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On Being a “Thumbprint”
Time and Space in Arivoli Activism
I first started to understand the extent to which literacy activism is really a form of cultural work, not simply a matter of teaching people how to read and write, one evening in a seaside village. It turns out that many villagers were taught to desire literacy and they learned a number of other things about themselves and their place in the world along the way. The occasion of my awareness was a street-theater performance by the Dawn Arts Group, a drama troupe that had been organized by Karuppiah and Neela to encourage people to join Arivoli classes and to recruit more volunteers for the movement. The central street of the fishing village where this performance took place was loud and lit brightly, lined with blaring loudspeakers interspersed with neon tube-lights fastened to bamboo poles. The saturated atmosphere would have reminded everyone of the yearly temple celebrations of local gods that also take place in the dry season. Young actors of the Dawn group started their performance by singing a song in the folk style of the Pudukkottai region. Their voices were distorted by the mic and speakers, which broadcasted their song powerfully into the air. The lyrics announced that this evening’s event was indeed a festival, but one devoted to the dissemination of a specific kind of knowledge:
Street by street, we come in festive procession;
We rise up and come to spread literacy.
(Vītiyilē vītiyilē ūrvalam varukiṉṟōm
Eḻuttaṟivai pōtikka eḻuntē varukiṉṟōm.)
Because the Light of Knowledge movement comes to teach the darkness of ignorance
Because we are waging yet another independence struggle.
(Kallāmai iruḷakaṟṟa aṟivoḷi iyakkam varuvataṉāl
Iṉumoru cutantirap pōr nāṅkaḷ naṭatta iruppataṉāl.)
Like the procession (ūrvalam) of a deity in a temple festival, the Arivoli Iyakkam had come to dispel the forces of darkness.
Following this song, the dramatic performance began by depicting a man, played by Karuppiah, sitting in his doorway attending to some sort of work with his hands. He wore a wrapped towel on his head signifying his status as a rural worker. A woman, presumably his wife, was sitting next to him preparing food. Two of the younger actors in the group held straight sticks at a right angle over their heads, giving the visual impression of a house. Another man walked up to the house carrying a clipboard and some papers in his hand. As he was approaching, the peasant told his wife to go inside the house. The stranger introduced himself as someone who was taking a survey for the government and asked the character played by Karuppiah how many people were living in the house. The peasant responded with some suspicion in his voice, and when asked to sign his name on the survey form as head of household, he refused. Wondering why he would refuse to sign his name, the survey taker went on to the neighbor’s house asking the same information, this time successfully collecting a signature. He then asked the neighbor why his first respondent had refused to sign. The neighbor explained that the peasant’s son was wanted by the police, and that he was probably afraid to talk to anyone from the government. The survey taker, still a little perplexed, went back to the first house calling Karuppiah’s character, explaining that this was only a government census and had nothing to do with the police. Still he would not come out and sign his name. The neighbor finally said, “He’s just a thumbprint [kaināṭṭu],” trying to explain his unwillingness to sign his name and also indicating that he should be counted as an illiterate in the census. All the actors froze in place. Leaving a few seconds of silence after the play ended, giving the audience time to absorb the lesson, the whole Dawn Arts Group stood in a straight line facing the audience, pointed at them, and sang:
This is the time of footprints on the moon.
Shame on you for using your thumbprint!
(Itu cantiraṉ mēle kāl vacca kālam
nī kaināṭṭu vaikkiṟatu alaṅkōlam!)
Some in the audience seemed stunned by the accusation coming from the mouths of these young actors. After this short play ended, there were a few moments of silence before the Dawn Arts Group launched into their next play, which was similarly about the difficulties nonliterates face in the modern world, but this time peppered with a healthy dose of comic relief. Following the performance that evening, our hosts in the village fed the actors a late meal, thanking them for the efforts they had made to come to this relatively remote part of the district. Songs from a cassette player continued to blast from the loudspeakers as the drama troupe packed their microphones and instruments back into the van. Before leaving, Karuppiah had managed to secure a promise from the local Arivoli Iyakkam volunteer that she would make renewed efforts to start a literacy group among the women of the village. The drama troupe’s van then drove into the night, stopping to drop off the actors in their respective villages.
