There was a time when you could do a PhD on an Indian language, or Indian dance, or sculpture or whatever, without having to tart up your dissertation with modish references to Continental philosophers like Habermas, Merleau Ponty, Foucault, etc. Even if you were a genuine Communist you didn't have to use academic jargon to establish your ideological credentials as 'anti-Fa'. This involved rejecting what Gadamer called the 'hermeneutics of Faith' (e.g. the notion that people like good writing and don't like boring shitheads) for the 'hermeneutics of Suspicion' (good writing is totes Nazi. Writing boring shite represents 'Resistance') .
Without loss of generality, this gives rise to the theorem that, if Mummy says 'why don't you study something useful at Collidge', you immediately understand that she hates you and is an evil witch in the pay of Neo-Liberalism. Also, she committed genocide in Gaza by letting your little sister have the last slice of cake. So what if it was her birthday? She is nothing but a tool of the Zionist power-elite. Most four year old are, you know.
Francesca Orsinis, an Italian citizen, first studied Hindi in Venice, Italy. Italians are good philologists and, I imagine, she would have been able to produce a good 'compare and contrast' account of the manner in which Italian was standardized as the official language of a united Italy and the movement for the standardization of Hindi and Urdu as official languages in India and Pakistan respectively. But this is an old story. Little value can be added to it at this late hour.
Orsini did her MPhil at JNU where, quite naturally, she absorbed the ignorance and paranoid bigotry of the jhollawallah Indian left. In particular she became close to Amrit Rai, the son of Premchand, and his son, Alok Rai. She then did her PhD at SOAS where the rising generation of scholars felt that the older members of the faculty were too 'empirical', conservative, and imbricated in elitist, patriarchal, narratives or discourse. (The exception was Rupert Snell. The girls thought he was a cutie-pie and wept bitter tears when he got married. )
The plain fact is, the work of the older, male, Professors was useful enough to specialists but not sexy or part of a wider critique of Neo-Liberalism as enforcing gender binaries in an occult manner calling for a critical response founded in 'the philosophy of suspicion'. Also, people getting PhDs from SOAS ought not to be forced to learn some shitty oriental language. They should get a sheepskin for writing illiterate nonsense.
Thus, Orsini's research, which was of little intrinsic value, enabled her to rise as part and parcel of a 'post-colonial' cohort of scholars who could be relied on to express hostility or paranoid suspicion of 'elites' and their instrumentalization of 'Nationalism' or 'Religion' or Literacy' or 'Employment' so as to sodomize the revolting masses and impose gender binaries upon them. Needless to say, this only happens because Neo-Liberalism is very evil.
Orsini, an Italian citizen, had a 5 year E-visa multiple entry for India for which the going rate is about 80 dollars. In March of this year, it appears that the Indian authorities cancelled the visa because they believed she had carried out Research on her visits to India. This was a reasonable supposition because she is in fact a researcher working on topics related to India. She should have got the Research Visa which is for three years and a bit more expensive than the tourist visa. For this reason, her visa was invalidated and she was deported from India some days ago.
This action by the government has led to an outcry by some left-leaning Indian intellectuals and commentators. If Orsini is barred from India, Hindi speakers will not be able to learn about their ancestral language. They will soon lose the power to speak intelligibly. They will make animal noises and start prowling around on all fours. It is clear that Modi intends to turn the Hindi speakers into cows- which he may then illegally worship in open defiance of the sacred Indian Constitution written by Boddhisattva Ambedkar. Needless to say, it is only Hindus who will be turned into cows. They will be spared the butcher's knife because cow slaughter is banned in many Hindi speaking States. What will happen to the Muslims? Bereft of access to Orsini, they will turn into goats and will be butchered for Eid-al-Adha or Kali Puja. This is clearly a diabolical attempt to reduce the percentage of Muslim voters. Worse yet is the plight of secular Indians. They will be turned into chickens. Their heads will be cut off and they will run around flapping their wings as 'murg-e-bismillah'.
Some such headless chickens have written the following article for Scroll.In-
What does Francesca Orsini’s scholarly work say? Five former students explain what they have learnt
Orsini, a Hindi scholar and professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, was recently stopped from entering India.
