‘He hid nothing’: Professor Madhavan K Palat on the 75,000-page archive opening Jawaharlal Nehru’s private thoughts to the public

The collection is expansive and often arresting. There is a 1931 letter to Mahatma Gandhi in which Nehru fumes against Jinnah’s “narrow-minded communalism”; another, written in 1949 to Uttar Pradesh chief minister Govind Ballabhbhai Pant, warning of the grave consequences of placing idols of Ram and Sita inside the Babri mosque; and correspondence with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel on the Kashmir resolutions.

These documents form only a fraction of the archive, which includes letters, speeches, books, and photographs — about 35,000 documents spanning 75,000 pages and over 300 themes.

Under Palat’s editorship, around 20 volumes of The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru have been published. (Express photo by Adrija Roychowdhury

In his office at JNMF, surrounded by Nehru’s published works and family portraits, Palat reflects on the archive’s significance in understanding how modern India took shape.

The Fund is housed next to the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library — formerly the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library — which has grown into the country’s largest repository of private papers of many public figures in India. JNMF, by contrast, focuses exclusively on writings by and to Nehru.

Together, Palat argues, these papers offer vital insight into his personality and the reasoning behind his decisions.

Excerpts from the interview: 

Q. How was the Jawaharlal Nehru Trust created?

Palat: The Trust was created by Indira Gandhi immediately after Nehru died, with persons of the stature of Radhakrishnan, Zakir Hussain, and others. Indira Gandhi gave it the mandate to commemorate Nehru and his values. She tasked us with publishing Nehru’s papers in a Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Indira Gandhi’s collection of his papers constitutes 90 per cent of what we use.

The Trust has two main jobs. One is to edit Nehru’s works, and the other is to look after the heritage buildings in Allahabad, namely Anand Bhavan. We also appoint a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow every year, and we administer a scholarship scheme on commission from the government of India.

Q. How is the collection of Nehru’s papers here different from the PMML archives?

Palat: No difference. What is lying at PMML belonged to Indira Gandhi, and it has been passed on in the family. It is their property, all kept in the PMML for safe custody. These were mainly the papers lying in his house, and they are called the Jawaharlal Nehru papers, or the JN collection.

We have been publishing them since the late 1960s. The series of 100 volumes started coming out then, and it was completed in 2019. They do not have a cumulative index. So, you cannot search all 100 volumes, and that is a major drawback. Further, it is the Selected Works and not the complete archive.

So, we decided to create a website devoted entirely to Nehru’s archive. Now, the whole of the Selected Works has been digitised, put on the website, and is fully searchable. One can access and download the archives freely.

But in addition to the Nehru household papers given to us, the first editor of the trust, Dr Gopal, collected a large number of archives from the Government of India. Indira Gandhi assisted in that effort. Many archives relevant to Nehru but not in the library were copied and brought here. In our own jargon, we call it the JN Master File. It is a whole set of copies from the ministries of external affairs, home affairs, the planning commission and others. Again, this was collected by us but placed there for safe custody.

Sometimes papers were brought in from abroad as well. For instance, people were sent to the Mountbatten Archive or the US National Archives. The process of collecting stopped sometime in the 1980s.

Q. How extensive is the Jawaharlal Nehru Trust archive as of now?

Palat: What has been published is about 35,000 documents, and approximately 75,000 pages. Now, what has not been selected is an equal amount. These are just Nehru’s items and anything related to Nehru.

His speeches themselves are very long. We transcribed them from the recordings. Those in Hindi have been preserved, the original transcripts exist, and English translations were made.

Q. There is such a large body of private papers of Nehru. As a historian, what would you say it reflects about the historical consciousness of Nehru?

Palat: Well, it says everything. You have the whole of Nehru there. He was transparent, so whatever you want to investigate is there. Anyone in a senior position keeps such archives, but Nehru was also remarkable for his candour, and stood out in this regard.

