To an illiterate villager, black letters can mean only one thing, the buffalo — or so goes a popular north Indian saying, kaala akshar bhains barabar . The buffalo is at the centre of the illiterate villager’s world. It’s a basic economic unit, a member of the family and, if you will, also a pet. The buffalo is a metonym for his world of tradition yet unredeemed by the light of education. His world is as dark as his buffalo and just as dumb, indolent and clumsy. His illiteracy is not merely an inability to read but also a lack of enlightenment that literacy and, by extension, liberal education have come to be conflated with. This conflation of learning with wisdom has roots in the European Enlightenment that reached us through colonialism. We continue the modern project of civilising the savage.

It is one thing to say that being literate would help a panchayat member understand his work and communicate better, and quite another that modern education would make him virtuous. The Supreme Court, which recently upheld a Haryana government law that mandated basic school education along with other qualifications for contesting a panchayat election, is not alone in believing that the ability to read and write can grant us the ability to tell right from wrong. The belief that wherever western modernity has not reached is an area of darkness is widely shared by Indians, including intellectuals on the right as well as the left.

Before the first general elections in India, MN Roy, the leading light of Indian communism, had said people should have been educated before getting the right to vote.

People in cities need not be communists to share Roy’s view. They believe villages are the dens of inequities that stem from a traditional worldview. But when it comes to the inequities in cities, they are believed to be random, individual phenomena or a law-and-order issue. The violence, injustice and discrimination in the cities are rarely linked to the influence of modernity.

When French philosopher Louise Althusser murdered his wife, he deployed his learning to justify it. If German philosopher Martin Heidegger, English poet TS Eliot or French philosopher Jacques Derrida is found endorsing Nazi ideas, it becomes his individual lapse. No one will blame modern education for creating a whole discipline that gave ideas for genocides — anthropology. If an intellectual is convicted of rape, it would have nothing to do with his background, but the whole socio-cultural context of a poor man from an Uttar Pradesh village would be probed for a similar crime.

If the villager is illiterate in our world, we are illiterate in his. For us, his entire world is as dark as his buffalo. The lack of modern education is a lack of all virtue. Slowly, we have stopped granting the rural world even the values intrinsic to a traditional society — community, sharing, compassion, sacrifice, and so on, because western modernity has come to claim all that’s good. So an illiterate man is less than human, a species akin to his buffalo.

A few years ago, a news item describing a police report for a missing buffalo revelled in the usual irony and wry humour urban middle-class has for all things rural. The news report found it humorous that the buffalo had a name, and a human name at that — Sheela, Kalawati or Bimla. It was funny that the buffalo had a definite way of responding to her name, perhaps with a swish of her tail or by curling her ears. The reporter, like most of us city-dwellers, found the way the villager related to his buffalo amusing. When a pet such as a dog or a cat can be described with human attributes, why not a buffalo?

For urban people, a buffalo is just a milk-making machine. This kind of modern bias has had serious implications for our world. Just as we consider his buffalo a mere machine, his land becomes for us an industrial resource that can be exploited without any qualms. For the illiterate villager, the buffalo is a family member, and the land his mother.

The villager’s inability to read is not just a navigational hindrance but also a lack that diminishes his being whenever he comes in contact with the government. There is a little bureaucratic routine in rural banks and courts — the taking of the thumb print — which is laden with meaning. The illiterate villager sticks out his thumb, the bank clerk grabs his limp wrist, jabs his thumb first on the ink pad and then on the document and brusquely releases the wrist. The man cannot be trusted even to place his thumb at the right place when directed. The act shows his utter lack of agency. As good as a stamp, he is bereft of not just the ability to sign his name but the very mind. The unlettered man cannot have a mind, as his buffalo cannot have emotion.

(Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist)

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