The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

Literacy and Social Progress

A colleague of Professor Awasthi, another scholar, Ganga Gautam, uses the same set up and equipment for recording his narrative. After introducing himself, he begins his story, like his fellow scholar, by “looking back to [his] education” during childhood when “there was no school in my community.” As we hear the narrator introduce himself as an Associate Professor of Education and the current President of The Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association, we also see a mature person speaking in a confident tone of voice. The description of status, the appearance of the person, and his voice and tone helps us more quickly understand the setting and direction of the story.

At first, it sounds as if Gautam comes from the same kind of social background as Awasthi, but as we listen to the details of the story, we see some significant differences in their backgrounds. Gautam’s story indicates that he grew up in a less remote part of the country and that his family was educated: his grandfather was a priest educated in Sanskrit—such a system of education was available to certain segments of the Nepalese society even about two centuries ago—and his father “started a [Sanskrit] school in [his] community.”

In some ways, Gautam’s story represents the Nepalese society’s abandonment of traditional, local, and need-based education mechanisms in favor a “modern” model of education based on the colonial education system of neighboring India which later came to be known as “Western” education. Interestingly, however, even though Gautam began his education with Sanskrit schooling, he transitioned into the new world of English and modern education early on. Based on the increased opportunities for intellectual development and social progress that the new model of education provides people, Gautam views the modern education, especially the advent of English as a medium of instruction, as a positive force for the Nepalese society. While Awasthi’s narrative does not include any detail of what literacy and learning looked like before the new system of education was introduced, Gautam’s story shows the failure of the local in the face of the global—an issue that other scholars deal with in a more theoretical manner in their stories. (full video in the DALN)

Gautam does less to position himself in the role of a character that faced and overcame challenges on his own than he tries to show the social changes that were taking place and thereby increasing the opportunity for his education. For example, he tells us that his father decided to educate him and his siblings for as long as they wanted because his father had not been able to pursue his own education in the earlier generation. In contrast to his grandfather who had literally escaped from the village to get a particular kind of education, Gautam, as well as his father, grew up during a time when his society was realizing that social development was possible only through education. Formal education was beginning to be considered as essential and therefore sought after at all costs. What is interesting is that the society did not necessarily know the details of that education, much like in the case of Awasthi where literacy meant sending children to school. This situation is telling about the introduction of an education system that the local community knew little about—a phenomenon that we will see continued until much later in the educational experience of the younger scholars.

Thus, in Gautam's story, we first see a tension between the new system of formal education and the society's desire to promote local epistemologies: out of his desire to sustain the family's tradition of priesthood, his father had tried to hire a Sanskrit teacher and help him become a priest, in the tradition of the grandfather. But the attempt to establish an alternative educational system would not succeed, because the death of a rare Sanskrit teacher in the village—a quite symbolic event in the story—was actually an indication that the society had adopted a different kind of education. When the school of five students was shut down, Gautam was sent to the public school system which his story suggests brought about progress for the society. The selection of details and the structure of the entire story, however, leave out the larger historical and political backgrounds that we shall see in the other narratives in this collection. The system of formal education was not simply a modernized one, but it was also, at that time, nationally designed to fulfill a very specific socio-political purpose: to ensure loyalty to the crown and nation.

Gautam chooses to focus on the positive aspects of the education, especially the progress that was undoubtedly made by the Nepalese society on the basis of the new system. Gautam, as does Awasthi, tells us stories about success that took place against that political backdrop of modern, and later on, English education, perhaps in spite of the limitations. Consistent with the overall message about the value of education, and of English medium education in particular, Gautam concludes his literacy life by reflecting on the importance of English for the society at large as well as personally for him: “it has become a life for me.” He adds:

I think everybody now accepts that English is the language through which we have global communication . . . connect [to] one another living in different corners of the world . . . and through which we have access to science and technology.

He further emphasizes that English has occupied a very important place even “back in the village” today. Because mobile phones are operated in English, he adds, “people realize that everybody has to learn English.” He calls English “the language of education . . . and a powerful tool for personal development, professional development, and for business purposes.” Highlighting the “huge demand and scope of English,” he asserts that the stakeholders of English have “expanded their reach in spreading English language not only in the areas that they are working but also at the national level.” A personal story, thus, turns into a larger story of a society where English is perceived as a crucial force for individual and social progress. It is by comparison that we are able to see this story as one individual’s rendering of social as well as personal history of education.

