'Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru' goes online; 35,000 documents, 3,000 illustrations available

New Delhi, Nov 20 (PTI) The 'Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru' is now fully available online with an entire set of 100 volumes, containing some 35,000 documents and about 3,000 illustrations related to the country's first prime minister, digitised and available free of cost for downloading.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh, a trustee of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) that carried out the exercise, said its second phase would entail efforts to locate letters to Nehru.

Ramesh said 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. He said incorporating that would be of the biggest value edition to the Nehru archive.

Ramesh called for the integration of archives of leading lights of the time such as 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 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 JNMF release said.

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

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, the years when Nehru was a major leader of the movement for Independence and thereafter was prime minister of the country, the statement said.

"It contains some 35,000 documents and about 3,000 illustrations. From volume 44 onward, that is, from September 1958, his 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," the JNMF said.

JNMF secretary, Professor Madhavan Palat, said, "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." Asked whether the archives would attempt to counter any narratives created by the present dispensation against Nehru, Ramesh 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, however, said, "There is no narrative busting. We are just putting out the true works".

There are 300 themes in the archives so far but they would be increased to over a 1000.

Ramesh said the archives have been sourced from 77,000 pages and 35,000 artefacts which are documented and spread over 61 years. PTI ASK SKC ASK DV DV