Word Processing

An Americans cathartic foray into Hindi is delightful but for the glib cultural discourse....

When Katherine Russell Rich,a New York-based magazine editor,decided to learn a second language,she was keenly aware of its implications in monolingual America. There,it would be perceived as a preoccupation of the disoriented; much like learning to play the piano or speak Mandarin,it was a perverted survival mechanism. Back in 2001,Rich fitted the bill,having just been fired from her job and surviving cancer twice. The language she chose was Hindi,beginning with sedate courses in New York,before plunging headlong in its pursuit in dusty but colourful Udaipur,a world several worlds away from her own.

Dreaming in Hindi is Richs delightful account of learning to live and love Hindi. Language learning for adults is always fraught with stock comic situations,an inability to understand or communicate being associated with an imbecility unpardonable in adults. So it is with Rich who,billeted with a Jain joint family,feels like half an overgrown child as she moves from the nervous namastes through the hop,skip and jump of gendered verbs to a place where she can crack jokes in Hindi with elan or appreciate the drama of Bollywood without being horrified by its cliches.

Those close encounters with an alien tongue are the more memorable parts of the book from a beginners literalism her apartment block is called Antriksh,translated as Outer Space; a fellow student sniggers that Iqbal is Ek-Bal or one-hair to the hieroglyphs of newly learnt alphabet: the beautiful letters,like stick trees that had bumped into a ceiling or a revue of performing snakes. Richs Hindi learning coincided with a parallel interest in neural responses to learning a second language and she quotes from language experts and piles of references painstakingly culled from books like The Neurobiology of Affect in Language and A Users Guide to the Brain.

Rich remains on solid ground while tracing the philological roots of Hindi words,praising Indian hospitality,or fulminating against limited pharmacopoeia,but the terrain turns uncertain once she ventures into cultural discourse. A Mewari household is but a poor microcosm of the mind-boggling complexity that is India,and training the NY editors cultural microscope on their mores can only lead to glib statements like there is no concept of privacy in India or that no one uses a cookbook in India. Or to disturbing assumptions on dowry death Rich uses a curious phrase called kitchen fire which,though alarmingly frequent,is still a crime and not par for the course as her tone seems to suggest.

In Udaipur,Rich often ends up in her friend Renees apartment,its decor like India and a sanctuary from India. That phrase could also describe the experience of Rich,and successful predecessors of her generic ilk like Elizabeth Gilbert,whose 2006 memoir Eat,Pray,Love set in Italy,India and Indonesia is a travelogue cum survival primer on failed marriages. Richs target audience her book is on Oprahs reading list is,after all,fellow city scribes and devotees of daytime TV in the US,who will alternately bristle and be wowed by her cathartic forays into the exotic. In the Prologue,Rich,however,is far more candid: I no longer had the language to describe my own life. I decided Id borrow someone elses.