Nehru archive goes fully digital as JNMF starts search for long-lost correspondence
The Fund said all 100 volumes, containing around 35,000 documents and about 3,000 illustrations, are now digitised and free to download on nehruarchive.in
New Delhi: The launch of the complete online edition of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru has opened a new phase for the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF), which is now moving to locate long-missing letters written to Nehru — including correspondence from Tagore, Einstein, Churchill, Mountbatten that was unavailable when the original 100-volume project was compiled.
The Fund said all 100 volumes, containing around 35,000 documents and about 3,000 illustrations, are now digitised and free to download on nehruarchive.in. The archive includes Nehru’s correspondence, speeches, interviews, file notings, diary entries and drawings from the 1920s to the 1960s. Facsimiles of the original printed editions are available alongside searchable digital text.
JNMF secretary Madhavan Palat said the platform allows users to toggle between the readable digital version and the scanned print version.
Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh, a JNMF trustee, said the second phase of the project begins immediately with the search for documents that never reached the editors of the Selected Works. “We will make every effort to locate letters to Nehru, which are not available in the selected box,” he said. He cited the 1937 Tagore letter to Nehru on Vande Mataram, which he recently traced to the Tagore archive. He said Nehru’s letter to Subhas Chandra Bose is available in the volumes, but the Tagore letter to Nehru is not.
Ramesh said the Mahatma Gandhi–Nehru, Sardar Patel–Nehru and Bose–Nehru correspondence sets are reasonably complete because material was available from both sides. But he said letters written to Nehru by several key figures remain missing from the published series. He said the correspondence between Nehru and Einstein, for instance, are in the Hebrew University archive in Jerusalem. “ Nehru to Churchill is available, but Churchill to Nehru is not easily accessible,” he added.
Ramesh said integrating the archives of Nehru, Gandhi, Patel, Bose, Rajendra Prasad and Maulana Azad “is very very important”.
To illustrate why, he added that “some of the letters from Patel to Nehru, for example, will shed light on many issues. For example, if you want to see Patel’s position on JNK, you don’t get it from the selected box. You get it from the selected correspondence of Patel.”
Palat said future updates will expand the archive beyond the printed volumes. He said the next stages will include photographs, audio recordings, videos, first editions of Nehru’s books, second editions where relevant, and books about Nehru published during his lifetime. He said these additions will allow users to track changes between editions and examine the context in which the books appeared.
Ramesh said the online release places the entire collection in public view. Asked whether the exercise was intended to counter political interpretations, he said, “The implicit narrative is transparency. Nothing is hidden in this as this is authentic and completely transparent, uncensored works of Nehru during his lifetime.” Palat said the Fund is not attempting to intervene in any debate. “There is no narrative busting. We are just putting out the true works,” he said.
The Fund said the current archive spans 300 themes and will expand to more than 1,000. Ramesh said the project draws on 77,000 pages and 35,000 documents collected over 61 years. Palat said the process of adding new material will continue indefinitely.
