Desk Report
Oniket Desk
Every evening, in millions of households across Bangladesh, the television screen glows with the elaborate sets, melodramatic scores, and exaggerated storylines of Indian television serials. Mostly from leading channels of Kolkata, but extending to non-Bangla Indian channel presentations, including content in foreign owned OTT platforms.
What began as a cross border cultural curiosity has, over two decades, evolved into something far more consequential: a quiet but powerful reshaping of the aesthetic sensibilities, narrative instincts, and linguistic habits of an entire generation of Bangladeshis, including those who aspire to be its next writers. The consequences for Bangladesh’s own literary and cultural heritage are neither trivial nor sufficiently debated.
The Depth of the Influence
Indian Bengali television serials are consumed not merely as entertainment but as a form of cultural immersion. For large sections of the Bangladeshi audience (particularly women and young people in both urban and rural settings) these serials constitute their primary daily engagement with dramatic storytelling. Over sustained exposure, the narrative grammar of these programmes begins to feel natural: stories driven by familial conspiracy, moral binaries of absolute good and elaborate evil, female characters whose central struggle is domestic rather than social, and resolutions that privilege tradition and patriarchal restoration over individual liberation.
Many young Bangladeshi writers are avid consumers of this content. The prolonged exposure to such content is quietly rewiring their literary imagination. Creative writing workshops and literary editors across Dhaka increasingly report a discernible shift in the fiction produced by writers in their twenties and early thirties: a preference for melodrama over nuance, for plot driven conflict over character driven interiority, and for social settings that inadvertently reflect West Bengali Hindu middle class domestic life rather than the distinctly Bangladeshi rural, riverine, pluralist or urban casual and experience that has always been the richest material of this nation’s literature.
The Linguistic Erosion
Perhaps the most measurable literary consequence of Indian serial dominance is linguistic. The Bengali spoken in these serials is the Kolkata dialect that is grammatically and phonetically distinct from the Dhaka centred standard Bangladeshi “Bangla” and considerably removed from the rich regional dialects of Sylhet, Chittagong, Noakhali, and Barishal that have historically fed some of Bangladesh’s most vibrant literary voices.
Young Bangladeshi writers increasingly code switch in their prose, borrowing vocabulary, idiom, and even sentence rhythm from the Kolkata dialect absorbed through serial consumption. This is not harmless cultural exchange; it is a linguistic displacement that gradually erodes the authenticity and distinctiveness of the Bangladeshi literary voice, the same voice that produced Jasimuddin’s pastoral poetry, Sufia Kamal’s romance poems, Syed Waliullah’s existential fiction, and Selina Hossain’s socially engaged novels.
The Vanishing of Local Stories
Literary culture is sustained by the stories a society tells itself about itself. When the dominant storytelling medium in a country consistently imports narratives from elsewhere, the local story begins to feel less worthy of telling. Young Bangladeshi writers from rural backgrounds who carry within them stories of floods, of char lands, of garment workers, of madrasa life, of the Liberation War’s unrecorded margins are increasingly finding that their own material feels uncinematic, undramatic, and uncommercial by the aesthetic standards set by glossy Indian serial production. They remain ignored, commercially unsuccessful, unread and misunderstood by editors, publishers and readers.
Most Indian serials are not story-built, they are built with an aim of TRP growth. Literature has a market, but it also possesses positive externalities. Following entertainment content to seek stories for literature is not the method of securing positive externalities of reading. The process is moving in the wrong direction. Literature should produce visual content, not the other way around. Unfortunately, in the case of Bangladesh, the direction is incorrect. This is probably one of the reasons why Bangladesh’s own literature and OTT content are struggling. This is a profound cultural loss disguised as entertainment.
Cultural and Media Policy Reforms
Addressing the harmful effects of foreign media saturation requires not censorship, but a proactive, well resourced policy environment that elevates and sustains local cultural production. Several reform measures are both feasible and urgent. Censorship alone is both practically unenforceable and philosophically untenable. Policy environment can be built and implemented.
Bangladesh’s cable television regulatory framework must be modernized. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission and the Ministry of Information should enforce existing content quotas for Bangladeshi programming on cable and satellite platforms with genuine penalties for non compliance.
A mandatory prime-time allocation requiring cable operators to broadcast a defined percentage of locally produced drama, literature-based adaptations, and documentary content during peak viewing hours would immediately create both market demand and financial incentive for quality Bangladeshi production.
A National Literature and Media Development Fund should be established, financed through a levy on foreign satellite channel licence fees. This fund should specifically support the adaptation of Bangladeshi literary works such as novels, short stories, and poetry collections, into high-production-value television dramas and web series. When young viewers see the stories of Hasan Azizul Haque, Akhtaruzzaman Ilias or Selim Al Deen rendered with the visual sophistication they generally associate with Indian serials, the literary imagination of a generation can be reclaimed.
The national school and university curriculum must integrate contemporary Bangladeshi literature more boldly and creatively. Reading lists that are dominated by classical texts disconnected from modern life fail to build the bridge between literary heritage and lived experience that young writers need. Creative writing as a formal, examined discipline should be introduced at the secondary and higher secondary levels, with mentoring programmes connecting emerging writers to established literary figures through government supported residencies and workshops.
Community and public libraries that are chronically underfunded and underutilised should be reinvested as cultural hubs offering storytelling events, literary cafes, and digital reading platforms tailored to young audiences. Making Bangladeshi literature physically and digitally accessible is a prerequisite for making it culturally competitive against the relentless convenience of satellite television.
Reclaiming the Bangladeshi Story
The influence of Indian television serials on Bangladesh’s literary culture is not a crisis of external aggression. It is a crisis of internal neglect. When a society fails to invest sufficiently in its own storytelling infrastructure, imported narratives will inevitably fill the vacuum. Bangladesh possesses a literary tradition of extraordinary depth, diversity, and emotional richness. What it urgently needs is the policy will, the institutional investment, and the cultural confidence to place that tradition at the centre of its young writers’ imaginative world.
