The fall of the demon Ravana

Last night was Dussehra here in Banaras. Lanka, a major street in Varanasi, was filled with people. Carnival toys and balloons were being sold. Pani Puri, or gol gappa as its called in Banaras, Ice cream and sweets are available from wheeled carts on the road side. I went out with my two youngest sisters, Guriya(16) and Lovely(12). The attraction of this day is the fact that i marks the part of the story on the Ramayana where lord Ram conquers the demon Ravan. This is depicted by the burning of a giant Ravana statue at midnight. The past couple weeks has been Ramlila, a dramatic recreation of the Ramayana by young actors who have purified themselves for a month before hand. Dussehra is the culmination of the story.
We didn't stay  out all night, our curfew is 10, but we went out to eat in order to celebrate. After much searching we found a pizza restaurant for dinner. Pizza here is... different. Some times it's not consumable and sometimes it's good but not normal. The place we went to, one where I had been once before, was in the latter category. The sauce isn't tomato sause its kinda like a spicy bbq sauce, anyway, we ate well. The three of us ate four individual sized pizzas and some garlic cheese bread. Afterwards we went to Lord Ganesh's temple for Puja.

Wonderland

For the first time in my trip here I have ventured into a bookshop... All I can say is wow. Harmony books on the outside looks like an unorginized mess, but like most unorinized messes in India, there is a system that is not apparent from the outside. Not only did the dashingly handsome bookstore owner have a complete catalouge of everybook he had, he had 10 books I could use for my project and more on the way. He also knew impressivly much about books written on nationalism and languge. I was impress as he kept handing me book after book. I bought 6 but will be back for more! research here just got a lot easier!!!

Host Family

After a few days visiting host families, I have picked one out. It was actually the first host family we visited. I fell in love with the room and the family at first sight! the mother is a tiny little woman, slightly demure and speaks quietly. She has the cutest smile, though. I also met her three daughters who I believe are 10, 19 and 20 years old and look a lot like their mother. I have yet to meet the father, who has a job in the private sector. I am so excited to move in and have a lot of shopping to do! I need a mattress, sheets, a clock, power strip with converter and circuit breaker, drinking water, buckets... I move in on Wednesday and will post a pic of the family then. 

Classes

We are still in Mussorie for the time being. Classes are in session and we are hard at work studying. Our teachers Virendra Ji and Vimel Ji are great and their styles compliment each other really nicely. The cooks at the hotel are amazing and every dish they produce is magic. One of the most interesting ones was bread pakora… which was an American sandwich deepfried with spices. Today I was a family of monkey on my porch and they seemed to be as interested in me as I was in them. They were playing, but when they saw me they cautiously approached, a little timid. They were really cute. 

Mussorie

Right now I’m in the foothills of the Himalayas in a town called Mussorie. We are up here to avoid the heat of Banaras and enjoy ourselves while starting Hindi classes. It is truly beautiful here. The hotel is great! We eat breakfast every morning amongst the clouds! We’ve also been out shopping a since we got here. They sell beautiful shawls here, though as this is a resort town prices are high by Indian standards(200 rupees/ 5 dollars for a shawl)Yesterday we got the chance to see something really cool a religious procession went right by our hotel. They were celebrating lord Krishna, who just happened to have a birthday in the last week too! It was really neat! People dressed like lord Krishna and other gods and demons form the different stories of his life. My favorite float was one which had Krishna, Radha and what looked like a Sadhu interacting. I’m not quite sure of the significance, but I will ask our Hindi teacher Virendra Ji. We start our Hindi class today and I’ve been doing some review. It will be good to have a regular schedule again. I feel as if I’ve been a tourist forever!!! Though this place is beautiful and cool(literally) all I really want right now is to move in with a host family and start my research. 

Arrival in Banaras

Yesterday we arrived in Banaras, our new home after an overnight train ride. We’ve been staying in a hotel that works closely with our program and have been busy with orientations and seeing the city. We met with some of the Professors at BHU(Banaras Hindu University)`that we will be working with in the future. I got a chance to talk with a few people who might be able to help me with my research and feel a lot better about finding a professor to work with. I also met the man who will be teaching me Urdu and who will perhaps be my advisor. We also went clothes shopping and I found that yet again I do not fit well into clothes made for Indian women. Our director, Vidya Ji, wasYesterday we arrived in Banaras, our new home after an overnight train ride. We’ve been staying in a hotel that works closely with our program and have been busy with orientations and seeing the city. We met with some of the Professors at BHU(Banaras Hindu University)`that we will be working with in the future. I got a chance to talk with a few people who might be able to help me with my research and feel a lot better about finding a professor to work with. I also met the man who will be teaching me Urdu and who will perhaps be my advisor. We also went clothes shopping and I found that yet again I do not fit well into clothes made for Indian women. Our director, Vidya Ji, was most helpful though in giving me ideas and scheduling a meeting with a tailor in order to get a few suit made. I really got a chance to use my Hindi while choosing and buying fabric. Everyone seemed very surprised and pleased at the fact that I spoke Hindi and I had a few fun conversations about my program, myself and clothes. The sales assistants here are very helpful, which scared some of the other girls, who were just looking for simple things, but I was very grateful for all of the help I could get. This afternoon I will pick up my first ever indian-tailored silwar-kamiz suit! Now all I need are some dupatas. I also really need to do laundry, but I think it will have to wait until tomorrow night. We are leaving Varanasi, which is HOT and HUMID this time of year for Mussori, which is in the mountains, for a two week language retreat. Internet access is not always easy to get. This morning we woke to find the internet router gone from our hotel and not a single employee that knows the password.

