The power of literacy

Today I realised that I’m illiterate. In Kannada. The government’s guidelines to check for literacy specify that I should be able to (a) write my name, and (b) read the newspaper in that language. I really don’t know enough Kannada to qualify. Maybe I should get enrolled in school. Fortunately, I happen to have a couple of backup languages that I’m able to use to get by. But, what exactly am I missing by being illiterate in Kannada? Or, for that matter, in Telugu, Kashmiri, Punjabi, or Spanish, Russian, Chinese? To understand this, I must talk about a magic trick that I used to demonstrate to my neighbour’s son Raju who was two years old.

Raju was, for his age, unusually vocal. He could generally say what he wanted, in a pidgin of Hindi, English, and the baby words every parent uses to make life easier for their child. Of course, he didn’t yet understand the concept of writing and reading. I would tell Raju that if he told me something, anything, then my brother, who would come by afterwards, would know it, magically. So Raju would say something like, “Miaow”, or “rickshaw” to me, and then my brother would come in and tell him the same words, much to his delight. But of course, the secret to our trick was the blackboard in the hall, where I’d scribble down the word for my brother to read.

In all fairness, the trick only sustained Raju’s interest a couple of times before he began to take it as a matter of course, an unspoken tenet that somehow adults all know everything. But we pull off this same magic trick daily, hundreds of times, in our ordinary routine, and don’t even think about it. We pick up names of streets that a signboard-painter encoded years ago. We understand instructions for making meals that some cook formalised in another city, another time. We study new subjects from words that were penned by experts a continent away, and we communicate with other students around the world using more words. It’s a skill many of us have learned in early childhood, and now we hardly ever stop to think about it. If we did, we’d be impressed with ourselves. Our own memory is a short-term, unreliable source of data, but we’ve learned to store huge amounts of information in an extremely reliable way. Also, it’s accessible to anyone who has learned to decode these letters on the page. And also, if we make a thousand copies of that page, we can get the exact same information to a thousand people simultaneously.

And the technology to do this has been around way before anyone thought of television or radio: since 1440 if you count the Gutenberg printing press as the turning point, since 200 AD if you’re okay with wooden block printing, and since the Harappa civilisation if seals and stamps can be counted. We come face to face with a miracle each day and are too used to it to notice.

The passion to understand
But could I conceivably get by with the spoken language around me? After all, written records come from the things that people speak about. That’s how generations of people have lived their lives. The written word, however, has taken over the zeitgeist and the public debate in such a way that the spoken word is the lesser now. Conversations happen and are forgotten. Worse, facts are spoken out loud and distorted in retelling. But written records remain, in their original state, for generations. They accumulate and cross-reference each other, until the written part of the language is much larger in size than the spoken part. So, even if I pick up, say, the day-to-day spoken Kannada that people around me use, I am left out of the in-depth discussions that happen in the newspapers, and out of the nuanced thoughts expressed in the literature. And those are what I miss when I’m illiterate in a language.

It’s not only material progress that literacy enables. As social animals, our personal growth and maturity hinges on our experiences in life. Reading fiction, poetry and written discussions gives us a window into a far greater number of experiences than we can hope to experience firsthand. Reading also gives us a window into feelings that are impossible to replicate in today’s life: whether it’s a speech that Jawaharlal Nehru made when we achieved Independence, or Oliver Twist’s trauma in Victorian England. Indeed, the whole range of human communication can be captured in the written word.

The more we think about it, the more we’re convinced that reading and writing is one of mankind’s greatest inventions. And in today’s world, its value cannot be overstated.

Consider the enormous advantage that a literate person has over one denied this skill. In the morning he gets up to date with the state of the world, via the newspaper. He gets to work, by whatever route works best, following the road signs. Almost certainly, his job involves reading and writing as a major component: whether it’s a clerical job managing files, or a knowledge worker on a computer, a doctor reading patient records, or a manager overseeing reports. Besides his job, he relies on reading for a lot of his entertainment (even watching TV requires him to find out programme schedules), and he communicates with family and friends by writing, either as letters or email or, nowadays, SMS. And then he does one more thing, almost invariably: he makes sure that his children are learning to read, at least as well as he can, if not better.

That last is very important. Almost no literate person today lets his future generations remain illiterate. Once you’re in the light, you cannot imagine being in the dark. It’s one of the reasons why the literacy rate has shot up over the past century: The worldwide literacy rate in 1900 was 21 per cent, and in 115 years, we’ve reached 85 per cent. Compare that to how long it took to get to that 21 per cent. The momentum has been incredible.

