Renowned Hindi Scholar Francesca Orsini Denied Entry Into India
Francesca Orsini, a world-renowned Hindi scholar and professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, was stopped at Delhi’s IGI airport on Monday despite having a valid five-year visa. The scholar said that no reason was provided for the denial.
As per the report in Wire, Orsini arrived in Delhi on the night of October 21 via Hong Kong after attending an academic conference in China and has a valid 5-year e-visa. While talking to the Wire, Orsini said that “I am being deported. That is all I know”.
Orsini currently teaches Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS’ School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, and also studied in New Delhi at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
She has written on diversified subjects, including East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India, and The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism.
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Renowned author Ramachandra Guha expressed disappointment over her deportation and wrote on X, “Professor Francesca Orsini is a great scholar of Indian literature, whose work has richly illuminated our understanding of our own cultural heritage. To deport her without reason is the mark of a government that is insecure, paranoid, and even stupid”.
Academician Arpita Das has also questioned the government’s move, “What an absolute shame! Orsini is a legendary scholar of Hindi/Hindustani; does the Hindi belt-Hindutva lot find her theories and writings too nuanced for their banal, trashy convenience?”
Notably, this is not the first instance when an academician has been denied entry to India. Earlier in March 2022, the Britain-based anthropologist Filippo Osella was stopped at Thiruvanthapuram airport and deported. Also, British architecture professor Lindsay Bremner was deported, without any significant reason. In 2024, UK-based Kashmiri academic Nitasha Kaul was denied entry at Bengaluru airport.
