NMML’s Modernisation Programme Unveiled

The project to digitise all archival material (90 lakh archival documents and 110 lakh pages of newspapers on microfilm) available at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi’s Teen Murti House, that was launched with a grant from the Prime Minister’s Office a year-and-a-half ago (it was conveived in 2006), is fully underway.

A catalogue of 2.5 lakh books in the Library—digitised in searchable format, author-wise and title-wise—is already available on the NMML website www.nehrumrmorial.com and this currently receives a daily average of more than 500 visitors. As for manuscripts, 50 collections (containing 7,66,947 images)—including the papers of Bhulabhai Desai, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, P.C. Mahalanobis, P.N. Haksar, Vijaylakshmi Pandit, G.D. Birla, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay—have been uploaded on the same website and more are in the process of being uploaded. The transcripts of oral history interviews number 834 (containing 73,058 images)—and those uploaded include the interviews of Dr K.N. Katju, Durgabai Deshmukh, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King (Mrs Coretta Scott). There are also 534 albums of photographs of various subjects (containing 29,802 photos), 176 rolls of microfilms (comprising 1,00,970 images namely of Amrita Bazar Patrika from 1905 to 1938), several films and audio-clips including Nehru’s reputed “the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere” speech following Gandhiji’s assassination—these have all been digitised (but not yet fully uploaded).

Among the letters, which could be read online shortly, is Motilal Nehru’s communication to his son Jawahar from 7 Ferozepur Road, Lahore on June 30, 1919 wherein he writes:

Malaviya arrived in Amritsar after I posted my letter yesterday. We then visited the Jallianwala Bagh. It was a truly gruesome sight. In spite of the lapse of nearly two-and-a-half months after the incident, there were more than one corpse to be seen floating in the well in a highly decomposed state. We spent some time there and examined the whole place very carefully. This was done in boiling heat. We then saw the notional foot bridge and also burnt down buildings. Today was set apart for Gujranwala but both Malaviya and Shraddhanand were so much affected by the trial of yesterday that they decided to have some rest. We are discussing things today. Tomorrow we go to Gujranwala and I leave the day after…
It is no use writing anything about what we have seen threadbare. I shall tell you all when we meet.

The letters also include one of Aruna Asaf Ali, the stormy petrel of the 1942 ‘Quit India’ movement, who writes to Bapu from underground on why she doesn’t want to surrender, and one of Vijaylakshmi Pandit writing to her brother about her exasperating experiences at the UNO.

At the preview of the Digital Archieves Website at Teen Murti last month, NMML Director Prof Mridula Mukherjee said the digitisation project would help the institution’s materials to reach across to the masses all over the world. Digitised holdings will dramatically improve accessibility, ensure better preservation of documents by preventing excessive exposure of original documents, thereby increasing their longevity. “This is an effort to keep pace with the changing times, in keeping with our mandate of preserving our content and popularising it, making it as widely available as possible. One million pages have been digitised so far and half-a-million upgraded already.”

However, the NMML’s modernisation progra-mme does not cover only digitisation. Jawaharlal Nehru’s 30 letters to his daughter Indira in 1928 opening her eyes to the world first came out in book form entitled Letters from a Father to his Daughter in 1929. Now a brand new Braille version of it has been released on June 13 with Nehru’s foreword for the 1929 edition as well as the preface to the second (1931) edition.

The proposal to publish the Braille edition was first made in 2008 by Dr N. Ratnasree, the Director of the Nehru Planetarium, who is also associated with the Blind Persons’ Association in Kolkata. It was accepted the following year and the BPA Secretary, Anupam Chakraborty, approached the NMML for support. Says Prof Mridula Mukherjee, “Sonia Gandhi gave us the requisite permission and after that we provided financial support.” The plan is to distribute copies of the 109-page book, prepared by the Lal Bihari Shah Braille Academia (the Braille press and library project of the BPA), among the sightless in and around Delhi. “The NMML purchased 200 copies from us for the purpose,” informs Chakraborty, adding: “It’s a wonderful work for the dissemination of knowledge among the blind.”