New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru’s speeches from 1917 to 1964, a trove of letters, and writings on him by his contemporaries will soon be housed under one digital roof. This audio-visual, multimedia digital archive will be open to the public next year on 14 November 2025, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund announced Wednesday.
The website, to be named nehruarchive.in, will be modelled after international platforms like the Wilson Center Digital Archive and the Churchill Archives Centre.
A repository of all things Nehru, the archive will give free access not only to academics but to anyone interested in the leader. It will have a search-engine, similar to the internet archive, allowing users to download materials and explore various dimensions of Nehru’s life and legacy.
However, the project provides no interpretations or commentary, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.
“The idea is not to counter negative propaganda about Nehru, but to put out authentic information. We’re not commissioning, nor are we interpreting,” said Madhavan K Palat, secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF).
This was reiterated by Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh, who said that the project was “an intellectual endeavour, not a political one.”
The JNMF, a trust established in 1964 to ensure Nehru remains alive in public memory, is known for publishing The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, a hundred volumes of which will be included in the digital archive.
What the archive will also provide is fundamental information on the history of independent India, from its most important prism—the first Prime Minister. “There could be no better vantage point,” said Palat.
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One-stop Nehru hub
While most of Nehru’s writings and letters are scattered across various international archives, there has never been a single digital platform to bring them all together under one umbrella. The plan is to collate material from archives in India and world over.
Historians Aditya Mukherjee, Zoya Hasan, and Purushottam Aggarwal have also been inducted into the project. A team has already started physically cataloguing material from the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library, which was originally named after Nehru. This will be separate from the ongoing digitisation project of PMML by the Government of India.
According to the JNMF, not all of the publicly available information on Nehru reaches the mainstream. For instance, Nehru’s A Bunch of Old Letters remains relatively obscure. But at the same time, it won’t be a ‘complete’ archive. Documents related to his defence, home, and foreign affairs ministries are still under the jurisdiction of the present government and will not be available in the collection.
Jairam Ramesh emphasised the importance of sifting through international archives, like the Malcolm MacDonald Collection at Durham University, to further enrich the present corpus of material on Nehru.
What sets this archive apart will be its user-first approach, according to the JNMF. Accessing papers on and about Nehru will no longer entail scouring reams of PDFs. It will also be free, with no membership fee.
“It should be the single most important source for research and study on Jawaharlal Nehru,” said Palat.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Timely! Nehru has been subjected to all kinds of bizzare propaganda and its time India and Indians got to know the person as he was.
Such archives about all prominent personalities not just Nehru would be ideal.