[2] 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.

[2] 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.

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.

Gopal died due to kidney failure in Chennai on 20 April 2002, three days before his 79th birthday.