This story of the birth of a new language raises some significant questions for our understanding of how bodies of knowledge are transformed. After the Sandinista revolution in 1979, for the first time in the history of Nicaragua, a huge nation-wide effort was made to educate deaf children. Hundreds of deaf students were enrolled in two schools. They had never been introduced to any of the world’s existing sign language systems, and came to the schools with only the simplest kind of gestural signs they had developed within their families.   Their teachers were new and inexperienced, and found it difficult to communicate with their students, but the students themselves had no problem at all in “talking” to one another. With great rapidity they began to build on the common pool of signs, and a complex new language began to emerge, which has come now to be called Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL).  Some years down the line, an even more interesting development is noticed. As younger children enter the school system, they not only pick up the language their seniors had developed, but they confidently break the existing language rules. They invent new signs and deform old ones, and these new signs that do not obey the old rules filter back into the language, making it more complex, richer and more varied.

The development of NSL raises all kinds of significant questions for scholars of sign language and linguisticians generally, but I was struck by a different kind of question. Does the continuing development of NSL tell us something about how knowledge is created and how shared bodies of knowledge are transformed?

In this era of exclusive and limiting rights in intellectual property, in which we live under the crushing myth of either the solitary individual producing knowledge in isolation, or of the corporation inventing knowledge from scratch in its laboratories, it is worth recognizing a simple truth underscored by the story of NSL  – that human beings produce knowledge by coming together in groups of different sorts, and that all knowledge is always situated in an extensive pre-existing field.

More importantly, it is the younger members, the newer entrants to a community, that make the breakthroughs that lead to new kinds of knowledges. They very rapidly learn what the seniors of the community have developed painfully over the years, and then take that body of knowledge in new and unimagined directions.

But what really leaps out from this story is that knowledge develops when rules are broken. The faithful following of old rules keeps a body of knowledge safe and pure. Safe and pure and sterile. It is the breaking of rules that permit uncharted directions, fresh insights, productive mistakes – the language that develops from rule breaking reveals an entirely new world.

Rule breaking then, is at the heart of all change, and is inaugurated by new entrants to a community. New entrants are also often the previously marginalized. New knowledge wouldn’t emerge, the world wouldn’t ever be transformed, if rules were not relentlessly, courageously – but sometimes just routinely – broken.

Routinely, because we need to recognize the fact that for most people in the world in which we live, rule-breaking is the only way to survive. Rule-breaking is the survival strategy of the poor in urban slums tapping electricity illegally, occupying “public” land earmarked for malls, for parking, for IT Parks, for housing for the rich. Rule-breaking was a way of life for Blacks under apartheid in South Africa, for the people of the north-eastern states of India smashed under the military jack-boot of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, for women who love women and men who love men in a world that makes heterosexuality compulsory.

Today we live in a world that has made every form of sharing a crime, and every transaction that seeks to escape the commercial, illegal. Downloading music from the internet and sharing it, photocopying books too expensive to buy. The Indian government is zealously pushing Intellectual Property Rights regulations, even up to police raids in Delhi on medical students’ hostels to root out photocopies of expensive foreign publications. The tragic irony of historian Eric Hobsbawm’s optimistic observation in his autobiography cannot fail to strike one, that the emergence of photocopying technology enriched the lives of scholars by making accessible books they could not afford to buy…

In a wonderful essay busting myths about copyright, Lawrence Liang, Atrayee Mazmdar and Mayur Suresh quote George Bernard Shaw: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have one idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

The new modified seeds that are being imposed all over the world, if even by chance some of them land in an adjoining field – carried by those flagrant infiltrators of private property borders: ground-water, wind, birds – the farmer who owns that land can be arrested, made to pay the corporations millions in damages. Farming, for centuries the quintessentially community-oriented way of life, is being sought to be transformed into an activity of isolated selfish individuals.

In such a world, does it not truly seem, as Emma Goldman said long ago – Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance and courage?

But of course, it is not only the powerful and the oppressors who make rules – every set of ideas, however revolutionary initially, settles into rigid rule-bound existence. And each time, it is rule-breakers who challenge once-revolutionary orthodoxies – feminists challenge marxism, sexuality movements challenge feminism; nationalism challenges imperialism, the margins of the nation challenge nationalism itself; ecology movements challenge both the Nation and the Old Left. And on it goes. Every new set of rules will be broken and deformed creatively, the sterile purity of every orthodoxy will be regenerated by the infections introduced by new entrants.

And as the broken and reconstituted rules flow back into the old spaces, these spaces will become unrecognizable.  It is this continuous creativity, this continuous rule-breaking that will keep life living.

(Largely based on a lecture delivered at the Youth Social Forum of the India Social Forum, Delhi 2006. Incidentally, kafila was launched at this ISF!)