Grammatical gender as the basis to create gender metaphors in Indian political discourse

Abstract

This paper is based on a study that explores the role of grammatical gender in the personification of abstract concepts in contemporary Indian political discourse where Hindi is the predominantly used language. Hindi has a two-gender system and the mapping of bio-logical sex and grammatical gender is strengthened by highly inflected sentence-structure which reinforces gender-marking all through the sentence and discourse. The present paper analyses the construction of three particular concepts (in Hindi) from contemporary Indian socio-political discourse – mehengaai (‘inflation‘; fem.), vikaas (‘development‘; masc.) and bhaasha (‘language‘; fem.) – in 10 texts, to study the role played by grammatical gender in the metaphorical construction of these concepts. The analysis shows how the cultural frame of patriarchy and ‘grammatical gender-biological sex’ mapping interact to create these gender metaphors. The larger cultural frame provides access to culture-specific mental models of man-woman relations, which is mapped on to masculine and feminine nouns to produce gender-based personification metaphors