The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

Literacy and Social Progress

Sitting against the backdrop of a sizeable personal library and looking into the camera, Professor Awasthi introduces himself: “Hello, I am Jai Raj Awasthi, currently working as a professor at Tribhuvan University.” He then seems to jump right into his literacy story—“Talking about literacy, . . .”—but the fact that his narrative has an unusual background, one that would be striking even to his Nepalese colleagues in Kathmandu, seems to demand that he first describe that background itself: “. . . I was born in a very remote part of Nepal, which is in the far western part of Nepal, bordering China and India….” The geographical reference to “a very remote . . . far western part of Nepal, bordering China and India” instead of a standard Nepalese reference to the administrative zone and district implies that Awasthi has a global audience in mind. Thematically, this reference to the still underdeveloped “far western” part of Nepal also immediately underscores the challenges that an individual from that background would face in becoming a professor of the nation’s only public university. Awasthi then continues with a typically narrative syntax: “When I was a small child . . .,” going on to describe the setting, where he, as the story’s main character, begins an extraordinary educational and intellectual journey. (full video in the DALN)

If we pay close attention to the texture of details, while trying to understand the overall organizational structure of this narrative, we will see that there are rhetorical purposes and logical reasons in the narrator’s selection and presentation of many details which may at first seem somewhat irrelevant. Narrators choose to include “specific events that form an inferential trail between the ‘beginning point’ and ‘value end point’, creating—through the selection of these details—the plot line or the desired trajectory of the teller’s life (Selfe, 2010, web).

For example, the first thing that Awasthi tells about his going to school is that he “had to go to school with [his] elder brother.” The sense of obligation implied in that expression may at first sound familiar—because children do “have to” go to school in most societies—but the gesture that he makes with his hands and shoulders and the sentence that follows—“I did not know I was going to school also”—subtly indicate that going to school was a new and unfamiliar experience in that society at that time: “We did not have school building then. We studied under the trees, big trees, and the rainy days would always be holidays for us.” Similarly, the references to studying “under the trees” and having “rainy days [as] holidays” are not just meant to underscore the lack of resources in the village, they constitute the very theme of the whole story: the narrator represents education as a means of progress for the individual and the society. Moreover, the details not only describe the narrator's humble backgrounds, which he later tells us he doesn’t want to forget, they also reflect humility on the part of the narrator.

If we look at the story in its multimodal form, we see that the images of the books behind the narrator stand in juxtaposition to the reference to studying under the tree. The juxtaposition thematically represents the vast difference between a first generation elementary school student who studied under the trees on the one hand and, on the other, the person went on to win the gold medal from royal hands; who completed doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in the United States; who established the nation’s largest professional organization of teachers; and who became one of the most renowned scholars in the country. That contrast between the beginning and ending of the narrative shows us a person who has continued to return to teach others in the village and see his scholarship as a part of a larger mission for educating others in the country. Thus, the visual and other non-verbal details that we see and hear in the mediated form of the story, in tandem with the verbal details of the narrative, reinforce the theme of progress, as we later understand once we have seen the overall narrative framework of the story. In this regard, the visual image of the person adds particularly strongly to the impression upon the audience: from a mature and serious-looking person who speaks in a soft voice, we hear about the radical changes that have taken place in the society, as well as in his own life.

When I was in grade four, then the local community built a school, and then I realized that a school was a building. We had a feeling that this literacy, or going to school, was only for the male child. We did not have any female student going to school. So, literacy for the parents meant sending their male children to school.

Only the actual voice and tone of the narrator allows us to listen to the concern with which the narrator remembers and talks about a community where “literacy for the parents meant sending their male children to school.” If this story was presented in the form of alphabetic text on paper or screen, it would lose much of the semiotic richness that we experience in such a multimodal form.

As a narrator, Awasthi positions himself as both an individual talking about his personal journey of learning and as a scholar who has worked to achieve a vision for his society. There is a consistent pattern of references to his trying to use his education to serve the society. When he returned to his village after completing what would now be high school education, he “realized that [he] had to educate the people of that locality”. Thus, “at the age of sixteen, [he] opened a school and became its headmaster.” He taught for two years before he returned to the city to continue his studies. Even during his graduate studies in Kathmandu, he embarked again in a national project of training primary school teachers for newly established schools around the country. He also returned to his community as a researcher and later as a teacher trainer; his studies abroad similarly “mounded [his] aspirations to work for the country, to work more and more, and then help the people, in my locality, in my country at large.” Thus, his literacy narrative presents a character who was directed by such a larger vision of using literacy as a means for his society's development. His personal views about literacy and education go along with his dedication for and contribution towards the society’s progress as a whole.

