Amita Jain and Niteen Patkar have donated $1.35 million to the University of California, Berkeley, establishing two permanent funds for Hindi education and graduate study. The couple gave $850,000 to create the Usha and Santosh Jain Endowment for Hindi Language Instruction. They also contributed $500,000 to establish the Usha and Santosh Jain Endowment for Graduate Students, an amount that UC Berkeley will match. The gift is the largest in the history of Berkeley’s Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. Both funds honor Jain’s parents, Usha and Santosh Jain, who came to Berkeley from India in 1960. While Santosh pursued a master’s degree in engineering, Usha studied Asian studies and began working as a teaching assistant. That opportunity grew into a 44-year career teaching Hindi at the university.

The additional resources will expand access to Hindi language instruction for both heritage and non-heritage learners while fostering a vibrant intellectual and cultural community. The Jain and Patkar family’s philanthropy will help train the next generation of Hindi scholars, advance research in related disciplines, develop innovative teaching materials, strengthen academic partnerships with institutions in India and around the world, and bring distinguished lecturers, artists, and visiting scholars to campus.

Combined, the two endowments will provide permanent support for the Hindi program Usha helped establish over her long career. The new language instruction endowment is designed to protect Hindi teaching from changing financial conditions and expand access to the program. The graduate student fund will support future scholars working in Hindi, South Asian languages and related fields. The endowments will also help develop teaching materials, strengthen academic partnerships with institutions in India and other countries, and bring visiting scholars, lecturers and artists to campus. The funding is expected to support research and a broader intellectual community around Hindi language and literature.This milestone gift was the culmination of months of collaborative conversations between the couple and UC Berkeley faculty. 

*Information shared here was gathered from both UC Berkeley and the American South Asian Network