It is important to reassess, formulate and develop India's civilizational and cultural imperatives in an increasingly globalised world. The nation’s perception of its ancient history plays a major role in this. The present series on the history of ancient India was conceived with this in mind. The aim is to put forward a nationalistic, factual and objective history of the ancient Indian past in eleven volumes. The cobwebs of certain ideas that we have lived with in the past are critically examined and in many cases found wanting and discarded.

The present volume, i.e. Volume II, discusses the post-Stone Age developments, dwelling on a vast array of interlinked themes such as the beginning of food-production, the phenomenon of the Indus civilization in all its regional diversities and features, and finally, the establishment of a ‘village India’ on the subcontinental level and its transformation into the phase of early historic urban growth. The volume is titled Protohistoric Foundations because these contain the seeds of what we see in the later contexts including the village India that we can still see, despite the impacts of modern socio-economic forces around us.