Vikram Sampath FRHistS is an Indian popular historian and columnist, who is noted for writing biographies of Gauhar Jaan, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Mysore Kings.

In 2012, he published a biography of Gauhar Jaan, which received critical acclaim and won the Yuva Puraskar in English literature from Sahitya Akademi.

[2][6] Against the wishes of his professors, who wanted Sampath to pursue a PhD in topology, he shifted to finance and obtained an MBA from S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research.

[7] In February 2014, Sampath was appointed for a three-year tenure as the Executive Director of the Bangalore regional center of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, from which he resigned in August 2015 for personal reasons.

[9] The same year, he also resigned from Bangalore Lit Fest after invited authors disagreed with his characterization of the Indian writers protest against government silence on violence and declined to take part in the festival.

[17] Another review in the Business Standard found Sampath to have surpassed all other works produced on similar themes in a non-academic context; he made excellent use of the archives to draft a "riveting" narrative.

Ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel found Sampath to have had sketched an "informative and evocative portrait" of Jaan and her politico-cultural milieu despite a non-scholarly approach that lacks citations; his work was hailed as a groundbreaking contribution to studies of Hindustani music.

[21] Harbans Singh, reviewing for The Tribune, praised Sampath's non-judgmental scholarship and forceful recreation of the cultural world inhabited by Jaan.

[28] 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 the public, with funding from T. V. Mohandas Pai.

T. M. Krishna found Sampath's work to be "engaging" and provides "a rare insight into one of the most enigmatic figures in Indian performing art".

[35] 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.

[citation needed] Janaki Bakhle, an associate professor of Indian history at University of California, Berkeley who reviewed the volumes for India Today, noted despite meticulous and thorough research, Sampath's contribution is wholly uncritical, and he accepts every primary source at face value; Bakhle criticised Sampath's interpretation of concurrent historical events as non-objective and lacking in updates from relevant scholarship.

[40] Madhav Khosla, professor of Political Science at Columbia Law School who reviewed the work for Hindustan Times, commended the detailed narrative but found Sampath's treatment of Savarkar's extremist views and his relationship with the British government less "thoughtful" when compared to another contemporary biography by Vaibhav Purandare.

[42] Salil Tripathi, reviewing for Mint, 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".

[50] In 2024, the book Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi’s Gyan Vapi by him was launched by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at Pradhan Mantri Museum and Library auditorium.

[54][55] The letter includes as examples sections from a 2017 publication by Sampath, which lacked explicit attribution and were copied with minimal paraphrasing from works of Vinayak Chaturvedi and Janaki Bakhle.

[57][f] Sampath rejected the allegations and filed a defamation suit in Delhi High Court seeking costs of ₹two crore (271,000 USD).

[54] In response, the complaining authors said referencing a publication is not a free pass to reproduce content;[54] Bakhle also noted the implausibility of numerous footnotes in any speech.