Yuva Hindi Sansthan and New York University win Fulbright-Hays award for the third consecutive year

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Yuva Hindi Sansthan, a New Jersey-based not-for-profit educational organization, in partnership with New York University, received this year’s Fulbright-Hays GPA grant for the third consecutive year. The theme of the project is: “Narrative of Diversity Performed through Storytelling and Encoded  in Historical Architectural Sites in India”. The program will enable a dozen US based language instructors and college students to visit India on a Study tour in the Spring 2025 without any cost to them. The program will bear all the expenses for the study tour.

“We are very grateful to the US Department of Education for extending this grant that focuses on improving language and cultural proficiency of US based instructors and students”, said Ashok Ojha, program director, YHS-NYU Fulbright-Hays GPA project. “The goal of this program is to allow students gain rich experience of the Indian culture”, he said.

According to Ojha, the program will be completed in three phases. A five part orientation session will be organized in December 2024 in the first phase in order to familiarize participants with the nuances of Indian culture. The second phase (Spring 2025) consists of travel to five locations  where heritage monuments of Hindu and Buddhist traditions are located. The participants will explore stories, legends, or myths that emerge organically from the collective wisdom and experiences of local communities and through various forms of storytelling preserved and communicated. To examine all these narratives, the program participants will visit the architectural structures in Ajanta-Ellora, Sanchi, Delhi, Khajuraho, and Varanasi-Sarnath and will explore folk figurative and performing arts, (e.g. dastangoi, puppetry, qawalli, jatra, pandavani, phad or kaawad) through hands-on workshops and demonstrations in the Tribal Arts Museum, Bhopal and in the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, Delhi. The participants will learn historical contexts of ancient monuments at these places and will participate in local cultural (songs, dances and stories performances) activities. They will study stories engraved on the walls of ancient monuments and compare them with popular folk stories.

In the third phase, on their return to USA, participants will develop topic based teaching materials with a deeper understanding of the rich cultural diversity of India for K-12 learners, thus expanding contextual teaching materials for Hindi teaching in the USA.

“The objectives of the program are to examine the cultural, social, and political themes, symbolism and meaning of various historical, mythological and folk narratives, significant as top-down and bottom-up communicative processes of encapsulating the intangibles of the cultural heritage in various regions of India”, said Ojha.

A host of Hindi Language and Area Studies academic experts from partnering institutions in the USA and India will guide and advise program participants. Besides the close collaboration with NYU, partnering institutions in the USA are: University of Texas-Austin (UTA), McMillan Center, Yale University, and Michigan State University (MSU). In India: RN Tagore University, Bhopal, Banaras Hindu University, Vasant College for Women, Varanasi, Indira Gandhi Center for the Arts, Delhi, and RN Tagore University, Bhopal.

Full time employed K-12 educators, college and university students and faculty members are eligible to apply through this link: https://tinyurl.com/fulbright-hays2024

“Expert academicians  from these institutions led by Prof Gabriela Nik Ilieva, NYU, will taught participants of the program”, said Ojha, the program Director. They will guide participants how to decode the images on ancient structures. Part of the program theme is inspired by ‘Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings’,  a research project by the New Jersey based Art historian Prof. Tamara Sears of Rutgers University, New Jersey, who will also lecture during the first phase of the program.