New Delhi: A century after Nehru first entered public life, every page of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru—from handwritten letters to Hindi speeches and interviews—have found a new place. All 77,000 pages have been fully digitised and made freely accessible for scholars and readers alike.
On 20 November 2025, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) launched nehruarchive.in, a comprehensive digital archive covering Indian history from the 1920s to the 1960s. A team of scholars, historians, app developers, and politicians—including historian Madhavan Palat, Indian politician Jairam Ramesh, and Kavi Bhansali, director of the communications firm Oijo—collaborated on the project.
The archive spans Nehru’s leadership in the Independence movement and his tenure as the country’s first Prime Minister.
The website currently has around 35,000 documents and nearly 3,000 illustrations. The collection has a wide variety of materials—correspondence, speeches, interviews, administrative notes, diary entries, and even his doodles.
But this is just the beginning.
“New items will be added in stages. These are 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 item,” said Professor Madhavan Palat, Secretary of the JNMF.
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Easily searchable
The main aim was to make Nehru’s vast writings easily navigable. Traditionally, printed volumes were nearly impossible to search, and researchers had to flip through page after page of index without any guarantee of success.
But this digitised archive changes that. Every document is fully searchable, cross-referenced, and supported by meticulously added metadata. Users can move directly to specific topics or explore related materials.
“Because the texts were too sensitive for automated processing, the team tagged everything by hand, achieving over 95 per cent accuracy,” said Bhansali.
The team benchmarked some leading global archives, including Churchill Archives Centre, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, and Wilson Centre Archive—learning from their strengths as well as their limitations.
The project was carried out by scholars and history students from JNU and DU, including some undergraduates.
“The team held brainstorming sessions and worked with 100 volumes of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru spanning around 77,000 pages in their native text form across multiple languages—Hindi, English, French, German, Russian, and even Urdu couplets that Nehru wrote in his letters,” said Jahanvi, account manager at Oijo and co-lead of the website’s data entry work, along with Pranav Pandey, a scholar of Modern History at DU.
Around 80 people in total—scholars and history students contributed to bringing this archive to life
The aim is to go beyond just uploading PDFs and to create a sophisticated knowledge resource that reflects an ethos aligned with Nehru’s commitment to public learning.
“The objective isn’t any narrative busting. We are just putting out his works, uncensored,” said Jairam Ramesh.
Also read: Nehru Archive is open for all—notes, speeches, letters to GB Shaw, Mountbatten
A growing archive
Lesser-known figures such as Habib Rahman, an Indian architect, also emerged from the archive. His correspondence with Nehru appears across letters and interviews. One anecdote recounts Nehru persistently reminding the Punjab Government for four years to settle unpaid architectural bills.
The archive’s scope extends beyond Hindi and English. It includes documents in Persian, Arabic, French, Russian, Hungarian, and several other languages, showcasing the full range of Nehru’s international engagements.
Historically, correspondence sent to the Prime Minister was carefully recorded, but the website doesn’t include the two-way exchanges yet.
The team explained that within the printed Selected Works, incoming letters often appeared only in summaries or footnotes, noting that Nehru’s replies responded to specific correspondence. Some incoming letters are included in the appendices, but the collection is far from exhaustive.
However, the new edition of the website is underway, which will include every available letter to and from Nehru, to create the most comprehensive correspondence set possible, including the articles he mentioned in his letters.
Palat was asked if Sonia Gandhi had been approached for unpublished letters.
He said that the team only worked with materials already public; if privately held collections are offered, they will accept them, but they do not solicit or assume what the families may possess.
The long-term vision is to bring into view the crucial collection scattered across continents.
If a document about Nehru is publicly accessible in archives—whether in Southampton, Sydney, or Shanghai—the team would coordinate with those institutions to bring it onto the Nehru Archive. Outreach has begun to institutions across Oxford, Southampton, the Mountbatten papers, and beyond.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)