Kodaganallur Ramaswami Srinivasa Iyengar (1908-1999) is a widely admired poet, critic and an erudite scholar who straddled the world of English and Indian literature with perceptible self-assurance. He is a pioneer in a systematic study of Indian Writing in English. His lectures as visiting Prof. of Indo-Anglian Literature at the University of Leeds in 1959 were published in 1962 as Indian Writing in English. This monumental study of India’s contribution to English Literature was not only a pioneering work, but remains a standard work of reference, which succeeding literary historians have drawn upon with profit. The range of his scholarship is remarkably wide spanning in its ambit the English, Indian and Commonwealth literatures as well as the American and African, bringing about thereby a happy fusion of the principles of criticism of the East and West. His literary output includes such diverse disciplines as poetic compositions and translations, literary history and criticism.

Keywords: K.R.S. Iyengar, Indo-Anglian Literature, Indian Literature, Commonwealth Literatures.