A.K. Ramanujan 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, Raman taught the 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 Ideological studies. He gave us so many new paradigms that no Indologist can now think about India without thinking through his thoughts.

The language that Ramanujan tried to bring to limelight in Indological studies is.