Dr. Usha Udaar is a professor of linguistics and Language research at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Her research interests include general linguistics, linguistic variation and the generative theory of Language, and she has a lot to her journey in this relatively new field of research.
Dr. Udaar was brought up in Delhi and had a really eventful childhood, while being exposed to several languages such as Hindi, English, Haryanvi (her mother tongue), and Punjabi. A good student in school, she had planned earlier on to get into the tech side of roles and fields.
During her undergraduate programme in elementary education from the University of Delhi, two courses on linguistics made her enthusiastic about the same, and to pursue her desire of being a good advocate for English and teaching the language, while also research about underrepresented Indian languages, she finished her Masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University.
She completed her PhD. in the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, under the supervision of Prof. Pritha Chandra. She is a fanatic of the system in IITs, and loves being around these technical institutes rather than other universities.
Dr. Udaar is critical of the current method of language instruction at the school level, pointing out how grammar is often limited to a set of rules without delving into the scientific and cognitive aspects behind why a language is spoken a certain way. She believes that since literature is a well-established field in language, when one wishes to pursue a career in language, it is presumed that they mean the literary aspect. She draws analogy from art. She says that while paintings can be the artistic perspective, and architecture the more technical and scientific, they are both composed of the same building blocks.
She points out that linguistics is a relatively new area of research (originating in the 1950s), hence the stereotype about pursuing literature while mentioning a career in linguistics may prevail.
When asked about any challenges she faced as a girl pursuing a scientific education, she thanks her parents for not discriminating between her and her brother in the field of education. She remembers that her parents not only gave her the freedom to pursue the field of her choice, but also to not worry about the future, irrespective of academic or financial success. She retrospects that her parents may have been the ones to face the backlash from a society which runs with stereotypes, and she thanks them for not letting her feel any of it, and giving her the freedom to pursue an area of research that had just begun to grow.
To future linguists, Dr. Udaar says that linguistics may not be a fruitful career yet, but it is a new branch with a lot of scope, especially since the Noam Chomsky revolution in the 1950s-70s. She believes it is a wonderful and unique scientific field with a lot of potential, especially with information across the world flooding the Internet. She is confident that now is the time linguistics would see its boom.
To the girls out there who wish to pursue an unorthodox career, she advises to be headstrong. "Never shy away from what you want; but once you know what to do, give all you have in it. With being headstrong, comes an internal pressure to live up to what you aimed for. Give your best."
She also notices that girls have an advantage in a typical Indian patriarchal society not to have a societal expectation to earn for the family, and thus they are not always pressured to take education seriously. She advises girls to use this opportunity to perform to their best and explore their potential, without worrying about any expectations.
To future students of language, she advises to never forget their root language, since she believes in the inherent linguistic variations that occur across dialects as well as languages that can be dived into as a study in linguistics. She also encourages them to ask questions, without fear or hesitation.
She is grateful Dr. Pritha Chandra for not only supervising her PhD, but also for being her inspiration in the field of linguistics. She thanks Mrs. Sudha Dutta, her English teacher in school, for polishing her understanding of the language and being firm about making her appreciate English.
She expresses her gratitude to her parents; her father for giving her freedom, not discriminating against her for being a girl, not putting on her the pressure of earning for the family; her mother with an analogy to the mother eagle, who removes the soft grass from the nest so that the chicks, once grown up, could experience the hard pebbles beneath.