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Vikram Sampath
Vikram Sampath (First person from right)
Born	Bangalore
Alma mater	BITS Pilani (Master of Mathematics) University of Queensland (Doctor of Musical Arts)(Doctorate in history)
Occupation(s)	Historian, columnist, former Senior Research Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
Notable work	Savarkar

Vikram Sampath is an Indian popular historian, noted for authoring biographies of Gauhar Jaan and V. D. Savarkar. He is a Fellow of Royal Historical Society. In February 2022, multiple academics accused Sampath of plagiarism; Sampath denies the charges and has responded with a lawsuit.

Early life and education

Sampath was born to and Nagamani; his father was a banker. He was raised in Bangalore and completed his schooling at the Sri Aurobindo Memorial School and Bishop Cotton Boys' School. He obtained a Bachelors in Engineering in Electronics and a Masters in Mathematics from BITS Pilani. He obtained an MBA in Finance from S P Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai.

Sampath has a doctorate (October 2017) in ethnomusicology from the School of Music at University of Queensland, Australia. He has been trained in Carnatic Music since the age of five; among his teachers were Jayanthi Kumaresh and Bombay Jayashri.

Career

C. early 2008, Sampath was employed in Citibank's Global Decision Management Team at Bangalore; he had resigned by July. In 2013, he was a financial analyst at Hewlett-Packard.

He has also been a former senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delh, and is the founder-director of the Bangalore Lit Fest as well as the ZEE Group's ARTH: A Culture Fest.

Works and reception

Wadiyar Dynasty

His first book, published in 2008 by Rupa Publications, was a history of the Wadiyar Dynasty of Mysore. The topic had captivated him since a young age esp. in light of the "humiliating portrayal" of Wadiyars in The Sword of Tipu Sultan and similar "misrepresentations". Sampath claimed inspiration from Arun Shourie and Ramachandra Guha but admitted that his' was not a "historian's point-of-view"; the lack of 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" judgements 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 her while researching for the previous book. In the process, he also set up a trust to digitize vintage gramophone recordings and make them accessible to public.

Ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel commended his "informative and evocative portrait" of Jaan — particular praise was reserved for meticulous archival work, which shed much-needed light on Jaan's ethnicity and early life. Though Sampath's approach was not scholarly and lacked in citations, his volume was a groundbreaking contribution to studies of Hindustani Music and firmly situated Jaan in her politico-cultural milieu. Partha Chatterjee, reviewing for Frontline, found Sampath's sketch of Jaan as "poignantly beautiful" and testimony to painstaking research.

Harbans Singh, reviewing for The Tribune, spoke highly of Sampath's nonjudgmental scholarship and forceful recreation of the cultural world inhabited by Jaan. In a similar vein, The Hindu Literary Review found the work to be meticulously researched despite the usual scarcity of archival sources on these figures — it was a nuanced portrayal 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 detail"; the work was held to be an amateurish attempt at reconstructing history.

S. Balachander

His third book, published in 2013 by Rupa Publications, narrates the story of Veena maestro S. Balachander. Balachander was a controversial figure and Sampath received hate-mails 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 S. 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.

V. D. Savarkar

His fourth work is the biography of V. D. Savarkar; it was published by Penguin Books in two parts in 2019 and 2021.

In a review at the Open 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 of updates in relevant scholarship.

Similarly, P. A. Krishnan found the work to be a "sympathetic biography" in a review over at Outlook. In contrast, Swati Parashar, a professor at the Gothenburg University, found the book to be a "must-read".

Honors

For his book on Gauhar Jaan, he 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. In 2021, he was selected as a Fellow of 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 Sampath's 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 (271,000 USD). He claimed the 2017 publication was the transcript of a speech, where he had properly included appropriate attribution, and stated that the sources were cited in the bibliography section. He stated that the biography paragraph was similar due to dependence on a shared source. In response, the authors emphasized that referencing a publication was not a free pass to reproduce content; Bakhle also pointed to the implausibility of numerous footnotes in any speech. 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 despite the order, were asked to be pulled down a week later.

Notes

1. The thesis was titled "Indian classical music and the gramophone (c. 1900-1930): A socio-cultural, historical, and musical analysis of the Gramophone Company's Indian recording expeditions."
2. Another source claims that he was the executive manager of Citi Bank, Bangalore.
3. Sampath spotted some letters from Jaan, addressed to the Mysore Government with pleas to not slash her salary.
4. Apart from historians in academia, members include "government historians, broadcasters, film-makers, creative writers, biographers, public historians, curators, publishers, journalists and editors, and academic librarians."
5. Chopra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. He has published on the intersections of Hindu Nationalism and media.
6. Chakravarti is an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. She has published on the histories of religion in S. Asia.
7. They also claimed to have come across other similar instances in Sampath's corpus of work.. Shortly after, Truschke published an "appendix" highlighting similar issues from his two-volume biography of Savarkar (2019; 2021). Passages were minimally paraphrased from works of S. Kamra, I. J. Catanch, M. Malgonkar, R. C. Majumdar, and K. Maclean.
8. Bakhle's support came about a week after the publication of the accusations. Sampath had argued, including in his representation to the Delhi High Court that Bakhle had reviewed his biography of Savarkar without any adverse comments about plagiarism, and she thus did not share the concerns of the letter.

