Gender, Culture and Tamil Folklore

This volume is a challenging and interesting one which consists of nine papers related to Tamil culture and folklore based on gender. After the first introductory paper that deals with cultural messages, genre and gender assignments, in the second paper ‘Contextual theory’ is used to prove the importance of the role of gender in a tale telling event and another one draws attention to the responses of audience, both female and male members, in the two events of rural and urban settings. Another paper attempts to analyze the female role, female voices, the conditions and hidden meanings of the voices found in Tamil oral literature. The contents of other papers on ‘Role of women in folk literature’, ‘Spirit possession and women’, ‘Depiction of heroines in different genres’, ‘The many faces of a Tamil woman’ which may provoke the readers’ thoughts in several ways regarding women’s eminence, intelligence, difference in genres and maturity of a woman that slowly develops from her childhood to old age, with special reference to Tamil culture. The last paper on ‘gender based proverbs’ shows how they mirror a particular culture and the intricacies of gender construction in Tamil culture. Scholars from various fields of Sociology, Feminism, Cultural Anthropology and Psychology will find the volume very useful and interesting, as the contents would provide the scholars with new findings such as women’s hatred and protest against their husbands, difference of a mother’s affection towards a son and a daughter, women’s intelligence with humour that creates tales and songs with hidden meanings.