Francesca Orsini, a leading scholar of Hindi and professor emerita at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, was Monday stopped from entering the country, and sent back to London from the New Delhi airport, senior government officials said.
Orsini, who was on a flight back to London, was unavailable for comment.
Originally from Italy, where she completed her undergraduate studies in Hindi, she later studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
The work she did at SOAS as part of her PhD was published by Oxford University Press in 2002 as ‘The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism’, and is considered her seminal work. It examines Hindi language in the context of the nationalism of those decades, through journals and literature, along with the ‘pure’ Hindi that was the language of education in the curriculum.
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 over three decades of her association with the institution.
“She has a more then four-decade-long association with India, having studied Hindi here. She comes back at least once a year, for about a month or two, because she works on manuscripts. She travels here a lot, to villages and towns in parts of the country, looking for manuscripts and studying them. 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 translates 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 basically 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.”
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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’.
