Dr Vikram Sampath is a historian based in Bangalore. He is the author of eight acclaimed books including Splendours of Royal Mysore: The Untold Story of the Wodeyars, Voice of the Veena: S. Balachander, Women of the Records and Indian Classical Music and the Gramophone, 1900–1930. His twovolume biography of V.D. Savarkar, Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1881–1924, and Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924–1966, and his latest book, Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History, have gone on to become national bestsellers.

In 2021, Vikram was elected a fellow of the prestigious Royal Historical Society. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s first Yuva Puraskar in English literature and the ARSC International Award for excellence in historical research in New York for his book My Name Is Gauhar Jaan: The Life and Times of a Musician. The book has been adapted for a play, Gauhar, by Lillette Dubey. He was among four writers and artists selected as writersinresidence at the Rashtrapati Bhawan in 2015.

Vikram has a doctorate in history and music from the University of Queensland, Australia, and was a senior research fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2017–2019). He was also a fellow of Aspen Global Leadership Network and Eisenhower Fellowships 2020 and a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2010. Currently, he is an adjunct senior fellow at Monash University, Australia. He has an engineering and mathematics degree from BITS Pilani with an MBA in finance from S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai. Vikram is also a trained Carnatic vocalist. He established the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research to promote original, primary source–based research on Indian history and the Archive of Indian Music, India’s first digital sound archive for vintage recordings. He is the founderdirector of the Bangalore Literature Festival and curates the ZEE Group’s cultural fest, Arth.