Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language Hardback - 2009

In early September 2001 American magazine writer Katherine Russell Rich arrived in India to immerse herself for an academic year in the Hindi language. Aged 45, Ms Rich (Kathy to her friends) could no longer make sense of her life in English, so she planned to borrow someone else's language and breathe life back into herself. This she did for the next year in and around the city of Udaipur in arid Rajasthan well north of Bombay. *** Until she was six years old, Ms Rich was hearing-impaired. As an adult she had twice survived cancer and written a book about it, THE RED DEVIL:TO HELL WITH CANCER -- AND BACK. She had been unhappily married. Everything was piling up: cancer, being fired from the eighth magazine she worked for, and other blockages of her life force. Kathy concluded she had decided that she could neither fight nor could she flee from them. Her only option for the past several years had been "playing dead." *** In September 2001 Kathy hoped, and her hope was fulfilled, that if she went to India, a country as alien to her past as any country could be, she would wake up from her self-imposed playing dead and find something new to live for. *** Indeed she found her own second-language learning fascinating. And in volunteering Fridays as a school in Udaipur for children born deaf, Kathy discovered yet another new world. In that non-hearing world, teachers taught young boys Hindi-related signing while the boys taught themselves a language unintelligible to their teachers. *** Katherine Russell Rich kept a diary. And upon her return to the USA in 2002 she systematically read heavy texts and interviewed linguists and neurologists to bring herself abreast of the fast developing worlds of linguistics: spoken, written and signed languages. This later research inspired Kathy in 2006 to return to Udaipur to perform a notably clumsy experiment to test whether her deaf students had indeed created a new language of their own. There was evidence from Nicaragua exciting the linguists and neurologists and Kathy had been provided the wherewithal to replicate Nicaragua. Scientifically she failed. But at the human level a deaf sign language teacher confirmed, "the children have a whole other language one even we do not understand." These are the final words of DREAMING IN HINDI. *** Perhaps the author tries to pack too many different ideas into too few pages: personal reminiscences, an exercise in spiritual autobiography, watching herself learn Hindi in school, in host family and on trips, theorizing about speaking, gesturing, signing and writing, about psychology, observing local reactions to the 9/11 attacks in the US, seeing a surge in Hindu hatred of Muslims and rising terrorism -- to name only the most obvious themes developed. There are many nuggets of insight and some passages of great poetic beauty in this book. But the narrative framework (or lack thereof) is hard to figure out and might, I fear, be off-putting for many readers. -OOO-

feeney