[3] Puthen Madathil Rajan Gurukkal was born on 15 May 1948 in a northern Kerala village called Kariyad near Mahe in the Kannur District of India.

[2] Then became a faculty of Centre for Historical Studies, JNU He was a visiting faculty briefly at Humboldt University(1987) and at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale, Paris (2006) and lectured at several Universities in the country as well as abroad such as Humboldt, Leipzig, Berlin, Heidelberg, Tübingen and Ruhr (Germany); EHESS, Paris; and CIRAD, Montpellier (France); Toronto and Kingston (Canada); Manchester, Glasgow, Reading, Westminster and SOAS (UK); Shanghai (China); Tokyo, Taisho and Toyo Bunko (Japan); Central European University, Budapest (Hungary).

He has worked on different and several important posts such as the dean of faculty, member of the academic council, senate and syndicate of a few universities and social science research institutes and others.

Gurukkal began his career as a junior lecturer at Union Christian College, Aluva in 1972 as soon as he finished his postgraduation.

[4] After completing his doctoral education, he joined as the teaching faculty at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University for some time before taking up the chair of Professor and Director, School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala in 1988.