Yale to offer Hindi-for-credit course in this spring's listings

This spring, Yale will offer a course in Hindi, the world's third most widely spoken language. The South Asian Society Action Committee (SASAC), a student group, was instrumental in bringing about the addition. "Everybody had wanted Hindi for a long time, but [the Administration] never understood it was a student interest," Shilpi Mehta, MC '99, last year's SASAC chair, said.

Modern Indian history Professor Valerie Hansen said, "Hindi is going to be offered as an experiment." Hansen is a member of a faculty committee working to develop a South Asian studies program. She said that Hindi-for-credit came only now because Yale has never offered as many classes about South Asia as it has about other regions of the world like East Asia, Southeast Asia, or Africa.

Last year, one lone student interested in learning Hindi began non-credit independent study with Dr. Bhatt, a retired Medical School professor who is the adviser to SAS. Eventually, several others joined to form a small tutorial.

Due to growing student interest, Mehta created a petition last fall for a credited course and acquired over one thousand signatures in three days. Fifty of those on the petition also indicated that they were interested in a Hindi class at Yale. Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, is the administrative liaison to the faculty and student committees involved in expanding the South Asian program. He obtained funding from the Mellon Foundation and the University to create the position of Director of Language Studies at the Yale Center for International Area Studies (YCIAS).

The new director, Nina Garrett, GRD '63, said, "Part of my mandate is to strengthen programs in less commonly taught languages."

Members of SASAC agree that the Administration should increase its commitment to South Asian studies. Vairavan Subramanian, SY '01, and Shivan Mehta, MC '01, the current co-chairs of SASAC, said, "There's some kind of resistance to making South Asian studies strong."

Rahul Rajkumar, SY '99, who studied Hindi last year, agreed. "Unfortunately, the administration has really stomped on those students who have taken the initiative to arrange independent study tutorials," he said. Although Brodhead referred to Hindi as a Less Commonly Taught Language (LCTL), he maintained, "This is a legitimate desire to learn languages for which there is no mass market."

The University is still interviewing prospective professors for the course which will count as general Yale credit and not towards the language requirement.

Still, Subramanian stressed the significance of the new course, stating, "Language is the keystone for building South Asian curricula at Yale."

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