Nehru’s 100 selected works volumes go fully online

The ‘Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru’, a set of 100 volumes, which has some 35,000 documents and about 3,000 illustrations, is now fully available online.

“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 on nehruarchive.in. The entire set of 100 volumes have been digitized; they may be searched and freely downloaded: and they may be used with equal ease on the mobile as on the laptop,” a statement by the JNMF release said.

The facsimiles of the original print version are also available alongside the digital text, it said.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh, a trustee of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) that carried out the exercise, said the archive will keep getting expanded to cover more text, photographs, audio, and films.

Mr. Ramesh said that the second phase would entail efforts to locate Nehru’s letters.

The Gandhi-Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel-Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose-Nehru correspondence is fairly comprehensive, but that is not the case with certain other correspondences such as Winston Churchill-Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore-Nehru and incorporating that would be of the biggest value addition to the Nehru archives, he said.

Questioned as to whether the archives would attempt to counter any narratives created by the present dispensation against Nehru, the Congress leader 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”.

According to JNMF secretary, Professor Madhavan Palat, “Hereafter 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 items.”

This online version would be of immense benefit to anybody who wishes to study any aspect of Indian history from the 1920s to the 1960s. From volume 44 onward, that is, from September 1958, Nehru’s speeches in the original Hindi, and an English translation, are also available. The documents consist of his correspondence, speeches, interviews, administrative noting on files, diary entries, and even doodles.