Aakriti Mandhwani , Priyanka Basu, Raahi Adhya, Chinmay Sharma & Kanupriya Dhingra
Hindi scholar Francesca Orsini’s work over the past three decades has been so expansive that it has proved to be difficult to present a neat introduction to her work.
It is easy for an intelligent graduate student to write a neat introduction to the work of their Professor. It is very difficult for a scholar whose head has been chopped off.
Contributors to this essay below offer several entry points into her scholarship through a discussion of her monographs –The Hindi Public Sphere: 1920-1940. Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002), Hindi translation (2010); Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (2009); East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (2023) – and several collaborative projects. All contributors to this piece have been Orsini’s students, and teach literature, literary history, comparative literature, and performance studies in India and around the world.e
It is impossible for any student of literary and print history in North India to form an informed view of the field without engaging with Francesca Orsini’s defining work on the early Hindi public sphere and popular fiction.
It is easy to do so by focusing on the primary sources. Orsini's work is derivative. If you have heard the fulminations of Alok Rai, you can ignore her oeuvre in its entirety. The plain fact is, Muslims chose to make the vernacular more Persianate. For some, this was in pursuance of their claim to be a separate nation. The election result of 1946 led directly to the creation of Pakistan where Urdu was made the national language despite the fact that only a small proportion of the population spoke it. This was one of the main reason why Pakistan split into two countries. India adopted a Sanskritized Hindi written in Devanagari. However different States were welcome to use their own language for any or all purposes.
It was the difference in Script which caused the separation of Hindi and Urdu. In Bengal, there was no difference in script and so there was no great divergence between the vernacular language of the Hindu and the Muslim. Nevertheless there was Partition. Religion mattered more than language or class or even ideology.
The British policy of encouraging students to learn one Classical and one Vernacular language may have contributed to the increasing separation between the two dialects. Muslims chose Persian or Arabic as the Classical Language and modified their written language accordingly. Hindus chose Sanskrit and sought to standardize the language by Sanskritization. But such tendencies had a long history in other parts of the world. The English language tended to become more Latinate and less Anglo-Saxon thanks to the spread of education and increasing affluence in the Augustan age. Publishers preferred texts written in a standardized version of the high prestige dialect. Hindi and Urdu developed similarly for endogenous reasons though, no doubt, the example of English was always at the back of the minds of the administrators and intellectuals of the period.
I may mention all countries had movements to 'purify' the vernacular in the inter-war period. Anthony Burgess, a student of literature in Manchester, mentions a friend who wrote a book using only words of Anglo-Saxon provenance. In Italy, there was the move to replace French words like 'Hotel' with the indigenous 'albergo'. That fad passed. America became the new model for emulation. Most new Italian words are formed out of American English. But Indians too sprinkle plenty of such words in their conversation. Dil mange more Pizza.
Her wide-ranging book on the Hindi public sphere
She is using Habermas's term for that part of society which is 'engaged in critical public debate'. Sadly, the public thinks such debate is not critical at all. It is a pastime for headless chickens teaching worthless shite or editing magazines which require a subsidy of some sort.
is remarkable because of its sheer engagement with primary sources
boring shite.
– periodicals being chief among them, many of them now buried in forgotten archives.
because they were boring, stupid, shite. Those which weren't gained market share and turned into big Media Corporations.
Hindi periodicals in the early 20th century literally shaped the story and image of Hindi as we know it today,
No. The market played a role but politicians played a greater role. What was decisive was Partition. After that, the Hindus decided to hang together rather than face the salami tactics of the Muslims and the Communists. Sanskrit has provided much of the vocabulary of even the Dravidian South. Shuddh Hindi in Devanagari can be learnt easily. The Madrasi is at no disadvantage in producing turgid texts in Shuddh Hindi even when compared to the Banarasi Pundit.
as evidenced by the fact that an entire epoch of Hindi literature is named after Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi,
Nobody gives a shit about him. Still, we get what Orsini is saying. Dwivedi is Brahmin. Premchand was Kayasth. Brahmins are bad. They sodomize and brainwash non-Brahmins. Did you know that Modi is actually a Brahmin belonging to the British Royal Family? His real name is Nicholas Maugham. Neo-Liberalism hired him to fool the bahishkrit people of India into voting for an evil Capitalist party controlled by Top Hatted Plutocrats in London and New York.
who edited the iconic periodical Saraswati for the first two decades of the 20th century.
