109. Hindi Lessons

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When my family left India for Greece in 1960 I was six and a half, and we had just started learning a second language in school. By the time we returned I was nine and a half and my peers at school in India had not only been studying a second language for some time but had started a third. Since I was enrolling in an English-medium school in West Bengal, according to India’s Three Language Formula (TLF) the second language would be Hindi, the national language, and the third, Bengali, the official language of the state. Upon entering St. Agnes Convent School in Kharagpur I had to take examinations in both languages; to my shame, my Hindi score was a resounding zero (a big laddu) and my Bengali score, for some inexplicable reason, a whopping six percent. Fortunately I was not very far behind my classmates in Bengali (at least those whose mother tongue was not Bengali), but catching up on Hindi was another matter.

Because my father is a perfectionist, he refused to teach Hindi to me on the grounds that he might pass on incorrect grammar and usage, even though he could speak Hindi reasonably well (and, of course, it shared a script and much of its vocabulary with his mother tongue of Marathi). So it fell to my English mother, who of necessity was entirely self-taught, to introduce me to the language. Mum made a large alphabet chart and posted it prominently, so that I could learn the characters and recite them aloud daily, memorizing them line by line: first the vowels— a-aa-i-ee-u-oo-ri, etcetera—and then the consonants: ka-kha-ga-gha-nga, cha-chha-ja-jha-nya and so on. Next she labeled every item in the house with a piece of paper proclaiming its Hindi name. And finally she engaged a Hindi tutor to come to the house weekly, after school.

My tutor was a very thin, quiet man who went over some basics of Hindi grammar with me for a few months, until I was more-or-less up to speed with my classmates at school. He didn’t have many pedagogical or even conversational skills and certainly not much creative imagination when it came to teaching a new language to a nine year-old, but he took me through simple drills, such as case signs and verb tenses. He must have taken on extra after-school tuition not out of any special vocation, but out of sheer economic necessity. All I remember about him are his shoes, thin, stiff leather lace-ups that were always polished to a shine and kept in meticulous condition. When I asked him about them once, he told me, to my amazement, that they were several years old. As a slapdash child who scuffed my shoes and stained my clothes on a daily basis, I could not imagine taking such care of something so well, and my rather nondescript tutor rose several notches in my estimation. Even at that age I must have felt sorry for him, because that small detail of his life gave me a glimpse of his pinched existence and made me realize what a struggle it must have been for him to hold on to middle-class respectability.

Our Hindi primers at St. Agnes, the Saral Bhasha (or Simple Language) series, were textbooks produced in the first decade after Independence and, as such, sought to inculcate in us the fundamentals of Indian citizenship, which included lessons in democracy (a story on Abraham Lincoln), in history both ancient and modern (tales from the Indian epics and biographies of Bapu-ji (Mahatma Gandhi) and Chacha Nehru), in cleanliness (a day in the life of an ideal boy), reverence for Mother, home, and the cow, and national pride (stories and poems about flag and country but also in praise of our geography and seasons).

I do not mean to mock or belittle the sentiments in our Hindi textbooks even though I look back at them now in recognition of the dominant ideology embedded in them; at that time some of the old British textbooks still lingered, and the newly independent nation was trying to produce home-grown texts to replace the paeans to daffodils, apples, snow, and other, more alienating elements of a foreign culture and value-system that had been imposed upon Indians through colonial education. The new nationalist ideals were duly inculcated, but neither the readings nor the pedagogy succeeded in awakening in me a love of the language itself.

At Mount Hermon our Hindi teacher was obviously a master of the language but seemed to resent having to teach it to us. I couldn’t understand his contempt until much later, when I was able to look back and gain some insight into his predicament. In post-Independence India, the Urdu and Persian words were expunged from Hindustani, reducing it to modern Hindi, a language created by politicians and used by bureaucrats, but not the living, spoken language of real people or the rich language of poetry, and not even the lyrics of Hindi film songs, that were almost all in Urdu, the language of love. It must have been Hindustani or Urdu that our teacher really loved, hence, I would guess, his disgust at the ungraceful prose that comprised most of our reading material and his frustration at our daily massacre of the language. As I recall, he became animated only when he taught us a short story by Premchand, who was the one Hindi writer on our syllabus for whom he seemed to have any respect. I’m afraid that I didn’t learn very much in his class and did barely mediocre work, excelling only in dictation, and then only because Hindi is a perfectly phonetic language and our teacher had perfect pronunciation.

As an adult I have sought to make up for my unsatisfactory Hindi lessons in childhood, lessons that left me with a crude approximation of the language that equips me, only a little better than my mother before me, to give directions to a rickshaw-wala or shop for goods in the market. I have studied Sanskrit at university in the U.S., bought Hindi dictionaries and comic books whenever I go back to India, and follow the BBC news headlines in Hindi on Twitter. However, because, with only one exception, the Indian side of my family lives in Maharashtra and speaks Marathi with great pride and proficiency (as well as fluent English), I have little opportunity or incentive to learn the national language over a regional one. In the 1990s I taught Nikhil the Devanagari script and attempted to find Hindi lessons for him in Amherst, but in vain. During our all-too-short stay in India in his childhood, when we divided our time between Delhi and Maharashtra, he had time to learn only a smattering of Hindi and Marathi words and phrases (but he did master Indian English, which I came to recognize and respect as a language all its own).

