Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion X:		Mehrsprachigkeit: Regionen, "Nationen", Multikulturalität, Interkulturalität, Transkulturalität
Section X:		Multilingualism: Regions, "Nations", Multiculturalism, Interculturalism and Transculturalism
Section X:		Plurilinguisme: régions, "nations", multiculturalité, interculturalité, transculturalité

Margit Köves (New Delhi)

French

The Reception of the Orient and India in Hungary

In the nineteenth and twentieth century the Orient in general, and India in particular formed a sphere in Hungary to transcend limitations: such as the lack of constitutional and civil rights, the frustrations of the Lost Freedom Struggle, the absence of a uniform civil code and unequal development in different areas of the economy and social life.

In this paper I would like to speak about the changes in the reception of the Orient and the introduction and transformation of certain themes. To highlight the differences in the reception of the Orient and India in different periods in Hungary I would like to divide the material into three different phases 1. In the phase 1800-1850 all efforts are directed to define and forge a national identity, and the Orient and India emerged supreme; at the end of this period analogies between the Habsburg Monarchy and the British Empire are drawn upon 2. after the failure of the Hungarian Freedom Struggle (1850-1900) the Orient forms an alternative where the antinomies of reality are played out at a different level; oriental studies are to take up the task to pursue the narrative of oriental connection 3. in the phase 1900-1950 - the Orient as utopia.

1. Constructing a narrative of the nation (1800-1850)

In the first half of the nineteenth century India was considered a solution to the problem of Hungarian prehistory and to the lack of a national language. The formation of national consciousness was closely linked to the Orient in Hungarian Romanticism. The poets and writers lived up to the expectation that the poet should restore to the nation its historical past and highlight its ancient glory. Herder's forecast about Hungarians disappearing in the multitude of Slavic and Germanic peoples called forth the resistance to German as the official language and the search for the lost origins of Hungarians in Asia. (1) The construction of the narrative of national origins ran parallel to Greek, Rumanian and Bulgarian claims of an antique past and the emergence of a larger Slavic political unity. (2) The Orient and India emerged supreme in this phase. The role of the national language as a carrier of national spirit which has a "cultural mission" in the life of the nation led to the establishment of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and to the efforts for the reform of Hungarian so that it could become the vehicle of scientific and literary exchange. (3) Alexander Csoma de Körös (1781-1842), a Szekler Hungarian from Transylvania traveled and walked to India after two years of studies in Göttingen. Though he failed to find the origins of the Hungarians in Asia in the course of his nine years of stay in Ladakh he initiated the study of Tibeto-Sanskrit literature and compiled the first English grammar and dictionary of Tibetan.(4) Csoma's figure left a great impact on the collection of national images.(5)

Early Romanticism took up the theme of the Hungarian - Hunnish connection in epic poetry and gave the newly reformed language its birthright.(6) Political philosophy was also imprinted by he idea of the "specific qualities of Hungarians carried from their ancient cradle in Asia".(7)

Analogies: Habsburg Monarchy and the British Empire

By the middle of the nineteenth century several Hungarians visited India, artists like Ágost Schoefft, scholars like G.W.Leitner occupied significant positions in the Punjab. The exhibitions of Schoefft's portraits of the ruler Ranjit Singh (8) and his court in the eighteen fifties and Leitner's collections presented in Vienna (9) in exhibitions (1870, 1883) and at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 sought to present Ranjit Singh's Court, Indian life and the art of India to the Habsburg Court. The view of a multilingual, multinational empire with a ruling Monarchy and the crown to create unity brought about a number of analogies with the Habsburg Empire. Leitner understood the value of semiotic symbols to reinforce unity . At the time of the Imperial Assemblage (1877) when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India Leitner invented the term 'Kaiser-i Hind' recalling the imperial titles of Roman Caesar and the German Kaiser.(10) In his post as principal of the Punjab University College at Lahore as part of the British administration, Leitner tried to initiate a movement to bring about a renaissance of local languages, applying the ideology of linguistic nationalism in the Indian context.(11)

