The University of Western Ontario is mourning the loss of revered Milton scholar Balachandra Rajan.
Rajan, who taught in the Department of English for 19 years and retired in 1985, died on Jan. 23. He was known for devoting his life to literature – having written one of the most influential books of Milton criticism, Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth-Century Reader – and public service in his native India.
English department chair Jan Plug describes Rajan as “a true poem,” living his life with a commitment to the arts and public service.
“No other Miltonist has ever achieved such an elegant Miltonic pattern,” he says.
Plug continues, citing Milton:
“He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things,” wrote Milton during his own period of public service, ‘ought him selfe to bee a true Poem, that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things.’ Bal was one such ‘patterne’.”
Rajan, 89, was named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America and was a Fellow and Medalist of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2006, a collection of Rajan essays, Milton and the Climate of Reading, won the Milton Society of America’s Irene Samuel Memorial Award.
He was also an expert on the Romantics, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and literary theory and authored two novels.
During his public service, he worked with the United Nations, UNESCO and UNICEF.
“Legends still circulate (and not just at Western) about the remarkable occasion when he recited the whole of book twelve of Paradise Lost from memory,” says Plug.
His daughter, Tilottama Rajan, is also a professor in the Department of English.
A memorial service for Rajan will be held at Western at a later date.