Introduction: On the Lessons of Balachandra Rajan

To have a friend: to keep him. To follow him with your eyes. Still to see him when he is no longer there and to try to know, listen to, or read him when you know that you will see him no longer - and that is to cry.

- Jacques Derrida ('The Taste of Tears,' 107)

Life: L'Allegro

Born in Toungoo, Burma in 1920, and schooled as a boy in Madras, Balachandra Rajan went on to distinguish himself at the University of Cambridge, initially as an undergraduate student of economics and then as a graduate student of English literature. While at Cambridge, he was actively involved in the Quit India Movement. Living an often impoverished existence in England, Rajan would discover a wealth of ideas, both in himself and in the writings of others. Upon taking his PhD in 1946, and publishing the first of his masterworks, 'Paradise Lost' and the Seventeenth-Century Reader (1947, 1962, 1967), he attempted to secure an academic appointment in an unapologetically racist climate, no doubt made more intolerant by a ruinous war and its aftermath. Moreover, although Britain had helped to defeat the Nazis, it had 'lost' India. In these politically charged circumstances, Rajan discovered that a demonstrably brilliant new scholar who happened to be South Asian had nowhere to go but home. Home he went, with reluctance, although both the man and his home had undergone enormous transformations in the meantime. In 1948, he joined the Indian Foreign Service and became a member of India's Permanent Mission to the United Nations (1950-57). It was during his sojourn in New York that his wife, Chandra Rajan, gave birth to their precious daughter, Tilottama. Rajan would also represent India on several international bodies, including UNICEF and the International Atomic Energy Agency. After thirteen years of public service, he returned to academe, first at the University of Delhi, where the Department of English was but three years old. Rajan was appointed Professor and Head of the Department (1961-64) and then Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1963-64). After a stint as Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin (1964-65), he made his way to Canada, first as Professor in the Department of English at the University of Windsor (1964-65), and then as Senior Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. Life in the then sleepy little city of London, Ontario, was not without terrific challenges for both him and Chandra, but it was also a time of tremendous scholarly activity, beginning with the publication of influential books on Milton (The Lofty Rhyme: A Study of Milton's Major Poetry [1970]) and Eliot (The Overwhelming Question: A Study of T.S. Eliot [1976]). For these and other scholarly accomplishments, he was the recipient of many prestigious honours, including the Royal Society of Canada's Pierre Chauveau Medal (1983) for exemplary contributions to the humanities.

Rajan remained at Western until his retirement and promotion to Professor Emeritus in 1984, which marked an unwelcome retreat from university affairs, but one that was at the time mandated by law. He was arguably at the height of his intellectual powers, and there was still a great deal to say and do. I was his doctoral student during this period, and remember that my teacher's critical imagination was so bracingly active and alert that I could hardly keep up with him. But my alma mater's loss was academe's gain. In the latter part of his scholarly life, his thinking and work saw a remarkable efflorescence. Rajan's earlier interventions had pursued the otherworldly coherence of the oeuvres of Yeats, Milton, and Eliot, respectively, but his subsequent research turned to seemingly antithetical theoretical and aesthetic questions. If these were fresh woods and pastures new, they were located in hitherto undiscovered countries of literary history. After publishing his sweeping account of incompletion and open-endedness in English poetry ( The Form of the Unfinished [1985] ), he composed a series of essays that affirmed the self-revising rather than self-confirming energies that ripple throughout Milton's poems...