By Sanaa Bashar

Historically, media has been used as a fierce form of rebellion which has produced material effects and altered the course of history repeatedly. Across the region of Bengal this struggle has never ceased. From the Bengal Gazette of 1780 through Ram Mohan Roy’s Sambad Kaumudi in 1821, the Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1868, and the Jugantar paper in 1906, the press in Bengal was never merely a medium for information, but a battlefield for power. Colonial authorities understood this well, and their attempts to censor, suppress, and control the press were almost as consistent as the resistance itself. This dynamic did not end with the retreat of colonialist powers from the Bengal region. Starting from the Swadeshi movement till contemporary Bangladesh, dominant powers have continuously attempted to silence media that threatens their authority, and the media has continuously found ways to survive, adapt, and resist. These historical patterns reveal a deeper ongoing battle between the struggle over media and the struggle for political power itself. Media in Bengal has long served as a form of resistance, culminating in the Swadeshi movement, serving as a catalyst for liberation in 1971, and being a point of fear in contemporary times. Ultimately, what has changed is not the tremendous power of the media, but who controls it and how power responds to it. 

Applying Political Scientist Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, as explained in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, this article examines how revolutionary newspapers and nationalist pamphlets served as a form of print capitalism. Through their circulation of shared ideas, these mediums of print helped foster a horizontal identity among Bengalis across both time periods. As new technologies changed the media landscape, radio broadcasts helped spread communication. This enabled similar patterns of language standardization and mass circulation. Building on Anderson’s idea that print capitalism standardizes communication and makes collective identities “imaginable,” this framework shows how Bengalis in all three periods saw themselves as part of a unified political community, even while they faced different kinds of imperial and state repression.

Additionally, this article will use the work of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist political theorist, whose concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony are outlined in the chapters “Hegemony and Separation of Powers” and “The Modern Prince” in his book Selections from the Prison Notebooks. According to Gramsci, hegemony operates through the superstructure (civil society, media, school, and state), shaping dominant ideas and norms so powerfully that they are accepted as “common sense.” By cultivating consent in this way, the superstructure supports the interests of certain dominant groups and helps prolong the underlying economic structure that keeps them in power. At the same time, Gramsci conceptualizes counter-hegemony as the organized effort to reconstitute an existing but fragmented collective will into a national-popular force capable of challenging this dominance. He describes this as an effort that requires political leadership, cultural transformation, and the active mobilization of ordinary people as opposed to spontaneous or purely economic forms of resistance. This framework looks at how British colonial authorities, the West Pakistani state, and the Hasina regime maintained control,  and how Bengalis utilized media to challenge these power structures and build subaltern political consciousness. Together, Gramsci and Anderson’s frameworks uncover how media served as the foundation for which collective political will could be expressed and directed against those in power. 

Swadeshi Movement (1905-1911)

Sparked by the British colonial decision to partition Bengal in 1905, the Swadeshi movement aimed to resist colonial authority and foster Bengali unity. Central to the movement was the concept of Swadeshi, meaning “of one’s own country,” which led to boycotting British goods and promoting Indian businesses during this time. Large protests, public meetings, and the burning of foreign goods rallied people around the cause. This political awakening grew with the rise of vernacular press, as revolutionary newspapers mobilized people across vast distances through nationalist ideas, helping to form a shared political identity. These forms of media not only helped Bengalis imagine themselves as part of a larger political community but also created space for organized resistance, showing how collective action could combat colonial hegemony.​ The Swadeshi Movement highlights a period when media, political consciousness, and resistance came together in Bengal not merely as discourse but as direct economic and cultural action, marking a strategic shift from petition to popular defiance. 

The role of media in forming a national consciousness among Bengalis during the Swadeshi Movement through the circulation of shared ideas, leading to the emergence of a national identity, is a perfect reflection of what Benedict Anderson calls an ‘imagined community’. Revolutionary newspapers like Sandhya played a central role by breaking away from the elite and using colloquial Bengali in writing to reach urban and semi-literate audiences. The shift in news language extended the movement beyond the urban elite, drawing new readers into a shared sense of belonging. Pamphlets carrying political messages further broadened the reach of Swadeshi ideals. For example, pamphlets written by Ramendrasundar Trivedi, titled Banglalakshmi Bratakatha, circulated far beyond urban centers. These pamphlets introduced rural village women to Swadeshi ideology through the affiliation of these ideals with Hindu idioms. Additionally, they presented participation in the movement as a devotional Hindu responsibility. This approach allowed for Hindu rural readers to be brought into the same imagined public as the city’s newspaper audience. Together, these forms of vernacular print capitalism enabled political messages to circulate across class and geography.

