Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Dreaming in Udaipur

What was an American journalist doing learning how to speak Hindi in Rajasthan, asks Inder Sidhu

US journalist and author Katherine Russell Rich spent a year between 2001-2002 in India learning Hindi at an Udaipur school. Recently released in India, Dreaming in Hindi (Tranquebar, Rs 395), an account of her stay in the country, has garnered high praise from the likes of Oprah and been warmly received by The New York Times. In an email interview, Rich discusses how the trip shaped her understanding of India and its culture, the intricacies of Hindi, and how the Gujarat riots affected her work and perception of our country. Excerpts:

What about Dreaming in Hindi will surprise Indian readers?
I think a lot in the book will surprise them.  The language took me deeper into the country than many Western writers go, or than the ones who come over and write about finding themselves in India go. I was more interested in finding India, which I’d fallen in love with through the Hindi language when I was studying it back in New York. A lot of Americans come to India and are overwhelmed by the differences, but because I was going in on words, I was able, through language, to make faster sense of India. The more I understood life there, the more that aspects of it became so compelling. I begin to love the closeness I found in Indian families, for instance, and maybe that’s one thing that will surprise Indian readers—that a fiercely independent, privacy loving New York journalist could come to cherish the nosiness and clamor and boisterous emotion that you find in Indian families. I still sometimes wish I had an Indian family here in New York to go stay with.

Full interview here Tehelka

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