Balachandra Rajan was born in Burma (Myanmar) where his father was an Indian Civil Service Officer. He studied at Presidency College, Madras, and then at Cambridge where he first trained in economics and then switched to English literature and published his first scholarly work on Paradise Lost in 1947. After Cambridge, he returned to India and joined the Indian Foreign Service, and was India’s envoy to the United Nations, UNESCO, and the International Atomic Energy Commission. He returned to academia in 1961 and joined the University of Western Ontario in 1966. He published six scholarly works focused on poetry and a seventh one on the representation of India in English literature from Milton to Macaulay. He also published two novels: The Dark Dancer (1958) and Too Long in the West (1962).