A.O Hume, who later founded the Indian National Congress, had set up schools in Etawah where he was the District Collector. He also set up a Hindi and an Urdu newsletter. Why? Kids who had learnt to read might lapse back into illiteracy if they had nothing to read. The question was whether Hindi, the language of the majority could replace Urdu (i.e. the same language but written in Arabic script). Madan Mohan Malviya- the founder of Benares Hindu University- got the Lt. Governor of the Province to grant recognition to Hindi in 1900. But the cow-protection movement of the Nineties had already given impetus to Congress as an organization capable of 'mass contact' and mobilization. Hume, I may mention, favoured cow-protection for agronomic reasons.
The story of the rise of Hindi is also the story of the rise of Hindu nationalism. For a time there was some hope that the Muslims would be content to be a junior party of the Hindu dominated Congress party. When they insisted on going their own way, it was inevitable that the official language would be Sanskritized. It is a different matter that only the market matters. Nobody cares about 'pure' or 'impure' language.
Another of Orsini’s major contributions is a thorough and sensitive close reading and attention to form. For instance, she writes the history of Chand, a very popular Hindi periodical of the 1920s, and how it expanded the space for women to exist in the public sphere through generic interventions such as the mode of the confessional.
This is silly. Chand, like Saraswati, was conservative. What changed things was campaigns within castes to abandon purdah and spread female literacy. Dr. Rajendra Prasad has written of the piteous condition of Kayasth purdah-nashin women in rural Bihar.
On the other hand, my own research into English literature has shown that the publication of the Beano magazine in 1938 caused the liberation of British women and led directly to the reign of Empress Thatcher. Previously, British women had no space to exist in the public sphere. They would hide in sewers.
Her expertise and close attention to historical and literary critical methods have persisted throughout her career in her numerous writings on periodicals big and small, literary and not so literary, popular and esoteric, and their expansive role in the formation of literary cultures and sensibilities.
She writes boring shite in the paranoid ideological style which is de rigueur in useless Academic Departments which provide sheepskins to morons.
Orsini’s work on the periodical – an ephemeral, fleeting, yet robust form
that which is robust can't also be ephemeral. What this cretin means is that periodicals often go bust. Their editors start new periodicals which too go bust unless they get a government hand out or are subsidized by a political party or vested interest group.
– has directed the attention of numerous scholars of print history toward study it.
Orsini, being Italian, writes correct English. This cretin is incapable of any such thing though she too got her PhD at SOAS.
Her pioneering work on the significance of popular genres, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India, draws attention to the overwhelming popularity of print in North India.
No. Circulation rates were low. What sold well were textbooks and religious tomes.
Lithography, a form of print technology that made possible the appearance of many languages and scripts cheaply and easily, found its real home in North Indian popular publishing.
Even illiterate people bought religious lithographic artwork, calendars, etc.
Following the introduction of print and publishing by colonial and missionary authorities, regional publishers were quick to spot a viable market in it. Uncovering this history, Orsini provides us with the expansive breadth of multilingual reading cultures of North India.
‘A more versatile map of north India’
She isn't adding to the information set. All this is covered in the standard history books people mug up for the UPSC exam.
Priyanka Basu
Francesca Orsini’s abiding interest in the circulation of literary texts in north India can perhaps be best understood
by the fact that she has a low IQ and can't specialize in anything of genuine intellectual interest. I am much smarter than her. That is why I have specialized in research on 'the Beano' and its role in the rise of Thatcherism. Sadly, my decision to write my dissertation in Indus Valley script has prevented it from gaining acclaim. This is because Neo-Liberalism is refusing to decipher that script. Personally, I blame Donald Trump for this horrendous outcome.
through what she herself calls “tellings and texts”, ie, a continued dialogic relationship between literature and performance.
Taking dictation is not dialogic. Few wrote Hindi if they could dictate it instead.
Over the course of the past two decades (and even more), her scholarship on the oral performative genres of the katha, barahmasa, dhrupad, bishnupad, qissa, Bhojpuri songs and others has illuminated the enigmatic world of early modern north India in India and beyond, such as in Mauritius.