Building on this expansion of political consciousness, the British sought to maintain their ideological and economic dominance over Bengal through the superstructure, a form of control that Gramsci termed “hegemony.” Economically, the British controlled trade and production, extracting wealth from India to benefit their home industries and entrenching the colony in a state of economic dependency. Additionally, colonial laws such as the Sedition Acts and the 1908 Newspapers (Incitement to Offenses) Act effectively banned influential revolutionary newspapers like Sandhya. This was a clear-cut example of the British attempting not to loosen their control ideologically through the banning of print media that played an influential role in changing notions of what was accepted to be “common sense.”

Although the resistance of Bengalis through print was constantly attempted to be shut down through British policies, the emergence of new journals such as Dharma and Nayak after former ones had been banned reflects the resilience of Bengali intellectuals in further challenging the British and rebuilding counter-hegemonic platforms. Additionally, through popular revolutionary newspapers that encouraged the boycotting of foreign goods by people in British India, revolutionary media challenged the economic dominance that the British held, representing a form of counter-hegemonic action in the economic sphere.

Similarly, Indian writer and nationalist Sri Aurobindo directly opposed the ideological control of the colonial superstructure through his articles in the notable newspaper Bande Mataram. For example, Aurobindo argued in his piece “The New Nationalism” that nationalists were not anarchists, but rather individuals committed to the nation’s freedom, willing to self-sacrifice for collective liberation. From a Gramscian perspective, newspapers like Bande Mataram contributed to building up ideological resistance against colonialist values and offered a form of political leadership that articulated goals and strategies for the movement by framing nationalism as a moral and political duty rather than mere lawlessness. This allowed for anti-colonial notions to become widely accepted as normal, communicating a certain set of shared anti-British values and nationalist beliefs among Bengalis and other Indians across the subcontinent, which weakened the British monopoly over political “common sense.” Collectively, these acts of economic resistance, strengthening of political leadership, and moral reframing generated a counter-hegemony capable of contesting the ideological and material foundations of colonial rule. 

While the use of media was able to rally people across Bengal over the idea of an India free from colonial rule, it ultimately struggled to mobilize the rest of the subcontinent as intensely. Following the 1911 annulment of Bengal’s partition and the relocation of the British Indian capital from Calcutta to New Delhi, many of the region’s leading intellectuals had lost the national influence they held previously, becoming confined to a more localized regional sphere of political life. The reasons for the limitations of the movement are seen through how the movement did not fulfill certain aspects of Gramsci’s Modern Prince—the mechanism through which a popular national collective will can challenge hegemony. 

According to Gramsci, economic resistance by itself is insufficient; the Modern Prince requires mobilizing ordinary people through a deeper cultural reorientation that is capable of challenging hegemonic power. In the case of the Swadeshi Movement, while the boycott of British goods allowed for economic resistance, the use of Hindu-centered imagery in Swadeshi print media limited the movement’s ability to build an inclusive national-popular bloc. Pamphlets like Banglalaskhmi Bratakatha relied on Hindu mythological idioms to mobilize village women, revealing how calls for Muslim-Hindu unity were undercut by the movement’s dependence on culturally specific symbols that many Muslims found alienating.

This problem was even more pronounced in pamphlets such as Sakharam Deuskar’s Shivaji, which openly celebrated the seventeenth-century Hindu warrior-king as a national hero. Although the text superficially claimed that Shivaji’s virtues would unite Hindus and Muslims, its rhetoric quickly turned exclusionary. At the end of his pamphlet, Deuskar urged his audience to “establish religion by the strength of the arm” and to “treat the iconoclasts like dogs”. For Muslim readers, who were frequently cast as “iconoclasts,” this language implied that the Swadeshi struggle was inseparable from a Hindu revivalist agenda that cast Muslims as historical enemies rather than partners in anti-colonial struggle. 

