5 Responses to “Dreaming in Hindi”

1. T. Patrick Killough says:

   October 25, 2009 at 8:38 am

   Let me begin by defending my overall THREE STAR rating:

   – organization of the novel through alternating chronology, autobiography, language learning: TWO STARS. Needlessly albeit probably deliberately incoherent. Kafka lite?

   – individual poetic passages of originality and insight: FIVE STARS. Not enough of them, however, to overcome the drag of a confusing organizational structure.

   – Description of language-learning (method: immersion, living with native families), language-theory (spoken, written, signed Hindi and possibly an original language created by deaf students): FOUR STARS.

   – A THREE STAR bibliography that excludes some of the author’s written sources but includes virtually no writings alluded to for her oral sources — though those sources are often published academicians writing on the same subjects being interviewed for.

   On balance: THREE STARS.

   For whom is this book, DREAMING IN HINDI: COMING AWAKE IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE written? I have no idea. It is that confusing.

   For whom will this book work? I suggest in this order:

   – family and people already personal friends of Katherine (Kathy) Russell Rich

   – readers and admirers of her memoir on cancer, The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer and Back

   – students of Sub-Continent geography, history, languages and post 9/11 politics, terrorism and Hindu-Muslim violence

   – both students and teachers of American Sign Language (ASL) and others among the world’s 200 signed languages. Katherine Russell Rich’s passages on the subject of the deaf and their languages (in Nicaragua, Rajasthan and elsewhere) are among her most impassioned and eye-opening. They make you want to learn more much more. And her fairly large, although spotty, bibliography gives you an adequate launching pad for doing so. As one example: [[ASIN:0061336467 The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)].
   
   has made me put on my must read list Oliver Sacks’s SEEING VOICES A JOURNEY INTO THE WORLD OF THE DEAF Signed By Sacks You should also google for some of the other linguistic authorities Ms Rich names but who are not represented in her bibliography — such as Judy Kegl and Ann Senghas.

   MY BOTTOM LINE: I am very glad that I read DREAMING IN HINDI, though at times I grew weary. I would love to have the author address a local group I helped start for the hard-of-hearing and for Kathy Rich to teach an adult education short course here in Western North Carolina on her experiences with the deaf and, especially, her speculations on

   – whether signing preceded language

   – and also whether profoundly deaf young people when first exposed to their un-hearing young peers (notably documented for Nicaragua) move inexorably from signing, to pidgin, to creole, to fully grammatical peer-created languages with no repeat no input from their teachers.

   Other readers may be drawn into Kathy’s inner life. She came to see her rush in September 2001 to a Hindi language school in Udaipur, north of Bombay, in terms of the three possible classic responses to danger: flee or fight or play dead. Immersing herself in India and in Hindi language-learning was Kathy’s way to play dead. Her American amours, jobs and friends were proving to be dead ends.

   She gambled that just pretending to be dead, i.e., learning Hindi, simply turning her back on all that was familiar in the USA would make her forget her earlier bout with cancer. She would measure how much of her poor hearing till age six had predisposed her to adult solitude and detachment. Perhaps Ms Rich was not so much dead when she reached India just before Muslim terrorists downed the World Trade Center Towers — as simply asleep. If so, as her subtitle asserts she experienced a kind of baptism by immersion, resurrection, a COMING AWAKE IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE.

   There is something in this book for everyone. And the good things shine through despite an order of presentation sometimes chronologically linear, at other times via flashbacks and looks into the future as far as 2006. There is obvious lifting of materials from a contemporary diary.

   There is never ending taking of the author’s psychological temperature: Kathy watching Kathy rebelling in Hindi class, Kathy seeing herself competing in a competition for foreign tourists, Kathy reacting to conversations (mainly after the period of the main narrative) with linguists. Kathy is pleased when a poet describes her as a good person. No one in the USA had ever told her that. And on and on and ,alas, a bit chaotically on. -OOO-
   Rating: 3 / 5
2. angelfood says:

   October 25, 2009 at 8:44 am

   Having an interest in travel, linguistics and Indian culture I eagerly awaited the arrival of this book. And to be fair, I slogged all the way to the end of it. That took real dedication, because it was without a doubt the most boring, whiney, pointless drivel it has ever been my misfortune to read. Let me break it down for you:
   
