A. K. Ramajujan was one of those thinkers, like Freud (whom he greatly, though not uncritically,
admired), who so transform our way of looking at a subject that we are in danger of undervaluing
their contribution, since we have come to take for granted precisely what they taught us, as we
view the subject through their eyes. At a time when the American Indo-logical establishment
regarded native Indian scholars merely as sources of information about language and texts, like
the raw fiber that were taken from India to be processed in British mills, but seldom as scholars
who might have their on ideas about how to process those texts, Raman 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, Raman valued their poetry, their stories
and their counter-systems. At a time when Indian literature meant Sanskrit, and Sanskrit meant
Greek and Latin, Raman 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
Indological studies. He gave us so many new paradigms that no Indologist can now think about
India without thinking through his thoughts