The Principal Loser as a Result of Professor Francesca Orsini’s Deportation Is India
Supriya Chaudhuri | 23 October 2025 | The Indian Express
I woke up today to the appalling news that Francesca Orsini, preeminent global scholar of Hindi and the early modern literary world of North India, had been barred from entering India and deported to Hong Kong. On the night of October 20, when she reached Delhi after a conference in China, she was stopped and her passport was impounded, with no reason given. She has lived and worked in London for many decades now, having taught at the University of Cambridge and at SOAS, where she is now professor emerita and was professor of Hindi and chair of the Centre for Cultural Studies. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, has held visiting appointments at leading universities around the world, and her many books have made an unsurpassed impact, placing Hindi and the North Indian vernaculars within the landscape of “world literature.”
In particular, we should mention The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002); Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (2009); and most recently, East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (2023)…