That world was already illuminated by granny and uncle and teechur and Guruji.
Her sustained investment in excavating the social history of a genre like the katha (or stories) only goes on to show what a “thick” reading of text(s) can allow us to see.
It allows us to see that thickos can get PhDs from SOAS. The good news is that they can then be barred from India. India does not need to import stupidity.
Incidentally, I had a Bengali friend called 'Sumit' which he pronounced 'Shumit' who was doing a PhD at SOAS at the same time as Orsini. I encouraged him to pronounce SOAS as 'Show-ass'. He refused to do so. This was because of evil influence of Empress Thatcher which was itself caused by the creation of a public space for women by the children's magazine 'Beano'.
Her long trajectory of scholarship on the oral-literate genres devotes space to and rigorously explains early modern texts such as Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Kānhavat,
Orsini makes no such claim. You would need to be an expert on Sufi lineages in order to do that. Padmavat- Jayasi's masterwork- is sufficiently well known. There are diminishing, or negative, returns to further research on the subject unless, of course, you happen to be a lesbian parrot and feel that LGBTQ birds have not received their proper place in Queer Theory probably because many academics in that line of work are fucking pussies.
Mir ‘Abdul Wahid Bilgrami’s Haqā’iq-i Hindī, Isardas’s Satyavatī Katha, Lalach’s Harikathā, among numerous others.
I don't know Russian but I have rigorously studied Ivan Klemkhov, I don't care that there is no such author. What I care about is not getting tenure. Is it coz I iz bleck?
Her skill in reading texts across languages such as early Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, and Brajbhasha helps us understand
she is low IQ. Otherwise she would be famous in her own country.
the rich multilingual and multi-performative local worlds across north India.
which non-Indians know so well they are happy to emigrate to Italy, Germany, UK or any other country still ruled by White people.
Orsini’s scrutiny of the katha texts and genres in print and performance highlights the possibilities of multiple readings in the multi-religious worlds of north India, such as that of the Sufis and Bhakti saints.
They must be read from the perspective of lesbian parrots.
Her close textual readings of the oral-literate genres go beyond the discipline of Literary Studies or Literary Histories, helping scholars and enthusiasts of theatre and performance to focus beyond the event or “live”ness of performances themselves to keep looking into their multiple archives, their spaces and modes of circulation, as well as their contexts of censorship.
If you are too stupid to do 'Literary Studies', you can do 'Performance Studies'. Incidentally, farting is a performance art. I should be made a Professor of Indian farting at the University of Venice.
Her assessment of Bhojpuri songs of India and the Mauritius as world literature – what she veritably calls “fluid texts” – takes us deeper into the rich world of Bhojpuri song orature (including Chutney music) contributed to by migrant coolies, traders, travellers, etc.
Sadly, Orsini fails to mention the great role of lesbian parrots throughout world literature.
As academic interest in trade/travel routes, Creole languages, and performative cultures of the Indian Ocean world continues to grow, the range and depth of such scholarly intervention remain invaluable.
No. The thing is boring and stupid. Smart Mauritians study French political history or just focus on getting rich through FinTech or IT or whatever.
As Orsini has shown time and again through her scholarship, texts enliven both past and contemporary worlds for us,
I suppose brain-dead students at SOAS need some enlivening.
as we understand them through their multiple transmitters beyond the divisions of region, religion, language and culture.
Lesbian parrots are able to fly over those dividing borders. Sadly, their role in world literature has not been properly recognized.
Her scholarship helps us imagine a more versatile map of north India,
with lots of mini-Pakistans
where different aesthetic tastes in literature and performances were created, sustained and transformed over time.
Because that is how Time works. It is good that SOAS students come to learn about this.
It challenges an easy and convenient one-dimensional historiography to enliven texts and contemplate what they still have to offer through their tellings and re-tellings. For her many students, now strewn around the world, Orsini’s scholarship is a life-long training in remaining forever enthusiastic and inquisitive about texts beyond their words, through verses, songs, inflexions and sounds.