References

1. https://theprint.in/author/vikram-sampath/page/2/
2. ^ "Telling the untold story of Wadiyars". Deccan Herald. 5 April 2008.
3. "Vikram Sampath ~ Author | Voice of the Veena | My Name is Gauhar Jaan! | Splendours of Royal Mysore". vikramsampath.com. Retrieved 1 August 2021.
4. ^ "The Hindu : Arts / Music : A wizard and his veena". The Hindu. 22 January 2012. Archived from the original on 22 January 2012. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
5. ^ "Tehelka - India's Independent Weekly News Magazine". 27 May 2012. Archived from the original on 27 May 2012. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
6. "The Hindu : Other States / Rajasthan News : BITS Pilani's date with the Wodeyars". 31 March 2010. Archived from the original on 31 March 2010. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
7. ^ Murthy, Neeraja (12 July 2008). "Spinning a Royal Tale". The Hindu. pp. 12 July 2008.
8. ^ Aravind, Indulekha (10 March 2012). "'Biographies can really drain you'". Business Standard India. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
9. "Founders – Bangalore Literature Festival". bangaloreliteraturefestival.org. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
10. "Savarkar (Part 1)". Penguin Random House India. Retrieved 1 August 2021.
11. "Deccan Herald - History retold". 1 April 2010. Archived from the original on 1 April 2010. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
12. "The Hindu : Metro Plus Bangalore : The facts of fiction". 1 April 2010. Archived from the original on 1 April 2010. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
13. ^ Bageshree, S. (1 June 2009). "A balanced reading". The Hindu : Literary Review. Archived from the original on 1 June 2009.
14. Jayaraman, Pavitra (29 March 2008). "Beautiful south". mint. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
15. Sankar, Anand (1 April 2010). "Off with his nose". Business Standard. Archived from the original on 1 April 2010.
16. ^ Desk, Outlook Web (5 February 2022). "Cascade Of Silk". https://www.outlookindia.com/. Retrieved 5 March 2022. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help); External link in |website= (help)
17. ^ Manuel, Peter (2012). "Review of "My Name is Gauhar Jan!": The Life and Times of a Musician". Ethnomusicology. 56 (1): 146–150. doi:10.5406/ethnomusicology.56.1.0146. ISSN 0014-1836. JSTOR 10.5406/ethnomusicology.56.1.0146.
18. CHATTERJEE, PARTHA. "Poignant notes". Frontline. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
19. "The Sunday Tribune - Spectrum". www.tribuneindia.com. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
20. "The Hindu : Book Review : Of a woman, her music, and her times". 5 August 2011. Archived from the original on 5 August 2011. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
21. Ganesh, Deepa (5 March 2012). "It's more than the melody". The Hindu. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
22. ^ "A rare insight into the life and art of a musical maestro". India Today. Retrieved 5 March 2022. {{cite web}}: |first= missing |last= (help)
23. CHATTERJEE, PARTHA. "Versatile genius". Frontline. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
24. Parashar, Swati (28 August 2021). "'Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924–1966' review: Hindutva's biggest ideologue". The Hindu.
25. Pillai, Manu S (27 September 2019). "In search of the real Savarkar". Open The Magazine. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
26. Bakhle, Janaki (26 September 2019). "The missing pieces | Books". India Today. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
27. Krishnan, P.A. (4 November 2019). "Pro Patria Mori Meets Fire-And-Brimstone". Outlook India. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
28. Bhattacharya, Akash. "Conjuring Savarkar: Vikram Sampath's Genealogy of the 'Hindu Nation'[1]". Liberation Central Organ of CPIML. Retrieved 29 January 2022.
29. Parashar, Swati (28 August 2021). "'Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966' review: Hindutva's biggest ideologue". The Hindu. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
30. Feb 15, Shrabonti Bagchi / TNN /; 2012; Ist, 06:45. "Yuva Puraskar for Bangalore author | Bengaluru News – Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 21 October 2021. {{cite web}}: |last2= has numeric name (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
31. "Vikram Sampath". Penguin Random House India. Retrieved 1 August 2021.
32. "281 new Fellows & Members elected to the Society | RHS". royalhistsoc.org. Retrieved 18 October 2021.
33. ^ "Savarkar Biographer Vikram Sampath Accused of Plagiarism, Historians Say Others' Work Not Cited Fairly". The Wire. 14 February 2022. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
34. "Vikram Sampath: The literary start of the right-wing". Deccan Herald. 27 February 2022. Retrieved 27 February 2022.
35. ^ Audrey Truschke (17 February 2022). "Additional examples of Vikram Sampath's plagiarism" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
36. Chaturvedi, Vinayak. "Would VD Savarkar have condoned plagiarism?". Scroll.in. Retrieved 24 February 2022.
37. ^ "'Vikram Sampath Is Claiming My Ideas, Words as His Own': Historian Janaki Bakhle on Savarkar Author". The Wire. Retrieved 22 February 2022.
38. Thapliyal, Nupur (18 February 2022). "Delhi High Court Restrains Historian Audrey Truschke & Others From Publishing Defamatory Material Against Vikram Sampath". www.livelaw.in. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
39. Jha, Prashant. "Delhi High Court directs Twitter to take down five tweets of Audrey Truschke against Vikram Sampath". Bar and Bench - Indian Legal news. Retrieved 24 February 2022.

Further reading

• Bhattacharya, Akash (13 November 2021). "How historian Vikram Sampath uses decolonisation rhetoric to make Hindu domination sound reasonable". Scroll.in.
• D'Souza, Rohan (20 October 2021). "The Risks of Looking at India's History Through the Eyes of Pseudo-Historians". The Wire (India).

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