This cultural exclusivity also revealed deeper divides, since the movement’s Hindu gentry leadership never effectively reached the Muslim peasantry, and the class and religious gulf between them made it nearly impossible to build a shared national project. In the end, the Swadeshi Movement illustrated the possibilities and limits of media in imagining a nation, but not being able to completely forge the unified political will that Gramsci’s Modern Prince demands.

Bangladesh Liberation War (1969-1974)

In the years leading up to 1971, the media played an even more urgent role in shaping political awareness during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Separated from the rest of Pakistan by India and politically sidelined, East Pakistan was often seen as a burden on the state. At this time, the Bengali population of East Pakistan faced government-sponsored violence and repression; which sought to suppress their linguistic identity, culture, and political autonomy in the name of nation-building. Policies such as the imposition of Urdu as the state language effectively marginalized Bengalis by restricting their ability to fully participate in government and public life. In response to Bengali resistance, the Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight. In the name of “maintaining order,” the operation mass murdered Bengali civilians, marking the start of a full-scale genocide. In response, the emergence of Bengali newspapers and radio broadcasts was crucial for allowing Bengali voices to be heard and communicating the reality of the atrocities occurring to local and international audiences. The cost of reporting was made evident through the fate of journalists like Serajuddin Hossain, executive editor of the Daily Ittefaq, who was abducted and killed by Pakistani forces in December 1971 for his role in reporting the atrocities. Media sources like the Daily Ittefaq helped nurture shared sentiments among Bengalis through print language and radio broadcasts, while simultaneously challenging dominant West Pakistani narratives.

In the case of Bangladesh, radio broadcasts and newspapers played a dire role, especially during the genocide of Bengalis in 1971. Both forms of media, published primarily in the vernacular language of Bangla, allowed Bengali-speaking audiences to understand and internalize messages about the ongoing crisis. In cities, villages, and refugee camps, Bengalis tuned into major radio broadcasts, hearing identical updates and appeals, which fostered a shared awareness among listeners. Stations like Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra and Bengali newspapers like Ittefaq, Sangbad, and the exile-printed Joy Bangla exposed rape, killings, and demolition across East Pakistan. These publications brought together dispersed audiences who shared frustration over the atrocities and helped inspire the movement for an independent nation. In this way, both newspapers and radio broadcasts served as forms of media capitalism that built emotional appeal and national sentiment around the cause of the Liberation War, fostering a Bengali “imagined community” as described by Anderson.

These forms of media unfolded against long-standing West Pakistani hegemony that was both ideological and economic. Economically, East Pakistan generated most of the country’s foreign exchange through its jute industry, accounting for 70% of both West and East Pakistan’s GDP, yet the bulk of state investment and private capital flowed to West Pakistan, reinforcing structural inequality between West and East Pakistan. Ideologically, West Pakistan exercised its dominance through the Information Ministry of Pakistan and Radio Pakistan, which suppressed any reporting on the genocide until July 1971, circulated fabricated narratives of “normalcy,” and depicted Bengalis as violent separatists while simultaneously banning Bengali newspaper publications and bombing radio stations. These actions were deliberate measures by the West Pakistani government to maintain its economic and ideological dominance, exemplifying Gramsci’s concept of hegemony by reinforcing an economic structure that benefits them and shaping public perceptions to secure their authority.

Despite this, radio stations such as Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra functioned as integral counter-hegemonic mechanisms, which did more than just spread information. They generated the cultural, political, and moral unity in Bangladesh, which philosopher Anotonio Gramsci argues is essential to the Modern Prince. The station broadcasted patriotic sentiments, updates on the war, and talk shows aimed at defaming West Pakistani propaganda. They sustained hope, reinforcing a shared Bengali identity and reshaping how ordinary people understood their place in the struggle. Additionally, the radio station broadcast coded messages that only the freedom fighters could understand, allowing them to coordinate military options. The ability of the broadcast radio to be powerful enough to guide mass resistance across the region, from freedom fighters to ordinary people, illustrates the strength of the political leadership and organizational direction that is necessary for the Modern Prince to be successful. 