Another major theme in Awasthi's narrative is that of the power of English for creating the opportunities for the individual as well as the society. Awasthi seems to suggest that it was education in English as well as his talents as a scholar that created the many opportunities including winning a national award for his master's degree in education, a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Michigan in the US, and the opportunity to complete a PhD from India and post-doctoral degree from Michigan State University. After outlining the story of his academic and professional successes, he goes on to reflect on the function of English as a source of “bread and butter” to many people in the world. He mentions that English can have an “adverse effect” on the learner and society in some ways, but he suggests that its benefits outweigh those effects: “Though we realize that English can have adverse effects in the native language” and though the government has been promoting local languages as the means of primary education, “English has been a part and parcel for going to higher education in this country.” Awasthi concludes his literacy narrative with the fact that “it is because of English that many Nepalese students go abroad and get education, best of the best education that they can get from any country.” As an educator who has seen tremendous progress made in the field of education in a country that has fared miserably in the political domain, there are undeniable justifications for Awasthi’s emphasis on the positive side to the role played by English in this country.

The personal experiences contained in the narratives of Awasthi and other scholars of his generation help us appreciate the benefits of modern education because they describe a historical juncture when a“modern” and “Western” system of literacy education was being established in Nepal. As other scholars in this discussion argue, such narratives demonstrate, rather than critique, how traditional epistemological worldviews were being displaced by a new idea of education as going to school. They show how the literacies that were embedded within social, occupational, cultural and religious lives of the diverse Nepalese communities were being replaced by a more systematic school education within the lifetimes of a generation or two. As a result, the transition from the “local” to the more formal and more global modes of learning is largely invisible in stories like these, simply because local epistemologies had actually never taken any significant shape or organization when the new idea of formalized education was introduced to the Nepalese society. So, it is only the introduction of theoretical/critical discourse frameworks that enables later scholars to conceptualize the gradual displacement of local epistemologies and literacies.

Awasthi’s narrative casts the narrator in the image of a scholar, teacher, and educational leader whose struggle and success parallels a larger story of progress of the Nepalese society. Seen within the analytical framework of Bamberg’s (1997) that I describe in the methodology section, the narrator positions himself in almost heroic terms: he faced and overcame challenges, he had a vision and commitment, and he returned to and helped solve the challenges of his community and society at large. Awasthi only occasionally makes explicit claims of a theoretical nature about literacy—instead telling us the story itself—but from the overall structure of the “progress narrative” we can see that he projects himself in the role of an experienced educator and social agent who believes in literacy and education as means for fueling and sustaining progress for both the individual and the society.

Theoretically and analytically speaking, the details that the narrator chooses (or doesn’t choose) to include and how he or she wants to use them to construct a story depends on what kind of identity he or she wants to perform (Wortham, 2000). From a theoretical perspective, the idea of literacy that the stories of Awasthi, as well as that of Gautam, seem to represent has been a subject of great critical debate in the west since Harvey Graff published his famous book The Myth of Literacy in 1979. In another book, Literacy and Social Development in the West (1981), Graff argues that

virtually all approaches to literacy follow from conjectures of historically-based assumptions: about the nature of social and economic development, of political participation and citizenship, of social order and morality, of personal advancement, and of societal progress. (p. 3)

As Graff maintains, the above view of literacy equates the phenomenon with civilization, moral integrity, social progress, individual prosperity, rational thinking, and superiority of literate people to less literate counterparts in other societies around the world. What is interesting about the Nepalese literacy narratives here is that while these stories embody unique experiences of individuals from a unique socio-cultural background, their narrators, as transnational scholars and global citizens, also use a somewhat universal frame of reference of what it means to be literate and educated that Graff refers to in his writings. This means that it is possible in today’s world for local and the global concepts about literacy to both collide and converge. As I indicated above, while “literacy narrative” may not be perceived as an academic genre or cultural discourse, stories of intellectual and educational success are, in general, common in most societies.

However, even when we seem to be encountering similar themes and patterns, if we listen carefully to the unique voices and visions about literacy, we will see that narrators from different cultural, political, and national backgrounds present highly specific details and different perspectives about being literate and educated. And those unique characteristics are best embodied by mediated artifacts like the video narratives we are watching here. In this particular case, Awasthi’s story of his progress from studying under the trees to becoming an intellectual capable of playing crucial roles in the development of a university and a national organization of teachers represents certain things that a print/alphabetic text would not. What we see and hear, instead of how we interpret the language, largely contributes to our understanding of the character, the story, and the issues he is talking about. Especially because this narrative is from a culture and society outside the mainstream of global academic culture and scholarship, the bodily presence of the narrator—image, voice, gestures, pauses and other non-verbal elements—adds to the meaning and impact of the message. We are better able to understand and appreciate both the general and the particular, global and local, abstract and concrete in the story.