The Light of Knowledge Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India

Francis Cody

Orient BlackSwan

272 pages, Rs 765

The Arivoli Iyakkam (Enlightenment Movement) in Tamil Nadu is considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. Its representatives worked in conjunction with district-level administration to encourage active citizenship among the most oppressed classes in rural Tamil Nadu. Cody’s ethnography of this social movement and government programme highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements, which seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right.