Bengali Women

“Where women are honored there the gods are pleased, but where they are not honored, no sacred rite yields rewards.”-Manu

“Woman is man’s better half, Woman is man’s bosom friend, Woman is redemption’s source, From woman springs the liberator.”

The supreme traditional values of Bengali women are fidelity, sincerity and self-sacrificing love.It is the woman’s noblest part to give herself unselfishly and always, that her husband may love and praise her, and her children rise up and call her blessed among women.

Such self-abnegation is the keynote of Bengali feminism. How different from the cult of Western emancipation.

In the West the sexes are at present torn almost to universal dissension with strife, distrust and recriminations. Apparently such antagonism is inconceivable to the mind of the loving, contented Hindu woman, who asks for nothing more than a perpetual deepening of her affection and solicitude for husband and children. She gains all by losing herself. It is nobler to serve than to lead, to heed than to teach, to obey than to command. Such is the highest ideal of the Eastern woman. “Vulgar equality “contrasted with this perfect happiness in the consciousness of the finer development of the emotions is a worthless toy.

The Bengali wife adores her husband with “passionate reverence”; and in return her husband offers her boundless tenderness and protection. He was taught to honour and love his mother; he is equally reverential and affectionate towards his wife and the mother of his children. The wife is the happy, willing servitor, companion, and disciple of the husband.

This power of the Bengali women is exerted not, as in Europe, by the young and attractive, but by mothers, grandmothers and widows. Manu declares: “The mother exceedeth a thousand fathers in the right to reverence, and in the function of teacher.

Wherever we find goddesses in a religion, there certainly exists a higher measure of esteem for women than among the faiths honoring only male deities. Half the Hindus revere Shakti, the female symbol of deity, and they address their god as She. Shiva is a personification of the male, Uma of the female.

However This purity of Bengali Women is being destroyed by western education, consumerism, television and growing atheism.