Tales from the Field Contd.. Hindi Dreams
-Stephen Christopher, PhD Student in Anthropology
This summer I dreamed in Hindi. Dreams as surreal as
Dali’s Andalusian Dog and as heteroglossic as anything
Bakhtin could theorize. You know you’re getting somewhere
with language when a Hindi succubus seeds you with
subterranean linguistic confusion. I awake, I think, which
language? Who am I apart from English? A summer staying
close to that question: Who is the non-English-speaking
me? To that end I took the name Heeralal (heera = diamond;
lal = red), and constructed my Hindi self around its rustic
associations. I picked the name randomly from a list of
rickshaw-wallahs, but find it fits nicely. This summer I
became a red diamond.
What other language program can transform an opaque
English-speaking PhD student into a translucent Hindispeaking
gemstone? I left in May a pudgy intellect and by
August I was the hardest material in the natural world.