A few years ago I came across an anecdote by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh that’s stuck with me since. The tale goes something like this: A healthy child is born to a well-off family and all his neighbors agree that he is lucky. As a teenager, he loses his leg in an accident and they talk about his great misfortune. Years later, a war breaks out and because of his injury he is spared from the draft. Once again, he’s lucky. But later when the dead are counted and the damages assessed, he finds himself alone, having lost almost everyone dear to him. Again, he is unfortunate. And so on. You get the drift. The obvious lesson is to take the long view, remembering that all that happens to us in life can only be interpreted according to (changing) context.
Maybe the allure of this tale for me was also a matter of context. In the time since I read it, I’ve embarked on the protracted path to a doctoral degree in Anthropology. And when you are on this road, to not “take the long view” generally means a steep fall to misery.
Women's Work, Women's Knowledge
A bit more specifically, my research is on food sovereignty, women’s agricultural labor, and rural social movements in the Himalayan region of India. But, lest my name or ample supply of melatonin should fool you, let me explain that Hindi is not my mother tongue and my family does not speak it. There are more official languages in India that I can count on my fingers and countless dialects. My family hails from a southern state called Tamilnadu where, for historical reasons too involved to delve into at the moment, Hindi has been considered the linguistic equivalent of the evil Darkseid.
Taking on learning a whole new idiom of sounds, an unfamiliar script, and a new grammatical system in the midst of the other requirements of my degree was daunting to say the least. My first day in class I found myself sitting in a roomful of NYU undergrads, most of whom were about half my age and came from homes where Hindi or some cognate was spoken. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so obtuse as I did sitting in class, trying to latch onto something recognizable in the swirl of foreign sounds, wondering why my efforts seemed to have so little pay off, and not knowing how I was going to physically get to campus four days a week in the midst of work, teaching, and a full time graduate course load. Google Translate didn’t help. Inevitably, my homework returned to me bleeding red, often with unhealable wounds. To say I was discouraged would be a massive understatement. Wasn’t a doctorate about becoming “expert” enough to share valuable insights? And if so, shouldn’t I have chosen a place and language with which I already had comfort and fluency?
Two years since my first Hindi class I’ve adopted the long view. I just returned from a summer in India where after a month of intensive language study, I visited potential research sites and had the surprising experience of going to places I had been before with a new ability to converse with people. On earlier visits, I had felt mute in areas where English wasn’t spoken, like some vital part of myself had been amputated. Now despite all the flaws in my comprehension and speaking, my skills were good enough to ask and answer questions, to talk about things that mattered. Besides the obvious practical benefits, the forced humility, the struggle to mold my mouth to new sounds, the necessity of listening closely, and the attempts to understand and put into practice a different grammatical logic has deepened both my ability to empathize with others and my understanding of myself.
Speaking Hindi while Making Rotee
There are many things in Hindi that have made me re-think things I previously took as self-evident. Here I will mention one. My teacher this summer — a grammarian and proud owner of over 400 dictionaries – asked me to define “hai” (है). My answer was rote: “to be.” “That is wrong!” he barked. I was confounded. In every Hindi class I had taken the meaning of “hai” was either directly taught or implied as “to be.” But, no. If the English “to be” was the infinitive form of a verb, what was the equivalent of “hai?” I was stuck. I had only ever used “hai” conjugated in sentences. Exactly. “Hai,” he explained, derives from the Sanskrit “asti,” which means existence. है has no infinitive because according to the philosophy from which it has evolved there is no abstract state of being, no sense of existence outside of particular circumstances, relationships, things, people, events. He, for one, could not understand the English “to be” in the same way, perhaps, it would be difficult to conceive of “sunset” without “sun.” The complacent translation of “hai” as “to be” in Hindi classes was not only a misinterpretation but an imposition that effaced something critical.
When I left class, I had है on the brain. I thought about how “I have one brother” in Hindi was “mera aik bhai hai.” But translated literally it was more like “My one brother is.” Thus the Hindi sentence suggested existence not ownership, and the “I” and “brother” were not emphasized as separate subject and object but were merged in a relational state of existence. It was different from when you said “I have two clocks,” which incorporated the additional word “pas” to connote material possession of an object separate from oneself. I was realizing how much these distinctions mattered. They challenged assumptions I made about language and life. I saw that in my notebook my teacher had written “मेरा मन है (Mera man hai).” It means “I have a mind” – or translated literally: My mind exists (as part of myself). But then, the Hindi “मन,” which derives from the Sanskrit “मनस्” does not just mean “mind” but “mind-heart-consciousness.” These are understood to be interrelated at the source – another good thing for a doctoral student to keep in मन.
All images by the author.