Full Obituary To Follow

Saratoga Springs, NY- Rajagopal Parthasarathy, 91, passed away peacefully in his sleep at home on Saturday, March 7, 2026 from complications due to Parkinson's disease.

R. Parthasarathy was one of the most significant modern Indian poets, ‘not only for what he has written, but also for what he represents.’ He was educated at Don Bosco High School in Bombay, at Leeds University (where his tutor was Geoffrey Hill), and at the University of Texas at Austin. His first book of poetry is Rough Passage (Oxford, 1977), and it quickly established his reputation. His influential anthology, Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (Oxford, 1976), is still in print. His translation of the fifth-century Tamil classic, The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India (Columbia, 1993), is the winner of the 1996 Association for Asian Studies A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation, the 1995 Sahitya Akademi Prize for Translation (English), and the 1994 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Citation of the PEN American Center, which noted that the work ‘joins ranks with the major world epics available in excellent English translation’. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit (Columbia, 2017) is a landmark anthology. He also edited a portfolio of contemporary Indian poetry for Poetry (Chicago, September 1997). Parthasarathy lived in the United States where he was professor emeritus of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Visitation will take place at William J. Burke & Sons Funeral Home, 628 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 on Saturday, March 14, 2026 from 11:30am to 12:45pm.

A funeral service and sharing of remembrances will be celebrated from 1:00pm to 2:00pm at the funeral home.

A committal service will follow at approximately 3:30pm at Vale Crematory, Schenectady, NY.

In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made to Saratoga Hospital Foundation (Palliative Care Service, Dr. John Pezzulo) or the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.