'Our kids are connected with our culture': Marlboro Hindi School teaches language, life

MARLBORO - In the summer of 2001, nine students gathered in Dr. Bishan Agrawal’s basement to learn Hindi.

Over 20 years later, the school, now known as the Marlboro Hindi School, has swollen to an enrollment of about 110 students. The basement classroom has turned into Saturday classes at Marlboro Memorial Middle School, with its calendar closely mirroring the regular school district’s schedule.

At its pre-pandemic peak, the Marlboro Hindi School enrolled 180 students. As the pandemic brought school closures and the Saturday school moved to online learning, it lost some students, but gained others who enrolled from as far away as Texas. The Saturday school currently teaches hybrid classes, with most students learning in classrooms.

“I strongly believe that you cannot understand the culture without the language,” Agrawal said. “Also, you cannot have the language without culture.”

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Passing down traditions in the U.S.

Agrawal, a former math teacher at High Technology High School who worked as a systems engineer with AT&T in Holmdel, said at the time of the school’s founding there weren’t any schools dedicated to teaching Hindi to the children of the burgeoning Indian American community in New Jersey. He wanted to form the school to pass down Indian traditions to the next generation of Indian Americans who will grow up in the United States.

The school offers three levels of beginner and intermediate classes and two levels for advanced students. Most students are between the ages of 5 and 16, with some graduates volunteering as teaching assistants.

Although Hindi is the language used in official documents in India, not everyone speaks Hindi fluently due to the country’s linguistic diversity.

Rakesh Chandwani, one of the school’s directors, said the school has seen interest in adults looking to learn Hindi as a second or third or fourth language. This year the school began a class for adults learning Hindi.

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Unlike college or community classes for people learning foreign languages where it is common for students be a decade apart in age, the Saturday school is geared toward children and their specific needs. Gurdeep Rathi, who teaches Beginner 1, said her class teaches “in a fun way,” while Abha Sood, who teaches Advanced 2, said her class will work on a long-term project that focuses on a historic or noteworthy person.

For older students at the beginner level, the Saturday school created a fast-track class.

Brij Gupta, another director, said the fast-track class was created after the school had “experiences with (older) students who just came, they didn’t know any word in Hindi.”

He said placing 11-year-old students with 5-year-old students in beginner classes would not have worked out well.

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Karuna Gupta, who teaches one of the fast-track classes, said the goal was to place the students by the next year into the intermediate classes.

Like Sood, Rathi and many of the other teachers, members of the PTA and the school’s administration, Gupta became involved with the school because their own child had taken classes or participated in activities sponsored by the school.

Brij Gupta, one of the directors, said everyone who works for the school works as volunteers.

The school’s curriculum was honed from the two decades of experience. The textbooks for the beginner classes were written by the school’s teachers while the textbooks for intermediate and advanced classes are ordered from India, according to Gupta.

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Agrawal said when developing the beginner language textbook, the school decided against a full-immersion approach in which Hindi would be the only language used. He said students can sometimes struggle to learn the Hindi alphabet.

“The children will lose interest. They will not capture it very quick,” Agrawal said.

The resulting textbooks have photos of object, the vocabulary words written in Hindi and transliterations using the Latin alphabet. It is an accommodation for elementary school students learning Hindi in the United States.

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For family, for work, for Bollywood

The reasons to pass on or teach the next generation Hindi are numerous. Gupta said he wanted his children to speak Hindi to their grandparents.

Meenakshi Singh, who teaches Intermediate 2, said she wanted her kids, who had graduated from the school, to learn Hindi to help with their future careers.

Raina Gupta, a member of the PTO who has two children in the school, said her husband wanted their children enrolled to gain a knowledge of traditional culture, while she wanted her kids to gain the ability to understand the movies of Bollywood, an aspect of modern culture.

Maya Gupta, who teaches Beginner 1, said she became involved when she enrolled her 5-year-old in classes in 2002.

“They never forget it,” she said. “Our kids are connected with our culture.”

Olivia Liu is a reporter covering transportation, Red Bank and western Monmouth County. She can be reached at oliu@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Marlboro Hindi School teaches language, life to NJ Indian Americans