Govind Purushottam Deshpande (1938 – 16 October 2013[1]) was a Marathi playwright and academic from Maharashtra, India.
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.
Deshpande completed his Ph.D. and later taught at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Deshpande wrote a column in the Economic and Political Weekly for four decades.
[citation needed] 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.