'Not political but intellectual exercise': Sonia Gandhi-led trust to bring out digital archive on Nehru

New Delhi: A mammoth cutting-edge multimedia digital archive on Jawaharlal Nehru will be unveiled November next year with hitherto undiscovered material, including unpublished writings by India's first Prime Minister.

The announcement on 'The Nehru Archive' by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) came on the eve of the 135th birth anniversary of Nehru. It said the online archive -- nehruarchive.in -- will be available from November 14 next year when the country celebrates his 136th birth anniversary.

The aim is to make words written and spoken by Nehru and on him on a single platform to help researchers as well as common man access it easily.

The 100 volumes of The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, his letters to Chief Ministers from 1947 to 1964 and published books by Jawaharlal Nehru such as Letters from a Father to His Daughter, Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography, The Unity of India, The Discovery of India, A Bunch of Old Letters and his lesser-known writings will be easily available on this platform.

Modelled on the Wilson Centre Archives and those on Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and John F Kennedy, the archive would also have Nehru's speeches from 1917 to 1964, writings on him by his contemporaries, material on him from global archives and lesser-known published and unpublished writings of the former Prime Minister.

"We aim to make the archive as comprehensive as possible, open-ended and dynamic, constantly updated with newer archival sources as and when they become available. It should be the single most important source for research and study on Jawaharlal Nehru. We want this to be fundamentally the primary archive on Nehru," Professor Madhavan K Palat, JNMF Secretary, said.

Asked whether it was aimed at countering the false narratives about Nehru and the political attacks aimed at him, senior Congress leader and JNMF Trustee Jairam Ramesh said it is "not a political exercise but an intellectual and historical one" while adding that the digital archive would make easily available for the user material on Nehru which one can search, cross reference and download.

The JNMF has already collected interviews of Nehru published in Russian, German, Arabic and French and got it translated into English and Hindi while efforts are on to collect those in Japanese.

The archive would act like a digital bookshelf, digital catalogue and digital knowledge repository.

Palat said there are a lot of archival material outside India and the aim is to collect those and make available for public.

This archive would also have Nehru-related material collected from other archives like that of VK Krishna Menon and Jaiprakash Narayan among others. It would also have audio, video and rare photographs of Nehru.

Vice-Chairman of JNMF Karan Singh said, "I am sure that this archive will make Nehru more accessible to successive generations who need to be informed of his contribution towards the making of modern India and the world."

The JNMF, at present, has 14 trustees and is headed by Congress Parliamentary Party Chairperson Sonia Gandhi.