‘A literary historian working primarily with Hindi and Urdu materials’ is how Francesca Orsini describes herself in her official profile on the website of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London.
This benign description though overlooks the seminal nature of her work for Hindi language and in particular on the making of the Hindi public sphere in the early 20th century, say fellow academics. When the Italian scholar was denied entry into India and deported for violating visa rules from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, there were both surprise and shock in literary circles.
For they feel Ms. Orsini is not known to make political statements and nor is there any known controversy attached to her works.
Her range of work includes studies of Hindi periodicals, oral traditions like Bhojpuri songs and ‘katha’, and cultural and social dimensions of ‘Hinglish’, Hindi-English language mixing in media and everyday life.
After a BA in Hindi from Venice University in Italy, she studied in Delhi at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University before going to SOAS for her doctorate for which she worked on the Hindi literary sphere of the 1920s and 1930s.
