'Nehru Archive' with 35,000 documents, 3,000 images goes online

New Delhi: The 'Nehru Archive' has gone live digitally with the 100 volume 'Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru' fully available now online with 35,043 documents and 3,000 illustrations and images that are available for free download. 

The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF), which is digitising material linked to the country's first Prime Minister, will soon be embarking on the enlarging the scope of the archives in the second phase where letters to Nehru will be located and digitised besides adding audio-visual material and books by Nehru, which will include first and subsequent editions.

Considered the first comprehensive digital archive with deeply interconnected and metadata-driven architecture on Nehru, it was built over a period of around a year.

Congress General Secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh, one of the Trustees of the JNMF, said the nehruarchive.in an "easily searchable and freely downloadable digital archive" initially built around the 100 published volumes of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru covering the period 1903-1964 and has over 75,000 pages and over 3,000 illustrations to begin with.

Archives across the world containing letters to and from Nehru are being contacted to expand the archive, he said. The facsimiles of the original print version are also available alongside the digital text.

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."

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. 

The JNMF believes that the digital archives on Nehru 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 digitised documents include Nehru's correspondence, speeches, interviews, administrative noting on files, diary entries, and even doodles. In the digital archives, Nehru's speeches made in Hindi from September 1958 are available along with English translation.

The team that digitised the archives has made search available on 300 themes and intend to increase it to 1,000. Search facility is also available through events, location and organisation.