Tilak Raj Sareen, whose first death anniversary is on March 8 , had an encyclopedic knowledge of the impact of Indian nationalists abroad on the Independence movement. He is best known for his work on the involvement of Japan before and during World War II.

His documentary histories are an archive in themselves. These contained a carefully selected set of key documents that explained the history, and helped researchers understand what else to search for, and where to find them.

This truly is his greatest legacy. As he explained, he did it so the subject could be more easily researched.

TR Sareen was born on February 5, 1935, in Lahore. His family moved to Delhi before Partition and he obtained his MA and PhD from Punjab University’s Camp College, named after Kingsway camp where its Indian campus had been relocated at this time.

He joined the National Archives of India in 1958, serving as its deputy director from 1979 to 1985. Then he became the director of the Indian Council of Historical Research till 1997, working with them as a consultant after his retirement. In the 1990s he was also a visiting Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, University of Tokyo and Senshu University.

While he was at the National Archives, he published his first book, Russian Revolution in India 1917-1921. It was published in 1977. A second volume shortly later. These were the first of his 30 publications.

After Russia and India, he started off on the area in which he made his mark, Japan and its alliance with the India Independence Movement in East Asia. His Japan and the Indian National Army in 1985 became essential reading for all historians interested in the area.

In 1988 he published the first of his priceless documentary histories, Select Documents on INA, followed in 1995 by the Secret Documents on Singapore Mutiny 1915.

In 2002, he went back to his core focus with Sharing the Blame: Subhash Chandra Bose and the Japanese Occupation of the Andamans. Then in 2004 he published the well-thumbed Documentary History of the Indian National Army, which contains complete transcripts of a carefully selected set of archive papers that enable a historian to get a clear picture of the key events and players.

He was 85 when Covid began but that did not stop him. He worked tirelessly through it, with four books coming out in 2023 and two as recently as January this year, including his memoirs. He was 88 then.

Sareen used his long experience as an archivist in India, access to institutions in other countries and his network of connections with the key protagonists of the subject he chose to work on to discover valuable nuggets of information that often shed a new light on the area.

A key aspect of being a good historian is not to let one’s bias affect the telling of the story. He treaded this line carefully, presenting both sides of the story. He does however help readers to make up their minds by framing the key point in a short, easy sentence.

For example in his book Japan and the Indian National Army, he says, “Whether the alliance of the Revolutionary Nationalists with the enemies of the British was treason or an act of patriotism is for the readers to judge”.

I met Sareen when he was 89. He welcomed me, a stranger, into his home and talked about the interesting people he had met relating to his research and how he had been able to weave that into his writing.

He passed away on March 8, 2024, in his home in New Delhi.