Yes I fully expected to be taken to task for suggesting that India was colonized by a literate culture, but I still maintain that this is the case. <br><br>It is of course true that literacy existed in India thousands of years before it did in what became Britain. Yet literacy belonged almost exclusively to elite castes throughout Indian history, and the great bulk of popular culture and society remained very much oral even as periodically great literatures flourished. Significantly, the printing press did not appear in India until it was imported from the west in the mid-19th century. And in the 18th century, as Britain gained political and military control of India, the relative rates of popular literacy in India and England were massively tilted in favour of England, a disparity that would only intensify over the next two centuries. I believe that it was precisely that disparity in popular literacy that enabled the colonization of oral India. For example, England's (also Scotland's) unprecedented rates of popular literacy in these years fuelled the Industrial revolution, among other literate social developments, which made even starker the difference in economic and administrative (and of course military) power between oral India and literate England. In the end it took someone of Ghandi's unique genius, able to understand and bridge both oral and literate political cultures and social dynamics, to successfully lead mostly oral India out from under the colonial thumb of literate imperialism.<br>
<br>Yet I maintain that in the realm of food, for example, this same process - western literate colonization of oral India - is happening today, with highly literate transnational (but based in the west) corporations like Monsanto and Cargill, whose every atom is defined by literate thinking and practices (patents, factories, genetic science, financial systems, etc.) and shaped by university-trained MBAs and statisticians and agronomists and marketers and lobbyists, actively attacking and usurping ancient Indian oral agricultural practices, communities and cultures with truly catastrophic results. <br>
<br>And this is happening because even if rates of popular literacy are much closer today than they were centuries ago, the popular deployment of complex literate systems in daily life is still very unequal. (At least that is my impression based on a modest degree of traveling in India. Even if, increasingly, there are urban centres in India that are - in some respects anyway - as literate as Paris or London.) And the solution to this problem is not the upgrading of oral Indian systems to match western literate systems. On the contrary, that is suicide, because those literate systems are unsustainable and are in the process of killing our planet. In my opinion what is needed are bridges between users of oral and digital systems that make use of literacy but are not ruled by it, to create a sustainable future<br>
<br>One small example of a community moving in this direction is described in my blog post of yesterday, titled Array of Words and the Manilla Street Kids Digital Gift Economy.<br><br>Regards,<br>John<br>--<br>blog: <a href="http://www.youareyourmedia.com">www.youareyourmedia.com</a><br>
<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Simon Biggs <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:simon@littlepig.org.uk">simon@littlepig.org.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="word-wrap: break-word;">I've not been following this thread but this email jumped out.<div><br></div><div>Surely India has been one of the world's most sophisticated and continuous of literate cultures, along with China. India and China were literate thousands of years before Britain existed as an idea, much less as an empire. However, this notion of literacy evokes a very narrow conception of what it is and what it can be. You might want to look at this:</div>
<div><br></div><div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3">Garcia, O (2006) with Bartlett and Kleifgen; From biliteracy to pluriliteracies, in Handbook of Applied Linguistics on Multilingual Communication, Mouton.</font></div>
</div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3"><br></font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3">also at:</font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3"><br></font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3"><a href="http://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/kleifgen/tech_n_lit/pluriliteraciesfinal.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/kleifgen/tech_n_lit/pluriliteraciesfinal.pdf</a></font></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3"><br></font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3">best</font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3"><br></font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3">Simon</font></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><br></div><div><br><div><div><div></div><div class="h5"><div>On 3 Sep 2011, at 15:18, Doug Belshaw wrote:</div><br></div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div>
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Wow. "<span style="font-size: 13px;">India was not primarily colonized by Britain but </span><span style="font-size: 13px;">by literate culture." Now *there's* an unwarranted assertion, John.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: 13px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 13px;">I agree we don't need more labels but, if we did, I think I'd find Dave White's 'Visitors and Residents' concept more persuasive: </span><a href="http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/" target="_blank">http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/</a></div>
<div><br>--- <br>Doug Belshaw<br><a href="http://dougbelshaw.com" target="_blank">http://dougbelshaw.com</a><div><br></div><div>This email is:</div><div><br></div><div>[ ] Bloggable</div><div>[x] Ask first</div><div>[ ] Private</div>
<br></div><p style="color: rgb(160, 160, 168);">On Saturday, 3 September 2011 at 13:00, <a href="mailto:idc-request@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">idc-request@mailman.thing.net</a> wrote:</p>
<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-style: solid; border-width: 1px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 10px;">
<span><span style="font-size: 13px;">India was not primarily colonized by Britain but<br>by literate culture</span></span>
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<br>Simon Biggs | <a href="mailto:simon@littlepig.org.uk" target="_blank">simon@littlepig.org.uk</a> | <a href="http://www.littlepig.org.uk" target="_blank">www.littlepig.org.uk</a></div><div style="margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;">
<br></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><a href="mailto:s.biggs@ed.ac.uk" target="_blank">s.biggs@ed.ac.uk</a> | Edinburgh College of Art | University of Edinburgh</div><div style="margin: 0px;"><a href="http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle" target="_blank">www.eca.ac.uk/circle</a> | <a href="http://www.elmcip.net" target="_blank">www.elmcip.net</a> | <a href="http://www.movingtargets.co.uk" target="_blank">www.movingtargets.co.uk</a></div>
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