Dr. Achla M. Raina, is a retired professor of Linguistics at IIT Kanpur. She was the Dean of Academic Affairs during the challenging Covid-19 years. Notably she is also the first woman Dean in the history of IIT Kanpur. What follows next is her inspiring story in her own words.
I was born in the year 1958 in Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), in a joint family living in downtown Ali Kadal nearabout the river Jhelum. When I was 2 years old, my father, a college teacher, got posted in the remote township of Bhadarwah in the Doda district. My earliest memories - my mother’s kitchen gods, trails in the neighbourhood hills, the traumatic Holi celebrations, and the haunting signature tune of All India Radio - are from Bhadarwah. When I was old enough to go to school, my family moved to the border town of Baramulla, where I was witness to the two wars of 1965 and 1971 in my growing up years.
My ten years of schooling took place in a government run Urdu-medium school in Baramulla. The school excelled in sports, music, and art, and I remember my school years primarily for those pursuits together with a love for reading that my mother, a school teacher herself, had painstakingly instilled in me.
I moved to the Women’s College, Maulana Azad Road in Srinagar after my pre-university and graduated majoring in Literature. I had the privilege of getting my Master’s in Literature from one of the most picturesque university campuses in the country, the University of Kashmir, located on the banks of the well-known Dal Lake with a full view of the awe-inspiring Mahadev peak in the not so well-known Zabarvan Range.
I must have been instinctively drawn to languages as I grew up speaking all the five languages I was exposed to in childhood. To these, I added five more in the later years. However, knowing many languages does not make a linguist any more than knowing arithmetic makes a mathematician.
It was in the picturesque campus of the University of Kashmir that I found my calling, namely, Linguistics. The imposing 10-floor (or maybe, more) library gave me access to the writings of Noam Chomsky, who, in the late 70’s was already a colossal figure on the intellectual landscape of the American and Indian universities. Some of his seminal works such as Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, Cartesian Linguistics, and Language and Mind had opened the floodgates of possibilities in the study of language. I was drawn to these and other works including an unforgettable introduction to Chomsky’s life and work (as of then) titled Noam Chomsky authored by John Lyons and another volume based on Chomsky’s conversations with Mitsou Ronat, Language and Responsibility.
These volumes turned out to be a life-changing experience for me and I went on to pursue Linguistics at Delhi University (Master’s and MPhil programmes) followed by IIT Kanpur (Doctoral programme). Both these institutions gave me a comprehensive exposure to much of the contemporary and traditional strands of linguistic thought including the ancient Indian, Greco-Roman, Chinese and Arabic traditions of language study. The Doctoral programme at IIT Kanpur in the late 80s was as rigorous and demanding as ever, and it must have brought out the best in me.
My engagement with Linguistics concerns some of the aspects of Indic languages approached from the modern-day perspectives on linguistic theory and practice. These perspectives include Generative Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Pragmatics, and Cognitive Linguistics. I along with my doctoral students at IIT Kanpur have been working on different theoretical and empirical aspects of linguistic phenomena observed in languages such as Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, English, and my first language, Kashmiri.
With my undergraduate students at IIT Kanpur, I have looked at a variety of computational aspects of Hindi, English, and Indian Sign Language. Teaching Linguistics to undergraduate students has been a very fulfilling experience indeed. One of the several offshoots of this exercise is a body of undergraduate research pursued by interested students. Another strand of my work with undergraduate students at IIT Kanpur is the language teaching courses that I have offered to beginners with varied regional language backgrounds. This activity rests on the premise that a multilingual language teaching classroom is a resource rather than an obstacle and must be optimally utilized during instruction.
The major challenges confronting scholarship and research in the field of Linguistics can be considered under three heads:
Antiquity of theoretical architecture: Linguistics is a discipline of over 2000 years’ antiquity with several well-established traditions. A constant conversation across these traditions far removed from one another in time as well as space remains a formidable challenge that a scholar needs to address.
Pace of growth: Turn of the 20th Century led to a revamped interest in the study of language triggered by a combination of philosophical and anthropological considerations as well as questions of scientific theory construction. These developments led to a breathtaking growth of ideas in the field over the last 125 years. My 45 years in Linguistics have seen many conceptual and empirical orientations, some of which continue to vie for space in academia. For example, the recognition that language, apart from everything else, is a cognitive faculty, has led to an upsurge of research interest in cognitive underpinnings of language use. Similarly, advances in computing resulted in a computation-intensive subdiscipline of natural language processing. Keeping pace with a fast-growing field and finding a niche of relevance for oneself in the process has been a challenge.
