He had mastered many languages including Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi.
On 15 May, Premier Zhou Enlai received him and they discussed Dunhuang and the visit of the seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang en route to India.
The expedition included doctors, nurses, photographers, cooks, car mechanics, scholars from Peking University and The Academy of Sciences, archaeologists, and a female companion for Sudarshana.
My father records the cold as unbearable, a jolting journey in a convoy plane and the bone-racking Polish car M20 crossing the vast desert.
These impressed leaders like Nehru, Zhou Enlai and Sukarno who extended personal encouragement, and appreciation to him for excavatory missions in search of Indian artifacts and manuscripts in those countries.
The Vihar was as Acharya Raghuvira's personal centre of research work in Indian culture, literature and religion with studies in its widespread impact and proliferation from Mongolia to Indonesia, China, Russia, and Central Asia.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, President Rajendra Prasad and ambassadors of nearly all South-East Asian countries used to visit it to see the progress of his work and his latest collections.
The Indian National Congress recognized Raghu Vira's linguistic expertise and elected him first to Constituent Assembly in 1948 and then to Rajya Sabha in 1952 and 1957.
In 1948 he clashed with Congress Party bosses on the question of Sheikh Abdullah's repressive policies against people of Jammu represented by Praja Parishad.
Even before RSS work began in Lahore, he started his Hindu Rakshak Sangh, and used to hold daily drills in DAV College grounds.
Apart from being a scholar, he was also a man of great energy and the highest ideas, that he sometimes put into practice by working among the untouchables in villages and spending some time in Gandhiji's Sabarmati Ashram.
He died in a car accident near Kanpur when, as Jana Sangh President, he was going to do election campaign for his socialist friend Ram Manohar Lohia's by-election in the Farrukhabad Lok Sabha constituency in UP in May 1963.