WHY REHMAT DOESN'T READ ANYMORE

Many of my original ideas about what should be done to help the poor have been taking a bit of a knock in recent months.
First, there was toilets: poor people don't want toilets inside their homes. They take up valuable space, the drains back up, they stink and they rob poor women of the chance to sit together and gossip.Then, there were windows: poor people don't want them at waist height, like most of us in the West. They want them up near the ceiling, so loose hands can't reach in and steal money or jewelry. Today, another piece of accepted wisdom comes under fire. LITERACY. Without literacy, poor women surely cannot improve their lives.

This is a truism. But what if it isn’t!

After Munni burned herself to death in April 1989, the members of Mahila Milan on Apna Jhopadpatti chose Rehmat to take her place Munni's were big shoes to fill. Munni was popular, she was literate, she was a good public speaker. She could even talk with me in English. So, to me, it seemed perfectly natural the following year, to find Taradidi teaching Rehmat to read Hindi.
Next day, I went round to Rehmat's hut. She was busy cooking. “Yesterday, the other women said they hope that you're going to take Munni's place. Are you learning to read and write now?” “Yes, they’re teaching me Hindi. - both reading and writing.”
Rehmat was keen to become literate because she was convinced it would help her as a leader on Apna Jhopadpatti. “ Listening to you all talk, I feel that I should be able to understand what you are all saying. So that's why.

This all seemed pretty obvious. Learning to read and write would empower Rehmat. So, you can imagine my surprise a couple of years later, when I asked how she was getting on with her Hindi lessons.

“Somebody used to come to teach me to read or write. I learnt a little bit, and then I left it..” I ask why. Rehmat mumbles something about too much work in Mahila Milan, then clams up. No point in pursuing it. I suspected it wasn't quite that simple. Rehmat's name came up again later that day. Jockin said Rehmat had been very close to Munni. This was why she'd been asked to take over immediately after Munni's suicide.

“Now, immediately after, she took on that, and she felt that she is an indisputedly(sic) leader, and the whole taste she felt about becoming a powerful woman in the community, thereby the whole thing got into her head. She started behaving not in the right direction, the way Mahila Milan goes.....”

In Rehmat's eyes, learning to read and write was a way of setting herself above the rest of the women.

“...she tried to get on to this whole literacy. And she adopted one of our staff, who is doing this class, into a special tuition master, like one to one. So she was having her book, her lesson, nothing to do with others in the community. So it mean, it didn't bring all good qualities. This is all going to destabilize. Which we saw through it. In six months, the community was really getting angry and called for a meeting. And all of them came to have a meeting and started asking Rehmat How could you play this role without telling us?

“..the same thing happened to Medina, when she decided that she is a superior leader. Whereas the Mahila Milan doesn't have one leader as such. It's a group. The same strategy was adopted to bring down Rehmat also, and make her accountable to the community.”

Rehmat's wings were clipped. In fairness, Rehmat did acknowledge the error of her ways, and is now once again an effective and respected leader. But the special literacy classes stopped. Everyone had learnt a lesson.

“..I think there are two things. If one is talking about reaching to thousands of people, private tuitions of imparting literacy skills is not the answer at all...”

Celine d'Cruz knows what she's talking about. A college graduate, she's worked with the pavement dwellers of Byculla for all her adult life. Celine isn't in to Development Theory. Hers is a strictly practical philosophy based on observation of what poor women actually do and how they do it. And on a recognition that literacy is no substitute for real education.
“..you have to work out a way in which you can educate many, many more people without falling into the trap that only literacy skills educates people....we are very clear..we have tried out teachers coming in and training women to read and write. And we realised it helps only up to a point. Then the women gets stuck, because then she feels she has moved on to another level and doesn't see herself as part of the community.”

Heirarchies and elites start creating themselves. The sense of community, of pulling together, is eroded. In Celine's eyes, the losses far outweigh any individual gains. Jockin goes further. He says that much of India's secondary education, based on the printed word, is unnecessary and dangerous. It doesn't correspond to the real skills, the real education that poor people need to change their lives.

