by Pramod Parajuli and Elizabeth Enslin

The ability to read and write can be a powerful force in empowering women as this experiment in Gunjanagar village shows. The following in a shortened version of an article that appeared in Convergence, no.1, 1990.

We found that through the use of key words, women can reclaim and redefine their powers. Literacy programs which move beyond the teaching of mere words provide forums for generating debates on gender relations and identities and also on issues such as caste inequality and the links between power and knowledge.

At the request of women in the village, we trained young women as teachers and began several literacy classes in November 1987. Women in the classes gained skills for reading and writing, but more importantly, they learned how to discuss their most immediate problems and then explored their potential for confronting them.

The issues that women raised in the classes — lack of recognition of women's work, men's card playing, drinking and violence, the deterioration of the local ecology and the erosion of women's physical and ritual spaces —became matters of debate throughout the community. The success of the literacy classes gave women the courage to begin not only identifying these problems, but also initiating concrete steps to ameliorate them.

Excited by the success of the classes begun four months earlier, women throughout the village organized to demand a plot of public land on which to establish a "Women's Centre" in March 1988. They envisioned the centre as a place where women could meet, discuss gender-specific issues, conduct literacy classes, provide health and legal services for women and run nurseries and skills training centres. In the struggle to gain control over public land, women attempted to reclaim a social and cultural space and gain more control over the processes of change....

Their mobilization to claim public land therefore reflected their growing concerns. In the process of struggling for the Centre, women encountered resistance from male members of the community including physical and psychological violence. Far from subduing them, male opposition angered them, led them to confront the sources of their oppression and spurred them on to further commitment and activity. While pedagogy began with a struggle for education, it evolved into a socio-cultural struggle. After initial confrontation between men and women, these issues became public debates not only among women but also among men. In every meeting and confrontation women learned how to analyse their social and cultural reality. Most importantly, they learned how to change it.

Women's Literacy

We decided to develop a literacy program for women after many months of considering how best to meet the community's demands that we bring them "development." They based this vision on an accurate assessment of the politics of top-down development in Nepal. They wanted to be given "development." For most villagers, development meant educating their children in English; cultivating with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and improved irrigation systems; buying bicycles, motorcycles and radios; and drinking coca-cola at local tea shops. High caste men demanded that we tutor their children in English.

Many women, however, asked how they could provide their children with medicine, improve their sources of income, and learn how to read, write and do arithmetic. We evaded men's demands for teaching English, but seriously considered how we could build on women's concerns for the inadequacy of health care for both women and children, their lack of control over property, income and their lack of socially relevant education.

We began to conduct small meetings in the various neighborhoods of the village and asked women directly if they wanted literacy classes and how we could develop a curriculum to meet their needs not only for literacy and numeracy, but also for improving other aspects of their lives.

We asked: What could you do better by knowing how to read and write? What kinds of information do you need?
What are the most crucial problems in your lives?....