Marg was founded in 1946, a year before India achieved independence, by a group of intellectuals spearheaded by Mulk Raj Anand, philosopher, litterateur, and social activist. Seeking to engender public debates about museums, monuments, urban planning, art education, and questions of heritage, Marg under his leadership for some thirty-odd years, undertook the massive task of identifying, cataloguing, and publicizing the nation’s heritage in the built, visual, and performing arts.
     As an avowed nationalist and modernist, Mulk Raj Anand set two goals for Marg. First, he and his colleagues sought to create a history for these practices, objects, and places which would allow them to survive and flourish in a post-colonial society. Second, he sought to encourage an international appreciation of Asia’s heritage, and within India, a cross-regional engagement with the nation’s collective inheritance.
     Today Marg continues this legacy under the general editorship of the internationally renowned art historian Pratapaditya Pal. We work with international and local scholars, seeking to create a space where South Asia’s past and present can be viewed from multiple perspectives. At the beginning of the new century, Marg has taken up the challenge of becoming more and more visible to Asia’s readers and heretofore unengaged Indian audiences. We also seek to address heritage as both something that is already made and something always in the process of becoming.
     Marg has been a forum for much pioneering research works to give just a few examples: Marg played the role of urban catalyst with the publication of Bombay: Planning and Dreaming (Vol. 18 No. 3) in 1965; the earliest excavations and studies at Hampi were documented in Splendours of the Vijayanagara Empire: Hampi (Vol. 33 No. 4) in 1981. More recently, our documentary film on Bombay, One City, Two Worlds (2002) has suggested a re-visioning of the city’s future planning.
     Back issues of volumes are in constant demand with students and scholars. In India Marg  has subscribers from diverse areas, even including remote regions of the Himalaya. Our international subscriber base includes institutions – libraries departments of art history, museums – and individuals in 32 countries.
Marg books are distributed in India and the rest of the world by respected distributors as well as by Marg’s own sales and marketing team.
     Marg started in 1946 with “seven ads and two rooms” provided by the visionary industrialist JRD Tata. From 1951 to 1986 Marg functioned as a division of Tata Sons Limited. From 1986 to 2010 Marg was a division of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, a Public Charitable Trust founded with support from the Tata Group. In 2009 a Public Charitable Trust, The Marg Foundation, was set up to take over the activities of Marg. The transfer of activities to The Marg Foundation took place on September 1, 2010.