Meyele Bratakatha: Depicting Women’s Life in Bengali Society through Oral Folklore
Author : Dr. Surojit Sen Gupta
Abstract :
The term ‘folklore’ is used in two senses: first as a way of living of the people and second, as a discipline that studies peoples’ way of life. So far as the first concept is concerned, “…. Folklore is the lore, erudition, knowledge or teachings of a folk, large social unit, kindred group, tribe, race of nation, primitive or civilized throughout its history” (Boggs, 2005). Folklore is taken into consideration, the group identity of the folk, creating the lore and also living within it, comes to the fore. A symbiotic relationship exists between the individual and the group to which they belong. So within the periphery of the broader notion of culture there may be, and remains, a number of folk groups having their unique lores. There is no denying the fact that folklore possesses its own uniqueness but conforms to the basic pattern of culture in a general sense. The complementary relationship between society and folklore may be viewed by taking into account the social functions of folklore. One of such folklore among the Bengali community is a Brathakatha, a Bengali ritual narrative, which is orally transmitted through generations among womenfolk in association with a special type of rite for their wish-fulfillment. Bratakatha has been studied since long past by different fields of scholars. Primarily bratakatha was studied from literary viewpoint and afterwards from anthropological and sociological angles. Bratakatha supplies authentic evidential documents of existing socio-cultural milieu. It is the most effective medium of folklore which reflects the way of life of Bengali folk society without any distortion. Thus, in this backdrop the present paper explores the potentiality of bratakatha, one of the intangible cultural heritages of the Bengali women folk, which is on the verge of extinction with the spread of modernization, urbanization, westernization and globalization.
Keywords :
Bengali, society, bratakatha, womenfolk, rituals, traditions
