By Francis Cody
Since the early Nineteen Nineties thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy classes, technological know-how demonstrations, and different occasions designed to rework them into lively voters with entry to country energy. those efforts to unfold enlightenment one of the oppressed are a part of a flow often called the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), thought of to be one of the such a lot winning mass literacy events in contemporary heritage. In The mild of Knowledge, Francis Cody's ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such hobbies that search to emancipate humans via literacy whilst literacy is a power-laden social perform in its personal right.
The mild of Knowledge is determined basically within the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it's approximately activism between laboring ladies from marginalized castes who've been really lively as beginners and volunteers within the circulate. of their endeavors to remake the Tamil geographical region via literacy activism, employees within the circulation stumbled on that their very own realizing of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was once frequently remodeled as they encountered enormously diversified notions of language and imaginations of social order. certainly, whereas activists of the circulation effectively mobilized huge numbers of rural girls, they did so via logics that frequently driven opposed to the very Enlightenment rationality they was hoping to foster. supplying a unprecedented behind-the-scenes examine an more and more very important sector of social and political activism, The mild of Knowledge brings instruments of linguistic anthropology to have interaction with serious social theories of the postcolonial state.
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Additional info for The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India
Sample text
Neela, for example, is one the activists I came to know who had developed a keen sense that the movement must ground its methods of mobilization in contemporary forms of social life among the rural poor. An avid reader and local intellectual who had never finished the tenth standard of primary schooling Of Light, Literacy, Knowledge in the Tamil Countryside 17 because her labor was needed at home when she was being raised by a single mother, Neela had risen through the ranks to become the Arivoli coordinator for the whole development block of Tiruvarangulam.
Karunanidhi (2003), and R. 16 Tamilcelvan’s Irul um O l iyum: A r ivol i Iyakka An upavan˙ kal (Darkness ˙ ˙ ¯ ˙ ¯ ˙ and Lightness: Experiences in the Light of Knowledge Movement), published first as a series of essays in the Tamil cultural studies journal titled T ¯ı mtarikit a¯ (Drumroll) while I was conducting fieldwork ˙ (2002–4), and later as a book in which the questions of enlightenment and political responsibility are turned back onto his readers has been my most important guide in this respect.
In each chapter we will see how attempts to spread light and knowledge through the written word hit certain limits, forcing those involved to rethink their strategy and orientations toward literacy. The first two chapters of this book introduce Arivoli Iyakkam activism by focusing on how the movement sought to unify experiences of space and time and to produce new forms of agency through literacy. Combining ethnography of the movement in the early 2000s and historical reflections on the movement’s origins in science activism and the broader Left, in chapter 1 I seek to understand how and why the literacy movement built its self-image through the trope of enlightenment.
