Back again

Dear dedicated readers (or those of you who still remain),

I’ve long since left Nanubhai and Kadod behind but I am thinking of reviving this blog as I enter into yet another Indian adventure, this time under the purview of the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program (www.clscholarship.org). I’ll be moving to Jaipur for ten weeks this summer and after a year of doctoral study I’m very much looking forward to seeing my old friend India again, this time, with different eyes.

I remember the very first time that I made the transition across the ocean as a sophomore in college, venturing to this place that I had studied but never seen – the alternating waves of elation and terror were so overwhelming that I considered, on disembarking for my connecting flight in London, simply turning around and going home. When I think back to that first experience, my memory catches on the surface level things – the smells, colors – those things that India is known for. I remember outrageous arguments with autorickshaw drivers and dust and heat and occasionally an elated rain. I remember thinking, “There is no reading about this place. There is only being here.” I still feel that way, even after three years of Indian residency.

The things I read in graduate school about India seem flat – two dimensional. Regardless of the quality of their empirics – their method, their contribution to the literature – it feels far away and somehow lacking. As I’m only a beginning scholar, I struggle sometimes for the proper words to intimate the why behind my feelings of distaste for these studies. Maybe it is that when I think of India, I think of my students, my close friends, the place I lovingly refer to as my village. My mind seems unable to comprehend India in aggregate.

In many ways, my understanding of India is like my Hindi. At first, formally schooled, I studied Hindi and India at a distance, from afar. I immersed myself in its study and believe myself knowledgeable. I was wrong. I couldn’t keep up in a conversation and while I could argue fine, I was miles away from true knowledge of the language. In Kadod, I achieved a sort of unschooled comfort with language and with India – I had to relearn many things that I thought I knew, be always ready for the cognitive dissonance of living in an unfamiliar place. My tongue became accustomed to producing the sounds on command and my mind found a way to reconcile itself to a new palette of experiences by inventing explanations for what I saw that gelled with my American way of understanding the world.

This combination of schooled and unschooled experiences are what I bring to my journey this summer. My relatively fluid Hindi needs grammatical supports – structure – to improve and my mind needs the combination of reflecting on my experiences in reference to theory in order to move forward in my scholarship.

I am hoping to document my attempt to do both of these things. While I cannot promise the array of characters that you came to know and love in my previous blog, I will do my best to communicate my experience with thoughtfulness, honesty, and with some luck, humor.

Best,
Cat