This is an unusual book. It is neither a travelogue nor a treatise but has skilfully integrated elements of both. Largely narrative, every now and then it brings in insights and concepts about our capacity to use, learn, absorb languages and scripts. It’s a lively, entertaining account of life in a small town in Rajasthan, revealing a horde of real-life characters, some of whom one can identify, such as the Udaipur-based Hindi poet Nand Chaturvedi and the poet, critic and cultural theorist Nand Kishore Acharya from Bikaner.
As far as I know, this is the first book that looks closely at the problem of learning Hindi by an American. As A.L. Becker is quoted as saying, “People who study languages think of them as codes, but they aren’t really. A language is a whole map of reality”. Katherine Russell Rich has tried to draw this map of Indian reality through the arduous task of learning Hindi. The map in its vignettes and details seems quite authentic, first-hand and all too often amusing. But such a map, drawn largely through experiences and encounters in Rajasthan, can offer only a segment of that complex and multi-layered reality called India. When Rich stretches this segment to look like the whole, the ensuing generalisations appear unreasonably blown up, disproportionate and overdone simplifications.
Here is one such generalisation: “In India there’s no female orgasm, not to speak of. ‘Orgasm’ applied only to men.... There weren’t separate terms for ‘marriage’ and ‘wedding’. Your shaadi was your wedding and your marriage, a small distinction, but in the early days of my marriage to Hindi, I was acutely aware of what was missing. ‘Privacy’ most of all.”
Rich jumps to many conclusions, sometimes suddenly. But once in a while they are interesting, like this one: “They say there’s no conversion rite into Hinduism, but there is: learn Hindi.” This comes after she is “perpetually bemused by how entwined this language is with Hinduism” and feels “...I think I can’t begin to speak it without a thorough grounding in the religion.” This clearly is an over-reading of a language.
Rich, while endorsing the view that “emotions derive from ‘cultural scripts’ and as such are learned in the language of the culture”, somewhat emotionally adds: “Perhaps this explains why, months into learning Hindi, I become keenly aware of a feeling I’ve never experienced before. It comes from outside me, fills me and the room. It’s longing, in a shade I’ve never known before: for something I can’t name but that I know viscerally is unbounded, an object or state that’s protean, divine. In English, the closest word for this emotion would be ‘melancholy’, but it is melancholy laced with joy and expectation.... Even if I could figure out what it is I’m in longing for, I wouldn’t want the desire to be satisfied, as that would kill the feeling”. Fortunately, there are many such moments when Rich is emotionally intense and truthfully vulnerable.
The book in the end embodies a rich emotional intelligence which gets formed from learning a language so distant and strange for someone brought up in the US.
