According to the 1998 Census of Pakistan the adult
literacy rate is 45 percent. In India it is better being 56.5 percent while in
the Maldives it is really good being 96.2 percent. Literacy has not been
consistently defined in Pakistan. In 1951 the ‘ability to read’ was defined as
the ability to decode the symbols on a surface. In 1961 it meant the ‘ability
to read with understanding’. In 1972 it was ‘whether a person can read and
write with understanding’ while in 1981 it was ‘whether a person can read a
newspaper and write a simple letter’. In short, the definition has been getting
more and more stringent. However, the enumerators do not have the time to
verify what the respondents claim and the figure remains a very rough, possibly
rather optimistic, estimate.
The project of literacy is part of the overall project of modernization. It gained momentum along with the industrial revolution for a number of complex, at times independent but mostly interrelated, reasons. One major reason seems to have been that industry requires the workers to read labels, follow written instructions and live in a fast-moving world dependent on the written word. Another was that the idea of citizenship and rights, which went along with the philosophy of individualism, urged people to seek self fulfillment in their own way. For this the world conjured up by print, whether fictional or factual, had to be accessed. Literacy ensured that one had access to opinions, facts and entertainment brought out by the printing houses. Thus the project of literacy gained momentum.
Literacy did not make people more civilized if civilization is defind as the growth of humanitarianism. Humanitarianism did, of course, gain momentum at the same time and it did give aspirations about peace, womens’ rights, animal rights, human rights in general, freedom, equality, fraternity, liberty and so on. But while this was going on, so was the cruel exploitation of workers in factories and the callous suppression of the peoples of Africa, America, Australia and Asia abroad. Even now, the United States, a fully literate society, is quite indifferent to the fate of those whom its government bombs, kills, maims and keeps imprisoned under inhuman conditions. Literacy by itself does not make people humane. After all Western societies confine old people to loneliness and takes less care of the young than pre-modern, illiterate societies. However, literacy does allow one to transcend the narrow world view of one’s society and gives access to texts produced by humanitarian intellectuals and activists.
Given these facts, how will literacy help Pakistan? Precisely by making it possible to deviate from the dominant world view of our society and have access to other, more humanitarian, world views. The dominant world view of our society is male dominance and the acceptance of power. The father, husband or other dominant males have economic power and authority vested in them by custom. In some parts of the countryside this is so great that brothers and husbands can (and do) kill their sisters or wives with impunity in the name of ‘honour’. The mothers-in-law, using their sons as their private army, can create a living hell for their daughters-in-law. Feudal lords can play with the lives of their serfs and tenants. Officers can disgrace ordinary citizens who pay their salaries. All these practices are justified in the name of custom, religion and national interest. However, they actually belong to the oldest religion of our area---the worship of power!
Literacy can help us transcend this in some ways. First, it empowers people who can find jobs in the expanding urban-based economy. This will undermine the basis of feudal power by creating immigration to the cities. Further, since women will be employed it will eventually challenge the economic basis of male authority. Above all, the texts created in Western countries will give new, revolutionary concepts to people. Among them will be the ideas of human rights, women rights, equality and so on. Even more useful might be the fact that educated parents will want to have smaller families so that all the children can get education. This will repeat the pattern witnessed all over the world. When parents, especially mothers, are educated the fertility rate decreases. This will mean that the population bomb will get defused---a truly thrilling prospect! However, along with these positive developments there will be some negative burdens also. For instance, the family will break up, divorce rate will increase and there will be a crisis in authority leading to anomie and loneliness. Assuming that we can pay this price the question is how to make people literate?
The government has tried many strategies including paying literate citizens for imparting literacy skills to others. One thing, however, has been common to all such programmes. The language of literacy is Urdu, except in the interior of Sindh, and the texts are made by urban, generally bureaucratic, elites. This has ensured that the common peoples’ linguistic and cultural capital has been rendered into a deficit. The message conveyed to them is that neither your language nor the literature in it is fit to be taught by the state. Indeed, in the Punjab the culture shame about Punjabi is so high that professional people do not even speak Punjabi to their urbanized children. Very often they are unaware that their language has any worthwhile literature at all. When they do hear songs and other literary products in their language they do enjoy them but they do not feel that they can be used in any formal programme of teaching literacy. They have internalized the contempt the dominant culture has for the indigenous languages of the people. This is profoundly to be regretted and, I believe, needs change.
One possibility of change is to teach the people in their own languages to begin with. Punjabi, Siraiki, Hindko, Balochi, Brahvi and a number of other languages are written in the nastaliq script---the script of Urdu and Persian. Some special marks and symbols are used, to be sure, but the skill learned will make the reader read Urdu texts too. Sindhi and Pashto are written in variant forms of the naskh script---the script of Arabic. As Nastaliq too is based upon naskh so if a person picks up Arabic or Urdu it is not very difficult for him or her to pick up these other languages too. Vice versa, if anyone picks up any Pakistani language, both Urdu and Arabic would be easy to learn.
There are various texts in the indigenous languages of the people. These are small, indifferently printed books in verse, and sometimes in prose, in Punjabi, Siraiki, Pashto, Sindhi and Urdu. I have not come across Baluchi and Brahvi texts though stories in these languages are available. Moreover, there are books published by the Maktaba-e-Darkhani in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on religious themes in these languages. These books are called chapbooks by William L. Hanaway, an American academic, who wrote a chapter on them in Studies in Pakistani Popular Culture (edited by Hanaway and Wilma Heston) in 1996. These chapbooks have also been read by the present author and I have referred to them briefly in my own book entitled Language, Ideology and Power (Oxford UP, 2002). These books are on three major themes: religion, romance and entertainment. The religious ones are called Nur Namas, Jang Namas and so on. They narrate stories about the radiance of God and the Prophet Mohammad (Peace be Upon Him) who spread radiance in the world. They have tales of the messengers of God, saints and other religious figures. Their religion is a popular version of folk Islam in which saints and miracles feature prominently. The Jang Namas and Karbala Namas are about the battle of Karbala in which Imam Husain became a martyr. These stories are in verse and are generally sung. In the villages a woman sings them out while the others follow in chorus. They are now confind to a rural or lower middle class urban readership. But, surprising enough, these chapbooks are in Punjabi, Siraiki and Hindko which are not otherwise formally taught in schools.
The romantic stories are both about the traditional lovers such as Heer and Ranjha and more modern versions of them. Their world is a magical one where cause and effect are not necessarily connected. This arbitrary world is very much like our peoples’ daily existence where almost anything, however unjust, can happen to them with no questions asked. I suppose such stories appeal to the people in the sense that they make them reconcile to the arbitrariness and injustice of the world around them.
Then there are the entertaining songs and jokes and books on black magic. The songs and jokes are sometimes quite bawdy---middle class puritarism has not got to them yet---and the books on magic and necromancy appeal to people who do not find answers to their daily problems either in public institutions or the family.
The chapbooks belong to a pre-modern world view which, I think, is not alien for our people. It might be a good idea to use some of them to make people literate. This will make use of the peoples’ local knowledge and languages. It will recognize these things as assets and not as shameful liabilities. Once they learn to read the chapbooks they can graduate to other books in their indigenous languages and Urdu. However, these others books should not be full of chauvinism and anti-Hindu propaganda as most of our Textbook Board products tend to be. They must build on the relatively less harmful model of the chapbooks to introduce the new literates to the modern concepts of citizenship, rights, democracy and freedom.