Last month, certain comments made in India following Professor Francesca Orsini’s deportation from Delhi airport were highly revealing of a tendency to reject foreign academics working on India. The official reason given for not admitting Orsini to India was the nature of her visa. But several participants in the public debate justified her deportation in other ways. An online media outlet close to the Hindutva movement, The Chronology, initially contented itself with labelling Francesca Orsini a “cultural Marxist” and attacking the sources of funding for her research – “Orsini’s work is funded by the European Union’s ERC.” These are the two things which, for the author, were enough to contest Orsini’s scientific credibility. However, The Chronology found a more profound reason to prevent her from conducting fieldwork in India in a highly political reading of her work on the place Hindi has acquired in India: “By framing Hindi’s spread as an imposition, Orsini’s bias fuels separatist anxieties in non-Hindi states and undermines constitutional respect for Hindi as one of India’s official languages.” This sentence suggests that academic freedom can be limited in the name of defending Hindi-speaking populations against others and the respect that Hindi is supposed to inspire because of its constitutional status. Applying these precepts could prevent a great deal of social science research from being conducted.Other comments, more numerous, sought to discredit Francesca Orsini on the basis of other arguments. Amish Tripathi, who headed the Nehru Centre in London from 2018 to 2023 and thus spent five years at the helm of an institution that its website describes as “a premier institution engaged in India’s cultural interface with the UK,” posted a message on X that sets the tone:“I have no views on this scholar Francesca Orsini. Had never heard of her. But those of us from a rooted background, who speak Hindi at home, read Hindi books as well, can only roll our eyes at this rather bizarre claim that ‘few have shaped our understanding’ of Hindi literary culture like a British SOAS Prof!”The last sentence reflects a misunderstanding of the work of social scientists. I apologise to readers for whom this is obvious, but what goes without saying is always better said – when social scientists make the historical trajectory of a language their subject of research, they do not just speak and read it. The third type of comment that deserves even more attention is particularly well represented by the words of Kanwal Sibal, Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University since 2023. In one of his posts, he says of Francesca Orsini: “It would seem she has been engaged in political activism and, for instance, supported the anti-CAA agitation etc. That will not be surprising as many Western India experts take anti-government positions on democracy and minority issues etc. The SOAS where she is a professor has the reputation of being a left-leaning radical university.”Sibal seeks here to discredit an academic with a well-established reputation through insinuations that are not supported by any empirical evidence – “It would seem…” – and engages in equally unfounded generalisations as Western academics do not form a monolithic bloc More importantly how can one say that some of them are motivated by a desire to be hostile to the government? There are no answers to these questions, but we can deduce a new idea from these statements: foreign researchers may be denied entry to India because they are believed to have anti-government aims. Such statements may pose another threat to academic freedom.But there is more to Kanwal Sibal’s posts, which more fundamentally express reservations vis-à-vis the very idea of Western intellectuals studying India: “The issue is whether we need foreign scholars to educate us on our civilization, interpret it for us, and help us understand our own heritage.” This is a rejection of intellectual dialogue that can be explained in two ways – but other hypotheses are undoubtedly possible, as we are now entering the realm of speculation. Firstly, this stance may reflect a certain discomfort with discussing one’s own society with a foreigner, who can only be seen as lecturing the locals and not as an alter ego of the “sons of the soil”. Secondly, and this is not contradictory or exclusive, this attitude may mean that only an Indian can understand Indian civilisation. Whatever the cause of this movement toward closure, it contradicts the very spirit of science, whose methods transcend cultures: academics have no homeland, and this must be stated with a certain stress. In the case of India, this fundamental reality has manifested itself in the many major contributions of foreign scholars and the unusually intense exchanges with their Indian colleagues, both in the hard sciences and in the humanities and social sciences. Most of the first Indian Institutes of Technology (where social sciences are studied extensively) were created in collaboration with scientists from around the world, for example.Refusing to continue this conversation on the grounds that Indians do not need foreigners to understand their history, society, and culture amounts to turning inward. Surendranath Banerjea. Photo: Public domain.The tension between openness to the world and this kind of closed-mindedness is nothing new. In fact, it is inherent in the two faces that nationalism has taken in India since the 19th century. Traces of this can be found in the opposition between Moderates and Extremists within the Congress Party in the 1880s-1890s. The former, through Surendranath Banerjea, refused to “cut themselves off from the lifeblood” that nourished the rest of the world, a sentiment that can be found, subsequently, in Tagore’s critique of nationalism and in Nehru’s definition of the Indian nation as “a mixture of many races” whose genius lies in constantly “marrying the new and the old.” The Extremists , on the contrary, preferred to defend their traditions against any outside influence, arguing that this legacy had to be protected at all costs, even though reforming it based on Western values would have been a step forward. The debate on the age of consent for sexual intercourse, which the British wanted to raise in the late 19th century from ten to twelve years, gave rise to some eloquent speeches. B.G. Tilak, for example, rejected the Age of Consent Bill “even supposing that this Act of Government will be a very beneficial and suitable measure.”Tilak’s heirs today argue that India has even less need for outside input given that it “invented” aeronautics and cosmetic surgery in ancient times. This argument is highly paradoxical given that the Indian ruling class sends its children to study in the West where academics, often non-Indian, teach them the history, sociology, anthropology, etc. of their country. While Western intellectuals are not as welcome in India as they once were, this is also true of their ideas, as evidenced by the way some of their writings are banned from public and private universities. If this effort to prevent foreign ideas from entering India continues, the country could well cut itself off from the intellectual lifeblood that nourishes the world, to paraphrase Surendranath Banerjea, thereby weakening their country. Indeed, true nationalists never cease to borrow from abroad what makes their motherland stronger – as the Japanese did in the Meiji era – and to listen to ideas that enable progress, as the great Indian reformers since Rammohan Roy have clearly demonstrated. Surendranath Banerjea, in this respect, is a true nationalist when he writes, about a notion that has enjoyed a long posterity, “swadeshi“:“Swadeshi does not exclude foreign ideals or foreign learning or foreign arts and industries, but insists that they shall all be assimilated into the national system, be molded after the national pattern and be incorporated into the life of the nation.”Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.