'Some say Hindi is dying. All I know is that exciting things are happening online'

How did you get interested in Hindi?
My mother is a retired professor of musicology, and she did work in India and also in Trinidad, where a lot of Indian people have settled. She worked there on Bhojpuri music, and later actually sent me to Trinidad when I was just 11 years old, all by myself. I studied at a primary school called Felicity Hindu School. It was an English- medium school, but there was some Hindi on the side…we would sing bhajans.I started learning from my classmates. So the interest was there then. When I did my BA, that’s when I started learning Hindi in a course. I was a music major in western music. Then I thought I’d do an MA (in Asian languages and cultures). When I started my PhD, I knew this was what I was very much attracted to.
How do you view popular online content in Hindi?
There are a lot of people doing some interesting work with satire and blogs. The amount of creativity — we can say it’s an everyday genius. For me as someone coming from outside the tradition, it’s just very exciting to watch.
Some people say Hindi is being imposed on us, or even stamping out languages like Maithili or Bhojpuri…maybe this is true. Some people say Hindi is dying, it’s getting pushed out by English. I don’t know which one is true. All I know is some very exciting things are happening in Hindi.
Online is where a lot of things are happening. In the past four years, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have made searching for things in Hindi much easier. Also, people read on their smartphones in the metro and they read in Hindi, it’s very interesting to see this.
You are working on a book on Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’. Tell us a little more about that.
I’ve spent over a year going back and forth to Renu’s village in Bihar’s Araria district, mostly working on his novel, Maila Aanchal. It has over a hundred folk songs. I went to the village after reading Maila Aanchal because I thought, my god, there is something special here! Renu understood something very special about his motherland and his village which is very difficult to express in a Hindi novel. I wanted to go to the village to find out what is happening now.
So I went and I learnt that Renu himself was a singer and performer. There were still some elderly people left — this was ten years ago when I first went there — who remembered singing with Renu. And of course, they performed this tradition. Now there is a new younger generation that is doing this... I recorded it. And now I’m writing about this connection between local performance and Hindi literature. There is a feeling in the village... they say, gaane ke liye koi nahin bacha hai aajkal (there is no one left to sing today). This is a very sad feeling. But coming from the outside as I do, I can see the sense of loss, but also the joy that this tradition existed at all. The joy in its memory and that an amazing figure like Phanishwar Nath Renu wrote about this and that we can still have it in our presence by reading it. I am writing about this in a very positive way, that even in the 21st century we can experience this.
Typically, what is the profile of students you get in your class?
I have quite a few different students. We have a three-year BA programme. Those students have no background in the Hindi language. They don’t have an Indian background either. They have different interests. Sometimes the best students are those who don’t even know why they want to take Hindi. They just see it in the catalogue and are just sparked by curiosity. There are also international relations students, who want to get into a career in diplomacy, maybe get into government service. I also have Indian students who haven’t studied Hindi formally. Maybe haven’t read any sahitya (literature). For them I have a different stream where we do advanced work in Hindi literature.
You have been written about on various websites before. And often, your fluency in Hindi is seen as exotic or something of an oddity. Do you have that experience in the hinterland?
No, I only get treated like that in Delhi. When I am in UP, or in Bihar where I spend the most time, it doesn’t surprise people too much. Maybe because their mother tongue is Maithili or Bhojpuri. In some way they are speaking not in a foreign language, but maybe in a language they are slightly less comfortable in. Maybe there will be a couple of minutes when they say, “Inko Hindi aati hai? (he knows Hindi?)” and then we get down to business and talk about folk songs, literature, village living. I only get treated as an oddity in Delhi. And I find it somewhat frustrating. I know hundreds of non-Indians who have learnt not just Hindi but Gujarati, Bangla, Malayalam, Telugu. Some people say, “I can’t believe you learnt Hindi.” And I ask them, “How many languages do you speak? You’re so multilingual!” I feel like I have to point this out.