Anoop Chandola


→Anoop Chandola is an American linguist-anthropologist, originally from Pauri, where he was raised in a priestly Brahmin family.
He was educated at the Christian Messmore Intermediate College of Pauri. After completing a year of intermediate education he joined the D.A.V. College of Lucknow for his second and last year of Intermediate.
Before moving to the United States in 1959, Chandola was educated at the University of Allahabad and graduated with a B.A. in Economics, Sanskrit, and English literature. From the University of Lucknow, he received an M.A. in Hindi literature. He subsequently obtained an M.A. in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago. As a graduate student at Berkeley and Chicago, he developed the Hindi teaching program. While a graduate student at Chicago he claimed in his paper "Animal Commands and their Linguistic Implications" that languages such as Garhwali contain peripheral linguistic features found in certain behaviors, such as communicating with domestic or wild animals. His Ph.D. dissertation presents the first syntax of Garhwali, a central Pahari language of the Indo-Aryan group. He is one of the founders of the Linguistics Program at the University of Arizona. At the University of Arizona, he developed a Hindi program where he taught Hindi with his new method of language teaching. He named this method "Language-Culture Lab" where students perform various native cultural activities speaking the native language only. His published researches also include the Garhwali "pandau" rap dance-music based on the ancient Mahabharata epic. His writings reflect his pro-Dalit and pro-women stand. He believes in animal rights.
He and his wife Sudha live in Tucson and also in Seattle with their granddaughter Prasha and son, Manjul Varn Chandola, a Seattle/Tacoma lawyer .

Career

Chandola has taught Indian literature, culture, and religion at several universities in India and the US, including Sardar Patel University, the M.S. University of Baroda, the University of California, Berkeley, University of Washington-Seattle, University of Texas-Austin, and University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He is a member of the American Anthropological Association, Association for Asian Studies, Linguistics Society of America, and Linguistic Society of India.
Though he retired as Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona in 2003, his writing career continues. He is a frequent guest lecturer on Hinduism and related religions. He is listed in Marquis Who's Who as a recipient of Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Chandola has written scholarly books and articles primarily in the areas of linguistics, music, religion, and literature which includes extensive interdisciplinary and theoretical analysis. Publication of his seminal work "Folk Drumming in the Himalayas: A Linguistic Approach to Music" was supported in 1973-1974 by a grant from the National Science Foundation. This book and several papers advanced a new interdisciplinary field that he named "Musicolinguistics." Some of these papers include " Metalinguistic structure of Indian Drumming: a study in Musico-linguistics", Language and Style, II : 288-295; "Some Systems of Musical Scales and Linguistic Principles", Semiotica, 2.135-150 ; "Aspects of Drum Knowledge amongst Musicians in Garhwal, North India", European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 63, p. 72; "Stress Behavior in Musicolinguistics", The Performing Arts, Proceedings of IX International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, ed., The Hague: Mouton ; "Musicolinguistics in Literary Esthetics".
His Hindi publications and citations are not listed here.
His researches in Musicolinguistics have been favorably reviewed in the leading journals of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and linguistics. He holds that his use of the term "Musicolinguistics" containing the prefix "Musico-" before "-linguistics" also suggests the evolution of music, e.g. humming, before language.
Chandola is also a novelist who covers multicultural themes. The motto of his novels is "inform and reform" with which he debunks harmful Indian religious traditions and advocates secular egalitarian society. An example is his latest novel "Mutilating Women", a Himalayan story predating the "Me-Too" revolution of abused women.

Academic books