In January, South Asia scholar Steven Poulos and several colleagues were in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where they had an appointment to meet U.S. ambassador Mary Ann Peters.
The Bush administration was at the time ramping up efforts to alter negative perceptions of America throughout the Muslim world. The government-funded Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language music-and-news station, had hit Middle Eastern airwaves in March 2002, positioned as a hipper version of the Voice of America, and the State Department had launched a $15 million ad campaign in Islamic countries depicting Muslim Americans leading contented, Westernized lives. Peters asked the group if any of their current or prospective funding was going to be used for PR or diplomacy. It was not, the visiting scholars told her. “She wasn’t happy with us,” Poulos says. “She said, ‘What are you doing for us? What are you doing to get Bangladeshis to learn more about the U.S.?’ And I said, ‘You don’t understand. That’s not what our funding is for. We’re trying to teach Americans about Bangladesh.’”
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The scholars’ efforts got a boost last year when the U.S. Department of Education gave the University of Chicago $1.6 million to set up the South Asia Language Resource Center, the goal of which is to improve methods for teaching and learning some of the region’s 650 languages–including Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Pashto, and Persian, tongues spoken in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran respectively. But Poulos’s larger mission–making the study of South Asian languages a national priority–is quixotic, to say the least. In late September 2001, CIA officers were already operating in Afghanistan, but translators proficient in the native languages were in short supply. The agency contacted Poulos last year looking for an “astonishing number” of fluent speakers of Pashto, the language spoken by the Taliban. Poulos told them he knew of none and that the language wasn’t even taught in America. “Does it surprise me that there are intelligence officers running around Pakistan and Afghanistan with no language skills?” asks Poulos. “It doesn’t surprise me one bit. We’ve been arrogant about this.”
He signed on as head of Berkeley’s Center for South Asia Studies. His responsibilities included overseeing the university’s Pakistan-based language program, which had for decades been sending students to Lahore to learn Urdu and study the local culture. The war on terror has changed that–the U.S. government, a significant source of the program’s funding, says it’s too dangerous to continue sending college students to Pakistan. Poulos isn’t so sure: “Are there terrorists there? No question there are. Could Americans be targets? Absolutely. But in 29 years in Lahore, no Pakistanis ever attacked our students,” he says.
On the other hand, he says, “I wouldn’t even be happy to have $50 million tomorrow. I’m not sure we’d know what to do with it. We have to build toward it and be more inclusive of more institutions, and I think that will happen little by little.”
“The question is: Where do we see students finding interesting projects to potentially engage them?” says James Nye, director of the U. of C.’s South Asia Language and Area Center and author of the SALRC grant proposal. Marathi, the state language of Maharashtra in central India, and Telugu, a tongue of Andhra Pradesh in southeastern India, “have really deep traditions of learning and literature” and are prime for exploration by archaeologists, historians, and cultural-studies scholars. Some early Marathi literature, for instance, dates back to the 13th century, and plays from the 19th century on have strongly influenced the Bollywood film industry.
The CIA recently graduated the largest class of new officers in the agency’s history–three-quarters of whom speak a foreign language with considerable fluency. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, has added course work in Dari, Urdu, and Uzbek, among other languages, to get military personnel up to speed. And nongovernmental organizations are making their own efforts. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages is focusing on less commonly taught tongues and has declared 2005 the “Year of Languages.” Poulos and his colleagues still hope to capitalize on the climate before focus shifts to the next danger zone.
