| Sarvepalli Gopal | |
| Birth Date: | 23 April 1923 |
| Birth Place: | Chennai, India |
| Death Place: | Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India |
| Occupation: | Historian |
| Subject: | Indian History |
| Awards: | Padma Vibhushan, 1999 (for his contribution to Indian history)[1] |
| Spouse: | Kaveri/Indira Ramaswami (1949) |
| Parents: | Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (father) Sarvepalli Sivakamu (mother) |
Sarvepalli Gopal (23 April 1923 – 20 April 2002)[2] was a well-known Indian historian.[3] He was the son of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the first Vice-President and the second President of India. He was the author of the Radhakrishnan: A Biography and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography.
Sarvepalli Gopal was born in Madras, India, on 23 April 1923 into a middle-class family. He was the only son of S. Radhakrishnan, the first vice-president and second president of independent India, and Sivakamu. He had five sisters.
Gopal was educated at Mill Hill School in London and at the Madras Christian College. He was an undergraduate student of history at Balliol College, Oxford, where he won the Curzon Prize. He continued as a student at Balliol earning his PhD on the viceroyalty of Lord Ripon in 1951.
Subsequently, he was appointed as a Director in the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, in the 1950s, where he worked closely with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In the 1960s, he was a Reader in Indian History at St Antony's College, Oxford. When the new Jawaharlal Nehru University was founded by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, he was appointed as a Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, which he helped in setting up.[4] In the 1970s, he was a Chairman of the National Book Trust, New Delhi.
Gopal died due to kidney failure in Chennai on 20 April 2002, three days before his 79th birthday.