Efluentes líquidos generados en el Laboratorio de Suelos

It is difficult to analyze the contemporary role of literacy or education without taking into consideration the vision produced by some of the prominent leaders of the nationalist movement. It is striking that none of the nationalist leaders (except for a few

52 Rambilas Shaima (1989), Bhasha Aur Samai. 361 53 Francesca Orisini, op.cit., 110

54 For the role o f Kisan Sabha in Bihar, see Vinita Damodaran (1992), Broken Promises - Popular Protest. Indian Nationalism and, the Congress Party in Bihar. 1935-1946. For a study o f the impact of the Gandhian mass movements and the discourse o f Swaraj, see Sumit Sarkar (1983), Modern India: 1885-1947: and B.C. Parekh (1989), Colonialism. Tradition and Reform: an analysis o f Gandhi’s political discourse

like Tagore and Gandhi) who discussed educational change radically dissented from the basic assumptions of the colonial discourse on education. The basic premises were accepted by a majority of nationalists including Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India. Only Gandhi and Tagore provided a profound and complete discourse on education specifically relevant to the Indian context. Nehru did not write anything specific and exclusive on education and literacy. In such a situation, the role of literacy and education can be discerned only from his broad general vision about independent India which drew upon both swadeshi (indigenous) and Western modernist language but was more inclined towards the latter.

If nations are indeed ‘imagined communities’ as Benedict Anderson has so persuasively suggested, one of the specific modes of imagining the nation is the emergence of print capitalism and print language which can be seen primarily in terms of literacy use and its effect and which made available historically unprecedented technical means for the thinking of the nation. Anderson is right in insisting that nations must be distinguished not by the truth or falsity55 of the claims they make, but by the style in which they are imagined. However, he considers only a very limited number of styles, and more precisely, he excludes from his analysis a major source of materials for the nationalist imagination in the third world, namely, the economy - the material reality. It is not only the print commodities but other commodities too which provide means to imagine the nation, such as hand-woven cloth or common salt, the symbolic examples which Gandhi used for political mobilization in India. The popularity of ‘Varanasi Saris’, ‘Aligarh Locks’, ‘Dehraduni Basmati Rice’, ‘Bengal Rice’, ‘Jharia Coal-fields’, ‘Hajipur and Chandannagar Bananas’, ‘Dhaka Silks’, ‘Hyderabad! Pearls’, ‘Kanyakumari Temples’, are other examples of commodities which enabled people to imagine the territorial context of their culture and empire before India was imagined as a modem nation-state. These are still the popular notions and modes of imagining the nation in rural India. However, while Anderson emphasizes the emotive aspects of the national imagination, Ernest Gellner in a very different way places the economy at the core of his argument. His thesis is that nationalism is a response to the strengthening of industrial society which requires a ‘homogeneous high culture’ for the ‘musical chairs’ economy characteristic of modem societies where mobility across diverse occupations is a fundamental need. Nationalism thus performs the function of educating, imparting a generic cultural training to individuals who should be able to ‘communicate contextlessly’ with each other in this constantly changing social

55 Benedict Anderson (1983), Imagined Communities ,1 5 54

environment56. This is a modem necessity as the members of industrial society ‘must constantly communicate with a large number of other men, with whom they frequently have no previous association, and with whom communication must consequently be explicit, rather than relying on context’57.

Despite the revolutionary significance generally attributed to it, print in colonial India did not function as a radically autonomous agency. Only with the rise of a small middle class, the growth of distant markets and the introduction o f a new system of higher education could print affect the oral mode of communication and knowledge transmission in India. Knowledge and information through print on a local or national level remained

58

limited, and mostly confined to English-language newspapers . Here, Jawaharlal Nehru’s reflections on British-Indian newspapers is worth considering:

I remember that when I was a boy the British-owned newspapers in India were full of official news and utterances; of service news, transfers and promotions; of the doings of British society, of polo, races, dances, and amateur theatricals. There was hardly a word about the people of India, about their political, cultural, social and economic life. Reading them one would hardly suspect that they existed.59

Under colonial conditions, the use of print in India by privilege catered to imperial interests and discourses which acted more as a hindrance than as an aid to publicity of nationalist thinking since resources and freedom for the use of print were lacking60. A few like Gandhi, who could avail himself of print facilities, made extensive use of it. But the nationalist imagination through print in the Hindi region remained constrained by censorship, high cost involved in establishing a printing press, lack of a unified public and common language and elite-mass alienation. Above all, ironically, the advent of nationalist imagination in the region was pulled by tensions between the imperialist and the Orientalist discourses open to the modernist elites of India. Thus M.G. Ranade hoped that sooner or later, ‘the national mind’ would ‘digest the best thoughts of Western Europe with the same intimate appreciation that it has shown in the assimilation of the old Sanskrit learning’61. The basic premise common to both the Europeans and these ‘anglicized upper-caste elites’ was that the Indian masses suffered from moral and material poverty and that it was only with their help that the character of the Indian masses could be improved. Eminent

56 Ernest Gellner (1983), Nations and Nationalism , 35-37 57 ibid.

58 Here, English refers to national and Hindi as regional 59 Jawaharlal Nehru (1946, 1981), The Discovery o f India , 294

60 Most indigenous newspapers and journals failed to meet the cost o f print, and a few which existed often met censorship and hence were banned. See N. Kumar (1971), ‘Journalism in Bihar’ in Bihar District Gazetteers , Government o f Bihar

61 Sudhir Chandra (1994), The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India. 14