Welcome Remarks by Dr Arvind Gupta, Director VIF on the Release of History of Ancient India volumes

Sh Ajit Doval Ji,

Sh Gurumurthy Ji,

Prof Dilip Chakrabarti Ji

Members of the media and

Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to today’s function being organised to release the VIF’s History of Ancient India Volumes. The first five books were released in Dec 2013 by Sh LK Advani. We are delighted to release the remaining volumes.

We are delighted that Sh Ajit Doval, National Security Advisor and Sh S Gurumurthy, Chairman of the Board of Trustee of the VIF, are with us today. They are the initiators of the series. The idea of the project was conceived by Sh Gurumurthy Ji and brought to fruition by Ajit Doval Ji. This was a gigantic task. I am sure they will be satisfied that the flagship project of the VIF, which was started by them, has been completed successfully.
As Sh Doval Ji notes in his foreword in the first volume, the VIF undertook the task envisioned by Swami Vivekananda: Indians needed to write Indian history and rescue lost and hidden treasures from oblivion. The result was the History of Ancient India series.

The idea behind bringing these volumes was to remove the distortions in writing Indian history by western scholars and their faithful followers in India who gave a selective one-sided narration of the exploits of the foreign invaders into India, deliberately ignored India’s achievements and generating an inferiority complex amongst Indians about their past. The present volumes tend to correct this distortion.

The History of Ancient India series covers India’s prehistoric roots, its proto-historic foundations, political, social, economic history and ancient India’s contributions to science and technology, medicine, literature, religious and philosophical system. These should be of great interest to the young generation at a time when India is experiencing a renaissance.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Prof Dilip Chakrabarti, who has worked continuously without break on the project for the past several years. Without his dedication, hard work, guidance, inspiration and perseverance, this project would not have been completed. Thank you, sir.
We are grateful to Prof Makkhan Lal, who co-edited the first five volumes with Prof Chakrabarti, for his significant contributions in the initial years. He could not be with us today as he is travelling.

Prof Dilip Chakrabarti and Prof Makkhan Lal were able to mobilize a large number of scholars and academics to write for these volumes. We hope that these volumes will serve as reference books for future researchers.
I now request Sh Ajit Doval Ji to kindly release the Volumes.