Speaker
Dr. Vikram Sampath
Historian and Author
Dr. Vikram Sampath is a Bangalore-based historian and the author of ten acclaimed books on Indian history, including Splendours of Royal Mysore: The Untold Story of the Wodeyars, Voice of the Veena: S. Balachander, and Women of the Records and Indian Classical Music and the Gramophone. His two-volume biography Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past and Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, along with Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History and Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi's Gyan Vapi, have all become national bestsellers. His latest book, Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore's Interregnum (1760–1799), entered a third reprint within a month of publication.
In 2021 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He received the Sahitya Akademi's first Yuva Puraskar in English literature and the ARSC International Award for excellence in historical research in New York for My Name Is Gauhar Jaan: The Life and Times of a Musician, which has since been adapted for the stage as Gauhar by Lillette Dubey. He was among four writers and artists selected as writers-in-residence at Rashtrapati Bhavan in 2015.
He holds 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. He has been a fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, an Eisenhower Global Fellow, and a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, and is currently an adjunct senior fellow at Monash University, Australia. He is the founder of the Archive of Indian Music, the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research, and NAAV AI, a technology startup established with Sandeep Singh Chauhan that translates content from English into Indian languages.