Francesca Orsini, a leading scholar of Hindi and professor emerita at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, was Monday stopped from entering the country, and sent back to London from the New Delhi airport, senior government officials said.

Orsini, who was on a flight back to London, was unavailable for comment.

Originally from Italy, where she completed her undergraduate studies in Hindi, she later studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi .

The work she did at SOAS as part of her PhD was published by Oxford University Press in 2002 as ‘The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism’, and is considered her seminal work. It examines Hindi language in the context of the nati

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