On any given day in Lutyens’ Delhi, if you stroll into the prestigious library at India International Centre, you cannot miss Mr Avatar Singh Bhasin. A tall, slender man at 90 who sits at a desk towards the back as he tirelessly reads and writes through the day. All it takes is a glance at the shelf behind him to realise the immensity of his contribution to knowledge production.
Dozens of thick hardback collections to his name are on view – India-China Relations (five volumes), India-Pakistan Relations (ten volumes), India-Sri Lanka Relations (five volumes), and on and on. Stored within them are tens of thousands of carefully arranged documents, which have allowed scholars to gain insights into Indian Foreign Policy and helped historians upend pervasive myths. Their very accessibility is, in and of itself, a silent academic revolution, and as unbelievable as it may seem, the credit largely goes to one man.
While Mr Bhasin’s last two books—Nehru, Tibet and China (2021) and Negotiating India’s Landmark Agreements (2024)—received critical acclaim and introduced him to a wider readership beyond the Indian strategic community, his close relationship with history spans three-quarters of a century.
In the late 1950s, Mr Bhasin developed a fascination for East Asian history, China and Japan in particular, which he extensively studied as a young man enrolled in BA Hons. Upon graduation, he started a three-year stint at the National Archives, which was instrumental for him to understand “what records are, how are they maintained, what is their value, and how to use them.” This experience would stay with him all his life.
