'Death is not understood by death: nor you, nor I': so W.H. Auden, one of the favourite poets of S. Gopal who died on April 20. Nobody will ever be able to explain why S. Gopal, whose enjoyment of life was second to none, should have suffered such a long and debilitating illness before time claimed him irredeemably. I first saw Gopal on April 2, 1974 when Barun De invited him to deliver a lecture at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He made such an impression that I still remember the date. I got to know him when later that same year I became his pupil in the history department of Jawaharlal Nehru University. The rapport was almost immediate, and on my side - because of my youth, no doubt - it bordered on hero worship. The relationship evolved. He watched me grow from a precocious student to a young historian and teacher and then to a journalist. The verb 'watched' is used advisedly. Gopal did not believe in deliberate monitoring. He watched, when asked he gave sane advice and helped by stealth like a millionaire dowager shoplifting at Harrod's. We became friends, and for a few years in the Nineties, before illness prevented him travelling, we tried to coincide our visits to Delhi so that we could meet for breakfast at the India International Centre to chat and gossip. After that, whenever I called him, his first question was, 'When are you coming to see me?' I did manage to go to Chennai in August 2000, only to see him. We spent the entire morning together and I could see how frail my old friend and teacher had become; that special Gopal sparkle had gone. I remember coming away from Girija, the house his father had built, and thinking of the lines of Philip Larkin which Gopal himself had quoted to describe his father's old age and final illness: in this evening which lights no lamps. There were many many more meetings than the ones I have just recalled - and I will be pardoned for reminiscing, but memories have been chasing each other since the phone call came on Saturday afternoon that Gopal was dead - but there are a few that tend to stand out. One glorious spring afternoon in Cambridge, Easter Sunday I think it was, when we met unexpectedly on King's Parade, both of us walking unhurriedly to listen to evensong at King's; the silence and the solitude that followed once the service was over. Coffee at King's Arms, the pub across the road from the Bodley in Oxford, on the morning Sanjay Gandhi's plane crashed: Gopal telling me softly that he had known Sanjay as a small boy. And most of all a hilarious coach ride from Cambridge to London when all the other passengers wondered what a grey-haired man and a young man, quite obviously don and student, had so much to chuckle and laugh about. Oxford lay deep in Gopal's heart, and seeing him there, I always thought of the place as his natural habitat. And so it was, because his association with the place went back a long way and was, in fact, parental. His father, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, was the first Spalding professor of Eastern religion and ethics in Oxford. Gopal went up to Balliol from Mill Hill, a public school just outside London. In the Sixties, he went back to Oxford as the Reader in modern Indian history. He remained till his death a fellow of St Antony's College. Oxford manners and rituals were so embedded in him that at a lunch in Delhi for Colin Lucas, who had then just been elected Master of Balliol, Gopal, forever the loyal Balliol man, went up to Colin, many years his junior, and said, 'Good afternoon, Master.' Even Colin Lucas's reassuring 'Just Colin to you, Gopal' didn't persuade Gopal to jettison the old world Oxford formality. But this shouldn't convey the impression that Gopal was a formal man. With friends he was always casual and even with students who made the effort to break through his formidable personality. His teaching was informal and open. He was better in tutorials than in classroom lectures. He listened to questions and always had time for answers with which he was not in agreement. He never pushed his own views but encouraged students to think for themselves. When we were his students in the middle Seventies and the shadow of the Emergency had not fallen on JNU, Gopal was at the peak of his power and influence. But he wore this very lightly and most students were unaware of the weight his voice carried. His closeness to Jawaharlal Nehru went back to the days when Gopal had served as the director of the historical division of the ministry of external affairs. Gopal described Nehru as 'the hero of my youth'. It was thus fitting that Gopal became Nehru's biographer and the editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. But he took his time to don the mantle of Nehru's biographer. His first books are now forgotten. He won the Curzon Memorial Essay Prize in Oxford for an essay on the Permanent Settlement in Bengal and its Results. This was published as a book. He wrote two separate books on the viceroyalties of Lord Ripon and Lord Irwin. This immersion in the viceregal papers paved the ground for a major study of British policy in India between 1858 and 1905. Individuals were thus important to Gopal and even his study of policy was individual-centric. He did not look at the social and economic structures that made policy and were made by policy. British Policy in India, published in 1965, examined 'the ideas and aspirations of British parties and statesmen, their ways and methods of implementing them and the consequences, both anticipated and unintended, of these efforts'. The date of publication is important. Gopal in 1965 was already 43 years old (he was born on April 23, 1923). Most historians around this age have formed their views. Gopal showed his intellectual openness in the way in the next ten years he absorbed the work of his younger colleagues in Indian economic history and the history of Indian nationalism. Gopal encountered and became part of the first major shift in the historiography of modern India. The first volume of the biography of Jawaharlal Nehru (published in 1975) opened with a masterly and lucid survey of the Indian economy and society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gopal used this as the context of the life and career of the young Jawaharlal. The focus on the individual was now fleshed out with an awareness of context, of the way in which social and economic factors make the career and opinions of an individual, even of a remarkable one. The subsequent volumes never matched the command of the first one. He became too close to his subject, the hero of his youth, and faltered wherever Nehru did. But the first volume of the biography of Nehru will remain a landmark biography. Gopal surprised everybody when, after the biography of Nehru, he decided to write a life of his father. But this is perhaps the best book he wrote. It was a son's book, but the level of objectivity and distance he achieved was remarkable. It could not have been an easy book to write. He seldom spoke about it. But he traced the life and the ideas of Radhakrishnan with clarity and coherence. His prose, always limpid, acquired in the sections on his father's last years in Madras, an almost poetic quality. In the Preface to the book on his father, Gopal wrote, 'I have tried not to be swayed by personal affection and have shirked nothing.' There was something fearless about this declaration. Not only in his writing, in his life too Gopal could be fearless. He refused to compromise with the Emergency despite his closeness to Indira Gandhi and broke with her. In an interview to The Telegraph in 1997, he said that the Emergency was the worst disaster to have befallen India in the 50 years after independence. In 1977 when the Janata government began an onslaught on the so-called leftist bias in history writing, Gopal was among the first to react with a long essay called 'The Fear of History' in Seminar. He edited a volume on the Babri Masjid controversy called The Anatomy of a Confrontation. He lived by certain values and refused to surrender them. These values were informed by an unalloyed enjoyment of life. Gopal loved to travel and loved good food and good wine. When one was with him laughter was a constant companion, banter a part of his art of conversation. Like most Oxford men, he loved gossip. He was often serious but never deadeningly solemn. He refused to let the child in him die and this gave to his persona an ineffable charm. He was also devastatingly good-looking. All this, and the full life that he had lived, made his last days so sad for those who knew and loved him. I began with Auden and I will end with him: 'he closed his eyes/ upon that last picture, common to us all,/ of problems like relatives gathered/ puzzled and jealous about our dying.'