Vikram Sampath

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	Historian, columnist, former Senior Research Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library[1]
Notable work	Savarkar

Vikram Sampath is an Indian popular historian, noted for authoring biographies of Gauhar Jaan and V. D. Savarkar. Sampath was born to a wealthy family 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 yea,r Sampath published the first 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 widely held to be uncritical and methodologically unsound. In February 2022, multiple academics accused Sampath of plagiarism; Sampath denied the allegations and responded with a lawsuit.

Early life and education

Sampath was born into wealth; his father was a Tamil banker and mother, a Marathi housewife.^[2][3] He was raised in Bangalore and completed his schooling at the Sri Aurobindo Memorial School and Bishop Cotton Boys' School.^[3] He was trained in Carnatic Music since the age of five; among his teachers were Jayanthi Kumaresh and Bombay Jayashri.^[4][5] Sampath graduated from BITS Pilani with a degree in Electronics Engineering, and later with a Masters degree in Mathematics.^[3] 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.^[3] In October 2017, Sampath received a doctorate in ethnomusicology from the School of Music at University of Queensland, Australia.^[a]

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 has also been 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.^[6][7]

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".^[2][8] 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.^[9][10] The work was proof-read by Suryanath U. Kamath.^[9]

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.^[11] 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.^[11] 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.^[12] 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".^[13]

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.^[14][b] In the process, he also set up a trust to digitize vintage gramophone recordings and make them accessible to public.^[5]

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.^[15] 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.^[15] Partha Chatterjee, reviewing for Frontline, found Sampath's sketch of Jaan as "poignantly beautiful" and testimony to painstaking research.^[16]

Harbans Singh, reviewing for The Tribune, spoke highly of Sampath's nonjudgmental scholarship and forceful recreation of the cultural world inhabited by Jaan.^[17] 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.^[18] However, Sadanand Menon, reviewing for Outlook, found the book be filled with a "glut of [pedantic and tiresome] detail"; the work was held to be an amateurish attempt at reconstructing history.^[14]

S. Balachander

His third book, published in 2013 by Rupa Publications, narrates the life of Veena maestro S. Balachander.^[19] Balachander was a controversial figure and Sampath received hate-mails from various quarters;^[20] however, he was extensively helped by Balachander's family (and widow) during research.^[4] 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.^[21] However, Krishna noted a couple of errors on musical history of S. India.^[21] 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.^[22]

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.^[23]

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.^[24] 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.^[25] Similarly, P. A. Krishnan found the work to be a "sympathetic biography" in a review over at Outlook.^[26] Salil Tripathi found that Sampath's choice of language and analyses "gave 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."^[27]

In contrast, Swati Parashar, a professor at the Gothenburg University, found the book to be a "must-read".^[28]

Honors

For his book on Gauhar Jaan, he was awarded the first Yuva Puraskar in English literature by Sahitya Akademi, India^[29] and the Excellence in Historical Research Award by Association for Recorded Sound Collections.^[30] In September 2021, he was selected as a Fellow of Royal Historical Society.^[31][c]

Plagiarism allegations

In a letter to the president of the Royal Historical Society, dated 11 February 2022, Audrey Truschke, Rohit Chopra,^[d] and Ananya Chakravarti^[e] accused Sampath of plagiarism and requested that Sampath's membership be revisited and his scholarship be thoroughly examined.^[32][33] They included sections from a 2017 publication by Sampath, which were minimally paraphrased from works of Vinayak Chaturvedi and Janaki Bakhle without explicit attribution.^[32] Another cited example was from his biography of Savarkar, in which a paragraph was nearly identical to that in an undergraduate student thesis.^[32][f] Chaturvedi expressed his disappointment at Sampath's lack of ethical standards;^[32][35] Bakhle requested that Sampath offer a public apology for what was unequivocal plagiarism and retract the publication.^[36][g]

Sampath rejected the allegations, and filed a defamation suit in Delhi High Court seeking costs of 2 Crore INR (269,000 USD).^[32] He claimed 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.^[32] In response, the authors highlighted that referencing a publication was not a free pass to reproduce content;^[32] Bakhle also pointed to the implausibility of numerous footnotes in any speech.^[36] On the first hearing, an interim order was passed restraining Truschke and others from publishing the letter or any other defamatory material;^[37] multiple tweets to such effect, that were published despite the order, were asked to be pulled down a week later.^[38]

Notes

References

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).