Arivoli Iyakkam
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Notes Introduction 1. “Arivoli Iyakkam” would be translated literally as “the Light of Knowledge movement,” although the word “Arivoli” is now commonly used to refer to Enlightenment rationality in Tamil cultural studies. 2. Historical accounts of Soviet and Chinese mass-literacy movements can be found in Clark (2000) and Peterson (1997), respectively. 3. It was as a result of a Total Literacy Campaign that took place in 1991–92, and of repeated efforts to organize literacy classes in villages since that time, that Pudukkottai’s female literacy rate rose from 44.2% to 60.9% according to the 2001 Census of India. The 2011 census suggests a 73.8% female literacy rate across the state of Tamil Nadu, with 80.3% overall. The current rural female literacy is estimated at 65.5%. Since its inception over twenty years ago, over thirty thousand volunteers have worked for the movement in the rural district of Pudukkottai alone. During the period of my research, in 2002–4, some fi ve thousand recently trained activists were conducting literacy lessons for women while running four hundred village libraries and reading rooms across the district. 4. India had already begun to liberalize its economy from an import-substitution-based, centrally planned mixed economy by opening markets and reducing protective tariffs under Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership in the mid-1980s. It was only after a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991, however, that the rural credit system was completely overhauled as part of a larger struc- tural adjustment plan. Financial sector reforms have been introduced since then in an attempt 214 Notes to Pages 9–21 to transform credit institutions, leading to an emphasis on microfi nance (Kalpana 2005; Lalitha and Nagarajan 2000). See also Deepak Nayyar (1996) for a macroeconomic overview of shifts in development policy under liberalization. 5. Partha Chatterjee (1993) and Sudipta Kaviraj (2010) have argued that the Nehruvian state asserted its legitimacy as the bearer of modernity through development projects that often were at odds with the very principals of democracy. 6. The early 1990s also marks the universalization of Panchayati Raj (decentralized democracy). The fi ndings of Heller (2005) and Tanabe (2007) have given reason for hope that the general devolution of state power has in fact opened new spaces for what Tanabe calls “vernacu- lar democracy.” Corbridge et al. (2005) remain more equivocal in their studies of local governance in northern and eastern India. 7. As James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) have argued, it is not always easy to distin- guish between state projects and social mobilization in the sphere of “civil society” in an era when some of the most important development work is being done by GONGOs—government orga- nized nongovernmental organizations. 8. See Arturo Escobar (1995) and Akhil Gupta (1998) for classic accounts of how the dis- course of development has portrayed a good part of the globe as “behind” and needing to “catch up” with the industrialized North; Ashis Nandy (2003) on how development requires a sacrifi ce of the present for the sake of the future; and Tania Li (2007) on continuities in development ideology from the colonial to the postcolonial. 9. I borrow the language of “infrastructure” from Craig Calhoun’s (1991, 1992) essays on modernity and from Brian Larkin’s (2008) ethnography of media technologies in northern Nigeria. 10. Benedict Anderson (1991), Elizabeth Povinelli (2006), Charles Taylor (2004), and Michael Warner (2002) are among the social theorists who have sought to theorize the sort of “stranger sociality” fi rst enabled by writing that sits at the core of modern understandings of national citizenship. 11. Maurice Bloch argues that it is within the paradigm of Enlightenment that “systems of communication are therefore to be judged in terms of their transparency,” that is, in terms of writing’s capacity to circumvent forms of social mediation (1998, 166). Both Goody (1977, 1986) and Lévi-Strauss (1973) are writing within this paradigm of Enlightenment insofar as they are both concerned with the question of the relation between writing and transparency. Jacques Derrida’s (1976) classic critique of Lévi-Strauss elaborates this argument concerning the role of transparency in the anthropologist’s fear of the written word. See Akhil Gutpa (2012, 192–95) for an overview of this debate and its signifi cance for the study of literacy and democracy in India. 12. Voter turnouts in recent elections are, in fact, consistently higher in constituencies with lower average rates of literacy in India (Yadav 2000). 13. Places where the Arivoli Iyakkam was a strong movement with widespread involvement at the grass roots include Virudunagar, Sivagangai, Tirunelveli, and Pudukkottai districts, and the Union Territory of Pondicherry. The neighboring state of Kerala was also a strong center for this type of literacy and science activism. 