Vikram Sampath

Vikram Sampath is an Indian popular historian and columnist, who is noted for writing biographies of Gauhar Jaan, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Mysore Kings.

Sampath started his career in finance. He published a history of the Wadiyar Dynasty of Mysore in 2008, and a biography of Gauhar Jaan in 2012. In 2013, Sampath left his job at Hewlett-Packard to obtain a PhD in ethnomusicology and history at the University of Queensland, Australia. He wrote a two-part biography of V. D. Savarkar that received praise for its thorough detail but was criticised for its uncritical treatment of the subject. In September 2021, Sampath was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

In 2022, some academics accused Sampath of plagiarism, providing examples of near-identical reproduction of other authors' works in his corpus. Sampath denied the allegations and initiated a lawsuit.

Early life and education Vikram Sampath's father Sampath Srinivasan was a Tamil banker; his mother Nagamani Sampath was a Marathi housewife. He was raised in Bangalore, and completed his schooling at Sri Aurobindo Memorial School and Bishop Cotton Boys' School. Sampath graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) with a dual degree in electronics engineering and a master's degree in mathematics. Against the wishes of his professors, who wanted Sampath to pursue a PhD in topology, he shifted to finance and obtained an MBA from S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research. He went on to join Hewlett-Packard, where he stayed until July 2013. The same year, he also resigned from Bangalore Lit Fest after invited authors disagreed with his characterisation of the Indian writers protest against government silence on violence and declined to take part in the festival. President Pranab Mukherjee selected Sampath as a writer-in-residence at Rashtrapati Bhavan in 2015.

In 2025, Sampath co-founded NAAV AI to use LLMs to translate English works into Indian languages.

Works and reception

Wadiyar dynasty Vikram Sampath's first book, a history of the Wadiyar dynasty of Mysore, was published in 2008 by Rupa Publications, a topic that had captivated him since reading the "humiliating portrayal" of Wadiyars in The Sword of Tipu Sultan, and a "television show's misrepresentation of a particular era of the dynasty" provided the impetus to explore the subject. Sampath was inspired by the works of Arun Shourie and Ramachandra Guha but said his work is not a "historian's point-of-view"; the lack of an academic training coupled with a disinclination to either Marxism or Hindu Nationalism benefitted him. Suryanath U. Kamath proof-read the work. His methodology—mundane documentation of all sides to a story absent any historical analysis—was criticised as were his "totally inane" observations. Another review in the Business Standard found Sampath to have surpassed all other works produced on similar themes in a non-academic context; he made excellent use of the archives to draft a "riveting" narrative.

Gauhar Jaan In 2012, Sampath published a biography of Gauhar Jaan, who was India's first classical musician to record on the gramophone. He had chanced upon Jaan in the Royal Archives of Mysore while researching for the previous book.

All reviewers commended Sampath's meticulous archival work despite the scarcity of sources on figures like Jaan. Ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel found Sampath to have had sketched an "informative and evocative portrait" of Jaan and her politico-cultural milieu despite a non-scholarly approach that lacks citations; his work was hailed as a groundbreaking contribution to studies of Hindustani music. Partha Chatterjee, reviewing for Frontline, found his portrayal of Jaan "an unusual and beautiful book".

Harbans Singh, reviewing for The Tribune, praised Sampath's non-judgmental scholarship and forceful recreation of the cultural world inhabited by Jaan. The Hindu Literary Review admired Sampath's nuanced chronicling of the dichotomies that arose with regimes of princely modernity. Sadanand Menon, reviewing for Outlook, found the book be filled with a "glut of [pedantic and tiresome] detail"; the work was held to be "at times tiresome, at others ingenuous in its amateurish attempts at reconstructing history". and Marathi. It has also been adapted into an eponymous play by Lillette Dubey and Mahesh Dattani. Ashutosh Gowarikar acquired film rights for the book in 2017.

Digital music archive While working on the book, Sampath set up a private, non-profit trust in collaboration with Manipal University to digitise vintage gramophone recordings and make them freely accessible to the public, with funding from T. V. Mohandas Pai. In 2015, Sampath donated the collection to the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Since 2013, much of the archive has been accessible for free on SoundCloud. As of 2021, the archive includes almost 15,000 records, 7,000 of which had been digitised. Balachander was a controversial figure; Sampath received hate mail but he was extensively helped by Balachander's widow and family during his research. A review in Frontline commended Sampath for situating a well-researched, detailed and objective biography of an enigmatic figure within the broader interplays of Carnatic music. The book has been translated into Tamil.

V. D. Savarkar Sampath's fourth book is a biography of V. D. Savarkar that was published by Penguin Books in two parts in 2019 and 2021. The book was critiqued by several academics. In February 2022, three 'left-wing' historians accused works by Sampath—including parts of his two-volume Savarkar biography—of plagiarism in a letter addressed to the president of the RHS following Sampath's election as a fellow of the RHS.

