In 2011, while reading Mein Kampf, the autobiography of Adolf Hitler, Mumbai-based journalist-author Vaibhav Purandare remembers stumbling upon a passage in the text, which had a scathing mention about India. “Did people know that the German dictator said this?”  Purandare remembers asking himself. Turns out, very few did.

For the next decade or so, he pored over several archives—German, Indian and British—to understand what Hitler thought about India and its struggle for freedom. “A great deal of what Hitler said or wrote about India, and all the communication he had with Indians—whether politicians, journalists, students or his own officials dealing with Indians—is not available in his published writings and speeches. Archives of the Third Reich were of critical importance to unearth all of this. So were pre-Third Reich records because, surprisingly, Hitler had articulated his views, especially about the Indian freedom movement, right from his earliest days as a speaker in Munich’s beer halls and up until his appointment as Chancellor in 1933,” Purandare shares in an email interview. He visited some of these libraries, and accessed other archival files from the 1920s to ’40s online by writing to the holders of these collections.