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By Kate Rix
After all these years, Usha Jain is still not used to the weather in the Bay Area. “I tend to get chilly,” she says, pulling a puffy maroon parka tight over her blue and brown sari. It’s a foggy morning in May and Jain seeks out the warmest table at Caffé Strada.
Jain’s colleagues call her the backbone of Cal’s Hindi program. For 40 years she has served as a role model for colleagues, developing the best and most widely used curricular materials for teaching Hindi. In 2001 she received Cal’s distinguished teaching award, which is rarely given to lecturers.
Jain retired as a lecturer as of the end of the Spring term. Having begun her teaching career at Cal six years before the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies was even founded — when Hindi was a mere foundling of the Department of Near Eastern Studies — Jain has helped shepherd the evolution of what is now acknowledged as the foremost Hindi instructional program in the United States.
“In the Fall of ’67, I started. And I never stopped,” she says, warming herself under an outdoor heater. “Honestly, I never applied for this job.”
Hired by linguistics Professor John Gumperz in January of that year to take on one of his classes while he went on sabbatical, Jain went on to teach generations of Berkeley students both the grammar and the culture of the Hindi language.
Jain had only been in Berkeley a few years, having married her husband Santosh Jain in an arranged marriage and come with him to Berkeley so he could complete studies in chemical engineering. Having studied history in her home of Saharanpur, India, Jain wanted to pursue academic work and settled on the Master’s program in Asian Studies, emphasizing cultural anthropology. She had her first child here in Berkeley but returned to India to have her second child. It was after returning from this trip than she received a knock on the door one chilly January morning from Professor Gumperz, asking her to please come and take on a Hindi class.
As the primary language of the large Indian Diaspora, Hindi has grown in popularity in American universities over the years of Jain’s teaching career. In her early years of teaching, most of her students were interested in learning Hindi out of a spiritual interest in India. “It was part of the Hippie culture at the time,” she says, “and that interest in Hindi has remained. But today there is so much demand from students in business, economics, political science, journalism and other disciplines.”
At first teaching only half-time while raising her two children, Jain went on later to take on a fulltime teaching load and publish text books for teaching introductory and intermediate Hindi. As part of completing her Master’s in Asian Studies Jain published The Gujaratis of San Francisco, an anthropological look at families from the Indian state of Gujarat who now run successful hotel businesses in the United States. She just completed an advanced Hindi grammar text.
But her teaching has not been limited to the grammar of the language. “Every little thing you say in a language has cultural impact,” she says. She takes great care to educate her students in the nuances of Indian culture and in the myriad ways language and culture interface in daily life. “Language is a vision into the culture of a country. Grammar is the skeleton but the heart is the culture.”
For example, in India there is a great emphasis on respect for elders. For a businessperson invited into the home of a potential Indian business partner, using the more familiar pronoun to address the partner’s elderly mother could be a deal-breaker.
“I tell my students that they may be linguistically correct, but culturally quite wrong,” she notes.
In a letter prepared as part of her nomination for the Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Vasudha Dalmia wrote that Jain’s “years of service have added to the liveliness and freshness of her classes, rather than diminished them, as her students have repeatedly pointed out. She has shown no signs of fatigue, rather she has felt the need to improve, to change, to constantly adopt new pedagogical approaches and tools.”
“Usha and I have worked very closely since I joined the Department in Spring 1998 and I consider her a dear friend,” Dalmia added in a recent Email. “The year I entered was a difficult one, there was major Departmental crisis, and the Department went into receivership. Usha was a pillar of strength for many of us and she stood by me as I set out to build the graduate program. It had three students then, two of them dropped out, one struggled on. In the meantime, the graduate program has become one of the strongest and best in the country, not least due to Usha's support.”
Another colleague, Professor Robert Goldman, wrote in a speech for Jain’s retirement event that for four decades Jain has “been the core of our Hindi program and a conscientious and dedicated teacher, mentor and counselor to generations of Berkeley students. She has been a gracious and generous colleague and, I might add has set a standard for sartorial elegance in our corridors that many of us might like to emulate.”
Jain will teach a course in the coming year and plans to continue in that lighter capacity, teaching one course a semester, for a while. She is currently working on a reader for teaching advanced Hindi and is refining her previously published texts to make teaching the language even easier and more natural.
“It should be so smooth,” she says, “that they don’t even have to think about it.”
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