Changing My Shape by Learning Hindi

This is part two of a dialogue between Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language [2], and Katherine Russell Rich, author of Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language [3]. Read part one here. [4]

Hi Chris,

It's funny, the last thing I was looking to do when I studied Hindi was be transformed. I'd just put in a decade at glossy magazines, where we frequently tried to make our readers over to death. I'd had it with American media-style redemption. I didn't want to lose the last five pounds. I didn't want to improve my life. I liked my life fine. One of the reasons I liked Hindi is because it doesn't have words like "transformation." There's a construction that means "to change your shape," but it doesn't imply upgrade.

I also just assumed I was pretty completely formed by then. But on the day I got back, a year after I'd left, I sat stiff-backed for an eternity on my sofa, too intimidated by my surroundings to move. The apartment looked as if it had been decorated by someone else—someone a lot smarter and more sophisticated than I was—and I actually half believed she might come back and find me there, and order me to leave.

After six months of living in India, I had gone from hard-charging New Yorker to a woman who preferred to keep her head covered. Language, I realized, funnels in culture at laser speed.

In Udaipur, where I lived, I had several expat friends who had not studied much Hindi. One of them, Renee, was then 70, and had moved there five years earlier from the U.S. She loved India passionately, but within months of my arrival, I was melding with the culture in ways she hadn't. "OK, we'll see you at six," I said once, throwing her into confusion. "Who else is coming?" she asked. No one. I just had, without knowing it, picked up the Hindi custom of saying "we" for "I" and transferred it to my English. Along with that, I'd picked up the beliefs that had shaped this usage—I was becoming, to borrow from your great description, colonized, linguistically and culturally.

See, the "we" for "I" usage partially derives from the fact that in India people don't regard themselves as individuals. They're part of a larger group—their family, their caste. Individuality is a kind of deviance there. Unlike in America, where it's a trait we pay shrinks good money to achieve.

In America, we use a lot of "self" phrases: self-expression, self-worth, self-respect, all of which, after an extended bath in Hindi, began to seem peculiar to me. "Self respect?" I wrote indignantly in my journal one night, with all the pique of an Imam denouncing an American obsession with "fun." (I have to say, in India, the whole American penchant for "fun" did begin to seem strange.) "But respect is something you give to others. If you live a good life, then others will respect you." And that was after just four months.

When you immerse yourself in another language, you immerse yourself in another set of myths and beliefs. They seep in without your noticing, and you don't know how they got there. Midway through my stay, I went to visit a friend, a batik artist who was married to another artist. We were talking, and her sweet gnome of a husband was half-dozing in a chair when she out of the blue mentioned someone called "the artist." No introduction, just "the artist, you know, he eats too many sweets." Two minutes later she said it again: "The artist is having a show in Indonesia." By then, I'd grown used to a high level of befuddlement in my conversations, so I just nodded: yeah, yeah, the artist.

It was only when I noticed her husband wake up and beam that I figured it out: Oh right; she's not allowed to say his name. I had no idea how I knew this was true, only that it was. Later, I realized I must have absorbed this during language instruction, when I was learning how the social conventions were expressed in grammar and phrasing: You use one verb tense for servants and children. You add "babu" to a man's name to show veneration. You don't, if you're a woman who adheres to tradition, use your husband's name: Husbands are so far above their wives, it'd be like sacrilege. Those traditions, whether you mean them to, begin to affect you. Every woman on my program had by then begun to cover her head.

No one, I think, gave this much thought in the beginning. We fell into the habit, at first simply because the sun was blazing the month we arrived. But as time went by and winter came on, we kept it up to conform with social conventions. These conventions were explained to us through innuendo, obliquely. I became gradually aware that if I looked pakka (proper)—head covered, eyes downcast and demure—I could fit in better, and roam around the town. By December, my face, as you mentioned, looked different, from the effort perhaps, and almost certainly from the language. By March, when I went out, I resembled a bee keeper-swathed in so much fabric, you could just see my nose. It was around that time that I got into a conversation with a local storeowner. People, I knew by then, would tell me things in Hindi they wouldn't in English, and as we talked, he confessed how shocked he was by the "shameful" Western women he'd see by the ghats. "They wear no sleeves," he said, "Shameful!" then quickly added, to my rustling figure in the chair, "Not like you. You are fine."

I didn't get to the subject of how our bodies themselves can be reshaped by language, haven't put down one word about gesture, something you write about so beautifully in The First Word [5]. Why don't we, next time, talk about that? And if we do, I'll show you some evidence of how a second language can change the way you look.

All the best back,
Kathy

Read the response from Christine Kenneally [6] here.