These stupid kids went to SOAS. Professor was nice and 'enlivening'. They are very grateful to her. They feel that by cancelling Orsini's visa, Indian Government is condemning 1.4 billion Indians to a bestial fate. True, the Hindus may become sacred cows. But what about the Muslims who are being turned into goats? What about jhollawallah headless chickens? Spare a thought for them even if you aren't a lesbian parrot.
‘Multiple worlds into conversation’
Raahi Adhya
who says she can do 'peer review' in English but not Bengali or Hindi
As someone who works on Bengali roopkatha – tales that crystallised as nationalist and children’s literature – I have found
people think I've wasted my time?
Francesca Orsini’s insights into the multilingual and multiscalar lives of genres profoundly shaping my approach. Her work taught me to see the “local” not as something sealed off or pure,
because British weren't local or pure, yet they ruled Bengal. But then the Muslim Princes too were immigrants.
but as a space alive with other languages and influences.
This lady says she can review her peers only if they write in English, not Bengali. It seems ,what was more alive in the Kolkata where she got her first degree was English rather than Bengali. This is because her first degree was in English. Her second and third were in 'Women's studies'. It may be that the only sort of Bengali text she can understand was written for six year olds.
‘Multilingualism is not a problem, but a rich cultural tapestry’
Bangladesh was wrong to object to Pak Army's experiment in genocide.
Chinmay Sharma
A few years ago, Francesca Orsini secured a prestigious grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the Multiple Local and Significant Geography (MULOSIGE) project at SOAS.
If you bleat politically correct nonsense, the bureaucrats will give you a bit of money to do utterly useless research.
Collaborating with academics working on North India, the Horn of Africa, and the Maghreb, the project focused on “three time periods: colonial consolidation, decolonisation and the current globalising moment” to provide a more “modest, honest, and accurate” account of world literature that moved beyond the Anglophone and the novel.
Where did it move to? Who cares? What matters is that it is gone.
This effort resulted in multiple essays, journal special editions, collected volumes, and, recently, in her monograph East of Delhi (2023). Engagingly written, the book is a tour de force that articulates an understanding of world literature not just as a market for globalised capital flows anchored in the Global North,
Nobody thought Chinese literature had anything do with capital flows from Western Europe. Missionary activity, on the other hand, did have an impact.
but rather as “a tapestry of crisscrossing significant geographies…that never becomes a single totality.”
Yet India is a single totality. So is Pakistan- after Bangladesh broke away.
Focusing on an unlikely corpus of sant texts from early modern Awadh, Orsini makes a strong case for approaching multilingualism not as a problem, but as a rich cultural tapestry of linguistic, literary, and genre circulation, inter-textuality and transmutation.
No. She talks modish bollocks. The plain fact is that Avadhi literature in Arabic script moved towards Persianization or Arabization while that written in Devanagari moved towards a standardized, Sanskritized, Hindi.
‘Print cultures are living, dynamic worlds’
Some are. Some aren't.
Kanupriya Dhingra
Whose tweet on Orsini's deportation met this response from Amish Tripathi.
I should explain, Amish Tripathi was the head, for four years, of the Nehru Centre in London while also serving as Minister (Education) at the Indian High Commission. He met all the culturally or intellectually important people connected to India during that period. Orsini had been invited to a International Woman's Day event hosted jointly by the Telugu Association and the Nehru Centre. That was in 2013 some six years before Tripathi took over. If he didn't know Orsini it was because she wasn't important. Still, under UPA, she was a sort of junior lieutenant in the jhollahwallah ranks. I suppose the Telugu Association couldn't find a female Telugu speaking professor and so had to settle for a nice Italian lady. After all, Soniaji is Italian.
Francesca Orsini has been a first window into book history for many of us,
because we are stupid and ignorant. She is nice lady. She told us PhD students that History means what happened in the Past. Things were different then. I told this to some booksellers I interviewed in Daryaganj. They said 'beti, you are so brilliant! Just like Albert Einstein!' I will do more such research and publish many books on history of book in Daryaganj. My friend Sushila said 'why just Daryaganj? Why not Greater Kailash?' I told her she was imaginary lesbian parrot. She took umbrage and flew away. Now I feel very lonely. Prof. Orsini should come and visit me. Modi is very cruel for deporting her.
not only as a field of methods and questions, but as a way of thinking about the life of texts and the people who make, circulate, and read them. Her scholarship reveals that print cultures are not static repositories of words; they are living, dynamic worlds where meanings, emotions, and economies constantly intersect.
