How Hindi scholar Francesca Orsini’s work illuminates India’s language politics – past and present

Few studies have shaped our understanding of modern Hindi and its deep entanglement with politics and culture as profoundly as Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism.

The book, published in 2009, is widely regarded as a landmark work. So it is understandably shocking to learn that the distinguished professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies was deported from New Delhi airport on Monday. Unidentified government sources claimed to journalists that she had conducted research on previous trips despite only having a tourist visa.

The strength of Orsini’s scholarship on the understanding and the development of the field of Hindi literary discourse stems from the vast canvas, filled with thick contextual details, that she paints of the modern Hindi language and literature in the two crucial decades (1920-1940) of the national movement.

The “public sphere” of Hindi is constituted of the intersections of literary and political movements, institutional and ideological spaces, and an expansive print culture marked by increasing diversity of journals, newsletters, pamphlets, books and magazines spearheaded by editors, political leaders and writers with overlapping roles. The result is a panoramic view that helps us understand not just the past, but the present politics of language in India.

At a time...

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