Renowned Hindi scholar Francesca Orsini denied entry at Delhi airport despite valid visa

Written by Mukesh Ranjan for The New Indian Express

Immigration authorities at Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport was on Monday-Tuesday midnight deported back Francesca Orsini, the scholar of Hindi and professor emerita at SOAS, London University, as she was blacklisted for violating visa conditions since March this year, sources in the Immigration Department told the New Indian Express on Tuesday.

A source said, “Francesca Orsini was on Tourist visa but violating visa conditions. She had been placed in Black list since March 2025 for violation of visa conditions. This is a standard global practice that if a person is found violating visa conditions he/she can be black listed.”

Claiming that a tourist visa is granted liberally and tourists coming to India are not allowed to participate in any kind of political, religious functions and research works, the sources said, on an earlier occasion Orsini was found to be getting involved in research works and given the existing international norms, “she was black listed from entering into India” and thus was “deported as per the norms”.

Orsini is a highly acclaimed author of the book -The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. She had arrived at IGI Airport on the night of October 20-21 via Hong Kong after attending an academic conference in China.

Critics, however, found the incident as an excess on the part of the government of India, as Ramachandra Guha wrote on X, “Professor Francesca Orsini is a great scholar of Indian literature, whose work has richly illuminated our understanding of our own cultural heritage. To deport her without reason is the mark of a government that is insecure, paranoid and even stupid.”

Taking to his ‘’X’ handle Historian Mukul Kesavan wrote saying: “The visceral hostility of the NDA government to scholars and scholarship is something to behold. A government ideologically committed to Hindi has banned Francesca Orsini. You can’t make this up.”