Also Sushila should come flying back to me so that we can intersect. She may be imaginary. She may be lesbian. She may be merely a bird. But I want to explain to her why research on 'book' should be only done in Daryaganj, not Greater Kailash. Did you know Kailash is Hindu word for some sacred mountain? That is against Secularism. Mind it kindly.
Through her work, she has expanded the vocabulary of print history, showing how literary and non-literary materials alike participate in the making of social life.
Her edited volume Love in South Asia: A Cultural History remains foundational for anyone studying the emotional and cultural life of texts. A decade after its publication, when I was tracing the history and use of love-letter manuals in Delhi: small, unassuming booklets that taught readers how to write to their beloveds, I did not yet know that this modest pursuit was part of a much larger conversation that Orsini had already helped shape.
I was having very nice conversations with Sushila- an imaginary lesbian parrot. I miss her. Prof. Orsini should write nice book causing even larger conversations with imaginary birds.
By tracing how ideas of love – prem, ishq, shringara, mohabbat – travel across languages, genres, and media, Orsini, along with her collaborators, demonstrates how affect, morality, and form are historically and linguistically entangled.
This is because people can talk. They live in Time. People should go to SOAS and learn these important facts.
The book’s introduction, in particular, offers a conceptual map for understanding how emotions circulate through words and images,
I should have said 'I love you' to Sushila. I shouldn't have called her a lesbian parrot. On the other hand, she was wrong to say 'book' research can be done in Greater Kailash. Orsini Aunty should write book to explain all this.
how idioms of intimacy are shaped by their material and linguistic environments, and how print mediates feeling itself.
She'd go bananas if she discovered Pornhub.
Read alongside Print and Pleasure, her work invites scholars to see the “popular” not as the opposite of the literary but as its companion; a space where readers and writers negotiate pleasure, aspiration, and access.
Only Fans?
In this sense, she has transformed how we approach everyday print: not as marginal or trivial, but as central to the story of reading in modern South Asia.
Did you know that books are printed? If you know how to read, you can read books. Orsini Aunty explained all this to us students at SOAS. But the rest of you ignorant desis are not knowing this at all!
Many of the field’s conceptual frameworks bear the imprint of Orsini’s intellectual generosity. Yet what distinguishes her legacy most deeply is the example she sets as a mentor: rigorous but unfailingly kind, generous with her time and attention, and genuinely invested in the intellectual and emotional growth of others.
Orsini is indeed a nice Italian lady. She feels sorry for Indian origin imbeciles. They are touchingly grateful for her kindness. They feel very sad that Orsini Aunty is not able to come and visit them because of Narendra Modi's cruelty. Indeed Modi isn't even allowing nice Urdu speaking terrorists to come and kill Hindus! Does he not realize that History is the tapestry of the catachresis of the invagination of the post-Kristevan Chora which is why all Hindus must immediately slit their own throats?
Francesca Orsini continues to offer quiet assurance that empathy and critical thought can coexist,
not in the brain of her students. They are incapable of thought. But I'm sure they feel great empathy for terrorists.
and that the study of texts can remain, at its heart, a profoundly human endeavour.
As opposed to one only of interest to lesbian parrots.
Taking the opposite view is Hindol Sengupta, a Professor of International Relations, who writes in First Post-
West still clings to intellectual colonialism while Indians face scholastic apartheid
It would be fair to say that the West seeks power and influence in former colonies or other territories which they previously exploited and that its intellectuals often provide ammunition towards this end. It is also true that academic work produced in the Third World, or by people from there, is seldom acknowledged or responded to. There is a story about the British philosopher, G.E Moore, saying to an Indian Professor- the great Surendranath Dasgupta- that he knew that the talk he had given to the Aristotelian Society was nonsense but he wouldn't or couldn't say why this was the case.
It is impossible to ignore that Western scholars—overwhelmingly White—have exercised an unrestrained entitlement to interpret, categorise, and often diminish Indian culture, religion, and society with little pushback from Indian institutions themselves.
