Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language by Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“India will change you forever,” a friend once told Katherine Russell Rich and after recovering from cancer and losing her job, that change was just what Russell wanted. “I no longer had the language to describe my own life,” she explains. “So I decided to borrow someone else’s.” She decides to study Hindi for a year in Rajasthan.

Adult language learning isn’t for the fainthearted. The optimum period for language acquisition begins at eighteen months and peaks at seven. The ability to pick up vocabulary lasts forever but learning intonation and sound patterns becomes progressively harder with age. However Russell is intrigued by the idea that speaking another language opens up another world, wondering if learning Hindi will double the size of the world she was born into.

What she discovers is her new world expands with its new language and her old one begins to vanish. While she learns words that have no equivalent in English, vocabulary she’s used all of her life fades into the back of her mind. “Hindi pollutes my English,” as she absorbs the formal address of her new language and transfers new rules of pronunciation into her native language where they don’t belong. She begins to say “we” instead of “I,” as Hindi blurs the distinction between the individual and the group for her. Even her face begins to change. When she looks in a mirror, she judges her features by the standards that exist in her new culture, described by her new language. She learns that in Hindi yesterday and tomorrow are the same word, that Indian time is circular, not linear. “in India, in Hindi, it’s always right now.”

Russell practices total immersion, living in “the incurably medieval” city of Udaipur with an extended family who ensure that she’s surrounded by Hindi, “a monsoon of words.” She takes long walks alone, looking at unfamiliar sights that she has no names for. Without language, she falls back into the wonder of childhood, where nothing appears ordinary.

Then on a bright day in September, the world shakes when the Twin Towers fall. Language becomes political with words like “terrorism,” “fanaticism,” “war.” The deep and murderous divide between Indian Hindus and Muslims becomes horribly evident to Russell. She learns that Hindi is seen by many as a right-wing nationalistic tool, intended to supplant the nation’s eighteen official languages and to remove all lingering traces of Persian words that came with the former Mughal rulers.

Linking Muslims and Christians as undesirable foreign outsiders, right-wing Hindu terrorists attack and kill an Australian doctor and his two sons because they believe the man has been proselytizing. Russell is attacked three times in public, punched and knocked down. Her host family, one of her teachers tells her, has been spreading rumors about her and, unnerved, she thinks this is true. She leaves the house that’s been her refuge, moves to a hotel, and becomes “lost in India.”

Four hours from Udaipur, Hindu pilgrims burn to death in a train car conflagration. “Muslims had done this thing” is the popular verdict, reinforced by nationalist leaders, and Muslims are killed with impunity as a result. The official death toll is nine hundred. Russell’s friendships are shaken when she hears people she’s close to spew hatred against Muslims. When her year is up, India and Pakistan are “teetering on the edge.” And yet India becomes part of her, her second world, along with her imperfect but passionate grasp on Hindi.

Dreaming in Hindi is more than a memoir. It’s a deep and piercing examination of what’s gained and what’s lost by submitting to another language, another culture. ~Janet Brown