A shared sense of history and culture are the constitutive elements of individual and collective identities of citizens in a nation state. India's history and civilization have had unbroken continuity, albeit with periodic disruptions that in recent times have led to an understanding of India that is fragmented, incoherent, and incomplete. Given the giant strides of knowledge systems and ever improving tools of investigating the past, there is a need to collect, collate, interpret, and integrate new knowledge into India's history, while being respectfully inclusive of India's own recorded and oral traditions. It is this motivating vision that guides IHAR in it's public service, education, and research.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts is a centre encompassing the study and experience of all the arts – each form with its own integrity, yet within a dimension of mutual interdependence, interrelated with nature, social structure and cosmology. It partakes of the holistic worldview so powerfully articulated throughout Indian tradition. The arts are here understood to comprise the fields of creative and critical literature, written and oral; the visual arts, ranging from architecture, sculpture, painting and graphics to general material culture, photography and film; the performing arts of music, dance and theatre in their broadest connotation; and all else in fairs, festivals and lifestyle that has an artistic dimension. Through diverse programmes of research, publication, training, creative activities and performance, the IGNCA seeks to place the arts within the context of the natural and human environment.