Nehru’s 35,000 Secret Letters Now Free Online; Rahul Calls It India’s “Evolving Conscience”
Massive 100-volume Nehru archive launched digitally.
The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund officially launched India’s first comprehensive open-access digital archive on Friday, placing the entire 100-volume “Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru” online at nehruarchive.in, making approximately 35,000 documents and 3,000 illustrations spanning six decades freely downloadable and searchable for scholars, students, and citizens worldwide.
Congress Leader Rahul Gandhi described the digitised collection as far more than historical records, declaring Nehru’s writings “a record of India’s evolving conscience.” The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha urged the public to explore the archive, emphasising that Nehru’s letters, speeches, notes, diary entries, and even doodles serve as an enduring compass for understanding the nation’s democratic struggles, aspirations, and anxieties from the freedom movement through the formative years of the Republic.
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge hailed the initiative as a vital antidote to what he termed deliberate distortion and disinformation about Nehru’s legacy. Quoting Nehru himself — “Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes” — Kharge stressed that the fully searchable digital repository would ensure the first Prime Minister’s contributions remain accessible to posterity in an era of orchestrated historical revisionism.
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The archive, sourced from over 77,000 physical pages and 35,000 artefacts, includes original Hindi speeches with English translations from 1958 onward, administrative file notings, and rare personal correspondence. Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh, a JNMF Trustee, announced that the second phase will focus on locating and incorporating thousands of letters written to Nehru — including currently incomplete exchanges with figures such as Winston Churchill and Rabindranath Tagore — while advocating eventual integration with archives of contemporaries like Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, BR Ambedkar, and Maulana Azad.
Facsimiles of the original print volumes are displayed alongside searchable text, optimised for both desktop and mobile access. The JNMF stated that the resource will prove invaluable for studying Indian history from the 1920s to the 1960s, offering unprecedented insight into the mind of the architect of modern India during the country’s most transformative decades.
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