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One man changed the World for all times!
Comprehensive Website on the life and works of
Mahatma Gandhi
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Gandhi's Legacy and Reception in Hungary |
- By Anna Aklan* and Tibor Kovacs#One author of the present lines had the privilege to live in New Delhi for many years. The compound where he lived on one side was bordered by Tees January Marg, a stone’s throw away from the venue of the Mahatma’s martyrdom. This proximity gave him the freedom and opportunity to visit Gandhi Smrti as often as possible to pay tribute to the Great Soul of India and the world. It was always touching to see how the simple visitors one comes across there, even seventy years after the demise of the Indian nation’s giant, still keep him respected and loved. Gandhi's impact is enormous throughout the world, and there is even further potential for how it could bring about peace and reconciliation in our peaceless world. If we consider, for example, vegetarianism, one of the fundamental manifestations of his teaching of non-violence, or in Sanskrit, ahiA sâ, two significant results would follow that are highly relevant today. Firstly, we will understand that he was a visionary, a prophet, who foresaw a radical but manageable solution for feeding the people of the 21st and 22nd centuries, thus putting an end to famine. On the other hand, environmentalists today, who are truly keen on reversing the harmful effects of climate change, also propagate vegetarianism (or, in terms that are more acceptable for the majority, reduction in meat consumption) as an important way of diminishing the harmful effects of the massive meat industry. We can consider it a justification of the Mahatma’s teachings which he started to propagate more than a hundred years ago. The fact that India’s independence was gained relatively peacefully - apart from the bloodshed that followed later - proves his political conviction was correct. Although he died of aggressive hands, his death added one more point to the relevance of his life: he died for what he believed in, thus becoming the icon of the non-violent resistance movement that may gain more and more followers worldwide, namely peaceful solution to economic, political and military problems among conflicting partners. Also, his approach to the poor is widely admired and respected. Similar to another saintly person of India, Mother Teresa, whom he never met personally, he shared the same love for the downtrodden, the destitute, the lonely, and the poor. This spiritual greatness contributed largely to the respect he won in each corner of India and elsewhere. Gandhi's legacy and reception in HungaryIn Hungary, Gandhi's activities, his philosophy, and ideas were conveyed by well-read and popular authors like Ervin Baktay, Amrita Sher-Gil’s maternal uncle, who visited India between 1926-29 and later. Baktay was one of the major Hungarian Indologists who did extensive research in India and whose pioneering writings and books contributed greatly to the knowledge of India in Hungary. His book entitled Gandhi: A Book on Mahatma Gandhi, the Hero of India’s Freedom1 was a milestone in making the Indian philosophy and Gandhi's thought available for the Hungarian public in the 1930s. Other important characters of Hungarian origin who were known to Gandhi are Elisabeth Sass-Brunner and her daughter, Elisabeth Brunner, who had the privilege to meet Gandhi personally. The two eminent painters were devoted artists who travelled to India from Hungary following their visionary call. Due to the sincere respect they had both for Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, they obtained permission to paint their portraits. They visited the poet in Santiniketan and stayed in Gandhi's Sabarmati ashram. Unfortunately, at that time, the great freedom fighter was imprisoned. They finally met the Mahatma in 1934 in Bangalore, and the younger paintress gained Gandhi's approval of the picture.2 Elisabeth Brunner’s Gandhi-portrait is the only known painting that Gandhi posed for in his life. Gandhi and his freedom movement appear in one of the most popular novels about India from the 1930s, the Fire of Bengal by Rozsa Hajnéczy. Her husband, Gyula Germanus, a historian and orientalist, was invited by Tagore to set up and teach at the Islamic Department at his Santiniketan University. Germanus and his wife spent some three years in India, allowing them to look into the social and political happenings of the times. The novel positively depicts Gandhi’s peace movement. During his stay in India, Germanus published several books like Modern Movements in Islam, and India Today. In his book entitled The light of India - Mahatma Gandhi3 published in 1934 in Budapest, he describes Gandhi's life, his character, and his teachings. He was also fortunate to meet the independence movement's leader in person. Let us not forget to mention another Hungarian who, although always in the background, was present during several changes in India’s 20th-century history: Shobha (Fori) Nehru, wife of Braj Kumar Nehru, who throughout her long life assisted and took part in the formation of the country’s history. B.K. Nehru was a cousin of the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Shobha Nehru, called Magdolna Friedmann at that time, left Hungary after the numerous clausus law4 was introduced in Hungary to study at the London School of Economics, where she met her future husband. As part of the Nehru family, “she grieved beside the body of Mahatma Gandhi.”5 She revealed in personal interviews that following Gandhi's assassination, in the absence of her husband, she was always ready to receive foreign dignitaries coming to pay respect to the martyred hero of India. So far, we have talked about contemporaries of Gandhi, several of whom had the privilege to meet the Great Soul in person. His death, however, marked the end of an era. Parallel to the bloodshed and difficulties of the birth of three countries in the territory of former India, Europe, too, got divided along the Iron Curtain. Information and books were censored, and the tyranny of the Soviet regime gloomed Hungarians’ interest in India for several decades. However, India as a non-aligned state was not completely banned in Hungary. In the 1960s, Gandhi’s message was kept alive and presented in various studies by the poet and translator Istvan Janosy,6 who saw Gandhi as an example to follow and who did follow him in his own way. Knowledge about Gandhi was revived in the 1970s especially due to the writings of Vera Gathy. A historian and sociologist, Gathy gave a detailed description of the independence movement and Gandhi’s paramount role in her scholarly works. In 1970, she published a monograph on the great leader.7 