For those who cannot attend in person, please click the link below to view via Facebook Live:

The video will begin roughly 5 minutes before the service is scheduled, (Saturday, March 14: 1:00pm).

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 born in India and educated at Don Bosco High School, Bombay, the University of Bombay, Leeds University, and the University of Texas at Austin where he earned his doctorate. He was for several years (1971-82) a literary editor with Oxford University Press, India. He was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Iowa City in 1978-79. In 1982, he moved to the United States, where he teaches English at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

R. Parthasarathy published his first book, Rough Passage (Oxford UP, 1977), to immediate acclaim. The book was a runner-up for the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. In an editorial in London Magazine (1978), Alan Ross wrote: “In Rough Passage a reconciliation is attempted between the Tamil past and the impotence felt in inheriting a foreign language . . . so that one has the sense, after the disillusion, racial ignominy and loneliness of exile, of finally coming home.” A House Divided, on the other hand, is set against the turbulent history of the subcontinent. It draws upon myths to explore the paradox of India since the Raj and to reinforce the survival and continuity of Indian civilization in spite of the ebb and flow of conquests, striking in the process a truly epic note.

Parthasarathy has also edited an anthology, Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (Oxford UP, 1976), now in its sixteenth printing. His translation of the fifth-century Tamil poem, The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India (Columbia UP, 1993), was honored in 1994 with a PEN/ Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Citation which noted that the work “joins ranks with the major world epics available in excellent English translation.” The book was published as a “Penguin Classic” in 2004 by Penguin Books India. He is the recipient of the 1995 National Translation Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, India’s highest literary honor.

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.