The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

Literacy as Symbolic Capital

Apparently using a written script to guide her narration, Gita Neupane, a scholar of Sociology at the University of Hawaii, tells a story that incorporates several powerful anecdotes and critical reflections on the subject of literacy alongside her personal experiences of becoming literate. The script seems to enhance the flow of the narration, but the rich non-verbal elements add to the complexity of the narrative as a whole. Unlike the mature male scholars we saw before, we now see and listen to a female scholar who is much younger and speaks differently about education.

To a certain extent, Gita’s story also provides the perspective of a female student and a daughter in a patriarchal society. Setting her story within a family where her grandfather, father, uncles, as well as a brother and sister were involved with the letters, she positions herself as an obedient daughter who, arguably, was anxious about her future as a woman. In general, her story shows how she “had to” study hard all the time. Even though she begins the story by stating that “the joint family, where I was born and brought up, gave me an immense opportunity to be cared and to be taught by different members of my family,” the events in the story also show that the education was more imposed than inspired. (full video in the DALN)

Because of the geographical region, the local culture, and the social class in which Gita grew up, her family seems to have adopted literacy as a more established culture than in the rest of literacy stories being discussed here. “I thought that going to school was very mandatory like eating meal and I realized that I also needed to go to school.” Even as she grew up, she says, “[She] just took [literacy] for granted.” The role of family looms large in her story. Gita’s doing well in school was primarily a function of maintaining her family’s and especially her father’s social image through education.

Gita’s story has two important female characters, herself and her mother.

My mom was a great source of inspiration for me in every step of my education life. As she herself could not get the education up to the level she wanted to due to her married life and household work. She wanted us to fulfill her thirst of education.

This seems to suggest that education was important not only as a matter of the family’s prestige but also as a means of empowerment for women in particular. While the family might not have explicitly stated that education was the only means to independence and dignity in a highly patriarchal society, the awareness of what the rest of the society was like seems to have added to the pressure for doing well in school. “If narratives are powerful ways of telling our literate selves into being, they also offer a potent means of conveying information about the historical and cultural contexts of literate activities” (Selfe et al., 2010, p. 11). As a student, Gita never knew why her parents exerted the amount of pressure that they did on her to excel in studies. “I could not realize the rationale behind it because I just did whatever I was asked to do.” A moment later, she adds: “So, reading well and doing good in the exam was a big duty for me, nothing else.” So, literacy is not just a matter of the individual’s progress but more importantly a matter of the family’s social status; moreover, it could also be shaped by other factors like gender and class.

Two special anecdotes that Gita includes in her story further highlight the place of literacy in the Nepalese society. One was when another female student in her high school committed suicide: “At that time I could not believe how somebody could die without finishing her school.” Whatever the cause of the suicide, Gita only understood it from the perspective of fulfilling the duty of getting an education, evidently a familial and social duty more than a personal one. Another anecdote, which also includes a fellow female student, is about someone dropping out of school in the 7th grade.

That was again a big shock to me. I did not know until that time people could drop from the school if they wanted; I only knew they could fail in the class. It bothered me a lot how she could do that. I asked my mom about her but she scolded me back saying not to care the people who did not go to school and did not study well. She even warned me not to speak with that dropped out girl.

Gita uses these anecdotes to highlight that going to school and doing well there was a responsibility that she didn’t always understand as a student. It is possible that the attitude that the family and society had instilled in her came from the sensitivities towards the relationship between gender and education that the society had developed. In the middle class societies like where Gita grew up, education would be deemed a crucial means for empowerment of women, if not a means of liberation from the shackles of patriarchal traditions. While the same social pressure to do well at school could mean one thing for a man—making a career for himself and providing for his families—it could mean another for a woman, for whom a good education would be implicitly or explicitly understood as the means to qualify for a good marriage.

Gita’s narrative highlights the obsession that middle class societies usually have with doing well in school, which was inscrutable for her as a student. Her family's pressure for her to be “first” in class or to pass in “first division” is symptomatic of the social attitude that assesses the value of learning in terms of symbolic capital rather than learning itself.

My parents used to follow me whatever I did in school. . . . and tracked my progress. [It was] whether I was doing the best in the class or not [and] not for how much I was learning. . . . My dad used to warn me saying that if you do not become, first, second or third or do not get this much mark, do not come back to home after school is over; just go wherever this highway leads you. He used to show the highway in front of our house. It stuck in my mind so deeply that before the result came out, I was very much worried about my result. I used to think that where is this road heading to? Whom I can talk and who will help me? . . . Now I realized that all the education was based on the competition and the score rather than how much to know.

This critique of schooling is primarily directed towards the traditional notion of rote-learning and the irrelevance of learning that other narrators have also dealt with. Gita says that it was not until she went to college that she started understanding the value and relevance of what she learned at school. “I read English poems, essays and knew the lifestyle of Western world from our textbook. [But] all that had very little to do in our practical settings.” When she looks at her educational experiences in Nepal, especially when she compares it with her experience as a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, “whatever experience I gain, whatever knowledge I am gaining and whatever work I am doing are all make a lot of sense to me. Now I can say that it does fit to me for whatever I want. I can take certain stand in certain epistemology and ontology for myself, for my work and for my life as a whole.” By contrast, she adds, “my previous academic knowledge in Nepal did not have direct bearing with the practice, understanding, way of thinking and for my whole life. The study was just for gaining the academic degree I would say.”

She concludes her narrative with a more general observation of the education system in Nepal:

I doubt if the existing model of education system of our country is helpful for the practical purpose. Most of the times, these textbook and curricular materials and issues became just something to read, recite and write in the exam, nothing more than that. I do not know what kind of epistemology we [can] develop and what kind of real output we want from our kids with that type of education system.

This concern for relevance and significance of learning to practical life, to the local society and culture, connects Gita’s narrative to the rest of the narratives, especially those of the younger scholars who seem to see themselves less as part of the educational establishment and more as individuals who want to challenge and change the system in favor of making formal literacy education more motivating and useful for students and to the society. Presented in a multimodal form, which allows us to see and hear the author—a much younger female scholar who speaks English with a South Asian accent and so on—we are better able to understand the story as a whole.