BeeSpelled

If language is indeed the first marker of identity,your location within a linguistic geography legitimises who you are,and why you are where you are. The success rate of Indian-origin kids in the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals in Washington DC is as much a peculiarly Indian-American phenomenon as it easily accommodates itself into the larger,age-old,immigrant narrative of meshing into the mainstream. That’s not to say that the families of the likes of Anamika Veeramani — who has just become the third Indian-American in a row to win — are fresh off the boat,desperate to show how well they,or their children,take to the land as ducks to water. It is,more elementally and across generations,races and ethnicities,about mastering English,and thereby claiming “American-ness”.

Now,there are aspects to the Indian triumphs that ride on an industriousness and commitment that have come to be accepted as hallmarks of the Indian-American community. (Hispanic children too,usually much less “privileged” than their Indian counterparts,do very well at the Spelling Bee.) But no other community has invested the effort,time and money in smaller spelling league circuits,such as the North South Foundation,that launch Indian children on their spellconquering trajectories.

And yet,too much success too often has its flipside. What was meant originally as a tool to help Indian-origin children assimilate and self-improve has rapidly changed,certainly since Kavya Shivashankar’s victory last year,through competitive and over-bearing parents. When the Spelling Bee was launched,it was meant as a fun thing. To bring too much un-childlike seriousness into it would make it joyless. A brilliant Indian kid,one of the subjects of Jeff Blitz’s seminal documentary Spellbound,crammed with French,German,Spanish and Latin,was felled by the word “Darjeeling” in 1999,the year Nupur Lalam who began it all in a way,won by spelling “logorrhoea”.