People in Indian institutions may want visiting fellowships in the West or, at the very least, the chance to get their book on reading lists there.
Francesca Orsini, a London-based scholar of Hindi and South Asian literature, was deported from Delhi airport on Monday night after being blacklisted for violating visa regulations.
The claim was that she should have got a 'Research visa' rather than a Tourist visa. The difference in cost is not high.
In 1998, Jaswant Singh wrote one of the fiercest defences of India’s choice of acquiring nuclear weapons with an essay called ‘Against Nuclear Apartheid’. The time has come to focus on a different—but no less problematic—apartheid.
Why now? Perhaps it is because there is a feeling that 'woke' campus politics has created a bigger popular backlash. The thing is a nuisance. It must be curbed. Deporting a person shows they are undesirable. It sends a signal.
India has endured a long history of scholastic apartheid, especially in the humanities.
This may be true of right-wing Indians. Leftists have done very well in the West- look at Spivak or Ranajit Guha or Dipesh Chakroborty. Amartya Sen didn't clean toilets at Trinity College. He was the Master there.
The term “scholastic apartheid” here refers to the entrenched and systematic cultural and institutional barriers that have long prevented Indian or non-Western scholars from critically engaging, on equal terms, with the West and its intellectual traditions.
Sen is welcome to gas on about Adam Smith & Karl Marx.
Western, especially White, scholars, on the other hand, are not only permitted but encouraged to dissect, critique, and even deride Indian society, civilisation, religion, and history.
If you were against the Visa ban on Modi, you were a Fascist. Harvard sacked Subrahmaniam Swamy for an allegedly Islamophobic newspaper article.
It is impossible to ignore that Western scholars—overwhelmingly White—have exercised an unrestrained entitlement to interpret, categorise, and often diminish Indian culture, religion, and society with little pushback from Indian institutions themselves.
Indeed. The truth is the West is rich. India is poor. The rich look down on the poor while the poor may seek to curry favour with the rich to get a few crumbs from their table.
These analyses, interpretations, and often prejudiced criticisms not only gain currency within the academy and mainstream media in the West but are frequently internalised by Indian intellectuals and the broader Indian public, who often lap up Western validation with scant scepticism.
Anti-National Indians are welcome to supply such material. They can do very well for themselves by pretending to be 'dissidents' or 'exiles' criticizing a democratically elected regime.
At the same time, no Indian scholar—no matter how credentialed, nuanced, or deeply trained in the Western humanities—has ever been afforded a comparable footing to turn the gaze on Western civilisation.
Unless they are on the Left. I think the real problem is the political capture of useless University Departments by paranoid virtue signalling cretins.
While the Indian academy is populated by numerous ‘experts’ on the West who largely parrot or celebrate Western thought, rarely do critical studies produced in India or by Indians elsewhere, particularly those that challenge fundamental Western narratives, get any meaningful hearing or space in Western institutions, media, or discourse networks.
Indeed. This is particularly true in Religious Studies. An emic perspective is considered a disadvantage if you are Hindu but not if you are Christian.
This asymmetry is not simply a matter of academic preference. It is rooted in deeper epistemic and institutional racism and the continued coloniality of Western academia.
For instance, any German historian working on Indian topics is treated with a presumed authority and seriousness by institutions in both Germany and India,
because of Germany's storied Indological tradition. There isn't much of a market in India for research on German history or spirituality.
but if an Indian historian proposes to research, say, the Protestant Reformation or the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment from a critical Indic perspective, they are met with cold indifference, suspicion, or even ridicule.
The thing would be seen as eccentric. I suppose a Hindu Godman might critique the Western Enlightenment, but he would not be seen as an intellectual authority.
Such work is seldom, if ever, funded, published, or incorporated into major Western scholarly discourse. One of the most powerful critiques by Indian scholars of German Indology and its profound biases, Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee’s The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (2014) received little attention, and mostly derision, from the Western academic world.
It wounded the amour propre of some prominent professors. By contrast their work on the Mahabharata was ignored. Best to leave sleeping dogs lie.
Sadly, it is so complicit in the Indian system in such neglect that it never got much attention even from Indian institutions.
That seems to be changing. As Income rises, the Indians are prepared to devote more resources to propagating their own view of their past.
