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For the mathematician , see Srinivasa Ramanujan

Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan () (1929—1993) was a scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan wore many hats as a Indian poet, scholar and author, those of a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and English. He published works on both classical and modern variants of these literatures and also argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.

He was born into an Iyengar family in Mysore City in 1929. He was educated at D. Bhanumaiah's High School and Maharaja's College, Mysore. He was a fellow of Deccan College, Poona in 1958 - 59 and Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University in 1959 - 62. He was educated in English at the Mysore University and received his Ph.D in Linguistics from Indiana University. Having been a lecturer in English at Quilon and Belgaum he taught at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda for about eight years. In 1962, he joined the University of Chicago teaching in several departments. In 1983, he was appointed the William E. Colvin Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, of Linguistics, and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and, the same year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

As an Indo-American writer Ramanujan had the experience of the native milieu as well as of the foreign milieu. His poems like the "Conventions of Despair" reflected his views on the cultures and conventions of the east and the west.

A. K. Ramanujan died in 1993 as result of adverse reaction to anesthesia during preparation for surgery.

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