Rajanarayanan began his literary career at the age of 30 and wrote under his Tamil initials Ki. Ra. His first short story "
Mayamaan" () was published in the magazine
Saraswati in 1959. It was followed by many more short stories. Ki. Ra.'s stories were usually based in
karisal kaadu () around his native region of
Kovilpatti. The stories are usually centered around
Karisal country's people, their lives, beliefs, struggles and folklore.
Gopalla Grammam () and its sequel
Gopallapurathu Makkal () were among his novels, with the latter winning him the
Sahitya Akademi Award in 1991. The novel deals with the stories of multiple people living in a village in south India before the arrival of the British. It involves the migration of the
Telugu people escaping brutal kingdoms north of Tamil Nadu. and use of the spoken dialect of Tamil for his stories, rather than its formal
written form. He viewed the spoken language as the 'correct' form of the language. In 1992, his short story
Current was made into a
Hindi film entitled
Current for the
National Film Development Corporation of India. In March 2003 (probably), he hosted the Italian anthropologist and Dravidologist
Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi in his home in
Puducherry. In November of that year his short story
kidai was made into a
Tamil film entitled
Oruththi and was screened at the
International Film Festival of India. He was appointed a professor of folklore at
Pondicherry University in the 1980s. He held the title of Director of Folktales in the university's Documentation and Survey Centre. Between 1998 and 2002 he also served in the general council and the advisory board of the
Sahitya Akademi. He was a recipient of the
Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel
Gopallapurathu Makkal in 1991. == Personal life ==