Stepping back through the gateway of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in Jaipur felt like an eerie dream. It was just as I remembered: flowers spilling over the front garden, pigeons cooing in the courtyard as I entered our small school. Standing in the front hall, I hear the low hum of the ceiling fans that I had sat beneath two years prior, sweating over verb conjugations and practicing the Devanagari script. The smell of chai wafts from the kitchen, but now it’s served from a single small tea kettle, not the large bartan that students would swarm around at daily chai time.
The school is different this time. Our school is empty.
Entering the institute that day in the cool spring months of March, the fiery summer heat had yet to return with the wave of new students from the Critical Language Scholarship program. For over 50 years, AIIS language programs have been at the forefront of South Asian studies, hosting scholars from U.S. state-sponsored programs like the Critical Language Scholarship and the Boren Awards. Programs designed to offer rapid language gains in an immersive study, the institute has multiple locations across India, providing courses on a plethora of South Asian languages.
“Everything’s on pause,” Swarm Jii tells me as he sits behind his desk in the teacher’s lounge. My old teacher, Rachna Jii, embraced me in a tight hug, her smile just as infectious as months before, Anita Jii greeting me warmly, but tension hangs heavy in the air. Sitting with them in the teacher’s lounge felt like a fever dream.
Sitting in the same chair that had held me when I first stumbled through a beginner’s vocabulary, I now hear Anita ji detail their curriculum plan for this year’s CLS applicants. Rachna jii chimes in with a light joke, and we all laugh. I can participate — not perfectly, but with enough understanding to feel a profound shift. It was after the introductory and the casual jokes and reminiscing that the conversation quickly turned grim.
“We have a month,” Swami ji tells him with a grimace on his face. “The CLS refreshes online classes, the entire student selection process for the year’s summer session, everything with the U.S. state department is on hold… if we don’t hear by April, we don’t know. We don’t know.”
To sit in the room that held my hands as I stumbled through textbooks and made spelling errors in every line, to this conversation, to be able to hear words, know their meaning, and yet still not understand. This entire institute, this gift of language learning, and the world it had just begun to awaken for me, the place in which I owed everything, and could all be crumbling down in a matter of weeks?
A Journey
My journey with Hindi began long before I set foot in Jaipur. It started as an 18-year-old Rotary Youth Exchange student living in Mumbai in the year between high school and college, the year of the pandemic. How can I explain the entire process of falling in love? With a city, with a family. With an entire way of life.
I wish there were a way for you to try the first Rasam dish Ama Padma ever made for me. Sweet, spicy, and savory all at once. I wish you could join me on my first train ride. I bet Hritvi would hold your hand, as she did mine, while the entire city of 20 million seemed to pack into our one train car. I want you to hear the Bollywood ballads that my host sister Vibeka would teach me, and how she would be so patient while I tried to learn the words.
And yet, in a world that felt so close, it was these words and the lack thereof that prohibited my understanding more than anything. I learned a few Hindi phrases and practiced with the alphabet. After some months, I even picked up informal classes bi-weekly with a family friend, but when the pandemic came, I watched as my city that never sleeps became petrified in a coma, and my language learning journey was over just as quickly as it had started.
An Investment
The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program offers fully funded summer language programs for U.S. college and graduate students, offering immersive, on-the-ground learning in countries around the world. And in 2023, (after a rejection in the previous application cycle), I was accepted, and I was going back!
Returning to India was a feeling unlike any other. I graciously welcomed the heat, the traffic, and the smells of homemade sabji wafting out from the kitchen of my new host family. While my fellow American classmates were busy adjusting to new life and transaction fees, I was facing a fear unlike anything I had ever known. Devanagari. Re-learning the Hindi alphabet and going on to mastering grammatical conjunctions and sentence structure, I studied intensively for two months, slowly learning to see and understand the place I loved so much through a new lens.
Language is a bridge, a doorway to new culture, food, music, and friends, a new way of thinking, of seeing, of living, and understanding the world and the people around you. A doorway that AIIS was able to crack open for me.
A Purpose
Since completing my CLS summer in 2023, I haven’t said goodbye to AIIS lightly. I have since had the privilege of continuing my studies through online sessions of CLS refresh, and again picking up classes as I returned to India this fall, now as a Banyan Impact Fellow. I was elated when I first heard the news,
(Photo Courtesy of the author)
“You mean AIIS has always taught Banyan Fellows?” I asked Sunita Jii over our first class and “reunion” Zoom call in October. I couldn’t believe my luck. Although the Banyan Impact Fellowship sponsors 30 hours of language classes with a teacher of your choice, the default for Hindi Lessons has always been AIIS. “For about 5 or 6 years, we’ve been teaching Banyan Fellows, in person and online,” Sunita Jii said, explaining that the sessions help in the slower months when the CLS Scholars are not visiting, and the scholars from other U.S. state-sponsored programs.
As I worked to adjust to my new life in Delhi as a Banyan Fellow, I came to take immense solace in my biweekly classes, returning to a curriculum and staff that felt like home. With my project in the Women’s livelihood manding fieldwork, and the need to understand Hindi, a pressing matter in my everyday life, I simply couldn’t let go of the lessons when the sessions were completed in January. It was only through the Banyan Impact “Professional Development grant” that I was able to continue the curriculum and begin an intermediate course and private lessons online.
One Critical Impact
Since I began my journey with AIIS 2 years prior, I have cumulatively taken over 120 hours of Hindi study with the Institut. First, as a Critical Language Scholarship recipient, then as a Banyan Impact Fellow, and now, I continue through a personal development grant on my Banyan Impact Fellowship. Studying a foreign language in an immersive environment is the most difficult task I have ever done, and today, as I continue my studies, I find language learning to be one of the most intimate and fulfilling processes, a gift to yourself and the world, and something everyone in their lifetime can benefit from.
While funding for the Critical Language Program has since resumed, the idea that these foundational components of cross-cultural understanding could be swept away is to siphon off a source of knowledge and impact that is truly immeasurable. Programs like this change lives, build bridges, and represent an investment that never stops giving returns. Language is the root of knowledge, connection, and understanding, perhaps the most critical investment we can make.
