Life & Background
Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born in Mysore in 1929, the son of a mathematician. He studied at the University of Mysore and Indiana University where he took his doctorate in linguistics. He taught for most of his career at the University of Chicago where he became a central figure in South Asian literary studies. He was a poet, a translator of classical Tamil and Kannada poetry, and a collector of Indian folklore. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983 and died suddenly in Chicago in 1993 at the age of 64.
Obituary
The poem is addressed to the poet's dead father — a homeopath and failed astronomer whose life is catalogued with ironic precision. The father left nothing: no wisdom, no example, no great achievement. By itemising what the father did not bequeath, the son discovers what he has actually inherited: the father's allergies, his body, his inclinations. The poem ends with the recognition that the inheritance is inescapable — the son carries the father's absence inside him like a disease.
Obituary is one of the most formally sophisticated poems in Indian English literature — a meditation on inheritance and paternity that uses the conventions of the obituary genre to arrive at something far more disturbing: the recognition that what we inherit is precisely what was not given deliberately. Ramanujan's characteristic irony — dry, intelligent, never sentimental — controls the poem perfectly.
Why A.K. Ramanujan Matters
Ramanujan occupies a unique position as the only figure equally significant as a poet, a translator, and a scholar. His translations of Sangam-era Tamil poetry are considered unsurpassed. His essay 'Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?' is one of the most cited documents in South Asian cultural studies. His poetry, spare and ironic, influenced an entire generation of Indian English poets.