India denies entry to top SOAS Hindi scholar — who is Francesca Orsini?

While Orsini, who was on a flight back to London, was unavailable for comment, The Wire had earlier quoted her as saying that she was provided no reason for being stopped at the Delhi airport. “I am being deported. That is all I know,” she said.

Orsini’s husband Peter Kornicki, Emeritus Professor of Japanese at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy, confirmed to The Indian Express that she had arrived in Delhi from Hong Kong, and was deported to Hong Kong. No reasons were given, he said.

Asked about the allegation of visa violations, he said he had “no knowledge of these matters”. On whether she may have attended any conferences in India of late, he said he did not know of any.

Originally from Italy, where she completed her undergraduate studies in Hindi, Orsini later studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Orisini is author of ‘The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism’, published by Oxford University Press in 2002, and was part of the work she did at SOAS for her PhD. The work examines Hindi language in the context of the nationalism of those decades, through journals and literature.

Orsini was a Fellow in 2013-14 at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. She taught at the University of Cambridge and at SOAS, before she retired from SOAS in 2021, after an association of over three decades with the institution.

“She has a more than a four-decade-long association with India, having studied Hindi here. She is a scholar of contemporary and medieval Hindi literature. Most of it is also oral, so she would talk to people, collect information, and meet scholars. She has also mentored several scholars, and translated texts. This was supposed to have been one of those usual, annual visits,” said a Delhi University professor and a friend of Orsini’s who did not want to be named.

Alok Rai, former professor at Delhi University’s Department of English, who has known Orsini for decades, said, “She came to India to learn Hindi, and fell in love with the country. Her first big work was on the making of the Hindi public sphere, and she then went beyond that. She has done detailed textual work on older texts, and is a very meticulous textual scholar. She is also an Urdu scholar… and has studied Persian.”

Orsini delivered the second Shamsur Rahman Faruqi Memorial Lecture on ‘The Purab: A Multilingual Literary History’, organised by the Dastangoi Collective in Delhi in October last year. She has delivered lectures at the Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi and at Delhi University in 2020, on literary history and world literature. At Delhi University, she spoke about Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat. Online, she delivered the BN Ganguli Memorial Lecture in 2021 at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, on ‘Hindi Internationalism: Literature and the Cold War’.