2. The Orient and India as an alternative (1850-1900)

After the Freedom Struggle (1850-1900) the function of literature changed parallel to the institutionalization of oriental studies and to a widening network of professional journals and newspapers in Hungary.(12) After the failure of the Hungarian Freedom Struggle (1849) the Orient often played the role of an alternative where antinomies of reality are played out at a different level. Historical fiction derived themes from "the shared history" of Ottoman Turkish occupation (13) and imbibed the high decorativity and grandiosity of the Turkish world in the French paintings of Ingres and Gerome. Poetry utilized the Hunnish - Hungarian theme, this time in a form of "retreat", "return" and " redemption"as an oriental counter-myth to the German Nibelung myth.(14) The theme of the ' Hindu' was transformed into a symbol of specific isolation, "an enclosure" , an alien existence. The ambiguities of bourgeois development and liberalism are reflected in literature and oriental studies in the complexity of the historical subject which is continuously broken up and formed anew.(15)

Oriental studies and the problematic nature of bourgeois development

In Hungary, like elsewhere in Europe, the institutionalization of oriental studies went hand in hand with historical linguistics and classical philology. The first university appointment made in the area of non-biblical Eastern languages in 1865 was given to Ármin Vámbéry who occupied the chair of Turkish and Arabic studies.(16) Vámbéry attached Hungarian prehistory to Oriental studies and even now this is a major area in research, directed to clarify details of Hungarian history before the conquest of the Carpathian Basin. This research has always been expected to live up to the nationalist trend in cultural politics and the satisfaction of this expectation has remained a question of the autonomy of individual academics.

The work of orientalists reflected the discrepancy between the development of bourgeois institutions and industrial monopoly and other areas of culture. The ideals of the Enlightenment: freedom, equality before the law were seen as their ultimate limitations, in the differences between original desires and hopes attached to these ideals. I would like to discuss the work of two orientalists Ignaz Goldziher and Aurel Stein in the context of their relationship to the community of the nation, to their social groups and to the state. Goldziher in his work on western ('magribi') and eastern ('masriqi') Islam dealt with problems of nation-building, the 'organic' and 'inorganic' elements of national formation and elaborated the role of myth in the relationship between production and ideology. His work can also be seen in the light of the hopes and frustrations with the course of Jewish emancipation, the belief in the possibility of religion remaining an ethical portion of the private sphere. (17)

Aurel Stein directed the excavations in Central Asia and established material evidence with regard to contacts between India, Asia and the Hellenised West as far back as the second century B.C. Stein's research also draws parallels between the organization of the state in the Turfan Basin in the ninth to thirteenth century A.D. and the organization of Hungarian tribes conquering the present day territory of Hungary. Stein ascribed to the Turkish-Uygur and Hungarian element innate political abilities which qualified them to rule over the original settlements in the area and in the meanwhile take over their cultural achievements, script, texts and religion.(18)

3. The Orient and India as Utopia (1900-1950)

Fin-de-Siecle literature, art and philosophy synthesized knowledge which was opened up by the modern editions of Indian texts and was disseminated by theosophy. (19) Theosophy exercised a great influence on modern writing, for example on Yeats, Strindberg and Maeterlinck. Major modern literature and philosophy in Hungary took root in the crevices of cultures, since many writers were bilingual and bicultural and this situation created a peculiar awareness of the private and public selves, and languages. The aesthetics of Secession rests on the tension of the different selves.The gravitation between the symbols of the East (the Ganges, Lotus flower) and the Hungarian wasteland in Endre Ady's poetry released the energy which changed the paradigm of Hungarian poetry. (20) The duality of the selves became a process of movement from a limited existence and consciousness to an unlimited physical body and infinite consciousness in Jenö Komjáthy's poetry.(21) Komjáthy's poetry and Béla Balázs's prose and poetry perhaps best could be understood in the context of the anticapitalist romanticism and this specific understanding of the Orient at the turn of the century. Balázs utilized a number of Indian themes and introduced the secession tale in Hungary. These tales change the conventions of time and space in the narrative. (22) Georg Lukács in his early work uses the figures of the Buddha, Radha, Krishna, concepts like maya, the transmigration of the Soul, the Soul (23) His diary, his Heidelberg notes and his notes on ethics also abound in references to the Vedas, the Bhagavadgita along with references to Meister Eckhart, John, the Baptist. (24) These were used to break out of the language of philosophy and help to point to the connection between the single phenomenon and the great substances.

The poetry of Sándor Weöres (25) and Lörincz Szabó (26) in the later part of the twentieth century take up Buddhist and Taoist poetry. India opened up new possibilities and an experience to be shared with for art historians like Fábri (27), Baktay, women-artists like Elizabeth Brunner and Elizabeth Sass-Brunner (28) whose work was mainly done in India. India also offered an escape from the shrinking possibilities in Hungary after the First World War. Weöres, Szabó, Komjáthy, Balázs and Lukács sought to transform the philosophical horizon of their work and along with the art historians and artists tried to involve a different multiple, existential subject of different urges and drives, such as hunger, will, desire of the kind which is indicated by Ernst Bloch in the Principle of Hope.

