Dreaming India
Westerners often fall in love with India through its sights – splendid monuments, colourful costumes and tourist destinations where tradition and modernity seem to coexist against impossible odds. Katherine Russell Rich’s love affair with India was somewhat unusual in that it was inspired by the sounds she heard while learning the Hindi language – not in some Indian backwater but in her home in New York City.
Rich, a journalist, began taking Hindi lessons to rekindle memories of a trip to India, where she had gone to interview the Dalai Lama’s doctor for a New York Times article. Although she had mastered no more than a few words, Rich was so thrilled by the lessons that someone suggested she ought to go to India and learn the language. “There’s a book in that,” he said, setting Rich off on an uncertain literary adventure.
Rich spent a year learning Hindi in India, immersed not just in the language but in India’s rich and bewilderingly diverse culture. And there was indeed a book in her experiences. Titled “Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language,” it’s a witty, spirited and engaging work that straddles multiple genres: travel, memoir, culture and cognitive science. Rich hadn’t intended to write such a book. “I wanted to be a guinea pig out there testing language theories,” she says. But her year in India proved so life-transforming that she ended up writing a book overflowing with intriguing characters worthy of the best contemporary fiction about India.
Rich’s linguistic odyssey takes place in Udaipur, a former kingdom in the desert state of Rajasthan that still lives in something of a colonial hangover. As a Westerner, Rich was accorded a kind of mild celebrity status in the small city. “My first month there, I thought there was some Indian joke I wasn’t getting that went, ‘I saw you on television,’” says Rich. “So many people said it, and I couldn’t figure out why.”
The mystery was revealed when Rich switched on the TV at her rented apartment one day. There she was, on the local channel, zoning out at a religious festival she had recently attended. It turned out that a TV crew had been filming her – a lot. In fact, Rich discovered that just about every public movement of hers was a topic of local discussion. “You live in Sector 11,” a trishaw driver would tell her. “And last Wednesday you were coming from the airport … yes, my friend drove you and he said you were wearing a red sweater.”
Before she left for India, says Rich, her father told her: “A whole year in India? Won’t you be lonely?” She now muses: “Yeah, right. Whatever the opposite of lonely is, that’s what I was.”
On several occasions, Rich was invited to visit the famed palace of Udaipur’s erstwhile ruler, the maharana. “It was always a trip,” she recalls, “like stepping into a medieval Indian court, except the maharana had a nicely sly, modern sense of humour.”
Rich writes about one hilarious Christmas Eve visit to the sprawling palace. After being received by a barefoot servant, she was led into an anteroom whose walls boasted elaborate gilt frames of Udaipur’s stark-faced rulers. Her host, photographed in a long white tunic and red plumed headdress, had “one eyebrow raised in a way that could look affronted or amused, depending on how you craned your neck.”
The maharana appeared much more relaxed when Rich was brought in to meet him in a chandeliered reception room. He frowned as if to place her and his aides, perched on chairs, shot each other glances. After a long, awkward silence, Rich asked the royal dignitary what he did for Christmas. “We drink,” he said gruffly.
During the first few months of her immersion into Hindi, there were moments when Rich suppressed her English to such a great extent that she was unable to mentally summon words in either language. “Even the normal, silent self-talk that everyone engages in disappeared for a time and it was totally disconcerting,” she recalls. “Without your normal language, you start to forget who you are.”
In fact, Rich had no idea how intricately connected language and existence can be until she lived in India. As her Hindi got better, for example, she began to notice physical changes in her body, including how she looked. She attributes this to the “mirror system,” a neuronal system scientists recently discovered whereby people inadvertently imitate others’ gestures, including facial ones, because their brains automatically record their gestures. Speaking a foreign language also alters facial features because each language has its own “resting place,” where the speaker’s mouth returns to when it rests. “In English, we rest on the schwa sound, while in French, it’s the uu,” says Rich.
Her way of thinking changed, too, because, as Rich puts it, “so much of Hindi carries bits and pieces of Hinduism, and the religion seeped in when I was there.” She still prays to the Hindu deity Ram, for example, and feels that a part of her will always remain Hindu.
While in India, a hotelier who had spent a lot of time with Westerners told Rich that she would find herself a nicer person when she returned home. “I thought he was crazy, but he was absolutely right,” says Rich. “The immersion in Hindi melted some of my New York edges and I work hard not to get them back.”
About the Author
Alison Gee is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in People, InStyle, the International Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She is a former editor of Asiaweek magazine and is presently writing an India-based literary memoir, The Peacock Sings for Rain (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
