UK professor Francesca Orsini deported from Delhi airport: Who is she and why was she refused entry into India?

Francesca Orsini, a London-based scholar of Hindi and South Asian literature, has been denied entry to India despite holding an Indian visa valid for another five years. Orsini, who is professor emeritus at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London was deported after her arrival at the Delhi airport Monday night, over alleged visa violations. Peter Kornicki, her husband said that Indian immigration authorities did not offer her an explanation for their action. However, news agency PTI quoted a source in the Ministry of Home Affairs and said that Orsini was travelling on a tourist visa, but she misused it for academic activity and since March 2025, she was blacklisted. She was deported to Hong Kong within hours because her purpose of travel did not match her visa category.

Who is Francesca Orsini?

Francesca Orsini is a leading scholar of Hindi and professor emerita at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Orsini is originally from Italy, where she completed her undergraduate studies in Hindi, Orsini later studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Orisini is author of ‘The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism’, published by Oxford University Press in 2002. Orsini held a fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute during the 2013–2014 academic year. She previously taught at the University of Cambridge and at SOAS, University of London. After more than thirty years of affiliation with SOAS, she retired from the institution in 2021. Her work explores the Hindi language in the context of nationalist movements during that period, focusing on literary texts and journals.

The Indian Express quoted Alok Rai, former professor at Delhi University’s Department of English, and said, “She came to India 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.”

In October of last year, Orsini presented the second Shamsur Rahman Faruqi Memorial Lecture, titled ‘The Purab: A Multilingual Literary History’, an event hosted by the Dastangoi Collective in Delhi. In 2020, she gave talks at both Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi and the University of Delhi, focusing on themes of literary history and world literature. At the University of Delhi, her lecture centered on Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat. Additionally, in 2021, she delivered the BN Ganguli Memorial Lecture online, organized by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, where she spoke on ‘Hindi Internationalism: Literature and the Cold War.’