When Bindu Reddy first moved to Evanston, she said there wasn’t a way for her to connect with other Indian members of the community. She would have to travel to neighboring suburbs to celebrate Indian holidays.

“It’s not the same when the people come to Naperville or Schaumburg,” Reddy said. “They have associations where they can go and celebrate or hang out. They don’t feel lost when (they) come to this country for the very first time.”

After selling Berry Pike Cafe, a breakfast restaurant she owned for six years, Reddy started the Evanston Association of India in February to solve that problem. As a community nonprofit organization, EAI works toward the awareness and preservation of Indian culture. 

Reddy said she hosted and attended informal events in Evanston to gather with Indian communities and celebrate holidays like Holi for years. She wants EAI to provide space for more organized celebrations.

“Evanston has more than 1,500 Indian residents,” Reddy said. “It’s a huge community. We really all are looking for things to do together, and I thought this was a great way to get started.”

Reddy has worked with the city and a number of local businesses to bring EAI to life. For her Holi event this spring, Reddy plans to collaborate with Downtown Evanston, One River Art School and Mt. Everest Restaurant. She is also looking to partner with student organizations at Northwestern. 

Reddy is also looking to work with NU students on EAI’s language learning curriculum for children in Evanston. She said she’s been teaching her son to read and write Hindi at home and wants to extend that opportunity to other children.

She will begin teaching the program herself and will bring in volunteers as needed. Classes will be completely free of cost, and the Evanston Public Library has agreed to host the program.

Martha Meyer, a library assistant at EPL, first connected with Reddy about two weeks ago to talk about the program. She said EPL is committed to helping create “world citizens,” so she is always looking for Evanston-based activities that expose families to different people and cultures.

“I don’t think literacy means very much in the world if you are only exposed to a white, middle class, cisgender narrative,” Meyer said. “The reason we read and learn is to develop perspectives besides our own. The library’s job is to support reading in all its forms and learning in all its forms.”

NU sophomore Shray Vaidya is the director of education at NU’s South Asian Students Association. He said that language is core to his identity as South Asian. 

“I’m in a class called language in South Asia, and it’s really opened my eyes to how unique reconnecting with language in India is,” Vaidya said. “For me personally, a lot of the way I connect with my Indian heritage as a child of immigrants has to do with language because all music, Bollywood movies, all of that is primarily in Hindi language.”

Reddy said she can speak six languages, and she can read and write three of them. Learning languages is beneficial for children, and this instruction should be available to all Evanston children regardless of finances, she said.

Reddy said she knows many families in Evanston whose parents speak Hindi, though the children do not. 

“If I don’t teach those languages to my children who are born here in the U.S. and a part of the next generation, they will forget there is another language,” Reddy said. “It will die in our families.” 

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Twitter: @avanidkalra

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