The Houston Chronicle
July 20, 2008, 11:15PM Teacher's Hindi text fills a growing need Written for his classes at Bellaire, book is first of its kind in the U.S.
By ERICKA MELLON Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
A native of India, Arun Prakash had lived in Houston five years when an assistant principal at Bellaire High School asked him to teach the school's first Hindi language course.
It was 1989, and Prakash, a college-trained businessman, accepted $15 a day to lead the hour long class. "It was more or less gas money," he recently recalled.
Prakash had no textbook and no worksheets, so the novice teacher invented his own lessons, writing them by hand until he got a computer equipped with a Hindi font.
Over the years, Prakash has stuffed countless photocopies into binders for his students. But this fall, for the first time, they will get a hardcover textbook — one Prakash wrote and had published in India this summer.
His 480-page creation, Namaste Jii (or Greetings), is believed to be the first high school Hindi textbook in the United States.
"Need made me do it," Prakash said.
Bellaire is one of only two public schools in Texas with Hindi classes, according to state education records. But as India becomes a bigger economic power, interest in its native tongue is growing. Texas, with the fourth-largest Hindi-speaking population in the United States, is poised to become a leader in Hindi instruction.
The University of Texas at Austin received a $700,000 grant last year to start the first nationally sponsored institute designed for graduate students fluent in the main languages of India and Pakistan.
"The desire to bring Hindi and Urdu down into the high school level is expanding, but it's not quite there yet," said Darlene Bosking, program coordinator of UT's Hindi Urdu Flagship. "Some of it has to do with getting a constituency together to say, 'We really need this,' and it's probably a matter of priority and funding."
Growing trend The Asian tongues got a popularity boost in 2006 when President Bush introduced the National Security Language Initiative. Over the past two years, the government has slated $151 million to improve skills in so-called crucial languages — including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and Farsi — mostly through new college and K-12 programs.
Mandarin Chinese has gained the most traction in schools nationwide, and Texas is no exception, with enrollment in public school Chinese classes jumping from 193 students three years ago to nearly 1,450 last year, according to the Texas Education Agency. Arabic also drew more students, with 385 taking classes last year.
Hindi trailed, with only 94 students enrolled. Nearly all were at Bellaire High in the Houston Independent School District, though about a dozen seventh-graders took Hindi in the inaugural year of a program in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford district west of Dallas.
"When students get out into the work force, with both China and India being major economic powers, this is something they're going to need," said Judy Ramos, spokeswoman for the suburban Dallas district, which also launched a junior high Mandarin program last year.
In June, Prakash went to the Hurst-Euless-Bedford district to train about 20 prospective Hindi teachers at a workshop funded through the federal language initiative.
Providing options Fort Bend ISD is considering adding Hindi to the offerings at Clements High School's new Global Languages Academy.
"I think every school should provide an option," said Hari Kewalramani, a Houston engineer and past organizer of Hindus of Greater Houston. "The demand of local people is there. We want to continue with that tradition that our children know Hindi."
Two decades ago, Prakash's first Hindi class at Bellaire had only eight students, he said, and all but one was of Indian descent.
"The one was a girlfriend to a heritage student," Prakash said.
He estimates that less than half of his 80 or so students last year were of Indian heritage.
"I have students in the program from China, Vietnam, Russia, (as well as) Hispanics, African-Americans — every walk of life," he said.
Next year, he expects more than 100 Bellaire students to take Hindi, which he teaches at levels one through five. The students give him various reasons for signing up:
"I wanted to learn something new."
"I watched a couple of Hindi movies."
"I thought, 'Why not learn Hindi?' "
"My best friend recommended me."
"You taught my brother or my sister."
Prakash also has helped start Hindi language programs at Rice University and at the University of Houston, where the new president, Renu Khator, is a native of India.
Interest in book Hindi is not as difficult to learn as Mandarin, Prakash said, though it also has a different alphabet, with 52 consonants and 13 vowels.
"Hindi is easy," Prakash promises, "because there is no spelling in Hindi. It is written the way you pronounce the word."
Prakash crafted his textbook with the help of Herman van Olphen, a Bellaire graduate and the director of UT's Hindi Urdu Flagship.
A school district in New Jersey, a private school in Boston and some colleges already have expressed interest in the book, which is appropriate for two years of Hindi in high school, three years in middle school or an introductory college course, Prakash said.
"Hindi is very much in need of materials development, as is Persian," said Catherine Ingold, director of the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland.
Prakash said he plans to sell the book with a CD workbook at close to cost (he has not calculated the price yet). He expects to publish an intermediate-level textbook by next year.
"It's definitely not for profit," he said. "I'm more interested in promoting Hindi."
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges