On 19 April 2013, Dr. Yamuna Kachru, Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English as an International Language at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA, passed away after a short and unexpected illness. A leading international expert on the Hindi language and in the field of World Englishes (WE), Yamuna was an outstanding scholar who, for many fortunate enough to have worked with her, was also an exceptional colleague, teacher, mentor, and friend.
Yamuna Keskar was born in the city of Purulia in the West Bengal region of India on 5 March 1933. During her childhood, her family moved to Bihar and to United Provinces, the neighboring states to the west. The daughter of a medical practitioner, she was raised in a traditional Maharashtrian Brahmin family, where in addition to her first language of Marathi she became fluent in Hindi, Bengali, and what she often characterized as initially ‘book’ English, since, as she liked to explain, she acquired the latter without any spoken interaction. In 1953 she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Bihar University, followed in 1955 by a Master of Arts in Hindi language and literature from Patna University, where she was recognized with two gold medals for excellence. After teaching for two years at Ranchi Women’s College, Yamuna joined Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute in Poona as a Fellow in Linguistics. In 1959, she moved further west, this time overseas to the United Kingdom, where she had been invited to teach Hindi at the University of London’s august School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), an institution with a lengthy list of notable international alumni including members of royal families, prominent political and governmental leaders, and renowned academic scholars, religious figures, musicians, and artists. In 1965 she completed her PhD in linguistics at SOAS with a dissertation entitled A Transformational Treatment of Hindi Verbal Syntax, the first in-depth analysis of the Hindi language to utilize the Chomskyan framework.
That same year Yamuna moved westward once more, joining her husband, the linguist Braj B. Kachru, as a faculty member of the Department of Linguistics at the UIUC, USA, which remained her academic home for more than three decades. Throughout her tenure as professor at UIUC as well as following her early retirement in 1999, Yamuna was an active and dedicated scholar who had an influential impact in all three professional domains, i.e. research, teaching, and service. With respect to research, she wrote or co-authored more than 60 scholarly publications, including monographs, journal articles, edited volumes, edited journal special issues/symposia, book chapters, and reviews. With its distinctly broad scope, her research reflects an unrestrained academic curiosity that led her well beyond her initial formal approaches to Hindi grammar to examine also functional aspects of language, its users and uses. Yamuna’s publications delve into such diverse research areas as speech acts, pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, corpus linguistics, language pedagogy, intercultural communication, and second language acquisition, while also venturing outside the boundaries of her initial language of focus, Hindi, to examine other languages of India (e.g. Bengali, English, Kashmiri, Marathi, Urdu), Asia (e.g. Singapore English, Philippine English), and Africa (e.g. West African English), an interest no doubt fostered by her multilingual upbringing in India.
Yamuna is recognized internationally as a leading scholar in Hindi studies. Over the course of her career she published several monographs on the grammatical structure of the language, utilizing both general and generativist frameworks. These were authored in Hindi and in English, and published by academic presses in India and the US/Europe (John Benjamins). She also did research on the pedagogy of Hindi, most notably co-authoring with her UIUC colleague Rajeshwari Pandharipande a widely adopted intermediate-level language textbook that has since had several reprints. Given her extensive expertise on philological and sociolinguistic issues of the sub-Himalayan countries, in 2008 she co-edited with Braj B. Kachru and S.N. Sridhar Language in South Asia, published by Cambridge University Press. On 14 September 2006, her pioneering research on Hindi and other languages of India as well as her scholarly contributions to the teaching of Hindi were recognized in the country of her birth with the Presidential Award, presented to Yamuna by the President of India in the official Presidential palace in New Delhi.
Another area of research in which Yamuna was a leading international scholar is WE, a field in which she was a prominent voice since its establishment in the mid-1980s. Yamuna published numerous articles on WE, and was a guest editor of several symposia and special issues of the journal World Englishes (WE). A member of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) since its founding in 1992, Yamuna served the field in various capacities over the years, including as a member of the WE Editorial Board and the IAWE Executive Board. In the months prior to her death, she had committed to playing a particularly active role in the association, serving as IAWE Vice-President/President-Elect and on the International Organizing Committee for the 2013 and 2014 conferences. She also had been invited to give one of two featured Focus Lectures at the 2013 conference, held at Arizona State University, USA, in November. Having taken early retirement in 1999 in part to devote more time to research, in the decade that followed Yamuna made significant contributions to research in WE. She co-authored two key monographs: World Englishes in Asian Contexts (2006, Hong Kong University Press), written with Cecil L. Nelson; and Cultures, Contexts, and World Englishes (2008, Routledge), written with Larry E. Smith and published recently also in Japanese translation. In 2009, she co-edited The Handbook of World Englishes with Braj B. Kachru and Cecil L. Nelson, published by Blackwell Press.
In the months following her untimely death, several events were held to honor and remember Yamuna and her considerable contributions to the field of linguistics. At the 2013 IAWE Conference her originally scheduled Focus Lecture session was devoted to a retrospect of her scholarship, with Profs. Margie Berns, Cecil L. Nelson, and Zoya Proshina highlighting her significant contributions to WE studies in second language acquisition, foreign language pedagogy, noetics, and intercultural communication. The month before, on 12 October 2013, a ‘Symposium on the Contributions of Professor Yamuna Kachru’ was held at her home institution, organized by UIUC Prof. Rakesh Bhatt. Held in conjunction with the Braj and Yamuna Kachru Lecture given by Prof. Salikoko Mufwene (University of Chicago) the previous evening, the event featured presentations from 13 scholars from around the world, including former UIUC department colleagues (Profs. Rajeshwari Pandharipande and Hans Henrich Hock), Yamuna’s sister and brother-in-law (Profs. Kamal K. Sridhar and S.N. Sridhar); several of her past graduate students (Profs. Tej Bhatia, Suzanne K. Hilgendorf, Cecil Nelson, Anita Pandey, Anjali Pandey, Tamara Valentine); and the founding and current co-editors of the journal WE (Mr. Larry E. Smith, Profs. Kingsley Bolton, and Daniel Davis). In attendance were also Prof. Braj B. Kachru and other members of their immediate family, including their children, their daughter Dr. Amita Kachru and their son Prof. Shamit Kachru, and their grandchildren, Sasha and Ila. The papers are being prepared as part of a special issue of WE to be published in the coming year.
For those who knew Yamuna personally, any retrospect of her contributions as a researcher would be lacking without a recognition of the unique person behind the scholar. In her many roles, as mentor, supervisor, teacher, and colleague, Yamuna-ji, as she was affectionately known by many, touched the lives of numerous individuals often in distinct and highly personal ways. At an informal gathering at the 19th Conference of IAWE, some 50 scholars came together to share memories and celebrate the friendship of Yamuna-ji, telling their stories of the impact of her generosity and graciousness. One word often heard at the memorial events was ‘dignity’, in reference to her great dignity as a scholar and person, as well as in the sense of her own humility and the kind regard she had for others. With respect to both her scholarship and friendship, Yamuna Kachru had a great impact in the field of linguistics. Her passing is a profound loss for the discipline and for all who knew her.
Suzanne K. HilgendorfPresident, International Association for World Englishes (2013–14)
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University
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