Between trips to India in the 1980s and 1990s I was also steadily performing, choreographing and teaching in New York City. During the 1990s I also embarked on a formal language studies program at Columbia University, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. ## Language Studies during the 1990s In 1988 and 1989 in the process of researching my Fulbright Fellowship topic - Poetry in the Kathak Repertoire, I realized that I needed to improve my language skills. Consequently, I enrolled in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Columbia University in Fall 1992. Over the next eight years I studied Sanskrit, Brij Bhasha, Avadhi, Urdu and Hindi. Some of the outstanding language and literature professors with whom I studied include Professor John Stratton Hawley – Brij Bhasha, Avadhi and the poetry of the 16th Century poet saint Surdas; Professor Theodore Riccarde, Jr. – Sanskrit; Professor Frances