Digital Nehru Archive Goes Live With 35,000 Documents

New Delhi: The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru is now fully available online with the complete set of 100 volumes digitised, Congress leader and Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) trustee Jairam Ramesh said in a press release.

He said the next phase of the project would focus on locating letters written to Nehru. Ramesh noted that while the Gandhi-Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel-Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose-Nehru correspondences are fairly comprehensive, the same is not true for exchanges such as Churchill-Nehru and Tagore-Nehru. Incorporating these, he said, would add immense value to the Nehru archive.

Ramesh also called for the integration of archival material relating to key national leaders, including Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, B. R. Ambedkar and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

“The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund is happy to announce that the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru is now fully available online, as promised on November 14, 2024. The website ‘The Nehru Archive’ is available at nehruarchive.in. The entire set of 100 volumes has been digitised; they can be searched, freely downloaded and accessed easily on both mobile and laptop devices,” the JNMF said.

Facsimiles of the original printed volumes are available alongside the digital text. The archive will benefit anyone studying Indian history from the 1920s to the 1960s, years during which Nehru was a central figure in the freedom movement and later served as India’s first Prime Minister. The digital collection includes about 35,000 documents and nearly 3,000 illustrations. From Volume 44 onward (September 1958), Nehru’s speeches in Hindi and their English translations are also included. The documents comprise correspondence, speeches, interviews, administrative notes, diary entries and even doodles.

JNMF secretary Professor Madhavan Palat said new material will continue to be added in stages, including photographs, audio and video recordings, books by Nehru, publications about Nehru released during his lifetime, unpublished Hindi originals of his speeches and other publicly available documents.