Who Is Francesca Orsini? Italian Hindi Scholar Denied Entry To India

Italian literary critic Francesca Orsini has lately been in the limelight after she was allegedly blacklisted and denied entry into India on October 20. She was reportedly deported from Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, upon her arrival from Hong Kong, where she was attending a conference. She last visited India in October 2024.

According to officials familiar with the incident, the denial of entry was due to alleged violations of her tourist visa conditions. However, reports indicate that Professor Orsini maintained she was travelling on a valid visa.

According to another official, Francesca visited India in 2024 on her e-visa issued for tourism purposes, but she had spoken at a university and conducted research, which was considered a violation of the terms of her visa.

Who Is Francesca Orsini? 

Orisini is an Italian scholar of South Asian Literature. She holds a PhD from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where she retired as Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature. She was previously a lecturer at the University of Cambridge before joining SOAS in 2006.

She earned a BA in Hindi from Venice University and later studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi. She completed her PhD at SOAS.

She has authored several acclaimed academic books, including "The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940" and "Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India."

According to the official SOAS website, she has worked on the Hindi literary sphere of the 1920s and 1930s and the contrast between the ebullience of literary and social experimentation in journals, including women’s journals, and the canonisation of “pure” Hindi and moral-patriotic Hindi literature in education. 

She is currently working on a book on the multilingual literary history of Awadh from the 15c to the early 20c. She has also been leading a project, “Multilingual locals and significant geographies: for a new approach to world literature.”

She is married to Peter Kornicki, an English Japanologist. Her husband is also known for his studies of the history of the book and of languages in Asia.