“..Not a single government official is interested in changing the environment of the pavement dwellers. But they are interested in bringing a change in their value and culture of the pavement dwelling girl....”

I explain the conventional wisdom in the West: “ In the West we say: to be a full citizen and to be cultured you must be literate.” Jockin rejects this out of hanbd: “this literacy does not give me anything today in our society.”
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Jockin believes literacy limits, not expands knowledge! Because it tends to restrict knowledge to what's written down in books. So to acquire knowledge you have to have access to those books. And there are other drawbacks. Manual skills get devalued. Oral cultures are undermined. Literacy creates expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled.

And Celine is adamant that literacy doesn't help much on the street. “Eighty percent of the things they do don't need literacy skills. Maybe even more than that. When they handle demolitions, handling their families, if there is no meal in the house she gets another meal ready for the family even if there is no money, even if there is no firewood. Where does all that ingenuity come from? She doesn't need literacy skills to do that!”

The irony is that most of the Mahila Milan women, of course, want their kids to become white collar workers. Most of them feel embarrassed they can't read or write. Many still believe that being able to read and write will somehow lead to a better life. If they didn't, then why would they insist that their sons, and their daughters, study?

Samina who lives on the edge of Jhula Maidan, admits she can neither read nor write. “But do you ever regret that you weren't able to learn?” “ Well, I regret it. But it doesn't really go into my head . There was that teacher who used to come and she used to teach us how to read and write. OK. I used to look. Come here, look! Tthe teacher would write something, make me write something. Bit never went in my head only.

But Samina did make her youngest daughter Safina study to Twelth Standard. So Safina can talk with me, after a fashion, in English. But it doesn't seem to have really changed her life. She married a hospital accountant. But they now live on the pavement bang opposite Samina's hut. Safina dreams of a world she's learnt from books. But simply being able to read and write hasn't given her the skills, or the self-confidence to get there.

But her mother Samina - the illiterate - she's got those skills and that self-confidence. Now, surely that's the wrong way round! Or is it?

I've watched these so-called illiterate women now for many years.

Their self-confidence doesn't come from literacy. It comes from what they've achieved. Listen to Laxmi describe how she sees the changes in herself over the past ten years.

“ We would shiver in front of a police before Mahila Milan was formed. We were very frightened of the police. Now, we can go up to the police station, talk about our problems, demand the justice be given to us. And this is true for every other institution that you would normally not want to deal with in the past. We developed a sense of confidence that we can now get across what we think to the outside world. The second great thing about this process is that it is not only for ourselves. But it has in it the strength of involving groups of other women in it. So, today, if I benefit from it, tomorrow I have the confidence that I can teach hundreds of other women the same thing.”

Banoo lives on Water Street. Banoo isn't talkative. But when she does decide to talk she chooses her words carefully. ” We visit other cities, we visit other countries and we also know now that there are poor people in other countries. Also Bangkok had poor people. Korea had poor people. So, we were not the only ones!”

Like most of the other pavement dwellers, Banoo thought there were only poor people in India, that the rest of the world was rich. Now she knows better! “The principle is very clear: whether you are a rich man or you are a poor man, you have to do your own thing. Nobody else is going to do it for you.”

And travel has led to some surprising conclusions. When Sona visited Manila, for example, she noticed that social workers ran the show in the slums there. The complete opposite from Bombay. “I feel ...we are much better off here, because even if we have problems over here somewhere we get help, we get support from other people. Whereas, over there, there is nothing. It is just the rule of the rich in that country!

Or Sakina. She's what we would call illiterate. But in my eyes she's immensely cultured and capable. Sakina has travelled to many cities, sung her songs to many audiences. This is how she describes the experience being a member of Mahila Milan.
“and one fine day, we found this office. And when we came to this office we were told that we have to use our own brains and find our own answers. So I thought it was like a school, when I first came here, and we continued coming, and this whole thing was like a magic. We suddenly realised that all of us were going to London and Bangkok and Bangladesh, and everywhere in the world. We'd never heard these names in our lives!”
Travel, of course, has broadened these women's minds. But it's also made them realise that just because you're technically illiterate doesn't mean you can't be the equal of a policeman, a politician, a white man, even a white Radiowallah!
“if we saw a white man, like you, we would run after you, stand in front of our camera, and say : Take our picture. It didn't mean anything. Now I can pull your collar and shake you, and that is the difference!”

