New Delhi: Francesca Orsini, a London-based scholar of Hindi and South Asian literature, was denied entry to India at the Delhi airport Monday night despite holding an Indian visa valid for another five years.
Peter Kornicki, her husband and emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, confirmed the incident with ThePrint, saying that the Indian immigration authorities did not offer her an explanation for their action, but that she is on a return flight to London via Hong Kong, instead of a direct Delhi-London flight.
Responding to an email, Professor Peter Kornicki said Professor Orsini’s passport had been withheld at immigration early Tuesday at 00.38 am, when he last spoke to her. “We had a brief telephone conversation (around 20.08 UK time) after she was refused entry: no explanation was given, and the officials did not return her passport,” he said.
“She was extremely upset to be refused entry to India, which has been the subject of her studies for more than 40 years. She is also bewildered, as no explanation was given to her,” Professor Kornicki added.
“I assume that her passport was returned to her on departure and that she is now on her way to London,” he further said, adding that he had not heard from his wife since that call.
Orsini is a literary historian who has specialised in Hindi and Urdu and now explores multilingualism in South Asian literary cultures.
Having studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, followed by a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, she has explored Hindi literary journals from the 1920s and 1930s.
Italian by origin, she is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, and a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), one of the highest academic honours in the UK for humanities scholars.
Her research spans the Hindi public sphere, book history, multilingualism, and Hinglish—a mixture of English and Hindi in popular culture.
“She was visiting India for a number of purposes, including research and meeting a Hindi woman novelist, but she was not planning to attend any academic event or seminar,” Professor Kornicki told ThePrint.
When asked about her work in India specifically, he said, “She has made an English translation of a novel by a Hindi woman novelist who lives in Bhopal and was going to visit her to clear up a few queries about her translation.”
Her publications include 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.
Currently, Professor Orsini is completing a book on Awadh’s literary history.
ThePrint has reached Professor Orsini, as well as the Ministry of Home Affairs, via email and WhatsApp for their comments on this matter. This report will be updated as soon as their responses are received.
Professor Peter Kornicki, Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies at Robinson College, University of Cambridge, said that Professor Orsini had flown to Delhi from Hong Kong after attending a conference in Changsha, China.
The conference, ‘Understanding and Communication: The Relevance of World Literature in Our Time’, was held from 17 to 20 October at the Foreign Studies College of Hunan Normal University. She was one of the speakers at the conference.
According to people close to Professor Orsini in the Indian academic circle, she is a purely academic scholar who has never been involved in any public criticism of the incumbent government.
“She is internationally renowned for her scholarship. This was one of her annual visits to India for research. She has trained many scholars in Hindi and Urdu,” a senior professor at Delhi University told ThePrint, on the condition of anonymity.
Scholars in support of Professor Orsini
As news of Professor Orsini being denied entry into India spread, there was an outpouring of solidarity from scholars, including her colleagues and Indian academics.
Mario I. Aguilar, Professor of Religion and Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics at SOAS, was among them.
“Our solidarity with Prof Francesca Orsini, linguist and scholar of Hindi at SOAS, who tonight has been denied entry into Delhi at Indira Gandhi International Airport. She had a current visa and was a frequent visitor to India. All those of us who visit India and research on India request freedom for our own research trips and writings about India,” Mario I. Aguilar posted on X.
Historian and novelist Mukul Kesavan, in a post on X, sharply criticised the Modi-led NDA government. “The visceral hostility of the NDA government to scholars and scholarship is something to behold. A government ideologically committed to Hindi has banned Francesca Orsini. You can’t make this up,” Kesavan wrote.
Historian Ramachandra Guha also reacted on X, saying, “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.”
Delhi University professor and noted academic Apoorvanand expressed shock at the development. “Shocking that Francesca Orsini, a friend and renowned scholar of Hindi, has been stopped from entering India despite valid papers. Her visits to India have been entirely for scholarly purposes. This is a direct attack on scholarship,” Apoorvanand said in an X post.
Last year, Professor Nitasha Kaul, a British-Kashmiri academic at the University of Westminster, alleged that she was denied entry to India and was deported to London. She holds a UK passport and also an OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) card.
Nitasha Kaul had accused the immigration authorities of preventing her entry to India due to her earlier criticisms of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, despite the Karnataka government inviting her to attend a conference in Bengaluru in February 2024. She was allegedly told by immigration officials, “We cannot do anything, orders from Delhi.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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