Founded on November 7, 1938, on the auspicious Kartik Sud Purnima, Samvat 1995, nearly a decade before the advent of Independence, with the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi and co-operation and support of several distinguished stalwarts of India's freedom movement, the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan has grown, from small beginnings, into a comprehensive all-India intellectual, cultural and educational movement. It is totally apolitical.

Its founder, Kulapati Dr. K.M. Munshi, looked upon the Bhavan as an 'Adventure in Faith', a faith in India's past, present and future. It is also a faith in India's people who have a rich and unbroken cultural heritage. True to its goal of revitalising Dharma or the Moral Law in its three-fold aspects of Truth, Love and Beauty - Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram - the Bhavan is ceaselessly striving to carry forward India's ageless message of Faith, Self-discipline and Dedication - Shraddha, Samyama and Samarpana. The Bhavan believes that there are elements in all cultures which transcend all barriers and knits people together. Its ideal is: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: "The World Is One Family." Its motto is Aa no bhadraah kratavo yantu vishwatah: "Let noble thoughts come to us from every side."

During the last six decades and more of its existence, the Bhavan has blossomed into an ever-growing, voluntary, apolitical national movement with an international outlook, devoted to life, literature and culture. Bhavan's programmes cover "all aspects of life from the cradle to the grave and beyond….it fills a growing vacuum in modern life" as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru observed when he first visited the Bhavan in 1950.