Prof Nagarajan passes away

Hyderabad: Professor Sankalapuram Nagarajan, one of India’s finest academics, passed away in New Delhi on January 6, according to a delayed report. He leaves behind wife Srimathi, sons Shankar and Chandramouli, daughter Leela, and their families. Nagarajan, ‘Nag’ to his close friends, was regarded as one of the most eminent Shakespeare scholars of India and an original voice in the world Shakespeare community of scholars.

Born in 1929 in Bangalore, he did his BA (English Honours) at the University of Mysore and his MA in English Language and Literature at the University of Nagpur where he was awarded the University Gold Medal. He went on to study for his PhD in English at Harvard University. He earned the doctoral degree in a record time of two years (1960-61), and held the distinction of being India's first Harvard PhD in English. For his doctoral study he was awarded a Smith-Mundt/Fulbright fellowship, a Harvard University fellowship, and a Folger fellowship. His dissertation on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies resulted in an invitation to edit Measure for Measure for the Signet Classic Shakespeare. In 2013, he published an edition of King Lear, a study he started as a Folger Shakespeare Library Fellow in 1998.

Dr Nagarajan’s scholarly articles on a wide-range of subjects appeared in prestigious international journals like the Shakespeare Quarterly, Comparative Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, and the Oxford Essays in Criticism. He was the Indian Correspondent of the World Shakespeare Bibliography for about three decades.