My encounter with the amazing historical work of Dharampal came about in 1976 in a most unexpected place: a library in Holland. I was at that time investigating material for a Ph.D dissertation, part of which dealt with the history of Indian and Chinese science and technology.
While there was certainly no dearth of historical material and scholarly books as far as Chinese science and technology were concerned—largely due to the work of Dr Joseph Needham, reflected in his multi-volumed Science and Civilisation in China— in contrast, scholarly work on Indian science and technology seemed to be almost non-existent. What was available seemed rudimentary, poor, unimaginative, wooden, more filled with philosophy and legend than fact.
Desperate and depressed, I wandered through the portals of every possible library in Holland trying to ict lay my hands on anything I could find. The irony of looking for material on Indian science and technology in Holland should not be missed. However, I was doing a Ph.D. there and had very little choice.
Then one morning, I walked into the South East Asia Institute on an Amsterdam street and found a book called Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century on the shelf. I took it down, curious. It was by a person named Dharampal whom I had not heard of before as a person or scholar cto active in that area of research. I took the book home and devoured it the same day. It altered my perception of India forever.
Now, more than twenty years later, I know that the book appears to have had a similarly electrifying effect on thousands of others who were fortunate to get a copy of it. It spawned a generation of Indians which was happy to see India thereafter quite differently from the images with which iit had been brought up in school, particularly English medium school.