CDN and the Horizon of English Studies in India

C.D. Narasimhaiah is more of an institu- tion than anything else. It is not easy to come across ‘a mere village shopkeeper’s son’ (p.11) going on in the 1940s for an English Tripos at Cambridge, finding F. R. Leavis as his Tutor there, getting nominated by him for a Rockefeller Fellowship to Princeton, making acquaintances with R. P. Blackmur, returning to India to a professorship at the University of Mysore, discovering that British literature is not all that English literature has for store, spending more than half a century to popularize and academise literatures in American, Indian, Canadian, Australian, African, Caribbean and all forms of other Englishes, as well as introducing classical Indian poetics to English studies through his journal The Literary Criterion and his very own institute The Literary Criterion Centre for English Studies and Indigenous Arts, Dhvanyaloka, Mysore, and at the end of it all, getting recognized not just by students and fellow academics but by the Indian government, which conferred the Padma Bhushan on him in 1990.