A take on the exotic East

In 2001,Katherine Russell Rich,a magazine writer and survivor of cancer,came to India to learn Hindi at an institute in Udaipur.The opening of this book,her memoir of that experience of a year,sandwiches her motivation between a description of how she found herself 'half-naked in a temple' (her sari unravelled) on 'the Lord God Shiva's birthday' - an anecdote that's spun to make it initially sound more dramatic than it turns out to have been.
Rich's motivation for her trip is also detailed,in a style that cannot fail to remind a reader of Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love.Rich was,she says,working in glossy magazines in New York,with the chant 'I want to live a more artistic life' running through her head.She owned expensive shoes (the brand is named Manolo Blahnik,a nod to the world of the sitcom Sex in the City) which her cat was in the habit of gnawing.It was time to get out.
Dreaming in Hindi,then,tells the story of her journey into the exotic East,and her imaginative recalibration into the frame of mind of a Hindi speaker - sort of.This also happens to be the period of September 11,and of Godhra and riots in Gujarat,events that lead Rich to think,but not always very profoundly,on the subjects of identity,identification and hatred.
Rich is an engaging writer,and if this book had only told the first-person story of her year in the small-town world of Udaipur,learning Hindi,it would have been entertaining and sometimes slyly well written.She can turn a phrase and has an eye for description.But someone - whether the author,her agent,or an editor - obviously decided that mere memoir wouldn't be enough,and so the narrative is padded out with a journalistic account of language acquisition.Rich has done her research,and spoken to several linguists and even some neuroscientists as well as reading reasonably widely.But the pattern of the book,in which even simple assertions from experience - for example that a language learner adopts the gestural patterns of native speakers - invariably furnish a page-and-a-half of pop science to support each observation,makes one ask - why?
In terms of style,too,Dreaming in Hindi always plumps for the smoothness and readability of good glossy magazine writing.Bluff humour is favoured over the potential of any actual disturbance;and anything that might resemble intellectual content is resolutely dumbed-down in tone as well as detail,in a way obviously designed to appeal to an American mass market.An intelligent character,for example,is described as having 'smarts';when initially relaying languageacquisition facts,Rich asks more than once,pre-emptively apologising for introducing abstract concerns,'but who cares?'
Transport,rather than transformation,turns out to be the book's concern - it is really a travelogue,rather than a memoir,for little in the way of a true personal journey comes through.But,as travel writing,it is weighed down by the repeated accretions of pop science,and the resulting tale is sadly often dull.