   1. She didn’t like India.
   
   2. She didn’t like the food.
   
   3. She didn’t like her language classes.
   
   4. She didn’t like her classmates.
   
   5. She didn’t like her host family.
   
   6. Hindi is really really hard to learn. I know that because it is repeated ad infinitum.

   I’m sorry the author had cancer, I truly wish her well. But that is no reason for this boring piffle to be published.
   Rating: 2 / 5
3. D. Boyer says:

   October 25, 2009 at 9:57 am

   I can sum this book up in a word BORING! Don’t waste your time on this colorless book when there are so many other good books out there!
   Rating: 1 / 5
4. Amy says:

   October 25, 2009 at 12:35 pm

   I really, really wanted to like this book. While I am monolingual, I have a great desire to speak at least one other language, and speak pigeon bits of a few. Being fascinated by India, I thought this would be a great combination of interests in addition to hearing Katherine’s tale. I admire women who “break the mold” and make their desires reality. Even so, I struggled to read this book, even completely putting it down and starting over (as per Nancy Pearl’s literary advice) later.

   Katherine moves to India to start an immersion (or submersion, as she refers to it) Hindi language class. Her classes start just before Sept 11, 2001 – “that thing” as she says people in India refer to the attack. Interestingly, she doesn’t spend any time wondering or worrying about her fate overseas; there are plenty of anti-American Muslims in India, and regular bouts of terrorist activiy – she even reports an Al Queda informant outside her village. I found things like this a bit odd; it seemed to me that, as a sheltered American, it would be part of the emotions one might experience. Her story telling approach is very matter-of-fact, and pretty emotionless. The same is true as she recounted her diagnosis and recovery from breast cancer. I found very little on which I could relate, and really was not able to form a connection to the author or to the story.

   About a quarter of the way through the books, Rich mentions learning a second language modifies the speaking and relating of the first. I wondered if that was part of what made the prose so difficult for me to read: perhaps HER language patterns had changed. The discussion of the neurologic pathways of language learning and aphasias, and language and memory are peppered throughout the text, and are interesting in and of themselves. However, it didn’t feel like the academic portions really segued into the stories themselves, and left me feeling a bit disjointed.

   Rich also throws in Hindu words here and there throughout the text, often telling a story on herself and how she misunderstood. In relation to a Bollywood concert that was coming up, she tells of the conversation she had a member of her host family:

   ” ‘Jaayegi?’ I heard Alka say: ‘You will go?’ The prospect of three hours of Bollywood crooning was about as appealing as a polka weekend…’Jaungi’:'I will go’. I was slightly surprised when an exchange of glances followed…”

   As she gets to the concertL
   
   “I deciphered the situation. I’d screwed up on a ‘egi’. Alka hadn’t said ‘Jaayegi’. She’s said ‘Jange’:'We are going’. She’d stopped by to tell me they wouldn’t be around and I essentially said, ‘Yeah, well, you’re taking me.’ ”

   While I can relate to the OOPS! moment, I had difficulty with the context. Perhaps if I’d studied Hindi or understood the conjugation, stories like this would be more entertaining to me. But I found she often would put the words or phrases she incorrectly used and juxtapose them against the correct words. Since I don’t know how to pronounce the words – and there is no glossary for me to have fun butchering the words myself or to look up meanings – I didn’t fully appreciate the stories.

   That being said, I think Hindi speakers would probably get a big kick out of this book. Me? I felt the struggle of finishing the book was worse than Katherine Rich’s struggle to learn Hindi.
   Rating: 2 / 5
5. Bluestalking Reader says:

   October 25, 2009 at 2:00 pm

   I thought I’d love this book when I first settled down with it. The author has a brilliant sense of humor, she writes very well, and the setting is exotic and a place I’m 99.9 % I’ll never visit.

   The problem is it becomes one long slog to get through if you’re not either a professor of linguistics or someone with a raging interest in the topic. My eyes glazed over after a hundred or so pages’ worth of information about how we learn language. Parts of it were fascinating,but I’m just not interested enough in it to devote so much time reading about it.

   The book was about 100 pp. too long, and too much textbook/not enough memoir. The author’s voice, so wonderful in the beginning, converts from a more familiar, interesting style to the didactic voice of a professor very early in the book. And from there on out it was difficult staying with it.

   I hoped I’d like it better. But as always, the blurbs failed to mention one needed a more specialized interest in a complex topic in order to truly appreciate this book.

   I think mixing memoir with a nonfiction book on the topic of language acquisition was too incongruent for anyone to pull off. This says nothing about the author’s writing skills, but more about the judgment of the editor. She’s a superb writer; her eyes were just bigger than her stomach in this case.
   Rating: 3 / 5

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