5. Preserving womanhood
The Bengali community is a society with a dominance of religious values (östör 1980). Most of the members of this society, especially whose who are living in the rural areas, irrespective of their religious identity badly follow the religious traditions, rules and values in their daily life. As a part of this process the Bengali Muslim people expect that the adult females members should maintain their womanhood with pardā4 at every aspect of their daily life (Gardner 1998), especially they should keep their sensitive body parts away from the eyes of the male persons. Some BEE hand gestures exhibited by Bengali people, especially women also reflect this perception of the society. For example, in doing Monazat—a part of Muslim prayer—Bengali Muslim people have to perform a kind of BEE hand gesture known as the curved back-palms (see the Figures 5a and 5b). But it is worth interesting that this gesture consists of two different shapes which are distinctively visualized in the performance of male and female persons. For instance, in performing this gesture Bengali Muslim women always make unmarked attached curved back-palms in front of their breasts so that these sensitive organs are not exposed to the audience. In fact, in response to the socio-religious pressure women subconsciously perform this form of hand gesture to maintain their womanhood. In contrast, since male persons do need to encounter such religious imperativeness, they do not bother this hence perform both attached curved back-palms (unmarked) and detached curved back-palms (marked) BEE hand gesture in doing Monazat. Here the term unmarked indicates that this form is generated by both male and female, whereas the word marked denotes that such gesture form is mainly avoided by female persons (De Lacy 2006).