Govind Purushottam Deshpande

Govind Purushottam Deshpande (2 August 1938 – 16 October 2013) popularly known as GPD or Gopu, was a Marathi playwright and a scholar of modern Indian theatre, China studies, Sanskrit, and Marathi, as well as an academic of history, politics, and foreign policy. He was a professor of China studies at the Centre for East Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, where he taught for thirty-five years. He pioneered 'political plays' in Marathi theatre and went on to write seminal works such as Udhwasta Dharmashala (1973), Andhar Yatra (1987) Satyashodhak (1994), and Rastey (1996), some of which were translated into Hindi and English, helping shape the modernist movement in Indian theatre in the 1970s. He was the author of Dialectics of Defeat: The Problems of Culture in Postcolonial India (2006), The World of Ideas in Modern Marathi: Phule, Vinoba, Savarkar (2009), and Talking the Political Culturally and Other Essays (2009).

He was a recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1996) for playwriting, the Kala Gaurava Puruskar (2005), and the Jeevan Gaurava Puraskar for Literature (2010). He wrote a column titled "Of Life, Letters and Politics" in Economic and Political Weekly for three decades. He was one of the founding members of the Institute of Chinese Studies in Delhi and also served as its director. Later, the institute, along with Deshpande's family, established the GP Deshpande Award in his memory.