*(Summary of comments by Professor K. B. (Bush) Gulati at the South AsianLiterary Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award ceremony, Philadelphia, December, 2006.)**Graduate teaching of English at Delhi University was a study in contrast with undergraduate teaching at Mandalay University where I had done my B.A. One hundred and twenty students, many of whom with zero back ground in English, were crammed in a room with chairs only versus never more than twelve-to-a-class, all taught by visiting British Council and Fulbright lecturers. At Delhi U. the norm was distance, no eye contact or interaction between lecturers and lectured.*
*I wanted to fly home on the first available flight. What really persuaded me to stay on was the arrival on the scene of Professor Balachandra Rajan as the Head of English Department and Dean of Arts Faculty. His presence alone gave some credibility to the parody passing as “post-graduate studies in English” at Delhi. It was his body language that made every student sit up and listen with heads bowed in reverence and silence. Gone were the knitting needles, the assorted magazines, the urgent messages making the rounds, and **the sketch pads that caricatured every lecturer beyond recognition.*
*September 1967, I landed in Toronto and soon learned with elation that Professor Rajan was now tenured Senior Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, in the other London, 200 kilometres west of Toronto. Since I was looking for work, I wrote him a ten-page letter congratulating him on his well-deserved position, recounting the hard times we had been through in Burma at the hands of the military regime, and finally asking him if I could name him as a referee in my job application. Professor Rajan wrote back a two-sentence response:*
/*Dear Mr. Gulati,*/
/*I was indeed sorry to hear of your troubles. You are welcome to name me as a referee.”*/
/*Yours sincerely,*/
/*B. Rajan*/
*I did not know what to make of his cold terse message. In August 1969, immediately after I had bought my first car, I drove with my wife and two infant daughters on what was in essence a pilgrimage to Professor Rajan’s abode. As an offering, we took along a generous basket of seasonal fruit.*
*Professor Rajan was incredulous anyone would drive all the way from Toronto just to see him and his family. Fortunately, he has since been disabused. However, like a */*pujari*/*, he gently removed a peach and a mango and returned the rest to the basket. *
*Getting to know each other has been a long process. At each meeting, the initial bread-breaking and table talk was restrained, formal and delicate. Each opinion was expressed in tentative terms. The familiarity I have gained over the years has been enriching, personally and intellectually. It has deepened my respect for this fine individual of many parts, a veritable storehouse of information, wisdom and needle-sharp wit. Given North America’s propensity for acronyms and abbreviations, his colleagues call him Bal. His students call him Balachandra. I can never bring myself to call him anything but Professor Rajan.*
*After I had taught at George Brown for about five years, Andy Wilson came aboard as an instructor. He had been an imperial history student at Western. Still, I asked him if he would happen know my old man, Professor Rajan. *
*His response was a knockout: Andy’s dissertation for the M.A. was */*Macaulay’s Minute: The Adoption (Imposition?) of English as the Official Language of India,*/* and Professor Rajan had been invited as an external examiner at his defence. As Andy told me, what happened at the defence was that Professor Rajan persuaded everyone the dissertation could be created as a document of lasting value by presenting a more balanced picture of the ground reality. Andy did not resent having to re-write the dissertation. When I asked him about how Professor Rajan was received by Western’s student body, his spontaneous response was, “Professors of English are a dime a dozen, but if Professor Rajan happens to be walking the campus on a busy day, the students part like the Red Sea.” *
*Retired university professor of English and college principal from New Delhi, Dr Tulsi Ram Sharma, who now lives in Toronto, had long pressed me for a*/* darshan*/* with Prof Rajan since he was the man who had finally approved his dissertation, */*Paradise Lost as a Classical Epic*/*, for the London University Ph.D. in English. *
*Summer 2005, as we drove to and from London, Dr Sharma, reclining somnolent on the passenger seat, kept mumbling, “Marvellous. Extra-ordinary. Divine. The very essence of the form. You don’t come across personages like this easily.” *
*April 2006, when Professor Rajan had turned 86 and was barely able to stand because of a muscular disability, he read standing at the Renaissance and Reformation Society’s symposium a 30-minute paper, */*Samson Hath Quit Himself – Like Samson */*on the relevance of Milton to the world today. Most memorably, he likened the twin towers spectacle of 9/11 to the spectacle of Samson bringing down the twin pillars of the Philistine temple. After the standing ovation, all his former students present made a beeline to congratulate him, drenched him in wet kisses and with refrains, “You taught me in ….”; “I was your student in ….”*
*Others who had not been his students regretted Western had done a poor job of publicizing in a timely manner what a jewel they possessed.” *
*I thank the organizers of the South Asian Literary Association for permitting me to share some of my experiences and impressions of Professor Rajan at this Distinguished Achievement Award ceremony *
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