Empirical challenge: Speaking of languages out there, these are subject to constant change, sometimes extinction and renewal. The result is that the empirical landscape of language study is forever shrinking as well as expanding. Many language hotspots have been identified the world over where one or more languages are facing the threat of extinction. The emergence of creoles across the world is an example of the expanding universe of languages.
The challenges for scholarship and research in Linguistics outlined here also open a sea of opportunities. For example, staying relevant in a field that has seen a remarkable pace of growth is a lesson in constant reinvention. Perspectival debates and newer approximations in theory construction have been two of my most engaging pursuits. The constantly changing empirical landscape ensures an open-ended research activity.
Issues of academic governance have always been of interest to me but what unfolded during my deanship of Academic Affairs at IIT Kanpur was an unprecedented chain of events set in motion by the COVID-19 pandemic. When our academic life at the Institute came to a screeching halt in March 2020, we had little clarity about the nature of the challenge and the timelines involved. The only certainty in the midst of all the uncertainties was that we must find ways and means of negotiating the impasse.
Starting with measures such as a premature closure of the ongoing semester during a nation-wide lockdown and the subsequent resumption of academic activities in remote teaching/learning mode, the Institute displayed its characteristic resilience. The challenge was to address the collective vulnerability of students, faculty and administrative staff in a way that does not compromise the academic calendar. Creating course materials on a daily basis and transmitting them to students was the most important concern of the academic office. The in-house platform, HelloIITK, was our handshake with the students located across length and breadth of the country and the challenge was to reach the student to the last mile. The areas that could not be reached through the internet were accessed by weekly transmission of portable drives via speed post.
While the pandemic raged, two batches of undergraduate and postgraduate students graduated in 2020 and 2021. Convocation 2020 was held in the virtual mode and Convocation 2021, in the hybrid mode.
The experiment with remote teaching/learning paradigm during the pandemic has resulted in the features of online teaching/learning being accepted as an integral part of the in-person classroom experience. The Institute now has a large repository of online courses with Dean, Academic Affairs as its custodian. The HelloIITK platform has been further upgraded and it continues to be available for hosting course materials as well as for learner analytics, assessments, forums, announcements, and other features that the platform has to offer.
I value my years as Dean, Academic Affairs for many life lessons that came my way. The co-operation we received from the students, faculty and the staff members at various nodes in the academic office during the COVID hiatus remains an abiding memory.
Language is many things rolled into one. It is the cognitive ability to learn and use symbols. It is also the set of rules that makes up the system of symbols. Again, it is the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. Language is by itself a knowledge system and also a vehicle of everything that we know about the world. This duality ensures that the study of language is not just a study of languages out there but also of the human cognitive potential that enables language use, and of the human brain, which regulates language.
Being a vehicle of knowledge, language builds interfaces with practically every domain of human experience throwing up multiple subdisciplines as a result. Each of the hyphenated disciplines and subdisciplines such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, semantics, pragmatics, etc. is a fascinating area of study by itself. These multiple interfaces make Linguistics a virtually borderless field where you carve out your space depending on which facets of language interest you.
Students from any stream can join the Master’s programme in Linguistics and eventually pursue areas such as Formal Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Neurolinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, among others.
Linguistics is one of the oldest fields of knowledge to have emerged in civilizational history and it will stay relevant as long as the workings of language continue to fascinate us. As I said earlier, the field has seen rapid strides in our lifetime, and chances are that this will continue to be the case. Triggers for evolution are likely to be both discipline-internal and discipline-external.
Just as philosophical and anthropological interest gave a new direction to Linguistics in the 20th century, it was the advances in brain sciences that gave rise to neurolinguistics while advances in computing led to research in machine processing of language. Recent advances in AI are bound to have a far-reaching impact on the discipline. AI generated texts are a new locus for language change in directions dictated by machine learning of language. This has an immediate consequence for the empirical challenge and opportunity we spoke of earlier.
I remain forever grateful to my first teachers at the Baramulla school for channelizing the energies of an unruly child; my friends and teachers at the subsequent stages for nourishing my worldview and my inward gaze, for steering the perspectival breadth in my scholarship, some discipline in asking questions, and whatever open-mindedness I can lay claim to; my senior colleagues at IIT Kanpur for instilling in me love for the Institute; and students and peers for enriching my journey in countless ways.