It’s not enough to treat literacy as a black-and-white yes-or-no condition. Just being able to write your name doesn’t give you that much of an advantage. But the better you get at it, the more benefits you get. Reading speeds in a language are closely correlated to fluency in the language, and of course, fluency has any number of levels. Being able to read and appreciate literature is the next level of literacy.

And that is where I lack, even if I can with difficulty make out the letters in Kannada. I live in Bangalore, but the mindset of the average Kannadiga, what seems reasonable to the people fluent in that language, is lost to me. Similarly, I am unable to grasp the zeitgeist of the average Telugu, the Kashmiri, the Spanish or the Japanese man for that matter. All I get is the pitiful percentage of text that is translated into English. That alone is enough to make me appreciate the richness of each of these languages. And I love words even more.

The way forward
Besides the impact it has on an individual’s life, literacy also transforms a society. When a society begins to leverage literacy to comprehend the world around it, and to move forward, it progresses much, much faster than one that relies on verbal communication. Imagine knowing nothing about the world but what you hear in face to face conversations. There’s no way you could keep up with the basic procedures of administration and planning today.

Let’s take one example out of hundreds: the periodic ritual of elections in India. You, as the voter, need to read about what the candidates propose for your area. You need to understand the various philosophies at work. And you need to be informed about the larger agendas of the parties to which your candidate belongs. Finally, you need to make sure you’re a part of the voters list, and then make the vote to your selected candidate correctly.

Remember those news items about voters being “bought” for bottles of alcohol and envelopes of money? That’s what happens when the voter takes a short-sighted view of the election process. And remember all those politicians who get voted in purely because they belong to the same community or caste as a majority of voters? That’s an outcome of not understanding the larger picture of the democratic structure.

Any number of other examples come to mind: how to fight against corruption, how to resolve land ownership, how to support or protest against a proposed legislation. In today’s world, the common man can no longer live untouched by the machinery of civic procedure. Literacy is a vital armament that lets each person make the right, informed decision in these situations. To take a telling example: Kerala paid a lot more attention to education after Independence.

As a consequence of this, there was a dramatic drop in female foeticide rates after the 1960s. Girls who had been schooled and educated had now begun to start families in the decade of the 60s.

There’s another insight that the thinker Steven Pinker has in his book, The Better Angels of our Nature. The book is about why as a civilisation, violence and bloodshed has declined over the past centuries. Where once public hangings and lynchings were considered entertainment, today we have people repulsed by the sight of blood, and preferring to use debate and reason to solve problems. Pinker points out three elements to this ‘Civilising Process’: a powerful State, an economy with opportunities for everyone, and literacy. The last because reading stories and viewpoints of different people teaches us to be empathetic to divergent viewpoints.

We are more willing to accept differences, and we are able to feel others’ pain. Reading about rape cases and their aftermath on the victims, for example, would make a person shy away from committing such crimes. For that reason alone, it’s worth encouraging and celebrating literacy.

Knowing all this, how can we let anyone remain illiterate in today’s world? Two generations back, we all had people in our families who were not literate, or barely so. It was a fact of life in India, and even urban society functioned at a pace that accommodated the occasional illiterate. There were characters in movies that were declared to be illiterate: “Anpadh”, “Angootha Chhaap”. But today, the problem has simply dropped out of the public eye. It simply isn’t worthy of being mentioned in the public mindspace, at least in the English media and in the large entertainment industries. Everyone in Bollywood movies today is English-educated, or at least a city dweller. Newspapers and magazines talk about illiteracy only as a statistic. Instead of talking about this blot on our nation, we’ve become obsessed with catching up with the West in comparatively trivial things: fashion sense, cuisine, tourism.

Instead, we should be updating our definitions of literacy to match the West: there are proposals to redefine literacy to include reading graphical data, understanding the operation of computers, keyboards, and mobile phones. Perhaps we could also include numeracy — the understanding of numbers, arithmetic, and operations like interest and compounding. And old-fashioned fluency with the language, of course, has always been assumed in the West but ignored in India.

Literacy has curious networking effects: the more it spreads, the more impact it has. And it has the most impact on someone who is a victim of the system: either economically or socially downtrodden. The old joke about your maid sending a Facebook update about her vacation is not that far off. But there’s a more beneficial side-effect: wouldn’t you rather have your maid able to vote for the better candidate than to suffer under a corrupt one?

What can you do to help it spread? All you need to do is to be aware of the situation, and help in any way you can. Your contribution could be as simple as donating to an NGO, or it could be helping translate documents or web pages into another language, or perhaps sponsoring a child’s education in school. There are several NGOs that are working to increase literacy rates in India, and contacting them to see how best we can help.

Perhaps that’s the point of having an International Literacy Day in the first place. It’s a celebration of what the human race has achieved together using the written word, and a reminder that we need to treasure it and spread it further.