Tamil Nadu Congress Committee’s senior vice president A. Gopanna called on former Congress president Sonia Gandhi in New Delhi on March 30, 2025. Photo: Special Arrangement
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement

When the senior vice-president of the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee and a longstanding face of the party A. Gopanna met former party president Sonia Gandhi on March 28 in New Delhi, it was not yet another meeting between a State-level office-bearer and one of the key decision-makers in the Congress. 

Having come to know that Mr. Gopanna, in over 15 years, had collected thousands of rare and old photographs of the former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) and others in her family, Ms. Gandhi wanted him to spare 700 photographs for the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, which has proposed to establish a website in the memory of the former Prime Minister.

The State-level functionary had used all these photographs in his biography in English on Nehru, which was launched by the former President Pranab Mukherjee (1935-2020) in New Delhi in May 2018, in the presence of the late former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, former Vice President M. Hamid Ansari, and veteran journalist N. Ram.  The Tamil version has since been brought out.

“After I authored an exhaustive biography in Tamil on Kamaraj, I began collecting photographs of Nehru in 2007 and went on for 10 years,” Mr. Gopanna said, adding, “At present, I have 7,000 pictures of Nehru.” Many of these photographs were sourced from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Society, now called the Prime Ministers Museum and Library Society. He handed over, in a pen drive, all 7,000 pictures to Ms. Gandhi for the Nehru website project.

Mr. Gopanna continues to frequent a couple of other libraries in New Delhi to collect numerous historical pictures. 

Subsequent to the completion of his book on Nehru, he decided to cover the Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) and Rajiv Gandhi (1944-1991), also former Prime Ministers. “I have around 3,000 pictures of Indira-ji, and 2,500 of Rajiv-ji, in addition to 3,500 photos of Kamaraj,” he said.  His collection of several thousand photographs includes other personalities as well. 

By August, Mr. Gopanna is hopeful of bringing out a coffee table book on Indira Gandhi. “The Tamil version will be out first, followed by the English version a few months later. Likewise, I hope to cover Rajiv Gandhi too,” Mr. Gopanna said, adding that he wanted to author a book on the history of the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, which has completed more than 100 years in existence.