Janaki Bakhle, an associate professor of Indian history at University of California, Berkeley who reviewed the volumes for India Today, noted despite meticulous and thorough research, Sampath's contribution is wholly uncritical, and he accepts every primary source at face value; Bakhle criticised Sampath's interpretation of concurrent historical events as non-objective and lacking in updates from relevant scholarship. Vikram Visana, a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Leicester criticises him for failing to put Savarkar's "rhetorical historywriting" that makes use of "epic heroism and myth-making" to incite "revolutionary violence" into context with his narrative. He also criticises him for taking Savarkar's allegations of abuse by Muslim prison wardens in Savarkar's My transportation for life at face value. Reviewing for Open, popular historian Manu S. Pillai voiced similar concerns; he praised Sampath's meticulous research and his persuasive case of Savarkar as a martyr who had sacrificed his youth for the cause of nation but criticised his methodologies, especially the uncritical acceptance of Savarkar's self-laudatory memoirs, and Sampath was held to be an unobjective biographer.

Madhav Khosla, professor of Political Science at Columbia Law School who reviewed the work for Hindustan Times, commended the detailed narrative but found Sampath's treatment of Savarkar's extremist views and his relationship with the British government less "thoughtful" when compared to another contemporary biography by Vaibhav Purandare. P. A. Krishnan, reviewing for Outlook, found the work to be an elaborate but sympathetic biography. Salil Tripathi, reviewing for Mint, found Sampath's choice of language and analyses to "give away" his obvious bias despite the façade of neutrality; particular attention was drawn to the cavalier descriptions of any massacre perpetrated by Muslims as "genocides".

In contrast, Swati Parashar, a professor at the University of Gothenburg who reviewed the volumes for The Hindu, called the comprehensive treatment of Savarkar a "must-read", admiring how he brought out "the contradictions, complexities and complicities" that made Savarkar. Reviewing for The Telegraph, TCA Raghavan described the book as "a straightforward, no-fuss narrative without hyperbole and hero worship".

Baul In 2022, Sampath, composer Ricky Kej and scholar Rajib Sarma produced a documentary film titled Who is Baul about the mystical Baul tradition of Bengal; it was directed by Sairam Sagiraju.

Bravehearts of Bharat Sampath's Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History, published in 2022, is an anthology of 15 biographies of "under-appreciated civilisational warriors". Among those included were Lachit Barphukan, Chand Bibi, and Lalitaditya Muktapida. Shashi Warrier, reviewing the work for The Asian Age, praised the author's selection of figures from a millennia-long span cutting across religion, profession, and gender and found his narration commendable; however, he took issue with the word "civilization", and further found Sampath's presentation of Lalitaditya non-critical and unconvincing.

Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi’s Gyan Vapi Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi’s Gyan Vapi was published in 2024 to analyse the Gyanvapi Mosque site in Varanasi. Sampath criticises historians for ignoring Hindu claims on the site and, at the book launch, endorsed attempts to build a temple on the mosque's current location.

Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore's Interregnum (1760–1799) In 2024, his new book "Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore's Interregnum (1760–1799)" was released.

Reception

Honors For his book on Gauhar Jaan, Sampath was awarded the first Yuva Puraskar in English literature by Sahitya Akademi, India, and the Excellence in Historical Research Award by Association for Recorded Sound Collections. Sampath was also accorded with a visiting fellowship by Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In September 2021, he was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Plagiarism Allegations In a letter to the president of the Royal Historical Society dated 11 February 2022, Audrey Truschke, Rohit Chopra, and Ananya Chakravarti accused Sampath of plagiarism and requested Sampath's membership be reviewed and his scholarship be thoroughly examined. The letter includes as examples sections from a 2017 article by Sampath published in India Foundation Journal, which lacked explicit attribution and were copied with minimal paraphrasing from works of Vinayak Chaturvedi and Janaki Bakhle. They also cited an example from his biography of Savarkar, in which a paragraph was nearly identical to one in an undergraduate student thesis. It was later supplemented with more examples of identical reproduction from the works of Chaturvedi and R.C. Majumdar. Bakhle found the 2017 article by Sampath to have included portions of an earlier article by her without in-text citation, though her article was referenced in an incomplete manner in the bibliography. Bakhle suggested that "if such plagiarism is the unintentional result of shoddiness in writing and publication", then Sampath and India Foundation Journal should offer a public apology and retract the publication. Bakhle also said that she did not have comments on the allegations of plagiarism in Sampath's 2019 biography of Savarkar, which she had earlier reviewed for India Today in 2019. Efn|Bakhle's support came about a week after the publication of the accusations. a week later and again in May, the court ordered Twitter to remove multiple tweets to such effect Truschke had published despite the order.

Critics Akash Bhattacharya has cautioned that "right-wing Indian historians such as Vikram Sampath have used the language of decolonisation to make Hindu domination sound reasonable" by contrasting "Hinduism's ancient glory" with "the so-called trauma of 'Islamic conquest'." Bhattacharya says that Sampath simplistically equates "Islam's presence in India with the supposed Hindu trauma", which Bhattacharya finds "prejudiced and incorrect." Describing Muslim rulers such as Tipu Sultan as barbarians, he claims that colonial mindset has taken from India its "civilizational greatness" by downplaying "bloody Islamic conquests".