UTTAR PRADESH: Surfing through YouTube, one may stumble upon a channel ‘English with Dehati Madam’. The initial curiosity is further roused when they are greeted by a woman on the screen, seemingly from humble background, draped in a rather modest cotton saree, standing in a field as she reels out tips on spoken English. The astonishment may be furthered on finding 2.85 lakh subscribers of her channel featuring 368 videos on the nitty-gritty of spoken English with 2.58 crore views since May 31, 2022.
This is the introduction to Yashoda Lodhi, 29, from Sirathu, a non-descript, sleepy tehsil in Kaushambi district neighbouring Prayagraj. Yashoda, while speaking fluent English may have a less than perfect diction and an accent utterly ‘desi’ but her confidence is sky high, neutralising whatever little shot-comings.
Yashoda, given away by her parents to a relative as a girl, is now a YouTube sensation through her channel ‘English with Dehati Madam’. With her head covered in the drape of her saree, just another ‘village woman’ Yashoda is an unlikely an English teacher who has taken the web by surprise by her penchant to explain the nuances of English language in simple and straight forward manner through her videos.
With topics ranging from ‘How to create an English-speaking environment’, or ‘Is grammar important to speak English’, Yoshoda goes deep into the workings of the language in videos such as ‘Idiom...cut to the chase’ or ‘Mistakes; have a fear of making mistakes’.
In one of her videos, ‘How to think in English’, Yashoda, who has studied till class XII in a Ludhiana college, claims that people often feel a hitch in speaking fluent English as they think in their dialect, only to end up translating it into English while speaking. “This exercise of translation takes away the fluency,” she says and explains how she herself has mastered the art of ‘thinking in English’.
To what propelled her to take to YouTube, a very unusual medium for a person coming from a background like her and taking up as unique a subject as ‘English speaking,’ Yashoda, wife of a daily wager, narrates how circumstances brought her to social media to help her family financially.
“On December 28, 2020, during Covid pandemic, my husband Radhe Lodhi, 30, met with an accident and suffered multiple fractures. Eldest among six siblings, he was earning `300 a day. Without any financial support, my father-in-law Manik Chand took a loan of `5 lakh to bear his medical expenses. Our family was in deep trouble. It was then that I came across the concept of earning from YouTube. Initially, I started four different channels where I attempted to teach ‘desi’ cooking, embroidery, decoration; but nothing seemed to work,” said Yashoda who married Radhey in 2016.
Somehow she convinced her husband to buy a smartphone for her around Diwali 2021. For the next three months, she spent hours on the web, learning about content creation, video editing and ways to gain traction online.
“In early 2022, I used to watch several motivational speakers online who were extremely fluent in English. It gave me the idea to be a motivational ‘dehati’ (rustic) speaker who can communicate in English. So, I invested my time and energy in learning the English language,” she explains, adding that she was confident that her ‘Dehati’ background would be what drew people to her videos.
“Over time, I focused on motivating people to learn the language, as it’s one of the key elements to obtain job or business success,” said Yashoda, who ironically has only a handful followers from her own village Dhumai Lodhan Ka Purva in Sirathu tehsil.
Gradually, Yashoda’s social media venture took off; the success of her videos positing her as the family bread-earner. She helped her in-laws repay the Rs 5 lakh loan they had taken for the treatment of Radhey three years ago.
However, the women folk in her own village often jeer at her while watching her speaking English. “They neither have any interest in learning the language, or letting their daughters learn it. But fortunately, my two sisters-in-law have started showing an inclination to learn the language,” Yashoda says.
Yashoda says that reading more and more has helped her a great deal in her endeavour. “You must develop the habit of reading; it’s the key for fluency in English. After this video, I’m certain that your inclination for reading will substantially grow,” says Yashoda in one of the videos.