An Indian American couple have given the University of California Berkeley its largest gift to elevate its Hindi studies program in honor of Usha Jain, who helped establish the program, and her husband Santosh Jain.
When the Jains arrived from India in 1960, their plan was clear: Santosh would earn his master’s degree in engineering, then they would return home.
But soon, Usha found her own academic calling, entering a master’s program in Asian studies and securing a campus job as a teaching assistant. Thus began Usha’s impactful career shaping Hindi instruction across the world.
Usha became an influential lecturer at UC Berkeley, producing popular textbooks and prominent alumni. Now, two new endowments in Usha and Santosh’s names will honor them by enriching Hindi language, literature, and graduate studies at their academic home.
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Earlier this year, their daughter, Amita Jain, and son-in-law, Niteen Patkar, established the Usha and Santosh Jain Endowment for Hindi Language Instruction and created the Usha and Santosh Jain Endowment for Graduate Students, which the campus will match. Combined, the two endowments will provide permanent support for the Hindi program Usha helped establish over her long career.
Amita and Niteen said they were motivated to shield Hindi instruction from financial fluctuations while giving students “a window into a new world that can expand their horizons.”
“Their gift — the largest in the department’s history — will elevate the Hindi Studies Program at UC Berkeley to become the premier program of its kind in the country,” said Munis Faruqui, the Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies and the director of the Institute for South Asia Studies.
The additional resources will expand access to Hindi language instruction for both heritage and non-heritage learners while fostering a vibrant intellectual and cultural community.
The Jain and Patkar family’s philanthropy will help train the next generation of Hindi scholars, advance research in related disciplines, develop innovative teaching materials, strengthen academic partnerships with institutions in India and around the world, and bring distinguished lecturers, artists, and visiting scholars to campus.
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“Hindi was such an important part of our lives; we wanted to know that it would continue as part of my mom’s legacy,” said Amita. “This is a gateway to having that experience be broader. We felt that was something we wanted to bolster as much as we could.”
Hindi is one of the most widely used languages in the world, with over 600 million native and second-language speakers. Besides India, several other countries — including Fiji, Nepal, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates — use Hindi in an official capacity.
Almost 900,000 people living in the United States speak Hindi, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Hindi is also closely related to and mutually intelligible with Urdu, which is common in Pakistan and parts of India.
The extraordinary legacy of Hindi language and literature at UC Berkeley began in the 1950s, when renowned linguist and professor John J. Gumperz introduced Hindi instruction. Gumperz wrote extensively on South Asian sociolinguistics and produced the country’s first widely used Hindi-Urdu readers and instructional materials.
Though Usha was the main impetus for the endowments, Amita and Niteen wanted to recognize her father as well. The couple worked as a team. “Without the support that he gave my mom, it would have been a lot more challenging for her to do what she did effectively,” Amita said.