Vikram Sampath | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Bangalore, India |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation(s) | Popular historian, columnist, former financial analyst |
| Notable work | Savarkar |
| Awards | Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar 2011 |
Vikram Sampath FRHistS is an Indian scholar and popular historian who is noted for writing biographies of Gauhar Jaan and Vinayak Damodar 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. In 2012, he published a biography of Gauhar Jaan, which received critical acclaim and won the Yuva Puraskar in English literature from Sahitya Akademi. The next year, Sampath published a biography of S. Balachander, which also garnered positive reviews.
In 2013, Sampath left his job at Hewlett-Packard to begin a PhD in ethnomusicology and history at the University of Queensland, Australia. In 2019 and 2021, he wrote a two-part biography of 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 February 2022, multiple 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.