Chronotopes of Enlightenment in the Tamil Country
It is now quite well known that the social imaginary of the development state is premised on a sense of a temporal difference attributed to those who are considered not yet modern. To claim that this is the “time of footprints on the moon” as the drama troupe did, for example, is to invoke a sense that those who do not read and write are living in the past. Akhil Gupta (1998) has provided a detailed ethnography of such temporal difference in agricultural development discourse among villagers in northern India. He explains how farmers feel behind in the race to become fully developed even if many had also become critical of what they see as an urban bias in government policy. Writing about Egypt, Lila Abu-Lughod (2005) shows how state and development agency–funded television serials worked in conjunction with adult literacy programs to fulfill a national pedagogical project by teaching the rural poor from Upper Egypt their marginal place in a broader story of modernity centered in the city of Cairo. It seems that in Egypt, as in India and elsewhere in the postcolonial world, political modernity “generates a tension between two aspects of the subaltern or peasant as citizen. One is the peasant who has to be educated into the citizen,…the other is the peasant who, despite his or her lack of formal education, is already a citizen” (Chakrabarty 2000,10). But there is still much to understand about the contradictions that arise in attempts to cultivate and manage the sense of dual temporality splitting these two aspects of the subaltern as citizen. The tension between these two aspects of the subaltern as citizen is, in fact, contradictory, profoundly unstable, and given to constant reformulations. Where the two aspects of the subaltern as citizen jostle each other is the very space of politics.
In this chapter I explore how activism works to produce senses of time and place among activists and villagers in the Arivoli Iyakkam. I focus in particular on ideological conflicts ensuing from a pedagogical desire to bring villagers within the narrative of the Indian development state, on one hand, and countervailing recognitions that Tamil villagers are already citizens with their own histories and senses of self that are not easily folded into the national narrative of progress, on the other. After examining the intellectual foundations of the literacy movement in the projects of state building, Left politics, and modern science, I then move on to examine how the discourse of Enlightenment itself has undergone significant transformations in the process of the Arivoli Iyakkam becoming a mass movement in villages across the Tamil countryside. In their attempt to build a mass movement among villagers, the leaders of the Arivoli Iyakkam found that they had to ground their narrative of national awakening in forms of experience and knowledge that would make sense to those they would seek to compel.
It is for these reasons that I find it useful to think of the cultural work of the Arivoli Iyakkam in terms of what the linguist and literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin (1981) has called “chronotopes,” the frameworks of time and space that serve to ground the movement of events and characters in a narrative structure. A national vision of progressive time sat at the core of this Enlightenment activism. Activists sought to teach villagers to think in terms of an affiliation to this large-scale chronotope, connecting villagers to their fellow citizens. The accusation that was often made of those who refused to participate in the Arivoli Iyakkam was that they were caught up in the narrow, hierarchical, and anachronistic socialities of kin, village, and caste, unaware of the role they have to play in the larger national drama. But this chronotope of national progress would constantly have to contend with other senses of time and place that could appear to activists either as resistance to the universalizing narrative of Arivoli or as narrative resources that could be used in the service of propelling the movement, and thus encompassed within the narrative of Enlightenment.
The festival-like drama performance, described above, is only one example of the techniques used by the Arivoli Iyakkam to teach, not only that everyone must read and write, but also the particular senses of time and place that characterize the developmental imagination. The peasant played by Karuppiah, who continued to live in the “darkness of illiteracy,” could not be counted as a full member of the national community. He could not legitimately represent himself to the state through a written signature and he would be counted in the census as an “illiterate.” To “teach the darkness of ignorance” to such people, such that they might mend their ways, is therefore to inaugurate what activists commonly call a “second independence struggle,” the true arrival of the nation in its tryst with destiny. In fact, among the signs of illiteracy that have been stigmatized as anachronistic departures from the narrative of progress perhaps most prominent has been the use of a thumbprint (kaināṭṭu, or, kairēkai “hand line”) in lieu of a signature on official documents. The thumbprint that many among the rural poor still use to identify themselves on government documents has, for a long time, carried connotations of ignorance and even criminality.1 A “thumbprint” is not something someone would call themselves. It is an epithet that is likely to be hurled at someone who cannot sign their name, indicating not only they do not write, but also that they are not smart and can easily be fooled.2 But to be “just a thumbprint” is no longer only a sign of being an uncultivated person; it is increasingly seen as a sign of a person who is living in the past. Many activists who ended up devoting much of their youth to the movement point to plays like the one described above depicting the lowly condition of a “thumbprint” as the reason they joined. Such plays invoked a collective sense of shame, serving as a call to action.
