Nehru in 100 volumes

With the release of the final volume of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Nehru Project—a mammoth effort of collation started in 1972—has come to an end

- SONI MISHRA

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU was expansive in everything that he wrote and spoke. After having served as a leader of the freedom movement for 30 years, he was prime minister for 17. It took 48 years to collate the archival material generated over the 47 years of his public life. The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, popularly known as the Nehru Project, is now complete, with the recent release of the 100th and final volume of the collection.

Madhavan K. Palat, who took over as the editor of the collection in 2011 and at volume number 44, describes it as the largest single archival publication of a historical kind which offers a panoramic view of 20th century Indian history from the perspective of one of its key figures.

“We do have publications of correspondence of Sardar [Vallabhbhai] Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Rajaji [C. Rajagopalachari] and so on. But none of them can be compared with the prime minister himself. And, especially a prime minister who was in a leadership position of a kind that was just next to [Mahatma] Gandhi’s,” said Palat.

The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund started the project in 1972. Prime minister Indira Gandhi, who chaired the fund, saw in it a lasting memorial to her father. The first editor was historian Sarvepalli Gopal, who laid the foundation by assembling all the documentation. This included the archives at Nehru’s house as well as documents from various government departments. Editors who followed in his shoes include historians like Mushirul Hasan and Mridula Mukherjee.