Indian-Americans dominate the Bee again

This article first appeared in MyIndMakers.

Another year and another National Spelling Bee won by a contestant of Indian origin.  This year’s winner Karthik Nemmani just became the 19thIndian American to win the Bee since Balu Natarajan became the first to win it in 1985.  Sameer Mishra started the current remarkable streak of 11 consecutive wins by contestants of Indian origin in 2008.

Indian Americans immigrants learn the art science of spelling fast.  When you have a ‘funny’ or ‘strange’ sounding non Judeo-Christian name in the US, as most Indians do, you get asked to spell your name a lot.  Whether one is at a doctor’s office or talking to a customer service agent over the phone, most of the time you have to spell your name –“N as in Nancy, S as in Sam” and so on and so forth.  As Anuradha Mitra admits in her Journal of South Asian Literature essay, “For all I know, it’s because of the consistent efforts of these well-intentioned people that I know how to spell eleemosynary without even so much as consulting dictionary.”

There are many theories about this remarkable feat of Indian Americans in the Bee.  The documentary ‘Breaking the Bee’ attempts to dig deeper into this phenomena.  The 1965 immigration reform brought in some highly educated individuals to the US, including some from India.  When Balu won the Bee in 1985, he soon became a role model for young Indian Americans.  The documentary talks about the support system, the network, the technology, and above all countless hours of hard work behind this remarkable success story.

A study by Sanjoy Chakravorty (Temple University), Devesh Kapur (University of Pennsylvania), and Nirvikar Singh (University of California-Santa Cruz) also looked at this Spelling Bee phenomenon very closely.  Among several plausible reasons, the study suggests that the extremely high levels of education of the Indian-American parents plays a significant role.  Nearly 30% of these parents have postgraduate degrees and about 90% their degrees are in technical discipline.  The parents of these Bee contestants are highly educated and therefore value education.  The method of rote memorization and the role of ethnic/family network are also highlighted.  Many see the Bee as an effort to assimilate with the new surrounding. Its their way of saying look, I can do this. I am like you all.  The study also highlights the fact that there is hardly any Indian American success story in sports thus far.

However, what gets overlooked in the modern-day theorizing is the past that many bee contestants have inherited.  Indic knowledge tradition has arguably been one of the most advanced continuing intellectual traditions in the world.  From the field of linguistics, to science, math, astronomy, medicine, etc., ancient Indians have produced some of most outstanding intellectual work.  The other aspect of this intellectual feat is the fact that the entire tradition has primarily been an oral tradition.  All texts, from the early Vedas to later Smritis and Shastras, were preserved and transmitted to the next generation of scholars and common people orally.  So a lot of emphasis was paid on flawless memory.  Correct pronunciation of the mantras was also a prerequisite for receiving desired results from the Vedic rituals.  The six Vedangas (the limbs of the Vedas) were developed as ancillary disciplines, a pre-requisite of sorts, for this very purpose.  They include Shiksha (Phonetics), Vyakarana (Grammar), Nirukta (Etymology), Jyotish(Astrology), Chhanda (Meter), and Kalpa (Rituals). Additionally, the Vedas also had many Shakhas (recensions).  According to Patanjali (2nd century BCE or earlier), there were 1,131 of them. 

Special chanting techniques were developed to help memorize the Vedic texts and preserve them in pristine purity devoid of any corruption.  One such technique is breaking up the mantras into smaller units and then memorizing different permutations and combination of it.  For example, if a mantra consists of 9 words, some of the ways of linking these 9 words (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) could be

              

               12, 23, 34, 45, 56, 67, 78, 89

               123, 234, 345, 456, 567, 678, 789

               12, 21, 12, 23, 34, 23, 34, 43, 34 and so on

These techniques of linking and chaining are called pathas.  Vedic mantras are memorized in these ways even today.  In addition, several other methods involving intonation, meter, etc. were applied to preserve texts error-free.

The point being made here is that such memory techniques have been part of Indic Cultural/Civilizational as well Knowledge Tradition.  Are Indians predisposed to such memory techniques and can those memory techniques be extended to Spelling Bee success?  It is hard to say at this time.  However, the modern research would suggest that human life experiences may also be passed on to the next generations.  Whatever the answer, we need detailed research linking Spelling Bee success of Indian Americans to their cultural past is the need of the hour.