Nehru's Legacy Goes Digital: Fund Launches Search for Long-Lost Correspondence
Image Source: Internet
The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) has taken a significant step forward with the launch of a complete online edition of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. The digital archive, available on nehruarchive.in, contains 100 volumes with around 35,000 documents and 3,000 illustrations, including Nehru's correspondence, speeches, and interviews from the 1920s to the 1960s. As the digital platform goes live, the JNMF is now focusing on tracing long-missing letters written to Nehru, including correspondence with famous figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Lord Mountbatten. According to JNMF trustee Jairam Ramesh, the search for these documents is a crucial part of the project's second phase. Ramesh highlighted that while the Mahatma Gandhi-Nehru and Sardar Patel-Nehru correspondence sets are relatively complete, several key letters remain missing from the published series. He cited examples of letters written to Nehru by Tagore, Einstein, and Churchill that are not easily accessible. The online archive will not only provide researchers and scholars with a wealth of information but also enable users to track changes between editions and examine the context in which Nehru's books appeared. Future updates will expand the archive to include photographs, audio recordings, videos, and other materials. JNMF secretary Madhavan Palat emphasized that the fund is not attempting to intervene in any debate or narrative but rather to provide transparency and authenticity by making Nehru's works available in their entirety. The current archive covers 300 themes and will expand to over 1,000, drawing on 77,000 pages and 35,000 documents collected over 61 years.
