A. K. Ramanujan
16 March: Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan born in Mysore, India. His father, Attipat Asuri Krishnaswami, is an astronomer and professor of mathematics at Mysore University.
AKR attends Marimallappa's High Schoo in Mysore.
AKR attends the Maharaja College of Mysore. He first majors in science, but his father convinces him to become an English major.
AKR becomes a Fellow of Deccan College, Pune.
AKR is a Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University in the US.
AKR receives a PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University.
He is hired as an Assistant Professor at the university of Chicago. He will become instrumental in founding and shaping the University's South Asian Studies program.
AKR will teach at several other US institutions, such as Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, and Carleton College.
His first volume of poetry, The Striders, is published.
Throughout his career, AKR will write poetry in both English and Kannada, one of the many languages of southwest India. He will make significant contributions to several fields, and become known as a poet, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. He will publish academic research both in and on five languages: English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit.
His commentaries on the poems in The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology gain him international fame.
Relations, another volume of poetry in English, is published.
Along with Edwin Gerow, AKR edits The Literatures of India, at that time the most significant anthology of Indian writing. It exposed Western readers to a canon that was thousands of years old while also highlighting the great variety of contemporary writing in India.
AKR is awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India. It is the fourth-highest civilian award in the country.
AKR is awarded a Macarthur Prize Fellowship (aka The Macarthur Genius Fellowship)
He is also 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.
Second Sight, his third volume of poetry in English, is published.
An essay, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" explains cultural ideologies and behavioral manifestations thereof in terms of an Indian psychology he calls "context-sensitive" thinking.
Another essay, "Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation" summarizes the history of the Rāmāyaṇa and its spread across India and Asia over a period of almost 3,000 years. AKR focuses on five tellings of the story from five different places and historical moments. He situates these five among many other versions of Ramayana, and also mentions a few versions that portrayed Rama and Sita as siblings, which contradicts the popular versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, such as those by Valmiki and Tulsidas.
13 July: AKR is being prepped for surgery, but has an adverse reaction to the anaesthesia and dies.
The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan is published.
AKR is posthumously awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999 for his Collected Poems.
AKR's "Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas" essay is included in the B.A. in History syllabus of the University of Delhi. Some Hindus find his commentary (where he was speaking as a folklorist), to be derogatory, and they seek a court injunction to have the text removed. In 2008, the Delhi High Court directs Delhi University to convene a committee to decide on the essay's inclusion. This committee votes to keep it in the syllabus.
The academic council for the University, however, ignores the committee's recommendation and votes to scrap the essay from its syllabus in 2011. This leads to protests by many historians and intellectuals, accusing Delhi University of succumbing to the dictates of non-historians.
but myself, . . .