Nehru online

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library NMML in Delhi is a vast sepia reserve of modern Indian history,with manuscripts stored in over 20,000 boxes,tapes that contain thousands of hours of interviews and valuable files of old photographs and newspapers. It is now stepping out of the old to the new: it is digitising its archives to be gradually uploaded on its website.

History,recent and distant,needs to be liberated from inaccessible archives and made readily available. And that is why libraries have made inventories,which can be indexed and investigated with ease. This is of a piece with this robust information age of ours. But in India,what is and what is not in public domain has more often than not been problematic. While the government has to,under the law,regularly declassify documents,there has been a great reluctance to do so,often restricting access in the name of public interest. Even the NMML has been no exception,for example,even denying a scholar access to the P.N. Haksar papers and at another time being selective about opening up the Nehru archive.

The new openness at the NMML is certainly welcome: even the Haksar papers will be available online now along with pre-Independence Nehru papers. It is really about time NMMLs online avatar came within the reach of teachers and scholars,in fact of anyone interested. However,NMMLs openness should not be confined to a mere flirtation with technology. It should go all the way,revealing its entire repository,without holding back anything. That would be the real mark of openness.