| Govind Purushottam Deshpande | |
| Birth Date: | 1938 |
| Birth Place: | Nashik, Maharashtra, India |
| Death Place: | Pune, Maharashtra, India |
| Language: | Marathi |
| Alma Mater: | Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Jawaharlal Nehru University |
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Govind Purushottam Deshpande (1938 – 16 October 2013[1]) was a Marathi playwright and academic from Maharashtra, India.
Born in Nashik, Deshpande grew up in Rahimatpur, where he went to school. He completed an MA in Ancient Indian History from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and enrolled for a Ph.D. at the School of International Affairs, New Delhi. This school subsequently became part of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Deshpande completed his Ph.D. and later taught at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He lived in Pune after retirement. He suffered a brain hemorrhage in July 2013 and was hospitalized. He died at home on 16 October 2013.
Deshpande wrote a column in the Economic and Political Weekly for four decades. His collection of essays on culture and politics, Dialectics of Defeat: Problems of Culture in Post-Colonial India (Seagull, Kolkata), was published in 2006, and he also issued a collection of poems, Ityadi Ityadi Kavita (Etc. etc. poems).He was the editor of the anthology of Indian plays in translation, Modern Indian Drama,[2] published by Sahitya Akademi, 2004.
Deshpande received the Maharashtra State Award for his collective work in 1977 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for playwrighting in 1996.
Deshpande's wife, Kalindi, is a women's rights activist. His daughter, Ashwini, is an economist at the Delhi School of Economics, and his son, Sudhanva, is a publisher with LeftWord Books and a theatre activist with Jana Natya Manch, Delhi. Marathi stage and film actor Jyoti Subhash is his sister, and her daughter Amruta, also an actor, is his niece.