Not so long ago, India's railway bookstalls provided an odd assortment of reading material. Pulp fiction and semi-pornographic novels crowded their shelves, attracting the attention of newly literate travellers seeking short-term amusement. One name stood out amidst such funk - Premchand. Few travellers could be seen engrossed in his stories. They followed the grit of society rather than the fantasy of the millions. Now, even this basic act of gazing at a bookstall has become rare in the digital age.
In a nutshell, the waning appeal of Hindi literature has never been taken seriously by Hindi literati themselves. So naturally, one asks a question as to why Hindi literature, with all its richness and history, continues to be so peripheral within Hindi society? Why does a language that is spoken by millions of people, does not encourage people to read its own classics?
Despite being like an exiled poet, the Italian scholar Francesca Orsini was the first to investigate this cultural conundrum. This time, however, banishing wasn’t done by Plato. It was the Indian government, that honours Hindi politically but snubs its literary merit. The deportation of Italian researcher Francesca Orsini from India adds to a rising global trend of intellectual silence. Such acts, formerly rare, have become disturbingly common. Last year, UK based academic Nitasha Kaul was deported on flimsy grounds.
Beyond the legal or moral discussion, Francesca's case is momentous due to her intellectual depth. In a Hindi literary culture that is frequently content with self-praise, she investigated the social and folk roots of the language, exposing how Hindi was influenced not just by elites, but also by the songs, stories and oral traditions of common people whose voices laid the groundwork.
During a time of violent Hindutva, Francesca's art served as a silent protest. Her investigation of the folk sphere (lokvritt) of Hindi broadened the concept of the language beyond nationalism and purity, allowing it to embrace everyday life, music and plurality. Through Ramlilas and political idioms, Francesca saw how Ramcharitmanas' influence abruptly increased in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Another aspect of Francesca Orsini's work is quite noteworthy. Her revisiting of the traditional concept of Purab (the East) and her investigation of the multilingual nature of the Hindi hinterland, where she made several significant postulates that called into question the widely held belief that Hindi is a single, homogeneous language.
According to Francesca's research, the ‘East’ didn’t start in the east. It started from Bilgram, the western frontier near Hardoi district. In Francesca's research, Bilgram resurfaces as a thriving mediaeval hub of linguistic interchange, where people from different languages interacted and coexisted. Currently, Bilgram is not even a dot on the map.
The relationship between language and nationalism in Europe has long intrigued literary historians. The idea of ‘one people, one language’ became the foundation on which many European nation-states were built. When these powers colonised regions like India, they first mapped the linguistic landscape before imposing their own categories.
The British assigned G.A. Grierson to conduct the Linguistic Survey of India, a vast project to classify India’s dialects and tongues. Even after Independence, India’s linguistic reorganisation of states followed this colonial logic. It overlapped speech communities into fixed administrative zones, flattening the subtle coexistence that once thrived between them.
Amidst this backdrop, Francesca's take on Awadh in the nineteenth century tells a different story. According to her, famous writers of that era employed different linguistic registers. They had Sanskritized Hindi for temples, Persianized Urdu for royal courts, and Braj, Awadhi or Bhojpuri as a common speech. They demonstrated that one language need not thrive at the expense of another by moving smoothly between these idioms. Therefore, Francesca's query is too radical. No external linguistic map can ever depict a multilingual setting.
Francesca Orsini argued that Awadhi love poetry was born from lived experience, not from competition between vocabularies. Yet, in schools, we are still taught to see medieval poets merely as ‘love poets’ who were mandated to spread religious and spiritual ideas. Francesca questions these cliches and demonstrates that in the medieval period, religious conversion was viewed with surprising neutrality, and poets, even from the same caste or family, freely drew inspiration from multiple faiths. This fluid coexistence defied the rigid divisions that shape today’s politics.
For Francesca, India’s literary history was never about schism but about the vivid interplay of languages and faiths. Her deep knowledge of Hindi, Urdu and Persian, paired with rare openness, enabled her to see this diversity in all its depth. Perhaps this very clarity itself unsettles those in power.
Her work envisions an India that once embraced linguistic and cultural fluidity, an India that was bigger than today’s rigid politics. Her deportation, then, is no bureaucratic loophole. It is a sign of an age that prefers prejudiced fantasy to genuine understanding, like travellers staring at railway bookstalls without truly seeing what lies within.
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