Abstract

This article attempts to question and counter the long-held Eurocentric perspective which claims that interest in children and their activities in Bengali-speaking society was predominantly engendered by contact with the West during the colonial era, particularly from the early nineteenth century. Using Maṅgala-kāvya poems, composed between the early fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as a valuable repository of folkloric ideas, this article analyses how Bengali folk tradition exalted both children and their play long before the establishment of colonial rule. It argues that the folk poets of Maṅgala-kāvyas did not simply celebrate play as an innocent exercise of children, but showed a strong inclination to divide the world of childhood play in accordance with the gender- and caste-based arrangements of traditional Bengali society. Their depictions of play thus reflect both notions of idealized childhood and dominant values about gender and caste—a folkloric enterprise that served as an effective vehicle of cultural transmission in pre-colonial Bengal.

摘要

本文试图质疑和反驳长期持有的欧洲中心主义观点，该观点声称对儿童及其在孟加拉语社会中的活动的兴趣主要是在殖民时代，特别是从 19 世纪初期与西方的接触中产生的。使用Maṅgala-kāvya创作于 15 世纪早期和 19 世纪早期的诗歌作为宝贵的民俗思想宝库，本文分析了孟加拉民间传统在殖民统治建立之前很久是如何提升儿童和他们的游戏的。它认为，Maṅgala-kāvyas 的民间诗人并没有简单地将游戏作为儿童的一种天真的活动来庆祝，而是表现出强烈的倾向，即根据传统孟加拉社会基于性别和种姓的安排来划分童年游戏的世界。因此，他们对游戏的描绘既反映了理想化的童年观念，也反映了关于性别和种姓的主导价值观——这是一种民俗事业，在前殖民时期的孟加拉邦是一种有效的文化传播工具。