  

Second day

Today we left for Agra and the Taj Mahal at 6am. We stopped for lunch on the way which was awesome. The food here is great!! Way better than anything you can get in an American restaurant. The first day was a little overwhelming, but I am feeling better by the hour. There are so many people in Delhi! From the pictures I posted above you can see how many people live in such tight quarters. There is no privacy here and everything is done in the open. From the rooftop of my hotel I can see kids playing, bathing, flying kites while their parents shave, chat and do their daily chores.  The Taj was nice.  The moment we got there men came up to our group trying to be our tour guides. Dr. Vidya and Shakar Ji deflected them all except for Tariq who became our guide by not taking no for an answer. He was very helpful and when Shakar Ji asked him how does he “know all of this stuff?” He replied “I have a big book at home.” It was a nice visit, but a lot of driving for such a short stop. I think they just wanted us out of the city for the day as it is Lord Krishna’s birthday and the streets are full of people celebrating. Children are dressed as baby Krishna and we drove by a procession of floats depicting the different stories from Krishna’s life.  There was a huge traffic jam last night due to the processions and we got to experience Delhi’s traffic at its best. It reminds me of the game called Rush Hour. There are no traffic rules here I swear. Last night I made the mistake of riding shot gun. It was slightly terrifying to see all of the people and cars heading straight towards us only to turn at the last possible second. There is internet here, though not very conveniently placed, and I will probably have a cell within the next two weeks.  So I’m not shut off from the world. We have TVs in our rooms and I’m watching Indian Soap Operas. There are a lot of commercials for skin lightener… like the opposite of tanner… Interesting. Anyway tomorrow will hopefully bring some close shopping as I am soon out of 4 clean outfits I have.  More then!

Kristina

Arrival in New Delhi

I've arrived in New Delhi safe and sound after a 14hr plain journey from chicago to Delhi! I am staying at the hotel, where I'm writing from now. Some of the group is already here. here are some pics from the roof of the hotel. There are kites everywhere! I think it might be some kind of kite flying ceremony. 

Leaving for India

Today, after two years of planning, my journey to India commences. I'm a little nervous and very excited looking forward to my year long adventure in a totally new and culturally rich land. Wish me luck!

And Intermediate Hindi Presents...

The fruits of our labor:

The Three Idiots... Produced by Intermediate Hindi 454 and brought to you by Our sweat, blood and tears.

Hindi Class Project

So for SASLI, South Asian Summer Language Institute, every class has to make a project for Thursday... I have effectively been saddled with a lot of the work on our project. We are making a movie and I am doing the editing, which I really do enjoy. I'll post the finished project when It's done. It's really turning out well. In other news I'm back on my IRB horse! My friend, a linguistics grad student, Sarah, is helping me with the IRB requirements as she has been through all of this before me. I think we might just be heading towards approval. I was a bit in doubt before. Well, I may be stressed and exhausted but things are looking pretty good right now and Louise, my friend from Denmark, is coming in 10 days!!! Peace!

Summer Update

Hey all!
I'm still trying to get IRB approval. It's proving to be a real pain. I have to get permission from the college in India in order to recruit students there and according to my advisers that could take a while. Summer Hindi classes are going well. I feel as if I am learning a lot and feel a bit more confident in my language abilities. yesterday I had a whole 3 hr conversation in Hindi with just a little English mixed in! I'm starting to get really excited to leave for India. Today we heard about the bombings in Mumbai... It's so sad. I wonder who did it... Luckily for me Banaras is a relatively stabil city, unlike Mumbai, which is torn with political and religious conflict, and not to mention a much larger city. My heart goes out to the families of those who were hurt and those who lost their lives.

Getting approval and finding an advisor

One of the biggest challenges for academics doing field research is not gathering the data, but remaining ethical while doing so. Almost every field that interacts with other living things has courses and books dedicated to ethics. Maybe 50 years ago this was not a huge issue, but today it is, and rightfully so. Things like consent and privacy have to be foremost in the minds of a researcher. It is often unknown  what affects the information an academic publishes will have on the people they study, so it is best to error on the side of caution.

One of the ways that academia in this country takes care to ensure the ethical methods of researchers is mandating that they get IRB certification. In order to get the certification an applicant must first take an online course on ethics laws and regulations. It took me 2hrs of reading and quizzes, but I'm done with that portion of the certification. Now my linguistics advisor, Monica, will help me with the rest.

