In the third week of January 2020 – exactly a year ago – I was in New Delhi, working in the collections of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I first discovered the archival riches of the NMML in the early 1980s, and explored them most fully while living in Delhi between 1988 and 1994. In those years I would spend a couple of days a week in the NMML, exploring its repository of private papers of major (and minor) figures in modern Indian history and digging deep into its holdings of old newspapers.
In 1994, I moved to Bangalore. I no longer had daily access to the NMML, and made do with a few trips a year. These were generally in January, April, September and November, thus escaping the brutal heat of summer and the sapping stickiness of the monsoon too. I would book myself for a week or ten days in a boarding house in New Delhi, within walking distance of the NMML. I would reach the Manuscripts Room at 9 am, as soon as it opened, colonise a desk by the window,…