University of Pennsylvania leads a quiet revolution to promote Indian Languages.

A group of men and women between the ages 30 to 70 converged at the leafy campus of the Ivy-league University of Pennsylvania this summer to attend a language workshop for teaching Hindi and Urdu. They came from as far as Vancouver, British Columbia to participate in a two-week long program to learn modern teaching methods. The workshop was hosted by the university under a federal funded program, 'Startalk'.

“I didn't know if there was a scientific way to teach Hindi”, said Dolly Chatterjee, a native of Kolkata, India and mother of two, who came from Swedesboro, NJ, to attend the workshop. “I have been teaching Hindi in a private setting in my township. Now I am going to apply modern methods and activities”, she said with confidence at the end of the workshop.

According to Dr. Surendra Gambhir, advisor of Startalk program and a retired professor of Hindi at University of Pennsylvania, the US government was creating new opportunities for Hindi teachers and learners that will lead to promoting the language in the USA. “It is a wonderful opportunity for the Indian American community to take advantage of the government initiative and campaign for teaching Hindi in private and public schools”, he commented.

Both Dr. Gambhir and his wife Vijay taught Hindi at University at Pennsylvania for 36 years until they retired last year. They were instrumental in starting the program under the South Asian Regional Studies department of the university. They reached out to the South Asian community and encouraged volunteers, who moonlighted as Hindi teachers during after school hours and weekends, to apply for attending the workshop. As a result dozens of Hindi and Urdu teachers, who met the criteria, were accepted for the workshop.

“The 'Startalk' program aims at familiarizing these teachers, who worked in community settings, such as temples, about various techniques that are commonly applied to teach foreign languages. One of the major factor of these techniques is connecting with the culture”, explained Vijay who addressed the participants every morning during the workshop.

The Department of South Asian Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, that hosted the workshop for Hindi Teaching, is involved in teaching and research in Indian languages for decades. “The department provides rich resource for studies of South Asian languages, including Sanskrit, Bengali, Punjabi, and Urdu”, said Dr. Vijay Gambhir who is the chief instructor for Startalk program. “In recent years number of students enrolled in Indian language courses has dramatically gone up. University of Pennsylvania has introduced a number of programs aimed at developing knowledge about India”, she said.

The credit to initiate Startalk program goes to the former US president, George W. Bush, who decided to expand and improve the teaching and learning of strategically important world languages that were not now widely taught in the US. One of the outcomes of his decision was to include Hindi as a component of the National Security Language Initiative in 2006. It categorized Hindi as a critical need foreign language along with Chinese and Arabic. The mission of the program was to increase the number of Americans learning, speaking, and teaching languages, such as, Hindi. To achieve the goal of exemplifying best practices in language education and teacher development, summer workshops like the one at University of Pennsylvania were designed.

“We hope that a community of teachers will be developed that would engaged itself in creating lesson plans based on learner-centered approaches”, commented Martin Smith, one of the guest speakers at the workshop and Supervisor of World Languages, who has been credited with introducing Hindi in Edison public schools system as a full fledged subject. “We shouldn't teach Hindi for namesake. With its wide range of dialects Hindi is a very challenging language that is spoken in many different ways. We need to keep in mind the varied needs of the students who spoke different languages at their homes”, he said.

“There is an explosion of the phenomenon of learning and teaching the Chinese language in USA because of the tremendous push from the Chinese-American communities. As India occupied an important part in the international trade and commerce, it was an ideal situation to promote Hindi on a wider scale. It is for the Indian American community to demand for teaching Hindi in more schools”, he suggested.

“Startalk is a great program to promote Hindi in the USA”, said Sanjay Kumar, a participant to the program who teaches Sanskrit and Bollywood movies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “The fact that so many men and women are teaching Indian languages in schools is an ample proof of increasing awareness of Indian culture in the community.”
Manju Tiwari, who came from Atlanta, GA to attend the Startalk workshop has been teaching Hindi for two decades. After a teaching stint of more than a decade at Emroy she moved to a local school for children, Bal Vihar. She said the theories and methods she learned sounded more meaningful. “I think we are now better trained than ever to teach Hindi in local schools”, she said adding that Indian American community possessed sufficient resources to press upon the school districts to introduce Hindi in local schools.

The history of teaching Indian languages goes back to a couple of hundred years. “We have collected thousands of books in Sanskrit, Hindi and other Indian languages in our library”, said Dr. David Nelson, South Asian Bibliographer at the University Libraries of the University of Pennsylvania. Nelson, who researched on early Vedic studies, said that the numbers of students eager to learn about India and its culture was growing every day. “I think the university conducts highly successful programs on South Asian studies. In recent years Americans have become tremendously interested in India that resulted into introduction of a host of programs in the universities”, commented Nelson.

Rita Sheth, who teaches Hindi at Bharatiya Temple in Blue vale, PA, intended to use the training in her school where students learn a number of India languages including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Sanskrit. She said that there was a great demand to learn Hindi and Gujarati in local schools.