Another important process that I am trying to get done before classes start is finding out who my research advisor in India will be. Each student in India gets an advisor for their project. Usually they get them later in the semester, but I really want to be able to get started right away when i get to India, so I am trying to figure out who my advisor will be now. The most likely candidate at the time seems to be a professor at BHU(Banaras Hindu University) by the name of RB Misra. He is the only sociolinguist in their linguistics department, though a pragmatist might also do. I am trying to find articles he has written and his areas of interest, but being able to contact him would help.

Everything is becoming so much more solidified and real as the date of my departure approaches. Tickets are bought and my visa will soon be on its way... I'm starting to feel really passionate about my research again after I kinda put it off to the side last semester. Wish me luck!

My Research Topic

As of yet I do not have a specific outline for my research so I had better get myself in line and start doing some more research. My research question is: How do the speakers of Hindi and Urdu view their own languages and speech communities in Varanasi.
For those of you not familiar with Hindi-Urdu is a member of the Indo-Aryan language family which is a part of the Indo-European language family which English, Spanish and many other European languages belong to. There have been many scholarly and household theories as to the origins of Hindi-Urdu and the extent to which Hindi and Urdu are separate languages or the same language.  The most commonly held theory is that Hindi-Urdu is descended from Khari Boli, which was the spoken language in parts of Northern India. When the Mughals ruled India  from 1526, they used Persian as the court language for their empire. A highly Persianized version of Khari Boli, called Urdu, became the language of the elite. The spoken language of the non-elite also became highly Persianized and was called Hindustani. When the British colonized India, they used Urdu and Hindustani interchangeably.
The linguistic scenario upon the colonization of Northern India was not one of recognized discrete languages and Indians did not make a clear distinction between Hindi and Urdu as languages, they merely recognized that some Muslims used more Persian words and some Hindus used more Sanskrit-borrowed words. Anyone who studies the colonial history of India will tell you that the English liked to do surveys and put Indians in to categories that were much more ridged that the previously existing systems. They solidified cast and Indian law in this manner. In the same way they attempted to categorize the languages of India. This is the mindset that gave rise to the ideas of Hindi and Urdu as separate languages. In 1902, in Grierson's Linguistic survey of India he gathered linguistic data from over the whole country and divided it up into discrete languages. However the Indians themselves did not see their languages in this manner. One student at Banaras University said to his professor, “we do not clearly understand what you Europeans mean by the term Hindi, for there are hundreds of dialects, all in our opinion equally entitled to the name, and there is here no standard as there is in Sanskrit.” Since then however, the idea of Hindi and Urdu as separate languages has emerged. Muslims and the Persian script have generally been associated with Urdu. Hindus and the Devanagari script have been associated with Hindi. Hindi and Urdu however are so similar that most linguist do not make a distinction between then except at the sociolinguistic level. 
This is of course a very simplified version of the history of Hindi-Urdu, but I do not have time to go into depth. I will perhaps do so later. 
My research will be looking at modern day perceptions of the sociolects Hindi and Urdu, how they differ linguistically and socially and how the speakers view their language and the other group as well. The point of my research is not to study religious differences, but to study the power of culture and politics upon our views of language. I am really excited to see what viewpoints I will find in a religiously conservative and yet open city such as Varanasi. 
 

due to popular demand

Due to the fact that everyone has told me to do a blog while in India I have decided to do a blog about my year in India. For those of you who do not know about my impending odyssey... here's a little about what I am going to do in India and why.

I first heard about the study abroad program in India when I was a first semester freshman here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Instantly I felt that this program was for me. It was like an epiphany. All of a sudden I had a new goal in my life that needed to be accomplished. The program was a year long and was centered around a field work project of the participants choice. It was the field work project that drew me in. I have always dreamed of doing my own field research, without really knowing what I would do it on. Also the location of this program seemed perfect. It is my opinion that study abroad should be about taking a person out of their context. Karen Blixen said once that you can only know yourself when you take yourself out of your normal context, when all of the social markers that once meant something to you become meaningless, when people do not know that you are polite because you open the door for them or well dressed because you tuck your shirt in. Only then can you see what's left, which are the tings that make you really you. I feel like going back to Denmark, which had been my original plan upon entering college, would not give me ample opportunity to completely know myself. India however, particularly Varanasi, a city lost in time, would be the perfect place for soul searching.

So not, almost two years later, I am sitting here trying to work through visa applications and finish off some preliminary research. I leave on the 20th of August and it almost doesn't seem real. I am nervous for what I will discover about the world and myself, but mostly I am excited to embark on what will hopefully be a life changing journey. I have narrowed my research topic to a sociolinguistic survey of Urdu and Hindi language communities in Varanasi. I feel both ready and unprepared for my research. There is so much more to know. so much more that could be useful to my field research, and at the same time I have read so much already and I just want to jump in and begin finding informants doing elicitations. I have taken a year of Hindi and will take another two semesters this summer. This will hopefully be enough to let me conduct my research mainly in Hindi while in Varanasi. But more on my research later! I have a minigolf game to get ready for!