The writings of India’s first prime minister are not just history, they are a record of our evolving conscience, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Friday, adding that for anyone seeking to understand the nation’s democratic journey, Jawaharlal Nehru’s words remain a powerful compass.
Gandhi was speaking on the completion of digitisation of ‘Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru’ — an entire set of 100 volumes, containing 35,000 documents, available free of cost for downloading — in the first phase of the Nehru Archive launched Thursday to mark Nehru’s 136th birth anniversary this year (nehruarchive.in).
“For anyone seeking to understand our nation’s democratic journey— its courage, its doubts, its dreams — his words remain a powerful compass,” the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said. “I’m glad this legacy is now open, searchable, and free for all. It will keep getting expanded. Dive into the new archive,” Gandhi said and shared a link to the archive.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge also hailed the development. “Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In an era of deliberate distortion, disinformation and misinformation regarding Pandit Nehru and his colossal achievements for India, it is worthwhile to digitise his writings for truth and posterity,” Kharge said on X.
Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh, a trustee of Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) that carried out the exercise, said the archive’s second phase would entail efforts to locate letters to Nehru. “While the Selected Works contain many letters written by Nehru to various eminent personalities, the next phase would entail locating letters written to Nehru,” he said.
These would include, according to Ramesh, correspondence between Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Mountbatten family and Winston Churchill. For this, he said, some of the archives pertaining to these personalities have already been contacted — including the organisations holding papers pertaining to Churchill, Mountbatten and Einstein.
The archive runs parallel to the Jawaharlal Nehru archives currently being held by the Prime Ministers’ Museum & Library (PMML) on the same campus. The digital archive — aiming to be the authoritative resource on Nehru — also includes his speeches. The JNMF, a not-for-profit trust headed by Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, had announced the exercise on November 14 last year.
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The idea is that it would be the “final authoritative and authenticated resource” on Nehru. Those behind the initiative said the data freely available in the archive will come in handy to dispel any false narratives about Nehru, even as Ramesh insisted that this is not a political exercise but an intellectual and historical one.
JNMF secretary Professor Madhavan K Palat said the online version will be of immense benefit to anybody who wishes to study any aspect of Indian history from the 1920s to the 1960s, the years when Nehru was a major leader of the Independence movement and thereafter was the prime minister of the country.
“New items will be added in stages — photographs, audios, videos, books by Nehru, books and other publications on Nehru that appeared in his lifetime, any other documentation available in the public domain, the Hindi original of his speeches which had not been published in the Selected Works, and other similar items,” Palat said.
JNMF office-bearers say all public papers are part of the new archives, while anything considered private has been kept out. However, they added, if anyone offers access to any other correspondence pertaining to the life and times of the first prime minister, they would be happy to digitise it and make it accessible in due course.
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The 100 volumes of ‘The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru’ were put together by the JNMF over the last 50 years. The facsimiles of the original print version are also available alongside the digital text.
