The Nehru Archive: How over 75,000 pages about Nehru, including letters and photos, were brought to your phone screens

These and many other things about Nehru are now available at a click on the phone, on The Nehru Archive, a digitised and easy-to-search collection of the entire 104 volumes of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. A project of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) and executed by communications firm Oijo Media, the Archive includes Nehru’s letters to leaders in India and abroad, a record of his public speeches, speeches in Parliament, prison diaries, pictures, cartoons, and more.

The Indian Express spoke to Aditya Mukherjee, historian and trustee, JNMF; Kavi Bhansali, director, Oijo Media; and Jairam Ramesh, Congress Rajya Sabha MP and trustee, JNMF, to understand how and why the Archive was put together.

Why did the JNMF decide to create something like The Nehru Archive?

Aditya Mukherjee: The letters and speeches of Nehru are not about Nehru himself, but are a window into how modern India was shaped. Reading them gives one a ringside view of history as it unfolded — accounts of Congress meetings before Independence, the reasons Nehru as PM took various decisions, the regard his contemporaries had for him can all be gleaned from these letters.

While the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (a collection of Nehru’s papers) have been in public domain for years, often, what was available online was scanned PDFs difficult to read and search. Our endeavour was to put together the collection in a form that was not just easy to read, but also search and share, by anyone, including researchers, journalists, or any person with curiosity, anywhere in India and the world. You can filter queries by keywords, themes, people, material type (document or visual), etc.

The Archive contains thousands of pages worth of materials. How was it all assembled and how was accuracy ensured when digitising them?

Kavi Bhansali: We treated the Selected Works as sacrosanct. The Selected Works were put together over decades, starting in the 1960s, by scholars and historians of great heft. So we didn’t tamper with them at all. What we did was scan each of these 104 volumes, running into 75,000-77,000 pages, page by page, in an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) format. This made the PDFs searchable. Then we put an entire hierarchy of tags and metadata on the material. A total of around 30,000 tags were created.

Jawaharlal Nehru at the age of 21, in Cambridge. (Photo: nehruarchive.in)

We realised early that all of this would have to be done manually, we could not use AI or any other technology. That is because there is a very wide range in Selected Works, from personal letters to official speeches. There is a great variation in the style of writing. Say in one letter to Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru refers to him as Bose, while in another official letter, he is addressed simply as Subhas. What we did was make it all linkable and searchable by one tag, with each variation recorded as ‘alternate name’.

Also, there are many different languages, from English to Hindi to Urdu to even Mandarin and Russian. While English was easy to deal with, other languages were not. So each page was manually scanned, metadata created, then someone went over each page for accuracy and chronology, and added notes and annotations as needed.

Aditya Mukherjee: Each document is linked to the original PDF from Selected Works. As historians, we insisted on it. The entire process took a little over a year, with around 25 people working full-time, and 50-60 part-time.

So Selected Works is the foundation of this work. How were Selected Works put together? How were all these letters and speeches, spanning almost six decades, collected in the first place?

Aditya Mukherjee: The Jawaharlal Nehru Papers were made available by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund to Prof S Gopal — son of Dr. (Sarvepalli) Radhakrishnan, who resigned his position at Oxford to set up the Centre for Historical Studies in JNU — to edit the Selected Works. He edited a number of the initial volumes. The first volume was published in 1972. Over the years, many historians, including myself, have been in charge of the Selected Works, and all materials publicly available on Nehru have been painstakingly put together. But Nehru himself was a hugely scholarly person with a great sense of history. He kept a record of all his papers. After his death, they went to JNMF.

So for Nehru, there was already a wealth of information to begin with. Can such an archive be created for other leaders?

Aditya Mukherjee: The Gandhi archives exist. Selected Works of Sardar Patel have also been put together. Such attempts should definitely be made for Patel, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Dadabhai Nauroji, and many others. They are people of outstanding intelligence and a breadth and depth of ideas that India today will benefit from. It will also help setting the historical record straight. Reading the original correspondence between Nehru and Patel, or Nehru and Bose, shows you the range of their relationship and the respect they had for each other despite differences — a quality fast disappearing from the political discourse today.

Many of these letters contain sensitive information. What steps have been taken to secure the website from hacking or other attacks?

Kavi Bhansali: The website has advanced architecture and industry standard servers. We have used world-class service providers like Cloudflare and Digital Ocean. Every attempt has been made to make the website as secure as possible.

Right now, the website does not ask for registration or login credentials. Are there plans to do that?

Aditya Mukherjee: The aim of the website is knowledge dissemination. The idea is to keep it free and easy to use.

Does the website track reader traffic? How many visitors it gets, what are the most-searched for questions?

Jairam Ramesh: This is not on our radar screen for now. We are focussed on the second phase of the Nehru Archive. Right now, the website has letters Nehru wrote to people. The second phase will have letters people wrote to him, as many as can be sourced. It will also have books by Nehru, books on Nehru by his contemporaries, photos, audio files, as well as movies about Nehru. The next major addition should hopefully happen by the end of February 2026.