Paribar of a Moslem Rural Village of Chittagong District, East Pakistan

Abstract

This is a result of a research on the domestic group (paribar) of a Moslem population in East Pakistan. The field work was conducted by the author during 1962-64 under the auspices of the Australian National University. The author tries to describe aspects of paribar and suggests that: i) Paribar basically takes a small and simple form of a man and his wife and their unmarried children, which is called pritak paribar. The larger extended form, ekanno paribar can be organized temporarily but it is always unstable due to the conflicts inherent in the structure. It is always easily breakable. Even a pritak paribar. by its implicit tendency, always changes to a smaller and simpler form. ii) Paribar is always disfunctional and cannot work as a meaningful unit in the village life. iii) Paribar members are quite heterogeneous and this makes the substitution of a member by the other very difficult. Because of this condition, paribar is comparatively speaking vulnerable against any change inside as well as that outside. iv) Paribar shows weak unity as a group and individual option in the behaviour of its members is usually accepted at its full extent. v) Paribar has elasticity in its form and in the mode of behaviour inside. Phenomenally, it always shows a wide range of variation in many aspects. vi) Within the context of paribar, several sub-cultural complexes of the Islamic origin often contradict each other at concrete level. This contradictions among ideologies and cultural complexes make paribar less meaningful in the village life. Relationship outside of paribar context like friendship often plays a greater role in village life. All these phenomena, to some extent, can be traced its origin to the ideologies and cultural complexes related to the Islamic religion of the village; esp., to the Islamic law, ideology related to the recogition of the sovereignty of independent individual, and that of the unchallengeable strength of human desire, esp., sex. Author assumes that we may be able to find similar state of affairs in the other Islamic societies.