Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past

During the launch of the book, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, said that every school and college in the state should have the book, and that every MP and MLA should read the book too.[13] Narendra Modi, the incumbent Prime Minister of India (and leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which largely subscribes to Savarkar's ideology) praised the work.

TCA Srinivasa Raghavan, former Indian diplomat and current Director General of the Indian Council of World Affairs noted it to be a must read no-nonsense book over a review at Calcutta Telegraph.[3]

In a review of the book at the Open Magazine, historian Manu S. Pillai praised Sampath's meticulous research and gathering of source materials to have aided in a definitive charting of his early years and noted of him to have persuasively laid out the case of Savarkar as a martyr who sacrificed his youth for the cause of the nation.[7] However, Pillai sharply criticized the methodologies of his scholarship especially the uncritical acceptance of Savarkar's self-laudatory memoirs, some written years after the incidents.[7] He rejected Sampath's acceptance of Savarkar's mercy petitions as a shrewd strategy that ran parallel to the plot by Shivaji, in that Savarkar stuck to his promises of absolute cooperation until his death and refused to be associated with acts of rebellion, anymore.[7] Pillai also notes Sampath to have not achieved the necessary distance of separation, required for penning an objective non-eulogizing biography; he remained in Savarkar's awe for much of the spans.[7]

Janaki Bakhle, an associate professor of Indian history at University of California, Berkeley, echoed concerns similar to Pillai.[4] She praised Sampath's meticulously through research but noted the work to be a wholly uncritical biography, with him doing very little to distance from the subject and accepting every primary source at face-value.[4] His interpretation of concurrent historical events were also faulted as non-objective and lacking of the recent radical developments in relevant scholarship.[4]

P. A. Krishnan noted the work to be a sympathetic biography in a review over at Outlook.[9] Madhav Khosla, professor of Political Science at Ashoka University noted the work to be detailed over a review at The Hindustan Times.[14] Krzysztof Iwanek, Asia editor for The Diplomat and chair of the Asia Research Centre at the National Defence University of Warsaw[15] noted the work to be extraordinarily detailed and containing hitherto unpublished information; however he found the work to be largely evasive on Savarkar's views about Muslims and sympathetic to his overall cause.[16]