It must be noted at this point that English did not supplant any unified or even well-developed system of education in Nepal; nor were the local resources of knowledge in the dozens of ethnic and linguistic communities developed into any organized forms of learning other than the learning that happened through family life, religious and cultural traditions, occupations, and public discourses. Thus, Gautam's shifting from Sanskrit education to what came to be known as “modern” education should not be seen as a simple invasion by a “foreign” system of education from the outside. Nepal was never politically colonized by external forces, and instead the dominant language and culture of the ruling classes have been detrimental to the survival and development of the rich local epistemologies that are embedded in life and culture of the many different ethnic communities across the country. In fact, the establishment or development of the new system of formal education—which meant going to schools that taught subjects like math, science, and English—until very recently made the language of the majority, called “Nepali,” the standard language of instruction, affecting the learning of students who came from almost a hundred local language communities. Thus, Gautam’s transition from the Sanskrit school to the public school does not represent such a transition of the entire Nepalese society from a “local” to a “global” mode of education. Instead, while Sanskrit education was useful and relevant to Gautam’s own upper caste Brahmin family and community, that system too was a foreign model of education imported from India and accessible only to that minority. The rest of the society remained excluded from any formal educational experience.

The narratives by other scholars in this group complicate the positive role played by the new system of education and by English in Nepal that Awasthi’s and Gautam’s narratives help us appreciate. Those younger scholars adopt more critical perspectives, not only perhaps because of their current scholarly engagement with critical theories of literacy and education, but also because they define their identity in relation to the educational establishment and the traditional society. While telling us their stories of becoming literate and educated, with particular reference to how they became scholars and teachers of English, they look at issues of power and privilege that comes with “English education” which they argue only a minority of the population has enjoyed in this country. Scholars of literacy on the global front have argued that “without a sociological theory of power, conflict, and difference, such models [of literacy as a means to social progress would] fail to provide an account for why and how some discourses, knowledges, [languages,] and texts ‘count’ more than others” (Luke, 1992, p. 312). That is, seen from the political perspective of scholars like Luke, which is also the perspective adopted by the younger scholars in this group, it is necessary to consider whether and how easily the general public gets access to the opportunity for English language education or quality education for that matter.

Thus, we see that this set of literacy narratives present at least two major perspectives on the subject of modern, formal, and especially English based literacy and education in Nepal. Seen together, these stories present a multifaceted assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of "English education" in Nepal. In listening to the stories and the vigorous discussion on the subject, the fact that these are multimodal texts makes a big difference. We see and hear the scholars, we hear their tones and voices, and we are able to assess the logos, pathos, and ethos accordingly. As scholarly texts, video literacy narratives like these at once belong to the universally recognizable theme of education as a means for social transformation, or the critical discourse of education; at the same time, texts also give us glimpses of the social transformation through education at particular historical moments in a particular culture and society—that is, as seen by particular individuals. As Lindfors (1999) states, “within [the] universal presence of narrative, there is wonderful cultural variation in the sorts of stories told and in the manner and contexts of their telling. And within [the] cultural norms, the individual creates and tells and responds to story. And so the suggestion is that narrative is at once a universal and cultural and an individual phenomenon” (p. 12). That is, while broader social debates about education may be important from theoretical perspectives, the unique perspectives of unique individuals should also be understood through personal stories like these.

Furthermore, when personal stories such as these are presented in multimodal forms, they also “assume a special performative power and an aesthetic dimension” (Hull 2003, p. 231) because of their multimodality. These multimodal texts, as narratives from different cultures, also have the potential to speak to us more effectively than traditional narratives can, not only because many cultures around the world are less oriented to print text than speaking and performing meaning but also because we can see and hear more of their stories through multimodal medium. Citing The New London Group—“the challenge is to make space available so that different lifeworlds—spaces for community life where local and specific meanings can be made—can flourish” (p. 70)—Borton (2005) tells us that “the mediums of audio and video allows narrators greater opportunity to analyze the lifeworld of their family and society than the written narrative normally does” (web).

We know that learning, communication, and knowledge production are all changing as a result of different cultures coming into shared domains like the Internet and increased transnational demographic movements. In Yancey’s (2004) words, we are “in the midst of a tectonic change” (p. 298) in terms of what it means to be literate and educated; what we need to do as scholars and researchers of literacy is to respond to that change by learning not only how to “read” and understand the new literacies but also by developing methodologies for doing research and scholarship with them.