~

Jockin says we confuse literacy with education. The two are not the same. And education to what end?
They equate literacy with status, education with the classroom, when the real school is right on their doorstep. Jockin hears it all the time. “When women come and say that I don't know how to talk. I don't tell anything. I don't know about the society. I don't do anything. I can't talk to that women I said Why can't you talk? What do you do in the morning? Oh. I wash my dishes Then what do you do? ..After washing your dishes you can't sit idle because of the culture. This is the nature of women. Then you get another women, one, two, three, four. All the four sit and doing their counting business. While they doing counting, learning, counting, while they teach and talk about local politics, national politics, gossips husband affairs, children affairs, own affair, sexual affair, everything is being taught in that communication mission.”

He’s right. You see the women combing out each other's hair, picking at each other's scalps, or washing clothes together, cleaning the rice.And telling stories. Exchanging experiences. Almost always learning, and without knowing it!

Fine! I can accept that. But suppose the BMC - the Bombay Municipal Corporation - does what it's supposed to do by law, and posts a notice on the lamppost announcing a demolition within twenty four hours!

Now if you can't read you're going to be up a gum tree. The notice is simple. Says your hut will be demolished. Jockin says that’s not a good enough reason. “I need not be literate to get to know what section, what department, who served the notice on me because the notice is very simple, very clear. You will be demolished in 24 hours. It's a common message.” “But surely you need to be able to read that.”. Wrong again. “There is no need that individual, because of the collective, the atmosphere of the society is this, you get the message.”
What Jockin's saying in his unique Body English is that a sense of community still holds amongst the poor in India. So, if I don't know how to read I ask someone who can. And I ask someone else where to go to register my protest, whom to see, what to say. Skills, in other words, tend to be pooled and then shared out.

While we've been talking, Sona's walked in with a shopping bag full of savings books and Rupee notes.

She sits down opposite Rashida. She takes a ballpoint pen and, painstakingly, starts carving - it's the only word for it, entries into the ledger.
This is hard work for Sona. And something brand new. Roman letters and symbols are Greek to her. She can only understand how to form a zero if she thinks of it as an egg. But she's determined to learn because for Sona encouraging people to save money for their houses is a religion.
Now, isn't this a contradiction with what Celine and Jockin have just been telling me? Not at all, says Jockin! “It's a very, very, totally functional literacy, need-based literacy, which she will not learn something which she doesn't want to connect with. She is not going to be to use literacy for her status!”
The day before Sona had brought along to the office Triveni, a Garwhali or Madame in one of the brothels on Fourteenth Gulli. I've forgotten why Triveni had come. But Celine says Triveni proves her point!

“....she handles lakhs of Rupees every night, just sitting at the brothel. And she doesn't have any calculator with her. She doesn't write it. It's all in her head. The next morning, she can give you the whole accounts without putting it down on paper. I think one has to acknowledge there is a stereotype imagery of what education is all about. For people who do not read and write, they use their other faculties. And one has to strengthen that, and use that creatively, instead of saying everything has to be oput down on paper. That would be the ideal situation!”

I'm not saying literacy isn't a wonderful thing. Where would I be without it! But it's only a means, not an end. It won't empower you. It can help, but it's only one possible tool among many, and while it may work for some it may be a waste of time in others.
Living with the women of Mahila Milan has taught me one thing: that real empowerment happens inside people's minds. What the catalyst is, is anybody's guess!.

Essay
Episodes 1 - 4
Episodes 5 - 8
Episodes 9 - 12
Episodes 13 - 16
Episodes 17 - 20
Episodes 21 - 24
Episodes 25 - 28
Episodes 29 - 32
Episodes 33 - 35

Main Episode List
Cast of Characters
Credits
MP 3

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