Balachandra Rajan

Who was Balachandra Rajan?

Balachandra Rajan was an Indian diplomat and a scholar of poetry and poetics. Focusing particularly on the poetry of John Milton, he was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Western Ontario.

He was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1944–1948, but left England to return to his native India, where he served in the Indian Foreign Service until 1961. During that period he served on the Indian Delegation to the United Nations, working extensively with UNESCO and UNICEF, and chairing an international anti-malaria effort. He served as Chairman of the UNICEF Executive Board from 1955 to 1956. Leaving his diplomatic career to return to academe, Rajan taught at the University of Delhi before emigrating to Canada to take up a position at the University of Western Ontario.

Rajan's scholarly work covered a wide range of English poetry, but returned frequently to Milton and particularly to Milton's Paradise Lost. His work cannot be easily assigned to any critical methodology; he was a scholar of poetics in many forms and from many approaches. His 1947 book Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader is primarily a response to Milton's apparent interest in Arianism, considered a heresy, and argues for a distinction between private and public meaning in Milton's poetry. The book was influential for William Empson, particularly Empson's critique of strictly theological readings of Paradise Lost, Milton's God. Later essays explore what Rajan calls "generic multeity" in Paradise Lost. In addition to his work on Milton, Rajan's later criticism addresses issues of meaning, intention, and context in a broad array of writers including Spenser, Yeats, Marvell, Keats, and Macaulay.