THE LEDE On the Other Hand

The deep imprint of American Sign Language in Bengaluru / Language.

- Manisha AR

On a Tuesday afternoon in early August, in a classroom at Bengaluru’s Dr SR Chandrasekhar Institute for Speech and Hearing, a teacher was reprimanding her sixth-grade class for their poor performance on a recent English exam. “Did you children not understand the chapter?” she asked, enunciating each word she spoke, so that her students—many of whom are deaf or partially deaf— could read her lips.

As the teacher turned to write instructions on the board, a student sitting in the front row whipped around and, with a cheeky smile, made a series of hand motions to a boy on the bench behind him, who nodded and responded with a few quick gestures of his own. Sensing a disturbance, the teacher turned around and caught the boys mid-conversation. She raised her voice and wagged her finger at them, saying, “You can discuss lunchtime and playing games later, children!” The boy at the front put a finger on his lips to indicate compliance, and the teacher returned to writing on the board.

The boys were communicating with one another in American Sign Language. ASL is partially based on English: it relies on spelling words by using individual letter signs of the ASL alphabet, which correspond directly to the letters of the English alphabet. Because of the sheer diversity of languages in India, however, the sign language most commonly used in this country—Indian Sign Language—is not based on any alphabet or language, and has numerous widely varied dialects. ISL also requires the use of both hands, while ASL only requires one. This last difference was how, as someone who doesn’t know either language, I recognised that the students at the Chandrasekhar Institute were using ASL.