The Interior Landscape

“With The Interior Landscape, Ramanujan uncovered ancient Tamil literature for the world beyond and, being not only a scholar but a poet himself, his English versions proved the original to be exquisite poetry.” – Girish Karnad “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of The Interior Landscape… It showed that translation called for as much in the way of creativity as it did in the way of scholarship.” – - Nakul Krishna, The Caravan “Seekers after happiness should turn to Ramanujan’s Interior Landscape.” – - Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, from Partial Recall “In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity, there is not much else in any Indian literature equal to these quiet and dramatic Tamil poems. In their values and stances, they represent a mature classical poetry: passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, leanness of line by richness of implication. These poems are not just the earliest evidence of the Tamil genius. The Tamils, in all their two thousand years of literary effort, wrote nothing better.” – -A. K. Ramanujan, from the afterword

A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993)

A. K. Ramanujan was born Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan in Mysore, India. He grew up speaking Tamil, English, Sanskrit, and Kannada. Ramanujan was educated at Mysore University and the Deccan College in India, and at Indiana University, where he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. His doctoral thesis was later published as a monograph titled A Generative Grammar of Kannada.

A poet in English and Kannada, a translator from Kannada and Tamil, Ramanujan was also a scholar, folklorist, philologist, playwright, and essayist. As Wendy Doniger wrote, he “blazed a great path through the center of Indological studies. He gave us so many new paradigms that no Indologist can now think about India without thinking through his thoughts.”

Ramanujan served on the University of Chicago faculty for thirty-two years as a professor in the Department of Linguistics and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. His accidental discovery of an anthology of classical Tamil poems in the university’s Harper Library led to the publication of The Interior Landscape.

In 1976, the Government of India honored Ramanujan with the Padma Shri, one of its most prestigious civilian awards, for his contributions to Indian literature and linguistics. In 1983, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

A.K. Ramanujan’s many publications include:

• The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan
• The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan
• Folktales from India
• Speaking of Siva
• Nammalvar: Hymns for the Drowning

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