Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language

Katherine Russell Rich

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

At 37, Rich had survived two bouts of breast cancer and written a memoir about the experience (“The Red Devil”). A magazine editor with a wardrobe of Blahniks, she was required, “as the second most geriatric person on staff,” to test the moisturizer. It was time for a change.

After 20 years in the magazine business, “A chant had begun to loop through my head: I want to lead a more artistic life.” The unnamed magazine cooperates by firing her (“divided attention”) and, almost on a whim, Rich takes a trip to India.

Beguiled by the place, she decides to learn Hindi as a window, sort of, into that exotic world. ” ‘If you speak English, you have one world. If you speak Navajo, you have another world,’” as the linguistics profs put it.

It was not her first attempt at a second language. Previous enthusiasms for French and Spanish had fizzled. But Hindi is already so obviously difficult she doesn’t have any expectations. Mick Jagger’s comment that he had been unable to learn French until he admitted to himself that he didn’t truly believe the French were speaking a real language strikes her as applicable.

Excerpted from the book review at http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090823/ENTERTAIN/908230347/-1/NEWSMAP

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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