It occurs to me that my own unsatisfactory experience is comparable to the nation’s  experience with Hindi since Independence, during which time it has not succeeded in making it a truly national language, let alone in phasing out English, which remains the language of higher education and the law after nearly sixty-five years; if anything, a mastery of English has grown even more essential, with the rise of English as the dominant language of the Internet. But Hindi—and I mean official Hindi, not the living language as it is spoken in the regions where it is a mother tongue—is still the poor relation, the clunky currency of officialdom without either elegance or power. Perhaps it will remain so until it embraces its mongrel heritage and reclaims the beauty and riches of its multiple roots. But nonetheless I am grateful for the Hindi lessons I received in my youth, for without them I would be even further cut off from the culture and sensibilities of a country which will always remain a part of me. 

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42. The Times Tables

As a child, like most of my generation, I had to memorize and recite the multiplication tables. The singsong recitation of the times tables was a not-unpleasant soundtrack to my early schooldays. We recited them as a group, we recited them at home under our breath, we recited them in our dreams, until, on cue in the classroom—or indeed anywhere, and for the rest of our lives—we were able to retrieve the product of any given combination of numbers from our memory banks effortlessly, and at lightning speed. Three elevens? Easy: thirty-three. Eight sixes? No problem, the same as six eights: forty-eight. Twelve twelves? A hundred and forty-four (or a gross—since the old British measures still lingered).

In India we were officially responsible for knowing the answer to the multiplication of any two numbers between one and sixteen (although I never mastered any beyond twelve). It was rote learning, no doubt, but rote learning employed where it worked best. Through repetition, in a reassuring rhythm, these basic computations became second-nature to us. And in any case, there was not to reason why: it was simply what we did.

Thirty years on, Nikhil’s schooldays had a different soundtrack. By the time he was in elementary school, requiring a student to memorize numbers or words was considered something akin to child abuse, and recitation of the times tables was retrograde. In fact, they were no longer even called multiplication tables, but were now simply Math Facts. Rather than being required to memorize them in logically ascending patterns of numbers, the children were now given worksheets to take home with lists of assorted math facts on them, in no discernible order. They were expected to practice filling out these sheets faster and faster, using higher and higher numbers, until they attained their personal best in speed and accuracy.

As a parent, I was at a loss to understand how Nikhil could be expected to memorize the products of seemingly random combinations of numbers without their being organized into tables by number, and without reciting them. (Kids have marvellous memories, and before Nikhil and Eric even went to school, reciting numbers was a game for them, their minds naturally creating their own order. I remember three or four-year-old Nikhil counting by tens up to a hundred: “…seven-ty, eight-ty, nine-ty—ten-ty!”) But somehow, without recourse to recitation, he did manage to master his Math Facts; and in any case, he now has the computations at his fingertips at all times, thanks to the calculator function in his iPhone.

If the educators of the nineties considered it borderline-abusive to require memorization of the multiplication tables from one to twelve, I wonder what they would have thought of  the system in my father’s boyhood? He had to memorize the tables not only for whole numbers, but for fractions: a quarter, a half, three-quarters, one and a quarter, one and a half. As my father recited out loud—in Marathi, of course—his father monitored him from a distance, while reading in the next room. Whenever he slipped or faltered, his father simply marked his mistake with a questioning grunt, and he had to start over. Before long, the answer to six three-quarters came as easily to him as the answer to six sixes does to me.

It is easy to mock today’s concern for children’s tender sensibilities from the perspective of old-school “common sense,” and I have been guilty of it above. But I can’t help thinking of an exchange I had with a classmate one day when I was eight, and we were being called on one at a time to recite a memorized poem in class. Like the times tables, the recitation of canonical poems or passages from Shakespeare plays was a regular requirement, but the experience was dramatically different for every child. Words came easy to me and, when called on, I loved showing off in front of the class. (In fact, I was no doubt one of those irritating kids who has her hand up insistently, early and often. “Please miss, please, ask me!”) On this one particular day, as I swaggered back to my desk after my performance, the hapless classmate who had been called upon next muttered to me, “It’s all very well for you—you love it.”

At the time I didn’t understand what he meant, and merely dismissed his bitter tone as sour grapes. It was not until many years later that it dawned on me that what had been positively pleasurable for me had probably been torture to him. While for me, memories of “Daffodils” and “The quality of mercy” are like Portia’s gentle rain from heaven, for many they are associated with the lingering hell of childhood failure, punishment, and humiliation. I could not identify with that schoolboy from Shakespeare’s “All the World’s a Stage” speech, “creeping like snail/ unwillingly to school”: I loved school. Still, socialization, while certainly preparing us for the world, took its toll. As Nikhil used to say of elementary school, “It’s okay. But it takes up too much time.”

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