Students taking Hindi will be able to declare it as a minor beginning next fall. The Arts & Sciences Curriculum Committee approved the Hindi minor last Monday.

For Mohammad Warsi, lecturer in South Asian languages, who initiated the conception of the Hindi minor, the approval marks an expansion of the study of foreign language and literature at Washington University.

Currently, the University offers 100- and 200-level courses in Hindi, but will offer 300-level courses in advanced Hindi along with the minor next semester. The minor will be comprised of 18 credits, twelve of which will come from language courses.

“The rest [of the credits] would be from courses in politics, religion, music-courses taught in the history department, the international area studies department,” explained Warsi.

The inspiration for creating a minor at the University stemmed from Warsi’s previous work at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California at Berkeley.

According to Warsi, there has been a growing demand among students for the minor because of India’s recent increase in economic activity, which is comparable to the growing international interest in China.

“Recently it has been seen that there are growing business and technology in India,” he said. “There are people eager to learn the language and go there not only for education and research, but also for business purposes. It is one of the major factors in the demand for the language.”

The students who study Hindu come from a variety of academic backgrounds.

“Some of them are in the business school, are engineers, in the social sciences, in history and international area studies. So there really is a growing interest in these courses we have. It’s a mixed set of students,” said Warsi.

Students taking Hindi will also learn Urdu. “In most universities Hindi and Urdu are taught together. Basically, the grammar and the structure are the same. As you go higher and higher toward Hindi, you are going to become more proficient in Urdu,” said Warsi.

Beata Grant, professor and general administrator in Arts & Sciences, stated that in past years students often had difficulty finding opportunities to study Hindi.

“Hindi was offered several times through University College, but it was sporadic,” said Grant. “It wasn’t every year and not connected to the University. Students had been asking for Hindi for years, and we’ve had mixed results with having people to teach. Finally, we’ve gotten Dr. Warsi since 2006 and we’re hoping to build up from there.”

Neehar Garg, a sophomore and prospective Hindi minor, said that his older sister, class of 2006, took Hindi, but had to create her own minor-Hindi language and culture studies. Now, however, Garg is able to take courses in Hindi and graduate with a standardized minor.

“For me, it shows that they’ve been speaking about expansion of the program, and this seems like a clear demonstration of it,” he said. “[Hindi] is a language spoken by an enormous number of people, and U.S. trade with India has been getting bigger and bigger. It’s a great idea for the University.”

While there are no immediate plans to initiate a major in Hindi, Grant said the minor will serve as a starting point for the creation of a major.

“As soon as we have enough variety of courses, then certainly,” said Grant. “But for all of our languages in this department, there is that literature component. We don’t have that; we have history now, but we don’t really have someone who does culture and literature courses. I have great hopes for it.”

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