“I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I’d borrow someone else’s.”
There is a huge controversy in linguistics [whether] learning another language will make you a different person. Each language makes you say something a different way and makes you think differently. You are obliged by the language. In Hindi, for example, you suddenly find yourself unable to say, “I own anything.” You can’t own anything in your mind. Little by little I was being altered by the language. I became less egocentric—you don’t say “I,” you say “we”—and I began to have a sense of being connected to the place.
In Dreaming in Hindi, Katherine Russell Rich takes a linguistic journey through India.
Having miraculously survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor, Rich spontaneously accepted a free-lance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language. Before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi.
Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
KATHERINE RUSSELL RICH is the author of the award-winning memoir The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer–and Back, and she has written for New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Salon.com, and National Public Radio.
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