Who Is Francesca Orsini, London University Scholar Deported From India

Francesca Orsini, a London University professor, was deported from Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport due to the alleged violation of visa conditions.

Orsini, a Hindi scholar, was deported on Monday shortly after arriving from Hong Kong. She had been on a "black list" since March for violating visa conditions. She last visited India in October 2024.

Who Is Francesca Orsini?

• Francesca Orsini is a literary historian and scholar of Hindi, Urdu, and South Asian literature. She is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
• She completed her BA in Hindi at Venice University in Italy, then studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. She earned her PhD at SOAS, focusing on the Hindi literary sphere of the 1920s and 1930s, which then became the title and subject of her book, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002; Hindi translation, 2010).
• Orsini worked on book history in Hindi and Urdu, leading to Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (2009).
• She taught at Cambridge University before returning to SOAS, where she ran the AHRC-funded project "North Indian Literary Culture and History," exploring early modern literature from a multilingual perspective. She co-edited After Timur Left (2014) and Tellings and Texts (2015), and studied contemporary literature and Hinglish with Ravikant at SARAI/CSDS.
• She also completed a book on the multilingual literary history of Awadh (15th-early 20th century) and led a research project called MULOSIGE, which looks at how different languages are used in literature in North India, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
• Orsini is a Fellow of the British Academy (elected 2017) and has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-2014), as well as a visiting scholar at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
• She co-edits the Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures series, edits the Journal of World Literature, and participates in research projects on Indian vernaculars and comparative classics.
• Her publications include Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006), Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Cultures (2010), and a recently edited volume on Hinglish (2022).