Literacy as enlightenment: Written language, activist mediation, and the state in rural Tamilnadu, India.

Abstract

This dissertation examines efforts to induce social change through social activism in the Arivoli Iyakkam, the Light of Knowledge or Enlightenment Movement, in southern India. It is based on research conducted in Pudukkottai district in rural Tamilnadu. Through an ethnography of activism, the dissertation argues that universal adult literacy of a particular variety, enlightened literacy, lies at the heart of certain modern conceptions of political agency. The goal of enlightened literacy is to produce human subjects that form themselves through the written word. The Arivoli Iyakkam is a mass-literacy movement begun in the early 1990's as a partnership between the state and non-governmental actors. The majority of the movement's activists are villagers. The Arivoli Iyakkam has focused primarily on women learners among the district's rural poor, in an effort to use literacy education to change their lives for the better by giving them the tools to represent themselves and to engage with the world around them. Its participants often liken it to the struggle for Indian Independence because of its impact on their lives. The dissertation's chapters are organized around four interrelated analytical themes: (1) the social morphology of state-sponsored grassroots activism, (2) the gendering of literacy in development as feminine, (3) the dialectics of critical pedagogy, and (4) the role of written language in rural governance. In spreading literacy as a means of enlightening and empowering rural Tamil women, the Arivoli Iyakkam in Pudukkottai has paradoxically sought to remake the very people that it aims to empower. Socialization to written language in literacy activism is also socialization to modernist perceptions of sociality and progressive time, stigmatizing what it portrays as anachronistic. In seeking to give the rural poor a voice, Arivoli's activists have thus been made to confront social difference as semiotic and temporal problems, and are grappling with the resulting paradoxes.