As a prime minister, this automatically happens. There is a whole bureaucracy under him, a secretariat which creates the archive as he speaks or writes. These are public records. Even the secret documents, or what were secrets, but are no longer secret, are available.

Public figures have very individual personalities. They think, write, and record themselves in different ways. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, was writing every day. He was also another totally transparent person, to the extent that he said, I do not need to write theory because my life is my theory. And his life is fully recorded, because he was recording almost automatically.

A former history professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Palat has spent years working through thousands of documents housed at the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF). (Express Photo by Adrija Roychowdhury)

Nehru, in some sense, was the same. Whatever he thought, he wrote down, and whatever he wrote down, he expressed outright. He did not like concealment. For operational reasons, certain matters were confidential at the time. But generally, he spoke out freely in Parliament and elsewhere, and all those speeches are very valuable. There is nothing very special that is hidden away anywhere.

He was conscious of the importance of the historical record, and even before he became prime minister, he kept his records in an orderly fashion. So we also have archives from his earlier days.

Q. While you were going through his papers, is there something in particular that really struck you?

Palat: What strikes you is that, actually, he is not hiding anything. That is what is remarkable. You are not discovering things about him that you never knew. In fact, you get a more positive view of him by reading it all.

For example, during his time, his public image was that he was a weak, vacillating person. Or that he was not tough the way Sardar Patel or Indira Gandhi was. But it is when you read him thoroughly that you realise that that is the wrong way to approach him. His primary concern was to keep the country together and preserve its independence fully.

After all, he had gone through a partition, and afterwards, one of the biggest jobs was to bring the people together into one nation, rather than allowing them to fight each other and giving the British an opening to exploit those divisions. So, the most significant objective was to keep the country united and ensure its global independence, and to advance the country’s development, which had been arrested for 130 years under colonialism. It is when you look at that picture that you realise that he did an extraordinary job.

Being tough for its own sake doesn’t help. If you are too tough, you alienate people. Already, he was dealing with insurgencies, beginning with the Communist ones, and later the one in Nagaland. The trouble in Kashmir was a never-ending problem. Nobody after him has managed to solve Kashmir either.

We must remember that what he was handed was not a united country. It was a divided country. He had to ensure that what remained was not only administratively united, but that everyone was politically active together as one nation. It was his achievement, and for that, he had to keep accommodating competing demands and adjusting to create consensus. You see that very clearly when you read his Selected Works.

Q. Is there any particular set of documents that comes to your mind in this regard?

Palat: The linguistic states, I would say, is one of his greatest acts of statesmanship. At first, he was not keen on the linguistic states because he was afraid we would have another partition. Before Partition, he was perfectly comfortable with the idea because it was an old Congress policy to have Provincial Congress Committees based on language. But after Partition, he was nervous about it.

He initially opposed the idea of Andhra Pradesh. But he saw the democratic impulse behind it, and he would say, if there is so much democratic pressure, then you do not object to it. After the division of Bombay, he said, this is something we have to support because it is not just a mass movement, but the intelligentsia also wants it. Everybody wants it.

He had realised that, actually, it would stabilise the country’s politics and unify it better. The linguistic reorganisation greatly strengthened the unity of the country.

He was opposed only to Punjab, since he saw it as a communal demand.

Q. How would you say that private papers help in the process of history writing?

Palat: What is private and public is never clear. A public figure’s private activity cannot be distinguished from his or her public life. It is a legal fiction to make this distinction. Once you are in the public domain, everything you do and say is of interest to the historian. So many private activities are investigated by historians.

History is written at so many levels. One can write it in the most elevated, political, philosophical style about decision-making and strategy. But when one investigates decision-making, one suddenly finds that private concerns are also vitally important, which most people don’t declare publicly.

That is discovered in private papers. Even the private papers of unknown individuals have been examined by historians of mentalities and popular culture. Historians study anything and everything that people do.