The Teaching of Punjabi in American Universities: Present Situation and Future Prospects

281 Gurinder S. Mann: Teaching of Punjabi in America The Teaching of Punjabi in American Universities: Present Situation and Future Prospects Gurinder Singh Mann University of California, Santa Barbara ________________________________________________________________ The paper begins with the historical context in which South Asians languages began to be taught in the United States, and highlight the teaching of Punjabi in some American Universities. It then goes on to focus on the factors that were instrumental in the creation of these programs, the key academic players on the scene, the constituency of students interested in learning Punjabi and their reasons for doing so, and some accomplishments of the past decade. The paper concludes by outlining the historical and linguistic challenges that will need to be confronted to strengthen the future development of Punjabi. ________________________________________________________________ The teaching of Punjabi was introduced into the university system of the United States in the late-1980s, and it is presently available in South Asian language curricula of Columbia University (1989-), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1989-), the University of California, Berkeley (1993-), the University of Pennsylvania (1995-), and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999-).1 Provisions to teach Punjabi exist at the University of Chicago and the University of Washington, Seattle.2 In addition, Punjabi is offered at Stanford University (1986-), San Jose State University (1998-), and Hofstra University (2004-), the universities with relatively recent associations with South Asian Studies. How Punjabi emerged on the language map of the U.S. universities and where it is current prospects lie are issues of significance for those who are interested in studying the history and culture of the Punjab and Punjabis living overseas. The paper begins with a discussion of the larger context that helped the rise of the teaching of South Asian languages in the post-Second World War United States. In the main section, I focus on the introduction of Punjabi into the language curricula of several American universities, analyze the student constituency interested in learning Punjabi, and assess the important programmatic developments at some of the places where Punjabi is taught. In a brief conclusion, I attempt to outline the historical and linguistic challenges facing Punjabi at the turn of the twenty-first century and propose some recommendations. In the process, I hope to reconstruct the history of the teaching of Punjabi in the United States, examine the considerations that resulted in its adoption for teaching, and identify opportunities for the further development of Punjabi to meet the needs of a global and globalizing community. JPS: 14:2 282 The Context The teaching of South Asian languages in the United States developed in two phases. The first began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Sanskrit began to be offered at major universities of the U.S. The pioneer scholars in the field included W. D. Whitney (1827-1894) and E. W. Hopkins (1857-1932) at Yale, C. R. Lanman (1850-1941) at Harvard, M. Bloomfield (1855-1928) at Johns Hopkins, and A. V. W. Jackson (1862-1937) at Columbia. The early decades of the twentieth century saw the establishment of Sanskrit chairs at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University.3 The teaching of Sanskrit continued in these universities without a break, and students interested in languages, literature, and South Asian studies learned it. The second phase began in the middle-decades of the twentieth century. With American troops landing in India during the Second World War, the government of the United States needed social scientists to help it understand South Asian reality, and this project required the learning of local languages.4 The historical circumstances thus created a need to learn the languages of people the Americans wanted to deal with. Unlike the teaching of Sanskrit, which resulted from purely academic interests, the introduction of modern South Asian languages in the university system originated from the political necessities of the post-War period. With the United States acquiring increasing role in international affairs, the basic linguistic wherewithal to understand distant regions and cultures received further affirmation. The geographic position of South Asia, vis-à-vis China and Russia, and the sheer numbers of people present in the subcontinent were significant basis to continue develop interest in the region. Further more, the post-1965 Immigration Act period saw the coming of large number of South Asians to the U.S., presently over 1.5 million, adding impetus to the interest in the culture of the subcontinent. In the early stages, the financial support to start the teaching of South Asian languages came from private foundations interested in educational development. The Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the United States government (under the Fulbright and National Defense Education Acts) supported the establishment of the first program in South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and under W. Norman Brown’s supervision, the teaching of modern South Asian languages was introduced there in 1947.5 The discussions on the issues of which modern South Asian languages to introduce in the United States’ universities in the 1950s make it clear that American scholars were aware of the linguistic complexity of the subcontinent but for pragmatic reasons they divided them into two groups: Hindi and Urdu, and all other regional languages.6 The political significance of Hindu and Urdu was reinforced by their linguistic and literary traditions and this resulted in a special recognition assigned to these two in the United States. The support for regional languages remained largely restricted to individual scholars, who 283 Gurinder S. Mann: Teaching of Punjabi in America argued for their importance in the larger framework of the study of South Asia. C. D. Dimmock’s backing of Bengali at Chicago is a case in point. Hindi quickly gathered the leading status among South Asian languages and it began to be taught in the United States at several places during the 1950s. In addition to the University of Pennsylvania, it was introduced at the University of Arizona, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and the Foreign Service Institute in Washington D. C. Hindi was followed by Urdu, which was introduced at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Foreign Service Institute. Over the years, the teaching of these two languages has been blended, and they are primarily taught in a two-year Hindi-Urdu cycle in most of the universities where they are offered. Other South Asian languages that began to be taught in the late 1950s and the early 1960 included, Bengali at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, Marathi at the University of Pennsylvania, Tamil at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, Telugu at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin, and Gujarati at Cornell University, and the University of Pennsylvania.7 The teaching of South Asian languages received a big boost with the founding of the American Institute of Indian Studies (1961), and the establishment of advanced language-training centers at Banaras and Jaipur (Hindi), Calcutta (Bengali), and Madurai (Tamil).8 The establishment of the American Institute of Pakistani Studies (1973) and the Berkeley Urdu program based in Lahore started around the same time expanded this agenda. Scholars from the U.S. participated in immersion program and also spent extended periods of stay at these places to do their research. Over time, these language programs in the United States and South Asia have prepared new teaching materials, have trained a generation of young scholars, and in the process have helped consolidate the teaching of South Asian languages in the United States. Although still in the category of ‘Less Commonly Taught’ languages, Hindi-Urdu combination has done well and is now offered at all major centers of South Asian Studies. The teaching of other languages, however, has not been that successful and is still in a relatively shaky stage of growth.9 The Case of Punjabi With the political focus broadly on Delhi (India-Hindi) and Islamabad (Pakistan-Urdu), it is ironic that the large Punjabi speaking region connecting these two centers did not figure in any prominent way in mid-twentieth century thinking. Scholars were aware that Punjabi written in Gurmukhi is the language of the Sikhs, but it got clubbed with other regional languages of the subcontinent and did not attract serious attention for introduction in the United States.10 The absence of a cosmopolitan center in the Punjab comparable to JPS: 14:2 284 Calcutta (Bengali), Madras (Tamil), or Bombay (Marathi/Gujarati), which American scholars had visited and with which they had developed a degree of comfort did not help the situation. Further more, Punjabi did not have any advocate within the American academia to argue for its literary/regional importance at the early stage of the debates. In the late 1950s, there was a possibility for the emergence of Punjabi, but it did not materialize. This opportunity came when a major figure in the field of General Linguistics, H. A. Gleason, got interested in the work of a young scholar, Harjeet Singh Gill, whom he met during his visit to the Institute of Languages at Pune, and brought him to the United States for advanced work. Their collaboration resulted in the publication of A Reference Grammar for Punjabi (Hartford: Hartford Seminary Foundation Press, 1962), a definitive study in the field, which remains unchallenged some forty years from its original publication.

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