The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism And

The Light of Knowledge EXPERTI S E CULTURES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE edited by dominic boyer A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. The Light of Knowledge Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India Francis Cody Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Copyright © 2013 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2013 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2013 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cody, Francis, 1976– author. The light of knowledge : literacy activism and the politics of writing in South India / Francis Cody. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5202-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8014-7918-2 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Arivoli (Organization : Tamil Nadu, India) 2. Literacy programs— India—Tamil Nadu. 3. Literacy—Political aspects—India—Tamil Nadu. 4. Tamil Nadu (India)—Rural conditions. I. Title. LC157.I52C63 2013 379.2'4095482—dc23 2013009771 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fi bers. For further information visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword vii Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xvii Note on Transliteration xix Introduction: Of Light, Literacy, and Knowledge in the Tamil Countryside 1 1. On Being a “Thumbprint”: Time and Space in Arivoli Activism 25 2. Feminizing Enlightenment: The Social and Reciprocal Agency 68 3. Labors of Objectifi cation: Words and Worlds of Pedagogy 101 4. Search for a Method: The Media of Enlightenment 134 5. Subject to Citizenship: Petitions and the Performativity of Signature 171 vi Contents Epilogue: Refl ections on a Time of Charismatic Enlightenment 206 Notes 213 Works Cited 225 Index 241 Foreword It is with the greatest pleasure that I introduce you to Frank Cody’s The Light of Knowledge . In it, Cody brilliantly analyzes the work of the Arivoli Iyakkam, one of the largest literacy movements in the world, which mobilized millions across Tamil Nadu between 1990 and 2009. The Arivoli Iyakkam sought to increase the political participation and leverage of rural women and aspired to help them attain new, enlightened autonomy through literate access to science and knowledge. A range of socialist literacy movements inspired the movement, especially Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.” Beginning as a volunteer-driven, nongovernmental project, such was the complicated and transitional situation of Indian statecraft during the period—as Nehruvian national develop- mentalism increasingly gave ground to visions of liberalization and glo- balization—that the Arivoli Iyakkam quickly found itself drawn into the interstices of nongovernmental and governmental authority. Cody shows how the work of the movement was strained by competing conceptions of development and citizenship in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet literacy viii Foreword was a locus of aspiration and a zone of social imagination claimed by all, whether to deepen the basis of national citizenship and collective purpose or to open a gateway to a new regime of individuated liberal freedom and autonomy. As fascinating as the backdrop of “socialist politics in a decidedly neo- liberal age” is, competing regimes of governmentality are not the real story here. Drawing on the analytic techniques of both linguistic and cultural anthropology, Cody delves deeply into the epistemic practices of the Arivoli Iyakkam movement itself. Here, Cody pinpoints a crucial tension between, on the one hand, faith in the promise of literacy to emancipate the self from social restraint and, on the other, recognition that literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. Cody does not argue that there is some fundamental incommensurability between the lifeworld of Tamil peasants and enlightenment accounts of the interconnection between literacy, science, and freedom. Instead, he gestures to the deeper paradox “at the heart of . pedagogical practice” within “charismatic Enlightenment” activism that people must, in essence, be charmed and trained to be free. In this respect, Cody fi nds that the pedagogical practices of the Arivoli Iyakkam often chafed against its principles, leading him to consider the generative intellectual labor of village activists to produce a coherent, and coherently “Tamil,” practice of enlightenment. He argues that it was the critical and refl exive practices of activists themselves that aligned, so far as this was possible, the senses of freedom incorporated in traditional Tamil culture with socialist models of emancipatory enlightenment. The Arivoli Iyakkam thus mutated Freirean pedagogy into a distinctively Tamil form, creating a new “rural humanism,” as Cody terms it. It is the epistemic and linguistic virtuosity of the activists, as well as their considerable social and cultural impact in rural Tamil Nadu, that is the beating heart of Cody’s account. When the Expertise series began three years ago, The Light of Knowl- edge was exactly the kind of transversal, horizon-opening project I had hoped to be able to recruit. Knowledge has long been a crucial zone of inquiry in anthropology and the human sciences. Indeed, anthropology’s long rumination on knowledge—whether, in the beginning, on “reason” and “belief,” later on “culture” and “identity,” or more recently on “expertise” and “epistemology”—has contributed generously to the conceptual apparatus of the discipline. The Expertise series has sought to recognize Foreword ix and extend this generosity. By centering the series in the anthropology of knowledge, my colleagues at Cornell and I have hoped to solicit rich and compelling ethnographies that demonstrate that epistemic practices and forms remain crucial objects of inquiry for anthropology and the human sciences. This is a question, on the one hand, of fi nding effective ways and research objects through which to narrate and analyze the broader complexities of human experience. But it is also a question of the search, after the (timely or untimely) diminishment of culture theory, to nurture anthropological theory that speaks effectively across many fi elds and subfi elds of the human sciences. Our goal is not to develop a new unifying signature concept (for example, to replace theory of “culture” with that of “knowledge”). Rather the idea is to use the foundational importance of epistemic factors across many domains of life to encourage, for example, studies of politics to connect conceptually with those emerging from media studies or to help research on medicine to form new links to studies of religion. We human scientists seem increasingly suspicious, and reasonably so, of unifying signature concepts in the era of the lateral connectivities of digital media. Still, the premise of Expertise is that more can and should be done to augment the capacity of the plurality of ethnographic fi eld knowledges to communicate more effectively with one another. This seems to me an appropriate horizon for anthropological theory in the digital era. Thus one might think of the Expertise series as a constellation of experi- ments to highlight different research nodes or meshes through which the anthropology of knowledge can help provide new connectivities between and among other fi elds. Daromir Rudnyckyj’s book, the fi rst in the series, elicited unexpected connections between anthropological research on development, modernity, and religion through a study of New- Age managerial ideology in Indonesia. In Iver Neumann’s ethnography of a diplomatic corps, the fi rst of its kind, we found a reimagination of states and their relations with each other through the eyes and hands of those who perform the intimate expertise of managing status, honor, and reputation between governments. In the case of Cody’s book, the operational node is “activism.” The trajectory of the Arivoli Iyyakam’s literacy activism transects and connects anthropological research on power and governance, movements and ideologies, media and knowledge. His project helps defi ne and extend the x Foreword analytic potential of an emergent area of ethnographic research that high- lights activism as a key mediating expert practice in the transformation of social and political subjectivities. Comparable work in recent years includes David Graeber’s and Jeffrey Juris’s research on antiglobalization and direct action movements, Angelique Haugerud’s research on satirical activism in the United States, Cymene Howe’s research on sexual rights activism in Nicaragua, Sally Engle Merry’s work on human rights activism, and Maple Razsa’s research and fi lms on Croatian anarchism. In each case, we fi nd studies of what goes on behind-the-scenes in social movements and public political discourse, of the work of activists to leverage the legiti- macy of universalizing principles (like human rights or freedom) for what are nevertheless always very local purposes. And, just as in Cody’s book, we fi nd that activists often solicit unique mediations between translocal and local knowledges. This entire fi eld of research, but Cody’s book par- ticularly, makes us rethink how transnational political discourses operate, how ideologies like Freirean pedagogy are translated and transformed by grassroots political actors and intellectuals, forcing seemingly universalist principles to acquire a plurality of distinct cultural infl ections (infl ections that, at the same time, are also able to reshape the local knowledges on which they draw).

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