On the Observation of New Age Females in Bengali Proverbs: an Empirical Study

Abstract

Abstract:Proverbs form an essential element of culture since they express the beliefs, values, and real-life experiences of the communities which produce and pass them on. In Bengali, probadmeans traditional sayings which show cultural norms, ideas of justice and injustice, andeveryday life. Because they contain the collective wisdom of a society, proverbs influencesocial attitudes and frequently reinforce gender stereotypes. For this reason, research intoBengali proverbs has so far mainly concentrated on their patriarchal character. Yet thisviewpoint fails to take into account other cultural meanings that recognize women'sresilience, their agency, and their intellectual abilities. In order to fill this gap, the presentstudy looks again at a number of selected Bengali proverbs from a cultural point of view thatis oriented towards women in order to examine their possible use in being recotextualized asnarratives about women's empowerment. It also looks at how contemporary womenunderstand these proverbs.The study makes use of a mixed-methods approach, involving a qualitative content analysisbased on Cliff Goddard's Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) together with aquestionnaire survey carried out among 100 women aged between 25 and 36 in Assam, India.The NSM framework enables a reinterpretation of the selected proverbs that is rooted in theculture, while the survey offers empirical evidence regarding whether these reinterpretationscorrespond with the current views of women.The results show that even though these proverbs came about in a patriarchal socialenvironment, their metaphorical structures also reflect women's resilience, their ability tocarry out multiple tasks, their intellectual skills, and their sense of agency. Instead ofillustrating a single patriarchal viewpoint, the proverbs display cultural bricolage by retainingalternative meanings which can be reinterpreted in an empowering way. Since the studyquestions one-dimensional interpretations of Bengali proverbs, it makes a contribution to thefields of folklore and gender studies and suggests an alternative approach for reclaimingtraditional sayings as means of promoting women's empowerment.