She also wrote extensively on modern India and was considered the first and most reliable authority on Gandhi in Hungary until she died in 2017. She also co-published a book on Gandhi with Andras Balogh, an eminent historian and a diplomat to India and Thailand, in 2000.8 In the 1980s another important work was written by Gyorgy Kalmar, a well-known political journalist who lived in India: Gandhi. Dreams — Politics — Reality.9 In the new millennium, a new generation of Hungarian scholars is emerging who are shifting their focus from the Mahatma’s political activism and historical activities to his political and religious philosophy, or else from practicalities to theory. The most prominent representative of these scholars is Dezsō Szenkovics, whose doctoral research on Gandhi was published under the title Central Concepts of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's Philosophy.10 Szenkovics publishes in Hungarian, but lives in Romania, in the Hungarian-inhabited Transylvanian area. Another smaller publication aimed more at the general public, reflects other aspects of Gandhi's teachings, namely his holistic approach to human life: his views on the environment, division of labour in society, gender roles, healthcare, etc. The book is a careful selection of his quotations assembled by Anna Aklan.11 In 2021, a special Gandhi issue of the scholarly journal Világtörténet (Global History) was published, which includes the papers of a 2020 conference commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of the Mahatma, dedicated to the “Figure of Mahatma Gandhi in History and Cultural Memory.”12 The important work of translating Gandhi’s works into Hungarian has also been started. As is well-known, Gandhi was a prolific author. However, he mainly published articles in the journals and magazines he edited. Out of the individual books, however, the most relevant ones, his Autobiography, and Hind Swaraj, have been translated into Hungarian and have been published several times.”13 Besides scholarly books written about the Mahatma, his memory in Hungary is also kept alive in other forms. Poets and writers were inspired by him, such as Gyula Juhász, who dedicated a poem to him in 1924. István Jánosy also dedicated several poems to the Mahatma in the 1960ies. Laszló Németh, an eminent Hungarian writer, wrote a stage play entitled “Gandhi’s Death” in 1963. In the fine arts, Gandhi is represented in a group statue in Budapest, where the world’s greatest religious figures meet silently around an orb. At least, that is what Hungarian sculptor Nándor Wagner envisioned when he created “The Garden of Philosophers,” a cluster of statues perched atop the crown of the popular hill, Gellért Hill, overlooking the Danube. The artist's intention with this piece was to promote mutual understanding among the world’s religions. The group of statues features an inner circle composed of what the artist saw as the five founders of the world’s major religions: Abraham, Jesus, Buddha, Laozi, and Akhenaten. The orb they gather around is about the size of a bigger apple and is intended to represent the similarities in what these major religions worship. Looking from the side-lines at this surreal meeting are Mahatma Gandhi, Daruma Daishi (Bodhidharma), and Saint Francis, who Wagner saw as leaders fostering spiritual enlightenment. Gandhi's statue is the most recognizable. On the occasion of Gandhi's 150th birthday, the Hungarian Post Office issued a commemorative miniature sheet containing four identical stamps. This philatelic specialty brings forward the memory of the Father of the Nation in Hungary and among international stamp collectors. Besides books and art, Gandhi’s influence in Hungary had a special manifestation during the change of the regime in the 1980s. In the 80s, intellectuals started to get organized in secret meetings. The whole country felt the oppression of communism, and the urge to action was felt at these secret gatherings. Unofficial and uncensored writings called samizdat were circulating. Intellectuals were secretly reading copies of the Hind Swaraj and did not only identify with India’s freedom struggle, but regarded her as a serious inspiration. The lesson the people of Hungary learnt in 1956 was to avoid armed struggle and all kinds of violence. Gandhi showed them a way to a successful liberation through civil disobedience. A further special connection between Gandhi and contemporary Hungary reflects the Great Soul’s support for the downtrodden. A secondary school in Hungary for Roma students adopted his name, thus becoming an important institution on its own for those coming from difficult and disadvantaged backgrounds. The Gandhi Secondary School, Pécs, is unique not only in Hungary but also in Europe for being a Roma minority educational institution. Besides general education preparing the students for matriculation, they also teach subjects about Roma history and India, their country of origin, thus enhancing their dignity in their roots instead of simply trying to assimilate Roma students into the majority culture. Gandhi's influence in his own time can be measured from the notes the great physicist and thinker Albert Einstein wrote about him: “Mahatma Gandhi's life achievement stands unique in political history. He has invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country, and practised it with greatest energy and devotion. The moral influence he had on the consciously thinking human being of the entire civilised world will probably be much more lasting than it seems in our time with its overestimation of brutal violent forces. Because lasting will only be the work of such statesmen who wake up and strengthen the moral power of their people through their example and educational works. We may all be happy and grateful that destiny gifted us with such an enlightened contemporary, a role model for the generations to come. Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.”14 There is a great unity among nations searching for peace and freedom through morally acceptable ways. Elizabeth Sass-Brunner put it this way: ‘This power [of national freedom] does not ask questions, just carries me away. Where? To the ocean, to an undulation, to a swaying where there is no separate will — this love, this power, this supreme extraordinary driving force is embodied in Gandhi, the Mahatma. This is a power that frightens no-one and is never frightened – it exists and keeps the whole world in motion...’15 Notes and References:
Courtesy: The article has been adapted from Gandhi Marg, Volume 44 Number 1, April-June 2022 1. Anna Katalin Aklan is external lecturer, Department of Indian Studies, Eétvés Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary. Address: 1088 Budapest, Muzeum krt. 6-8/A. Email: anna.katalin.aklan@gmail.com |