Focusing particularly on the poetry of John Milton, Rajan was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Western Ontario and Rajan was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1944 to 1948, but left England to return to his native India, where he served in the Indian Foreign Service until 1961.
During that period he served on the Indian Delegation to the United Nations, working extensively with UNESCO and UNICEF, and chairing an international anti-malaria effort.
His work cannot be easily assigned to any critical methodology; he was a scholar of poetics in many forms and from many approaches.
[citation needed] In addition to his work on Milton, Rajan's later criticism addresses issues of meaning, intention, and context in a broad array of writers including Spenser, Yeats, Marvell, Keats, and Macaulay.
The Dark Dancer is a sobering study of the conflicts of the Partition;[7] Too Long in the West, on the other hand, is a more light-hearted satire (perhaps influenced by Tagore's Farewell, My Friend) about a girl's return to her home village after an emancipating education in New York.