Nehru archive goes online: JNMF publishes fully searchable 100-volume collection

At a time when Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy has been fiercely contested in public debate, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) has released a comprehensive digital archive of his writings in 100 volumes, freely accessible and fully searchable, as part of what it calls an effort to make “authentic information” publicly available.

Trustees, after observing the archives of international leaders including Lincoln, Wilson, and Churchill, found their own model to make the information about India's first prime minister accessible to everyone. They argue that this archive has not been brought to life as counter-propaganda but to present transparent accounts of historical events related to Nehru.

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The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru in 100 volumes covering the period 1903-1964 have been uploaded to nehruarchive.in. The project marks the first time Nehru’s archival corpus, traditionally accessible only through expensive multi-volume sets or scattered PDFs, has been brought together, cleaned, tagged and presented as native digital text.

Archived 35,000 documents

The JNMF said in a statement, “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 independence movement and thereafter was the prime minister of the country”.

“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, with English translation, are also available. The documents consist of his correspondence, speeches, interviews, administrative notes on files, diary entries, and even doodles,” it added.

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The archive can be utilised simply by searching keywords or can be explored through the sections created: events, people, location and organisations.

The idea, according to those behind the project, had been circulating for years. However, the execution came together recently.

Free access to everyone

Aditya Mukherjee, historian and former professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the idea was that the “data should be available to people all over the world without having to buy those hundred volumes”. Mukherjee is a trustee of the JNMF.

“It was done after a lot of deliberation and looking at what the best global practices are. So the Lincoln archives, the Wilson archives, and the Churchill archives were all looked at, and a model was adopted, which is, at the moment, the best in the world in a sense. Most of the internationally recognised archives are all behind a paywall. But this is free for anybody and is essential to spread the ideas of Nehru,” he told The Federal.

'Not a counter-propaganda'

Part of the urgency stemmed from the present political and information climate. Yet, in a meeting with journalists on Thursday (November 20), Congress leader Jairam Ramesh and Editor of the archive Madhavan K Palat stressed that the archive was not made for “busting narratives”.

“This is not narrative busting. But the implicit narrative is transparency. Nothing is hidden; everything is in the open for everyone to read,” said Ramesh.

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For him, the attack on Nehru and Nehruvian ideology was definitely a factor in the archive, Mukherjee told The Federal.

“This is the position that many others and I in the trust argued that we must take a stand. It’s not counter-propaganda; we don't want propaganda. We want to put out authentic information about Nehru and, through him, the entire national movement. Definitely, that was one reason why this project was taken up, and it's been brilliantly executed within a year,” he said.

Archive with 300 themes

Kavi Bhansali, Director of Oijo, the company responsible for the technical build-out, told The Federal that the work started about a year and a half ago.

What existed earlier, Bhansali said, was either material “locked in fat books of 700 pages … sitting in libraries,” or PDFs that were “impossible to work with”. The archive was conceived to solve that.

To make the material legible, they built an internal classification system. “What we've done is we've created a very detailed sort of metadata structure on all that material and classified it into teams and given it lots of tags, so you can sort through them,” Bhansali said.

When asked about the security of the Nehru digital archive, he said, “You can’t build anything that can’t be hacked, but we’ve used very top-notch servers, content-delivery networks, and the world’s best security team to protect the site”.

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There are around 300 themes on the site, including demand for Independence, letters to chief ministers, Kashmir, external affairs, and personal. The team expects the themes to go up to 1,000 as work continues.

Feasible search option

On searching for Vande Mataram, for example, one finds a letter Nehru wrote to Syama Prasad Mookerjee on June 21, 1948, after he asked “that in view of strong feelings being expressed in several quarters over the Cabinet's provisional decision to adopt Jana Gana Mana as the National Anthem, a press statement should be issued to explain the government's attitude."

“I do not think there is any misunderstanding on the subject… Personally, I do not think Vande Mataram is at all feasible as a national anthem, chiefly because of its tune, which does not suit orchestral or band rendering. Our national anthem has to be played by a foreign orchestra all over the world. Jana Gana Mana, on the other hand, has already been greatly appreciated in foreign countries as well as in India, and its music has a great appeal to people who hear it in India or abroad. Vande Mataram is of course intimately connected with our entire national struggle, and we are all emotionally attached to it and will continue to be so attached,” the letter reads.

Archive to disseminate information

Mukherjee said that with the information now made easily accessible, there will also be work done to disseminate it through social media.

“The objective is also to reach social media; there should be a kind of magazine, which will emerge out of this collection. And every week, something which is topical can be brought out and made available on social media. In other words, to establish a presence for the secular, nationalist, Nehruvian view on social media where it is virtually absent, and a lot of communal stuff, a lot of make-believe, false stories are spread,” he said.

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According to Jairam Ramesh, while the archive has material on the letters written by Nehru, communication to Nehru is “more difficult to get”. Yet, he said the JNMF was trying to secure all publicly available documents and was in touch with archives in other countries where material on Nehru is available.

The JNMF said this was only the beginning, not the end. “Hereafter, new items will be added in stages. These are photographs, audio recordings, 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,” said Palat.