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 and history 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 the Royal Historical Society. In February 2022, multiple academics accused Sampath of plagiarism; Sampath denied the allegations and responded with a lawsuit.

Early life and education

Sampath's father, Sampath Srinivasan, was a Tamil banker and his mother, Nagamani Sampath, was a Marathi housewife.The skeptics called me a royalist
- Kumar, Smita Balram. Jade. He was raised in Bangalore and completed his schooling at the Sri Aurobindo Memorial School and Bishop Cotton Boys' School. He was trained in Carnatic music since the age of five; among his teachers were Jayanthi Kumaresh and Bombay Jayashri. Sampath graduated from BITS Pilani with a dual degree in Electronics Engineering, and a master's degree in mathematics.

Against the wishes of his professors, who wanted him to pursue a PhD in topology, he shifted to finance and obtained an MBA in Finance from S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research. In October 2017, Sampath received a doctorate in ethnomusicology and history from the School of Music at University of Queensland, Australia.

Career

Sampath worked at GE Capital in Gurgaon for about eight months till December 2005, before switching to Citibank's Global Decision Management Team at Bangalore, where he continued till March 2008. He went on to join Hewlett-Packard, where he stayed till July 2013.

He was a former senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and is the founder-director of the Bangalore Lit Fest as well as the ZEE Group's ARTH: A Culture Fest. In February 2014, Sampath was appointed as the Executive Director of the Bangalore regional center of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts for a three-year tenure but he resigned in August 2015. The same year, he resigned from the Bangalore Lit Fest, after writer-invitees criticized his opposition to the Award Wapsi campaign.

Works and reception

Wadiyar Dynasty

Sampath's first book, published in 2008 by Rupa Publications, was a history of the Wadiyar Dynasty of Mysore. The topic had him captivated since coming across the "humiliating portrayal" of Wadiyars in The Sword of Tipu Sultan and similar "misrepresentations" in later life. Sampath claimed inspiration from Arun Shourie and Ramachandra Guha but admitted that his was not a "historian's point-of-view"; the lack of an academic training coupled with an equal disinclination to either the Marxist Left or the Hindu Nationalist Right apparently served him well. The work was proof-read by Suryanath U. Kamath.

A review in ''The Hindu Literary Review'' noted the work to be unprecedented judging by the span of time it chronicled; Sampath's attention to the minutest of details was admired in particular. However, his methodology—mundane documentation of all sides to a story, absent any historical analysis—was criticized as were his "inane" judgments on Marxist historiography. Pavitra Jayaraman's review in ''Mint'' found the work to be a "page-turner", that attested to the years of work Sampath had put in the project. Another review in the ''Business Standard'' found Sampath to have surpassed all other works produced on similar themes in a non-academic context; he had 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 meticuluos 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 notwithstanding a non-schoarly approach that lacked in citations; his work was hailed as a groundbreaking contribution to studies of Hindustani music. Partha Chatterjee, reviewing for ''Frontline'', found his portrayal of Jaan as "poignantly beautiful". Harbans Singh, reviewing for ''The Tribune'', spoke highly of Sampath's nonjudgmental 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. However, Sadanand Menon, reviewing for ''Outlook'', found the book be filled with a "glut of edantic and tiresomedetail"; the work was held to be an amateurish attempt at reconstructing history.

The book has been translated into Hindi and Marathi. It has also been adopted 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 digitize vintage gramophone recordings and make them freely accessible to 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, it includes almost 15,000 records, with 7,000 digitized.

S. Balachander

Sampath's third book, published in 2013, narrates the life of Veena maestro S. Balachander. Balachander was a controversial figure and Sampath received hate mail from various quarters; however, he was extensively helped by Balachander's family (and widow) during research. Overall, Sampath found Balachander to be a much-misunderstood and maligned genius.

T. M. Krishna found Sampath's work to be "engaging"— it was a detailed and rare portrait of the various stages of Balachander's life, situated in the proper socio-musical context. However, Krishna noted a couple of errors on musical history of South India. 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 published by Penguin Books'' magazine, Manu S. Pillai praised Sampath's meticulous research and his persuasive case of Savarkar as a martyr who had sacrificed his youth for the cause of nation; however, Sampath's methodologies—especially the uncritical acceptance of Savarkar's self-laudatory memoirs—were sharply criticized, and Sampath was held to have not achieved the necessary distance of separation required for an objective biography. Janaki Bakhle, an associate professor of Indian history at University of California, Berkeley, echoed concerns similar to Pillai — despite the meticulous and thorough research, it remained a wholly uncritical biography, with him accepting every primary source at face-value; Sampath's interpretation of concurrent historical events were also faulted as non-objective and lacking in updates from relevant scholarship. Similarly, P. A. Krishnan found the work to be a "sympathetic biography" in a review at ''Outlook''. Salil Tripathi 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 Gothenburg University, admired Sampath's comprehensive and contextual treatment of Savarkar, and found the book to be a "must-read". Madhav Khosla, professor of Political Science at Ashoka University, found the book a "useful historical narrative". In ''The Telegraph'', TCA Srinivasa 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, ''Who is Baul'', about the mystic Baul tradition of Bengal, directed by Sairam Sagiraju.

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 that Sampath's membership be revisited and his scholarship be thoroughly examined. They included sections from a 2017 publication by Sampath, which were minimally paraphrased from works of Vinayak Chaturvedi and Janaki Bakhle without explicit attribution. Another cited example was from his biography of Savarkar, in which a paragraph was nearly identical to that in an undergraduate student thesis. Chaturvedi expressed his disappointment at Sampath's lack of ethical standards; Bakhle requested that Sampath offer a public apology for what was unequivocal plagiarism and retract the publication.

Sampath rejected the allegations, and filed a defamation suit in Delhi High Court seeking costs of 2 Crore INR ( USD). He stated that the 2017 publication was the transcript of a speech, where he had properly included appropriate attribution, and emphasized that the sources remain cited in the bibliography section. The biography paragraph was similar due to dependence on a common source. In response, the authors highlighted that referencing a publication was not a free pass to reproduce content; Bakhle also pointed to the implausibility of numerous footnotes in any speech. However, none except Chakravarti submitted to the jurisdiction of the Court. On the first hearing, an interim order was passed restraining Truschke and others from publishing the letter or any other defamatory material; multiple tweets to such effect, that were published by Truschke despite the order, were asked to be pulled down a week later and again, in May.

Notes

References

Further reading

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Sampath, Vikram
Writers from Karnataka
Historians of India
21st-century Indian historians