwritten rules of a mahalla (neighbourhood) that enforces conformity without ever needing to publish a manual.

This contrast reveals something fundamental about the nature of surveillance in Bangladesh. Anxiety about being watched does not originate where Orwell, writing in 1948 about a European totalitarian nightmare, assumed it would. 

The Orwellian dystopia is architectural and technocratic. Big Brother functions because the state has engineered the physical infrastructure to make him omnipresent. Remove the technology and the edifice collapses; the terror is not personal, merely well-engineered.

Elias never offers Osman a single target, providing instead an accurate diagnosis of how power operated in East Pakistan’s final years, and how it continues to operate in contemporary Bangladesh. Paranoia cannot fix in one direction because the pressure is omnidirectional. 

Part of it is class-based—caught in the miserable middle, neither poor enough to be ignored nor wealthy enough to be safe. Part of it is a deeply ingrained social conservatism that requires no uniform to do its policing. The rest is the ordinary exhaustion of living among people who talk, notice, and never forget.

If Orwell’s model is the eye-in-the-sky, the Bangladeshi variant is the eye-on-every-doorstep. Big Brother requires wiring; this version merely requires proximity. It thrives on the dread of "what people will say"—a phrase so deeply woven into Bengali domestic life that it is rarely registered as an expression of raw power, though that is precisely what it is.

It is tempting to conclude that Bangladesh simply traded one Big Brother for a thousand smaller ones, but that misinterprets the dynamic. There is no central watching eye missing from an otherwise totalitarian setup because no such totalizing setup exists. 

The politics Osman navigates—colonial leftovers, military decrees, and a fluid popular uprising—never cohere into a legible authority. Power is scattered.. and often invisible even to those holding a piece of it.

Little has changed. Today, Bangladeshi authority remains fragmented across state institutions, religious establishments, family hierarchies, local strongmen, and digital platforms that amplify whichever voice happens to be loudest. 

No singular Ministry of Truth dictates the self-censorship that citizens practice daily. A threat with no fixed location is notoriously difficult to fight; it possesses neither an office nor a nameplate.

Elias’s literary technique mirrors this diffusion. Chilekothar Sepai eschews a steady narrating voice, drifting between Osman’s internal monologue and the collective murmur of the neighbourhood. The reader is frequently left uncertain whose judgement is being voiced. 

Orwell does the opposite, locking the reader inside Winston’s skull because isolation is the core of the tragedy—one man against the apparatus. Elias deprives Osman of isolation entirely. His problem is not being alone; it is that he is never allowed to be.

To be sure, modern Bangladesh possesses plenty of Orwellian machinery. Data collection, facial recognition infrastructure, and vaguely worded digital speech laws mean that anyone posting online can theoretically fall foul of the state. These tools are centralized and have an author. 

Yet underneath this digital panopticon sits the older social system Elias described. No algorithm is required to police behavior when an entire community does it for free. No security officer needs to knock on a writer’s door when a family WhatsApp group can produce the same chilling effect through a few pointed messages. 

Digital tools have simply given ancient social mechanisms a faster, wider reach. A rumour that once took days to cross a courtyard now requires only a screenshot and ten seconds. The impulse, however, remains collective rather than bureaucratic.

It is worth resisting the urge to find a single villain pulling the strings. A solitary Big Brother makes for a cleaner narrative. But as Elias demonstrates through Osman’s exhausting, fragmented interior life, surveillance does not require a dictator to be absolute. 

It merely requires enough ordinary people paying just enough attention. Nobody runs this apparatus from a control room. It is scattered across a thousand unremarkable faces—a neighbour, a cousin, a local political cadre, a colleague. 

Osman never learns which one mattered most. Neither will we.

—

Mahmud Newaz Joy is a Dhaka-based writer and political analyst