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Paper short abstract

This paper explores Garhwali women’s folktales, where ripening kafal (bayberry) and cuckoo songs express grief, and ecological knowledge. Through sensory metaphors, these narratives trace human–nature entanglements, preserving memory and revealing how folk speech shapes cultural understanding.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the role of metaphorical folk speech in Garhwali women’s oral traditions in the Uttarakhand Himalayas, with particular attention to the interplay between ecological knowledge, memory, and gendered experience. In this region, nature is not merely a backdrop for storytelling but acts as a co-producer of meaning, morality, and shared cultural “common sense.” Through ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of oral narratives and songs, the study investigates how metaphors drawn from mountains, rivers, forests, and seasonal cycles encode survival strategies, social norms, and ecological consciousness.

A central case is the folktale Kafal pako, main ni chaakho (“The kafals [bayberries] have ripened but I have not tasted them”), in which a mother-daughter misunderstanding over fruit harvest serves as a metaphor for women’s labor, grief, and resilience. The narrative illustrates cyclical patterns of social expectation, emotional labor, and ecological interdependence. The recurring imagery of shriveling and regenerating kafals, and the mother and daughter reborn as cuckoos in local lore, exemplifies how folk metaphors mediate human and non-human relations while preserving collective memory.

The paper argues that Garhwali oral traditions, through their sensory-rich metaphorical language, transform figurative speech into forms of ecological activism, making women’s embodied experiences legible while sustaining ethical and cultural reflection. By situating these narratives within the framework of sensus communis and the phenomenology of feeling “as” versus “with”, this study contributes to understanding how folk speech sharpens shared knowledge, naturalizes cultural values, and reimagines what constitutes common sense in human-environment relations.