Vikram Sampath

Vikram Sampath is an Indian popular historian, noted for authoring biographies of Gauhar Jaan and V. D. Savarkar. Sampath was born in Karnataka. After academic training in engineering, mathematics, and finance, he worked in banking. In 2008, he published a history of the Wadiyar Dynasty of Mysore?a childhood fascination. He published a biography of Gauhar Jaan to critical acclaim in 2012, and won the Yuva Puraskar in English literature from the Sahitya Akademi. The next year, Sampath published a biography of S. Balachander to positive reviews. In 2013, Sampath left his job at Hewlett-Packard and began a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Queensland. In 2019 and 2021, he wrote a two-part biography of Savarkar that was held to be an uncritical work by most critics. In September 2021, he was selected as a Fellow of Royal Historical Society. In February 2022, multiple academics accused Sampath of plagiarism; Sampath denied the allegations and responded with a lawsuit.