Sixteen years ago, when an old adage that schools in Nepal are as scarce as snakes in Ireland was often taken as literal truth, Bernard Pignede made the discovery that in relatively isolated Dansing-Mohoriya village, some 80% of the Gurung men from 19 to 80 were literate. Eight percent of the women also could read and write. The national census of 1954 had shown the corresponding figures for the country as a whole to be just over 8%. Even in 1971, they were respectively still only 24% and 4%.
The village school was then only two years old and the young teacher who had come from Kathmandu to staff it had left if sitting empty after six months. The high rate of literacy was all the more impressive because Gurungs speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The men had been taught to read Nepali, which is Indo-Aryan, the official language of Nepal.
Pignede observed that literacy in Nepali seemed to follow a 'downward filtration' where those who received no direct training, mostly women and children, seemed to pick up basic literacy skills as if by osmosis from the army veterans, who had been taught while they served in the foreign armies, those of India and Britain.
The author examines Pignede's high evaluation of literacy amongst the Gurungs and outlines some of the main patterns of education and literacy in a village panchayat with a Gurung population, some three times the size of his.