14. These people are what Steven Feierman (1990) calls “peasant intellectuals” whose livelihood often still depends on agriculture, or what Gramsci (1971, 14) would call “rural-type intellectuals.” 15. In the words of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, we stand in a “differential distance to the necessity immanent to the universe under examination” (1992, 41). 16. Venkatesh B. Athreya and Sheela Rani Chunkath (1996) and L. S. Saraswathi (2004) have provided the most comprehensive accounts of Arivoli Iyakkam activism in Pudukkottai District. Notes to Pages 21–46 215 Krishna Kumar’s (1993b) critique of the mass-literacy programs used the Pudukkottai Arivoli Iyakkam as a case to argue that these movements extended the penetration of the market econ- omy. The journalist P. Sainath’s (1996) best-selling Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts made Pudukkottai famous across India through its descriptions of the Arivoli Iyakkam. A number of other reports and critical essays have appeared on similar National Literacy Mission efforts across India (e.g., Agnihotri 1994; Kumar and Sankaran 2002; Mukher- jee 2003; Rao 1993; Saxena 1992, 1993). 1. On Being a “Thumbprint” 1. The thumbprint as a means of identifying criminals and policing populations was fi rst de- veloped in colonial Calcutta (Sengoopta 2003). In the southern Tamil-speaking region, males from certain castes deemed “criminal” under the Madras Presidency Criminal Tribes Act of 1911, such as the Piramalai Kallars, were systematically fi ngerprinted and even restricted to their villages (Pandian 2009). It is in part because of these histories of colonial policing and population control that using one’s thumbprint to document even attestation to a statement such as a petition carries with it an air of lowliness and criminality. 2. As when Rajnikanth’s character in the hit fi lm Annamalai (1992) is referred to by the vil- lains as a “ kaina¯ttu ” [thumbprint] while signing away his family’s land. A similar usage can be found in Hindi, ˙as˙ when Jonathan Parry discusses how the son of an uneducated steel worker de- risively called his father “stupid and ignorant, how he had done nothing for his children, how he was ‘nothing but a thumb-impression man!’ ( angutha-chhap admi )” (2004, 292). 3. I have placed the term “ce¯ri, ” the Dalit hamlet that sits outside the main upper-caste set- tlement, in quotation marks because of its derogatory connotations in contemporary Tamil. In Kovilpatti, where my fi eldwork was conducted, elders from the upper castes would still refer to the local Paraiyar settlement as the “ ce¯ri, ” whereas younger residents of the main settlement would refer to it as the “colony.” Dalits themselves would simply call it their “ u¯r ” or refer to it by name as Katrampatti Colony. No one called it by its offi cial government name of Indira Gandhi Nagar. See Diane Mines’s (2005) ethnography for a detailed account of contests over naming in Tirunelveli district. 4. There is plenty of evidence that such views may not be shared by Dalit agricultural labor- ers themselves. See Kapadia (1995) for a critique of Moffat’s (1979) emphasis on consensus. 5. Part of the all-India Public Distribution System (PDS). 6. This is an offi ce established as a government order under M. G. Ramachandran’s chief ministership in 1980, consolidating the three older hereditary offi ces of accountant, security guard, and tax collector into one post, though popularly still referred to by the older term of “ kanakkuppillai .” ˙ ˙˙ 7. Below poverty line (BPL) status was granted to any household making less than 24,200 rupees per year at the time of my research in 2002–4. Most households in Kovilpatti qualifi ed at the time. 8. This claim is quite suspect given all the evidence pointing toward widespread support for Hindu nationalist politics among the highly educated middle classes (Hansen 1999). 9. Charles E. Clark’s Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia (2000) provides a detailed account of the campaigns of 1923–27, and a useful point of comparison. 10. According to a communiqué issued by the CPI(M) in Kerala, Parameswaran was expelled for his “open rejection of Marxism-Leninism and the fundamental tenets of the party” ( Hindu , Feb. 16, 2004). 11. Note the execution of a very Nehruvian ideal of developmental pedagogy in the name of modernization: “Simple science experiments, peeps into the microscope, and an explanation of 216 Notes to Pages 47–70 the ordinary phenomenon of nature bring excitement in their train, and understanding of some of life’s processes, and a desire to experiment and fi nd out instead of relying on set phrases and old formulae. Self-confi dence and the co-operative spirit grow, and frustration, arising out of the miasma of the past, lessens” (Nehru, quoted in K. Kumar [2005, 188]). 12.