After brief stints as lecturer at Hansraj College, Delhi, and as programme officer at the All India Radio, Delhi, he left India to join Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge in 1950.
He was the founder Head of the Department of English and the first Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of Hyderabad.
He was nominated as a member of the Jury for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (USA, 1981).
Several of his poems and short stories have been broadcast over the BBC—and published in Indian, British, American, Canadian and Australian journals and magazines.
In 1978, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London[4] during his stay in England as Commonwealth Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987 for his collection of poems Trapfalls in the Sky.