A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), one of India's finest poets, translators, folklorists, essayists and scholars of the twentieth century, is a stalwart in India's literary history. His translations of ancient Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry, as well as of UR Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara, are considered as classics in Indian literature. A pioneering modernist poet, during his lifetime he produced four poetry collections in English, and he had also intended to publish the journals he had kept throughout the decades. After his premature death 25 years ago, his journals, diaries, papers and other documents-spanning fifty years from 1944 to 1993-were given by his family to the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago in June 1994. These unpublished writings, meticulously preserved and catalogued at the University of Chicago, were waiting for someone to unveil them to a wider readership.

Review
'Ramanujan was the archetypal teacher and I met him at the right age. I was seventeen and a student of mathematics in Dharwar while he was ten years older, a junior lecturer in English in Belgaum nearly forty miles away. ... From our first meeting I was intrigued by this [. . .] delicate man with a high-pitched voice, and a slender sensitive forefinger, with which he punched or underlined the important points he wished to drive home [. . .] What was fascinating was the number of subjects on which he could hold forth with insight and scintillating wit: proverbs, riddles, conjuring tricks, mathematical puzzles, folktales' (Girish Karnad)

ttipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan (1929-1993) was a scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan wore many hats as a scholar and author, those of a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and English. He published works on both classical and modern variants of these literatures and also argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.

He was born into an Iyengar family in Mysore City in 1929. He was educated in English at the Mysore University and at Indiana University. In 1962, he joined the University of Chicago and later taught there in several departments. In 1983, he was appointed the William E. Colvin Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, of Linguistics, and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and, the same year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

As an Indo American writer Ramanujan had the experience of the native milieu as well as of the foreign milieu. His poems like the "Conventions of Despair" reflected his views on the cultures and conventions of the east and the west.

A. K. Ramanujan died in 1993 as result of adverse reaction to anesthesia during preparation for surgery.