NOTES

1	J.G.Herder,Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, p.688.
2	Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London New York, 1991.
3	Dezsö Pais ed., Nyelvünk a reformkorban [Hungarian language in the Age of Reform], Budapest, 1955.
4	T.Duka, Life and Works of Alexander Csoma de Körös, New Delhi, 1972; Alexander Csoma de Körös,Collected Works ed. József Terjék, vol.1-4, Budapest, 1984.
5	Mór Jókai, És mégis mozog a föld [Eppur si muove], Budapest, 1896.
6	Mihály Vörösmarty, Zalán futása [The Flight of Zalán], in: Összes Költeményei [Collected Poems] , Budapest, 1963, pp.53-255.
7	István Széchenyi, A Kelet népe [The people of the East], in: Munkáiból [From István Széchenyi's Works] Budapest, 1907, vol.2., p.16.
8	A.S.Aijazuddin, Sikh Portraits by European Artists, London Delhi, 1979.
9	A lt- und Neu- Indische Kunstgegenstände aus Professor Leitner's Jüngster Sammlung, Wien, 1883.
10	Bernard S. Cohn, Representing Authority in Victorian India in: The Invention of Tradition ed. By Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Cambridge, 1992, pp.165-209.
11	G.W.Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab since Annexation and in 1882, Patiala, 1972.
12	Németh G. Béla, Forradalom után - Kiegyezés elött [After the Revolution - before the Compromise of 1867], Budapest, 1988, pp.7-56.
13	Mór Jókai, Erdély aranykora [The Golden Age of Transylvania], Budapest, 1962; A fehér rózsa [The White Rose], Budapest, 1962; A janicsárok végnapjai [The last days of Janissaries], Budapest, 1962.
14	János Arany, Buda halála [The death of Buda] in: Összes Költeményei [Collected Poems], Budapest, 1967, vol.2, pp.681-785.
15	János Arany, Hindu vers [Hindu poem] ibid.vol.1, p.840.
16	A.Vámbéry, The Story of my Struggles, London, 1906.
17	Ignaz Goldziher, Az iszlám kultúrája [The Culture of Islam] ed.R.Simon, Budapest, 1981; Napló [Diary],Budapest,1984.
18	Aurel Stein, Innermost Asia, New Delhi, 1981; On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks, London,1933.
19	Teozófia [Teosophy, the yearly journal of the Hungarian Theosophical Society] Budapest, 1911-1921.
20	Endre Ady, A Tisza-parton [On the Bank of the Tisza] in:Összes Versei [Collected Poems], Budapest, 1989, vol.1, pp.26-27.
21	Jenö Komjáthy, Homályból Válogatott Versek[Selected Poems] ed. Aladár Komlós, Budapest,1981.
22	This spatio-temporal sensitivity made Balázs also one of the first theoreticians of film. For Balázs's tales see, Béla Balázs, Hét mese [Seven Tales], Gyoma, 1918.
23	He uses these concepts and sometimes also undercuts them with plenty of irony.
24	Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, London, 1974; Napló-Tagebuch ed. Ferenc L. Lendvai, Budapest, 1981; Versuche zu einer Ethik ed.György Iván Mezei, Budapest, 1994; Dostojewski Notizen und Entwürfe, Budapest, 1985.
25	Sándor Weöres, Egyedül mindenkivel [Interviews, Statements,Confessions], Budapest, 1993; Sándor Weöres, Eternal Moment Selected Poems, Budapest, 1988.
26	Lörincz Szabó, Vers és Valóság [Collected poems with his commentaries], Budapest, 1990.
27	Charles Fabri, Indian Flamingo, London, 1947; Géza Bethlenfalvy, Charles Louis Fabri, Delhi, 1980.
28	Jaya Appasamy, The Art of Elizabeth Sass Brunner and Elizabeth Brunner, Delhi, 1979.

		Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion X:		Mehrsprachigkeit: Regionen, "Nationen", Multikulturalität, Interkulturalität, Transkulturalität
Section X:		Multilingualism: Regions, "Nations", Multiculturalism, Interculturalism and Transculturalism
Section X:		Plurilinguisme: régions, "nations", multiculturalité, interculturalité, transculturalité