A.K. Ramanujan was one of those thinkers, like Freud, whom he greatly, though not uncritically, admired, who so transformed our way of looking at a subject that we are in danger of undervaluing views that see that subject through their eyes.

At a time when the American Indological establishment regarded native Indian scholars merely as sources of information about languages and texts, like the raw fibre that was taken from India to be processed in British mills, but seldom as scholars who might have their own ideas about how to process those texts, Ramanujan taught them all how to weave a theory, a folktale, a poem, a book. Long before it was politically respectable, let alone politically correct, to study the works of women or of 'illiterate' peasants, Ramanujan valued their poetry, stories and their counter-systems.

At a time when Indian literature meant Sanskrit, and meant Greek and Latin, Ramanujan arrived in Chicago to join Edward C. Dimock and the other 'founding fathers' in proclaiming to the world the relevance of Tamil and Bengali and the other mother tongues. Without so much as raising his gentle voice, he blazed a great path through the centre of Indian studies.