Not many remember an event last November rekindling a new economic domain in the country. MoTIV, an integrated creative studio in Uganda, was awarded the very first UNESCO-Bangladesh Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman International Prize for the Creative Economy. Our Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina handed the biennial award and 50,000 USD (paid by Bangladesh) in front of the UNESCO Director General Audray Azoulay on the occasion of the 100th Birth Anniversary of the country's Father of Nation (and her own father).
Twenty-two years earlier (1999), also in November, UNESCO made Bangladesh's Language Movement Martyr's Day (Shahid Dibosh), February 21, International Mother's Language Day. A similar message was robustly emitted: there is global mileage if a country promotes its own culture. This new interest, dubbed 'creative economy', can be found "at the interface of culture, business and technology." That is how the British Council announced its "Creative Bangladesh" workshop in March 2014. That workshop pointed out where advances could be made: "in the areas of fashion and design, music, film and publishing."
John Howkins first fleshed out this domain in 2001 through his The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas (Penguin 2001), then extended it into Creative Ecologies: Where Thinking is a Proper Job (Routledge 2009), before reiterating the underlying common theme-- Invisible Work: The Future of the Office is in Your Head (September Publishing, 2021). 'Creative economy' grew sporadically and without the kind of coordination other businesses in any economy and governments in policy-making utilise to navigate profitable prospects.
According to the United Nations, 'creative economy' has grown into a 2 trillion USD industry, engaging over 50 million individuals and contributing anywhere between 2 per cent and 7 per cent to a country's annual growth-rate (the global growth-rate presently being 6.1 per cent). The interesting question arises why Bangladesh is not plucking more out of this opportunity, especially when we often happen to be gung-ho about our culture and traditions, even more so when external agencies, such as the UNESCO, do the footwork for us. When we have so much to offer and the time is so ripe, we must stand up and project our culture before other globalising cultures (such as social media, Facebook, Youtube, Internet, and so forth) drown them out of considerations.
We boast the first Asian Nobel Prize-winning literary figure who has written the national anthem of two countries (Bangladesh's and India's) and influenced a third (Sri Lanka's), and a Rebel Poet who was intimately known across "an empire where the sun would never set" until he and other nationalists within that empire came along. The socio-cultural and linguistic platforms they vehemently defended and advocated found direct expression, after the British Empire was dissolved in South Asia in 1947, by our Language Movement. It spawned as pure a nationality-based country in 1971 as any other, whether in South Asia, all of Asia, indeed the world.
Surely there is more than history and identity here: remember how some of the leading maestros of pop, rock, or folk music in the English language gathered in Madison Square during August 1971 to chalk out an album for an embryonic 'Bangladesh'? Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and so forth, were not just pitching their own culture, but also dissolving barriers between cultures by energising evaporating idiosyncratic creativities. Note how famine and other human crises worldwide have since attracted the Dylan/ Harrison/ Shankarmodel of bringing music not only for relieving human sufferings and miseries, but also globalising music as an instrument of diplomatic suasion: the best-selling Do They Know it's Christmas, arranged for Bob Geldof's and Midge Ure's Live Aid concert for Ethiopia in 1983-4, stands out in this list.
We could not have a sunnier occasion to cash in on this movement. Our Shaheed Dibosh became International Mother's Language Day just as the country embraced a neoliberal economic order. We all know how that leaves us today knocking on the doors of a 'developing' country. Our globally envious economic growth-rate has even bred talks of a 'developed' country emerging soon. Climbing towards the pinnacle since then, our RMG exports exemplify that subtle shift towards 'creative economy' from producing Main Street jeans, sweaters, shirts, and skirts, they have now ventured into haute-couture, the types seen only upon fashion models and fashion-exhibition planks, even then in selected cities across the world.
From 2009 we marched into a Digital Bangladesh platform, whose legacy are the 15-odd hi-tech parks being constructed across the country?harnessing, yes teenagers, the very software you spend more time on than your academic obligations in class. Who would believe Fleet, from remote Rajshahi, is already capitalising on these new windows by supporting Amazon and Walmart through e-commerce and advertisement, and patenting Flex, Fix, & Fleetbuy?
Advertising got a new face. Hitherto attracting staid and sedate clients like banks, the country was literally starved of 'creative' advertising outlets. For example, before building bridge, highway, port, railway, and tunnel megaprojects, we hardly saw billboards adorning them. Though we only see the tip of the advertising iceberg now, this creative outlet is beginning to burst out of its historical dormancy, with Fleet and other companies planting footprints in software realms?a dominant medium today globally.
Similarly, from 2010, Bangladesh and India sought to open up border haats, to permit, among others, many border tribes in the northern and eastern Bangladesh to produce and exchange their own culturally diverse wares. That is another instance of unwittingly tapping the right buttons in this 'creative economy' era. We need to promote many such initiatives, particularly as clusters of diasporas Bangladeshis abroad now seek greater trans-boundary exchanges. Sylhetis pioneered this, one reason why the country's 'third' international airport is located there. With Cox's Bazaar airport becoming the country's 'fourth' international airport, we hope to unleash more 'creative economic' networks, this time with our Southeast Asian neighbours.
As evident, there is no fixed rule, and the skills can never be monopolised. All that is needed is for our youth to become enterprising and divert their interest into anything worth an outlet. Remember how Dhaka muslin was only a rural home-stitched item which went on to conquer the world's wardrobes and hearts? We may have many talents like that inside us that do not need a bank-loan for a start-up. Only by 'airing' them can our own stock-market value climb. As our budding highways become increasingly strewn with not just billboards, but also hotels, restaurants, and sweet-shops, even eco-parks, we sense 'global' potentials. Converting non-material inheritances into material benefits is an idea whose time could not be more flourishing.
Our small and medium enterprises (SMEs) typify this. These welcome cottage industries of the Dhaka muslin type, but it is hard to not latch on to the 21st century drive towards external expansion. Two quips should get our juices flowing in this regard. The first is paraphrasing William Shakespeare: "All the world's a [market],And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts . . . ." Next comes the famous New York Yankees' manager, Yogi Berra, whose 'It ain't over 'til it's over', should be our everlasting buzz-word! Can we, even in our haphazard ways, make 'creative economics' the country's next fulcrum the way the RMG sector had been before?
Dr Imtiaz A Hussain is Professor, Department of Global Studies & Governance, Independent University, Bangladesh.
