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The above is a trailer about the book “Dreaming in Hindi” by Katherine Russel Rich. I recommend reading the excerpt:
One time in India, I appeared half-naked in a temple, just up and flashed the worshippers. This was not something I’d been planning to do; I surprised myself on the Lord God Shiva’s birthday. Surprised the celebrants, too, I’d say. They hadn’t been expecting it, either.
My mom, a breast cancer survivor, had sent me Rich’s article from the NYT on how she has survived and thrived with breast cancer for 17 Years. She also happens to be from the Main Line, where I grew up.
I didn’t come to India expressly to learn the language(s), but I have picked up some Hindi from immersion. Although I wanted to know Hindi for convenience, somehow I would always make excuses about not having enough time to practice from the book I had bought. Considering how I had loved learning French and Spanish, my discomfort at the thought of learning Hindi was out of character.
Somewhere I had some I resistance–probably stemming from the various in-laws and family acquaintances who I’d met at the beginning and who’d insisted that I must learn, and who keep inquiring if I’ve learned. As if settling here wasn’t enough–I must also shed my language and adopt a new one.
Life was already overwhelming enough; I simply couldn’t take on one more thing that would invade my head. And confuse my identity even more.
A large focus of “Dreaming in Hindi” is on the effects of learning a second language on the brain. It is fascinating to think about the implications of living here on my identity (in terms of language, culture, spirituality etc). In terms of my experience, though, it’s unnerving & exhilarating!
The experience I had in India with language was so profoundly transformative that when I got back, I spent several years investigating neurolinguistics to try and find explanations for what I went through. The book, in a way, is a double immersion, because it also plunges you into the science of language, a field that’s really pretty fascinating.
Learning a second language really does alter you. You’re agreed to take in a whole other world in. When you do, your old world can’t be the same.
According to Rich, even though learning a new language is confusing, it helped her to discover a stronger, more true sense of self.
The experience of going into a far language strips you down, and in the long run, when you emerge out of that tunnel, find yourself back home, an extraordinary thing will have occured: a stronger core self has formed. You become who you should have been, or at least that’s what I found. But the process, which is profound, can be terribly disorienting.
In India, nothing about me translated. Because I got so deep into the langauge, I could tell how much I didn’t compute over there. Women were veiled and living behind closed gates. They didn’t work. They were grandmothers by 45. And here I was, divorced–that made no sense; with a career—a what?; a home owner in some misty distant land—you own a home and you are not married? But who gave this thing to you? It was even strange that I was speaking Hindi. My teacher said, “The first time I saw a Westerner speaking Hindi, it was like seeing a chicken barking,” and I was a barking chicken. The only thing I found would translate about me was goodness. I was teaching in a deaf school and people could see the goodness in that. They’d say, “See? We think Americans are bad, but they’re not all. Some of them help deaf boys..” It was alien for me, coming from New York, to be praised for goodness. That quality ended up getting amplified and since I’ve returned, I find it still is.
The last thing I ever thought would occur when I took that first Hindi lesson was that I’d end up kinder, sweeter, and calmer. But heck, anything can happen when you take a leap of faith. And I’m glad that’s what did.
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