Why We Need All Scholars – Foreign and Indian – to Study India
Christophe Jaffrelot | 07 November 2025 | The Wire
Last month, certain comments made in India following Professor Francesca Orsini’s deportation from Delhi airport were highly revealing of a tendency to reject foreign academics working on India. The official reason given for not admitting Orsini to India was the nature of her visa. But several participants in the public debate justified her deportation in other ways.
An online media outlet close to the Hindutva movement, The Chronology, initially contented itself with labelling Francesca Orsini a “cultural Marxist” and attacking the sources of funding for her research – “Orsini’s work is funded by the European Union’s ERC.” These are the two things which, for the author, were enough to contest Orsini’s scientific credibility. However, The Chronology found a more profound reason to prevent her from conducting fieldwork in India in a highly political reading of her work on the place Hindi has acquired in India: “By framing Hindi’s spread as an imposition, Orsini’s bias fuels separatist anxieties in non-Hindi states and undermines constitutional respect for Hindi as one of India’s official languages.” This sentence suggests that academic freedom can be limited in the name of defending Hindi-speaking populations against others and the respect that Hindi is supposed to inspire because of its constitutional status. Applying these precepts could prevent a great deal of social science research from being conducted…