Class Conflict and Class Struggle in the film Jibon Theke Neya by Zahir Raihan: A Marxist Analysis

Zahir Raihan’s Jibon Theke Neya (1970) is considered one of the most important political films in the history of Bangladeshi cinema. Through the film Jibon Theke Neya (1970), Zahir Raihan has shown the exploitation and oppression of West Pakistanis towards the people of subjugated East-Pakistan and the rise of Bengali nationalism against it, by telling the story of a family in a seemingly modest application of metaphor. The aim of this article is to study the class conflict and class struggle between the characters reflected in the film Jibon Theke Neya (1970). This analysis uses Karl Marx’s Class Conflict Theory as a theoretical basis, and the underlying meaning of the film is found through semantic analysis. An analysis of the results of the article shows that there are significant class conflicts and class struggles among the characters portrayed in the film. Social and political conflicts have emerged simultaneously through the metaphors in the film Jibon Theke Neya (1970). There are two aspects to this. Primarily, the ideological conflict between individual to individual in the family. The other is a structural conflict of political or state power, where opposing political ideologies of the state compete with each other. At the same time, the study observes that when inequality becomes severe, in the final stage, society moves on the path of a revolution through class conflict.