A “rare opportunity”: Shiva Sai Ram Urella launches Yale’s Telugu program

Shiva Sai Ram Urella joined Yale as its first ever Telugu instructor in the Fall, offering Elementary and Intermediate Telugu. This semester, Professor Urella is teaching Elementary Telugu II, Intermediate Telugu II and an Anthropology course titled Being and Becoming Hindu: Hinduism Through Ethnography.

“It’s amazing to see students progress and become more and more confident,” said Urella. “I'm  looking forward to seeing how the introduction of Telugu as a language at Yale will plant questions, not just about language learning, but about the very social context of the Telugu speaking region and the diaspora in the U.S.,” Urella added. 

Telugu is spoken by over 83 million people across the world and over one million in the United States alone. It is the fastest growing language in the U.S., yet only a handful of universities in the nation offer the language. At Yale, now the fifth university to offer Telugu instruction, Urella is working to make the language more accessible to members of the Yale community and online students from other institutions.

Before coming to Yale, Urella received his PhD in Religious Studies from Emory University and a Masters in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad. Urella is a native Telugu speaker who focused his doctoral dissertation on Ogguvandlu, Telangana-based ritual specialists. Urella focused on their common use of turmeric and how their practices challenge the Telangana state’s privileging of written texts. 

Urella has a depth of experience speaking and researching the language. But this semester marked his first time teaching the language. 

A paucity of teaching materials for early Telugu learners has led Urella to synthesize and workshop teaching materials. Among the resources he utilizes are a textbook written by Velcheru Narayana Rao, the first Telugu chair at Emory University, and a set of cassette tapes issued by the Central Institute of Indian Languages. He also often searches for resources online.

Telugu is an agglutinative language, where words are formed by combining morphemes that correspond to different syntactic features, making it challenging for English speakers to get used to. Moreover, the diverse forms of Telugu spoken today have prompted careful consideration from Urella about how best to teach the language.

“There’s a question of dialect, there’s a question of register, there’s a question of tone, there’s a question of etiquette,” Urella explained. “All of these add to what kind of Telugu it is possible to teach.”

The question of dialect, in particular, is one Urella has been careful to account for. Urella himself grew up in the Telangana region, which he said has its own register of the language. The region’s Telugu has more Urdu, Persian and Arabic influence, and it never became a literary medium. Linguistic diversity exists even among Telugu speakers in the region. 

But most Telugu teaching materials are authored by scholars from outside Telangana. Moreover, the Telugu officially used in written documents tends not to reflect all the spoken forms of the language. According to Urella, the historical reasons for this trajectory are complex and contested. From his understanding, colonial education and print technologies generated the discourse from which the language’s standardization arose.

As a teacher, Urella said he encourages students who grew up with the language to use the terms and grammar they are familiar with rather than forcing them to adopt the exact style he teaches. He tries to incorporate different spellings and pronunciations into his lessons and makes sure not to penalize students for using non-standardized forms.

Urella follows a weekly schedule that includes both instruction and hands-on learning. He teaches his elementary class a grammar concept on Mondays and introduces new vocabulary on Tuesdays. Students also bring one new Telugu term to class each Tuesday, which they practice using in a sentence. On Wednesdays, they watch a video of some kind, and on Thursdays, they practice reading and speaking. They have a weekly assessment on Fridays, followed by more speaking.

But Urella’s pedagogical practice extends beyond the classroom. When he came to Yale, he hoped to facilitate the kinds of one-on-one connections he had grown accustomed to creating at Emory, a much smaller university. Communicating beyond language instruction, Urella encourages all his students to meet with him for Office Hours, where he gives them feedback and resources but also gets to know his students on a personal level.

Urella’s methods have paid off.

Dhruv Javangula, a junior in the elementary class, characterized Urella as “very encouraging” and said he has loved taking Telugu this semester. Javangula, who chose to take Telugu because his parents speak it at home, joked that he had a “0 out of 10” degree understanding of Telugu reading and writing before taking the course. 

“It’s nice to get reinforcement in class every day and then talk to my grandparents on the phone and reinforce the material even further,” said Javangula. Already, he has seen the fruits of his labor. 

Javangula recounted a recent conversation with his grandmother, who almost started crying when she heard him speaking Telugu. “I feel so much closer now,” Javangulu recalled her telling him during the call.

For Javangula, powerful experiences like the one he shared with his grandmother make him grateful for the chance to learn Telugu in an institutionalized setting. He noted that although the language is spoken by millions in India, Telugu speakers make up only a fraction of the heavily populated nation. Therefore, learning it at Yale has felt like a “rare opportunity” that he hopes to continue pursuing.

“Professor Urella seems to really appreciate the language from an intellectual perspective,” Javangula said. “He cares a lot about the musicality of the language and the origin of certain words.”

“As an example, Javangula mentioned the word “madhyāhnaṁ,” which is spelled differently in the script and the spoken language. In class, he said Urella explained how it was borrowed from the Sanskrit word madhyana and took on an additional vowel sound, making it a modified loan word, or a "tadbhava."

Javangula said a highlight of his week often comes on Wednesdays, when Urella plays YouTube videos like comedic skits or educational content for the class. He also enjoys coming to class with a new word and hearing what other students picked. 

Recently, he said he learned the word for revolutionary, “viplavātmaka,” after Brent Bianchi shared it during class. Bianchi, the South and Southeast Studies Librarian at Yale, has been taking Urella’s class and helping him find resources to teach the language.

“Often, when a new class is offered at Yale, we’re in a pretty good position,” said Bianchi. “That was not the case with Telugu.”

Bianchi mentioned that, due to Yale’s history, the University does have rare collections relating to missionary activity. That includes a “full run” of a rare Telugu journal called Hitavadi—the earliest missionary journal in India—often studied by scholars today. Bianchi said he hopes to get all the publications of the journal digitized. 

Bianchi said an interesting aspect about learning Telugu thus far has been noticing similarities across languages. 

“I was surprised at how much of the vocabulary is shared with Sanskrit and Hindi,” Bianchi said. “There may be subtle differences in the way a term is being used, but that actually goes a pretty long way,” Bianchi said. 

For Samantha Tischler, a junior in the elementary class without prior exposure to South Asian languages, learning Telugu has felt “different than any other language” she has previously studied. Tischler is currently also taking L5 Russian.

Initially motivated to enroll in Urella’s class because her boyfriend and his family speak Telugu, Tischler said the experience has been “a lot of fun.”

“I think all the students in the class are coming at the language from very different places, and Professor Urella has been super adaptable in terms of not scaring students away from taking the course,” Tischler said. “He’s done a really good job of challenging us in different ways to make sure we’re actively engaged in learning.”

Like Javangula, Tisch said she enjoys watching Telugu videos in class. She added that learning songs and nursery rhymes have also been favorite parts of her experience thus far.

Urella said he was not quite sure what to expect of Yale when he arrived here. Would he be able to form the same kinds of bonds possible at a smaller university? What would the student body at an Ivy League institution be like? So far, he has been thrilled by his students’ investment and focus, from how they go about their everyday lives to their connections to their residential colleges and their extracurricular activities. Yale, to Urella, is “a very special place.”

“I have this great group of students in both my classes who are really here for a reason,” he said. “That sense of engagement makes the job much easier.”