Along with radio broadcasts, journalists, both local and global, allowed for news of the war atrocities to circulate, and print media allowed many to understand the true realities of what was happening in East Pakistan. In particular, the publication of “Genocide” by the Sunday Times made headlines internationally and exposed the war atrocities being carried out by the West Pakistani government, invoking sympathy from the global audience and allowing many state actors to stand in favor of Bangladesh. The extension of the struggle beyond borders demonstrates how the Bengali counter-hegemony developed from a local opposition to an internationally acknowledged moral endeavor, key to fulfilling the role of Modern Prince.

Contemporary Bangladesh (2024-2026)

The July Revolution of 2024 in Bangladesh reveals yet another chapter in Bengal’s long tradition of media-driven resistance, one that applies Anderson’s concept of “imagined community” in a distinctly contemporary form. Beginning as a student protest against job quotas, it rapidly transformed into a national uprising, unified not through newspapers or radios but through rap, slogans, graffiti, and social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, which served as a form of digital media capitalism. Through the use of popular hashtags like #QuotaReformNow and #JusticeForStudents, the widespread adoption of solid red profile photos to symbolize bloodshed and solidarity, and the release of protest songs like “Kotha Ko” encouraging people to speak up against the regime and “Awaaz Utha” which poetically exposes the irony of of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s famous March 7th Speech against the mass killings occurring under Hasina, Bangladeshis across class and geography were drawn into a shared political identity. From wealthy individuals to rickshaw drivers, the circulation of these shared sentiments and messages built what Anderson would deem a horizontal imagined community, one that extended beyond Bangladesh’s borders as international audiences witnessed the revolution’s grievances in real time.

These forms of media unfolded against the Hasina regime’s long-standing hegemonic control over Bangladesh’s political and cultural life. The Awami League maintained ideological dominance through its influence over civil society institutions, state media, and the suppression of dissenting voices, influencing what counted as political common sense in Bangladesh in strategic ways that protected the regime’s authority. This hegemony extended into the cultural sphere, where institutions and media outlets perceived as aligned with the regime reinforced a narrative that framed the regime’s authority as legitimate and its critics as destabilizing forces. In direct response, students, artists, and digital creators collectively dismantled this ideological dominance through decentralized media, with social media acting as what Gramsci would term a counter-hegemonic challenge to the dominant narratives of the ruling political party. Following the revolution and the ousting of Hasina, anti-India sentiments intensified, particularly after the killings of National Citizen Party leader Osman Hadi, amid allegations that the attackers fled to India. In response, mobs attacked the offices of Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, framing them as outlets of Indian influenced media, as well as renowned Bengali cultural institutions like Chhayanaut, which was largely labeled a promoter of Indian culture by attackers. While these acts were framed by some as resistance against Indian influence, the reality is more nuanced, shaped by decades of complex political entanglement between Bangladesh and one of its most significant neighbors. The deeper irony is that a revolution which demanded democratic reform has, in its aftermath, begun to reproduce the very forms of silencing it sought to dismantle. 

Examining both the July Uprising and the events that followed through Gramsci’s Modern Prince uncovers a quite complex case. In many respects, the revolution fulfilled the conditions of the Modern Prince exceptionally well. The traction gained through digital media enabled mass popular mobilization across class lines, the ousting of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina produced tangible political leadership through figures like Osman Hadi and the formation of the National Citizen Party, and the revolution achieved a genuine cultural transformation in how Bangladeshis understood their political agency. However, the attacks on media houses and cultural institutions in the revolution’s aftermath reveal the same fractures that limited the Swadeshi Movement’s fulfillment of the Modern Prince. Just as Swadeshi print media’s reliance on Hindu imagery alienated Muslim readers and prevented the construction of a truly inclusive national-popular bloc, the post-revolutionary targeting of journalism and cultural institutions risks producing a similar fragmentation, where the collective will that unified Bangladeshis against Hasina fractures along new ideological and communal lines. A country whose independence had journalism and free expression integral to its making must protect this vital right as it rebuilds, for the struggle over who controls the media and how power responds to it did not end with Hasina’s fall; it simply entered a new and unresolved chapter.