On my last trip to Delhi, I went to a bookshop – so far so vanilla. But the book I came home with was special: a collection of short stories by Munshi Premchand (1880–1936), among the most celebrated names in Hindi and Urdu fiction. The extraordinary thing wasn’t that I’d bought Premchand. It was that I’d bought him in Hindi – a language I hadn’t read since dispensing with it, aged 15, as a compulsory subject in grade ten.My physical home is India. My linguistic one is English. I grew up speaking the language with my parents, dreaming in it, crooning in it now to my cat. I went to an “English medium” school in Delhi where everything but Hindi itself was taught in English. And I read, for pleasure, exclusively in it.While growing up I spoke Hindi daily, but usually only to the “servants,” to shopkeepers and autorickshaw drivers, to the guards at the school gate, to strangers I needed directions from. The non-English-speaking Indian – an overwhelming majority of the country – was but a cast of supporting characters in my life.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThis didn’t strike me as strange. India’s polyphony had room for an Indian in any of its dozens of languages, and thousands of dialects. I was brought up to believe my country’s great strength to be its refusal to police what being “Indian” meant. That there was no authority that could accrue to itself the power to decide who was truly Indian or not. My idea of India was as valid as anyone’s. Ergo: an English-Indian like me was as valid as any other kind.It took living in China for me to problematise this certainty. It was 2003 and one of the first stories I reported as a newbie freelancer was on the department of South Asian studies and languages at Peking University. Founded in 1946, the department had played a key historical role in the dissemination of Indic literature in China. I sat among eager 20-year-olds who’d given four years of their lives to learning Hindi, hoping it might land them a post at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or in a Chinese company’s India office – only to be discovering that English might serve them better.Everyone in China speaks Chinese, they said. Why don’t you speak “Indian?” I remember launching into the usual complexities – the unfairness of imposing one tongue on a country of so many, English as lingua franca, the linguistic bridge without which my Tamilian father and north-Indian mother might never have found common ground.But in China, these arguments lost their Oxford Union-debate sheen. The students looked at me with a mixture of pity and bewilderment. Here was a country that had simply done the thing – forged one language for over a billion people – and the logic of it, common tongue as common identity was self-evident to them. How could any country cohere if its parts couldn’t communicate?An Indian learning Hindi in BeijingLooking at India through Chinese eyes made me interrogate my assumptions. The bond between language and identity is profound. Was plurality as the basis for unity – dogma to me until then – anything more than an admirable sentiment? What did our refusal to make a single language the basis of national identity do to divide rather than unify? And how was an English-Indian (like me), implicated in perpetuating hierarchies in a country already riven by caste, class and religion? Was English as much a caste as a language?A minuscule number of Indians (around 0.02%) speak English as their first language. And yet, it was the language of the Supreme Court, of much of government and the media at the national levels, of elite business, and of success.Twenty years have passed, and I am back in Beijing, this time with Premchand in hand, and the determination to do at fifty what I couldn’t be bothered to do at fifteen: read. In Hindi. I began reading for an hour every morning. It was tough going. Fluency is a reporter’s stock in trade – a certain glibness her currency – and it’s easily mistaken for intelligence. Being back at a primary-school level of reading, where I had to place my finger below the words of a sentence so as not to lose my place, was frustrating, almost humiliating. After all, this wasn’t Chinese, or Spanish – languages I had learned as an adult, but the idiom that came closest to being “Indian.”Time and again my tongue stumbled over the conjunct consonants – क्ष, ज्ञ, त्र (Hindi letters ksh, gy, tr) – that attached to the full-blown letters of the Devanagari script. And every paragraph had words whose meanings I could sense from context but could not provide translations for on their own. It struck me, that I needed a teacher. I’d been learning Chinese weekly for the last several months. But clearly, I needed to learn Hindi as well. But how? I was in China. And then I remembered that interview from 2003. Peking University had a South Asian languages department. Perhaps I could find a teacher there.Which is how I have arrived at this moment. Sitting inside a conference room in one of the university’s newer academic buildings, with “Chetna,” “Nirmala,” “Disha” each of us taking turns to read out paragraphs of Premchand’s masterpiece: Idgah. Chetna is the Indian name for Wang Jing, an assistant professor of Hindi language at the South Asian Studies department. The other two are amongst the school’s 30-odd undergraduate students.When I first contacted Wang with the idea of starting a Premchand reading group, primarily to help my own reading of it, she was instantly taken with the idea. The irony of an Indian learning Hindi in Beijing has an obvious appeal – especially to people like “Chetna” who have devoted their lives to studying the culture of a country that their own government has a fraught relationship with. Once a regular visitor to universities in India, Chetna has not been given a visa to travel to India since the Galwan border clash of 2020 led to a diplomatic freeze.Unlike the students I had met in 2003, Nirmala (Yichun) and Disha (Ying) are also unsure they will ever live or work in India. The opportunities to work in India with Chinese companies have sharply reduced in the intervening years. And yet, they are enjoying the language. It is an intellectual challenge and rewarding for the culturally curious.The Premchand group has had only one meeting so far. We’re planning to meet twice a month.The story itself, when we finally get into it, makes me sad – not for its plot, which is gentle and quietly stirring: a boy of modest means spends the few coins he has at a village fair on a pair of tongs for his grandmother, rather than on sweets or toys like his friends. What saddens me is that its characters are almost all Muslim, speaking in an Urdu-inflected Hindi, rendering a syncretic, pre-Partition India – the story was written in 1933, 14 years before Pakistan’s creation – with an unselfconsciousness that would be unthinkable in today’s chest-thumping Hindutva climate.And yet, here we are in this room. Three Chinese and one English-Indian, brought together by a language none of us fully owns, reading about a Hindu-Muslim culture in a country my teacher has been frozen out of. How to unpack all of this? Perhaps that’s a fool’s errand. Yet, amid all the culture wars and identity politics, a spark of cultural messiness is being kept alive here, in a Beijing classroom by a stubborn 50-year-old and a handful of undergraduates. A reading group is a modest thing. It will not change the geopolitical realities of a polarising world. But for two hours, twice a month, in this room, a story like this still gets to belong.Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.