Last week, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) Society, an autonomous body under the government of India, announced that it would be renamed “Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society.” The decision, unsurprisingly, has sparked a war of words between the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The charges being bandied about are equally predictable. The BJP’s view is that the renaming of the institution expressed the nation’s “deep commitment” to democracy, while the Congress accuses the BJP of trying to obliterate not just Nehruvian history but also Nehru’s legacy to modern Indian politics. In politicising the issue, one misses the wood for the trees.
The Evolution of the NMML
What scholars know today as the NMML originally began within the Teen Murti Bhawan, a sprawling colonial building named after the three statues (which you can see as you drive by Teen Murti-Haifa Chowk on Teen Murti Marg), established in 1922 in honour of the services of the princely states of Jodhpur, Hyderabad, and Mysore (with detachments from Bhavnagar, Kashmir and Kathiawar), in the liberation of Haifa, during World War I.
Known as Flagstaff House during the Raj, it was used as the residence of the Commander-in-Chief, before it was taken over by Jawaharlal Nehru after India’s independence. Upon Nehru’s death, it was decided that Teen Murti Bhawan would serve as a museum and a library, which would promote original research in modern Indian history, with special reference to the Nehruvian era.
Over the years, as interest in India’s past grew, the library evolved into a more multi-faceted repository. As more and more private papers were donated, more space was required and an exclusive library building was constructed, inaugurated by the then President V V Giri in 1974. This is where scholars studying at the NMML may be found even today. As even more space became the need of the hour, it necessitated the further construction of an annexe building in 1989.
In short: there has always been a museum, as well as a library, on the grounds of Teen Murti Bhawan. In its early days, this museum certainly was fashioned as a memorial to Nehru himself, the architect of modern India. It housed the drafts for his speeches and his letters to his daughter, as well as his beautiful library and the souvenirs that foreign dignitaries brought him.
Understanding What the NMML Consists of
What the BJP has done, in 2023, is to widen the scope of this museum. As a historian, I appreciate the need for Indians to understand the legacies of different prime ministers across the decades. In a country where not enough popular or academic work has been done on post-independence politics, the BJP has smartly filled a gap that most Indians value, judging by the footfall that the sangrahlaya sees every day. In that sense, the concept of a sangrahlaya itself is not a bad idea, though the versions of history being presented in the exhibits is a subject for another story.
But as far as the library itself goes, the fact that it has been subsumed under the expansive – and somewhat unwieldy – umbrella of the “Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society” is more than a little concerning. This is not to say that NMML has not seen its share of political controversy over the years. But in all these moments, it is easy to miss the wood for the trees.
The library’s origins were never to do with Nehru himself, nor was it ever intended to be prime real estate which focused only on the leaders of this country. That is an important distinction and can be seen even at a casual glance at the catalogues of the library. Jawaharlal Nehru’s papers are most certainly here but there are so many others that it almost boggles the mind.
The roster of those whose papers can be found at the NMML is immense, ranging from freedom fighters to the Father of the Nation; from Sarojini Naidu to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur; from former British ICS officials who served the Raj to those of MGK Menon, who briefly headed India’s space programme; and from the proceedings of the All-India Congress Committees to the volumes of the Quaid-e-Azam’s private papers. There are memoirs of journalists and oral histories of former union ministers; as well as microfilms of old editions of national and regional dailies and weeklies.
But not everything here is political. An interested scholar may find the intimately personal in the letters and diaries of private individuals, or the flamboyantly odd in the papers of forgotten ranis and maharajas. Geopolitics can be better understood in the correspondence of former foreign ministers and diplomats. Over the years, the NMML has grown to become much more than a library or even a repository of documents and papers. It is an archive of, among other things, post-colonial India’s memories and records.
A Congress-BJP Ping-pong Match
To reduce it, then, only to the doings of prime ministers is to miss the point of a research institution entirely. There is no commitment to democracy in the renaming of an institution. If anything, by only focusing on the contributions of prime ministers, one risks reducing them to being the mascots of different eras, rather than remembering them as leaders, capable of great mistakes as well as great successes.
After all, a nation is not built by a prime minister alone. It is shaped by diplomats, bureaucrats and legitimised through their paperwork. It is forged through the blood spilled in the fire of revolution. It finds its voice in the slogans of students and freedom fighters. It is built by communities, by different languages and religions.
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library began with an eye to the future. It evolved based on a keen realisation that in order for India to find its way to true power, it needed to understand its post-colonial past. But that aim is lost in the ping-pong match of Whose Museum and Library Is It Anyway? that the Congress and the BJP seem to be playing.
(Narayani Basu is a historian and the author of V P Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India (Simon & Schuster India, 2020) and Allegiance: Azaadi & the End of Empire (Fifty Two Publications, 2022). This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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