Figure 1. An Arivoli Iyakkam image produced by S. P. Raju for a World Literacy Day poster depicting a woman being saved by a pen from drowning in her own thumbprint. Reproduced with permission from the Tamil Nadu State Resource Centre.
Work on the cultural politics of citizenship and statecraft has underscored the extent to which the modern state is not only defined by what Max Weber famously identified as a “monopoly over legitimate violence,” but also by what Pierre Bourdieu would call “a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population” (1999, 56). This second form of state power, or “metacapital” can be defined simply as a capacity to determine the legitimacy and political efficacy of signs within state space. Distributions of social power are calibrated in relation this field of value to the degree that the state can set the basic parameters of what counts as a successful performance of citizenship and what does not. The task for an anthropology of state power must then be to account for how a semiotic monopoly is produced and maintained.
How do people come to think that they are lacking certain qualifications for entry into the sphere of full citizenship? It is in plays and images like those above that we can begin to appreciate how the politics of time and space is integral to the project of producing a monopoly over legitimate sign usage in the context of postcolonial state formation. It was the capacity to be counted in the census as a literate person and, by extension, as a full-fledged citizen, and not simply as a body, that was at stake in the drama. The desire for full literacy, I argue, was premised on the unification of a field of social and political power that would determine the value of semiotic acts such as the thumbprint and the personal signature. This is a politics of time and space insofar as entry into the sphere of legitimate intercourse with the state through signature correlates with entry into the very chronotope of “footprints on the moon” depicted in the song above. To the degree that activists working in the Arivoli Iyakkam were devoted to such a unification of time and space in the homogenizing narrative of progress, they participated in reproducing a form of state power premised on the destruction of older structures of semiotic legitimacy. But these claims remain rather abstract at the moment. Let us return to the modes of cultural work employed by the movement to produce the “allochronic” (Fabian 1983) effect that would render these structures and modes of social behavior as archaic or out of time, and specifically to the question of how this effect is related to the very technology of writing.
Divisions of Linguistic Labor
Arivoli Iyakkam activists’ understanding of the difference between progress and retrograde social habits was built in part on their experience of change over the course of their lives. Rural Tamil Nadu has seen massive transformations in the social division of linguistic labor, for instance, such that there is now a more generalized stigmatization of “illiteracy” and of dependence on others to mediate interactions with the worlds of writing and state officialdom. Norms had been shifting away from the assumption that literacy and education are the domain of a privileged few, and activists saw themselves as agents in establishing a new consciousness (viḻippuṇarvu) of the need for everyone to read and write. This new understanding of one’s place in the world also turned on the premise that the lowliness or humiliation (kēvalam) of illiteracy must be identified as such, and as subject to change through pedagogy. But this was a process of raising consciousness that remained grievously incomplete in the eyes of many, requiring the ongoing “second independence movement” announced in the song reproduced above.
While chatting one afternoon on the front veranda of her small home in the village of Mangalapuram, Neela once explained to me the positive changes she had seen as a result of the Arivoli Iyakkam in particular:
Now common folk [pāmara makkaḷ] know about the necessity of literacy and education. Before they would have just relied on others and avoided going to government offices or the banks themselves. But now they go, and if everyone else is signing their name and they have to put a thumbprint, they’ll be shy [veṭkappaṭuvāṅka], they’ll face difficulty [kaś ṭappaṭuvāṅka]. People will say, “Oh, she’s just a thumbprint [kaināṭṭu].” They will see the necessity of literacy [eḻuttaṟiviṉ avaciyam].
The empirical claim that Neela was making, that everyone now understands the need and uses of literacy, remains open to question, as we will see in a moment. Even if villagers were perhaps more ashamed to leave a thumbprint now than in the past, and they were more likely to find themselves in situations in which literacy is required, it was not necessarily the case that they were conscious of a need for total literacy. But Neela was also making several other claims worth our attention. First, she identified illiteracy as an undesirable social identity, as something that should and can be overcome. Second, Neela was also making a normative claim, providing important clues about the strategies of Arivoli activism. She was in a sense arguing that people should be made to feel ashamed, that “shyness” and facing difficulty are in fact signs of progress spurring “common folk” and “thumbprints” to pursue literacy. As Neela’s fellow activist, the famous essayist and short-story writer S. Tamilcel...