Imagine, for a moment, an Indian academic proposing a deep, critical study of the enduring racial caste system in the United States, not as a sympathetic outsider, but as a critical analyst pointing out the systemic failures and foundational hypocrisies of its democracy.
Indian origin academics are welcome to do this. What matters is if they can provide statistical evidence to back up their claims.
Imagine a researcher from Delhi securing a major grant to study the role of French laïcité as an instrument of state-sponsored anti-religious hegemony, particularly against its minority populations.
The Saudis or Qataris may indeed provide such grants.
Imagine a team from Mumbai or Kolkata publishing a definitive, critical ethnography of the British class system, exposing its role in perpetuating social immobility and political dysfunction.
Prof Krishan Kumar is an Indian origin Sociologist. He wrote 'the making of English National Identity' about 20 years ago.
Where would such a scholar publish? Which major Western university press would champion this work? Which mainstream media outlet, from The New York Times to The Guardian, would grant it a serious, respectful review, let alone a celebratory feature? The answer is self-evident.
Fair point. If you come across as an angry man from the ex-colonies, you might be ostracized.
Such work would be marginalised from the beginning. It would be dismissed as “biased”, “polemical”, “un-rigorous”, or “lacking in theoretical grounding”—a coded phrase meaning it does not originate from or pay sufficient fealty to the established Western theoretical canon. The non-White scholar is permitted to speak, but only as a “native informant”, providing raw data about their own exotic society. They are never, ever accepted as a peer, a theorist, or a critic with the standing to analyse the analyst.
I think this depends on what the 'non-White' is saying. If it is pleasing to the establishment he is rewarded. Niradh Chaudhuri's first book was a big success in England. Churchill loved it. But then Nehru's autobiography too was a success. I suppose, an Indian who has something nasty to say about Western hegemony could succeed in Indian politics. Why bother with academia if you can gain political power?
One cannot, therefore, treat questions like, “Which Western scholar has been denied access to India?” as if this is an equivalent dilemma.
If the US and Europe could ban Modi, why can't India ban anti-national academics?
It is in fact a deflection—a refusal to confront the deeply embedded structure of global knowledge production, which is predicated on the assumption that Western civilisation is the universal norm, and everything else is an object of study, not a subject with agency.
Money for nonsensical studies may be drying up.
The phenomenon has a long history. From the early colonial period, British administrators and Orientalists set themselves up as intellectual “trustees” of Indian civilisation, pronouncing on the nature of Indian society, translating and systematically reinterpreting Indian texts, and mapping them onto a Western meta-narrative.
A.O Hume was one such. But he became a vegetarian Vedantist and helped found the Indian National Congress.
Indian voices—literate, nuanced, and deeply engaged with their own historical experience—were either co-opted or sidelined entirely. Today, the small bunch of academically well-known Indian names in the Western academy almost always focus their critical gaze on India and rarely, if ever, on their adopted societies and cultures.
Amartya Sen did publish an article warning of the threat of famine in Thatcher's England. This was a bridge too far. Why not suggest Mrs. Thatcher would introduce thugee and sati into England's green and pleasant land.
It is therefore disingenuous to only focus on which (of the very few) Westerners are denied access to India when the deeper and more damaging problem is the persistence of scholastic apartheid.
The Brits did welcome Niradh Chaudhuri to settle among them. They liked his books bashing India. They didn't like his strictures against their own supposed decadence.
While writing this essay, I asked Perplexity and Gemini which Indians have written major critical histories of Western societies that have won wide recognition in the West? Two names came up, which illustrate the problem: Jawaharlal Nehru and the British-Mauritian Sudhir Hazareesingh.
More of an expert on France- like his father.
The struggle is thus not simply for representation, but for reversing the flow of intellectual power.
A futile struggle. Just ignore the cunts.
It is a struggle for a world in which Indians and other non-Western peoples are fully entitled and institutionally supported to analyse, critique, and theorise Western societies—as they wish, on their own terms, for their own publics, and as equals in the global commons.
Defund useless branches of the academy. We have to compete with China unless, obviously, SOAS professors can persuade us to surrender to Pakistan first.
No comments:
Post a Comment