Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Head of the Department of Indian Studies, distinguished plenary speakers, esteemed colleagues, dear students, ladies and gentlemen,

It is a privilege to open a conference of this calibre.

The Department of Indian Studies at ELTE is, I believe without exaggeration, the most complete and most serious centre of Indian studies in Central Europe. It carries students from their first Sanskrit paradigm through to the doctorate. It sustains an Indo-European linguistics research group, a publication series, a specialist library and a public lecture programme that has quietly built an Indophile readership in this city over decades. And it has now brought a four-year national research project on canons and standards in premodern Indian sub-Continent to its close with five plenary lectures and thirty-six papers, ranging across linguistics, epic and Purāṇic studies, Buddhism, literature, philosophy, the history of the sciences and South Indian studies. That is not merely a department. That is a school of scholarship.

Hungarian scholars have long earned that description. Sándor Kőrösi Csoma set out on foot to find the ancestral homeland of the Magyars and gave the world instead the first Tibetan grammar and dictionary, dying at Darjeeling in the service of learning. Sir Aurel Stein, born in this city, gave us the critical edition and translation of Kalhaṇa's Rājataraṅgiṇī, still indispensable to anyone working on the historiography of Kashmir. Ervin Baktay translated Indian literature into Hungarian, and urged his young niece, Amrita Sher-Gil, born here in Budapest, to paint India as she herself saw it. Patient, first-hand, source-based work: that is the Hungarian tradition, and it continues in this room.

Why does the study of India matter? First, for its own sake. The grammarians of Sanskrit, the logicians of Nyāya, the poets of the Prakrits, the Buddhist and Jaina compilers, the astronomers and mathematicians, these produced work of the first intellectual rank, which any serious account of human thought must reckon with. Second, because India is not one tradition but a continuous spectrum: Vedic and vernacular, Sanskritic and Prakrit, Buddhist, Jaina, Islamic and much besides, transmitted with extraordinary fidelity across three millennia, and still living rather than excavated. And third, for a plain fact of arithmetic. India is one-sixth of humanity. To understand a sixth of the human race, one must understand what it remembers.

India today is returning to that inheritance with renewed seriousness and, this matters greatly, with a firm commitment to evidence over assertion. Under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the National Education Policy of 2020 has brought Indian Knowledge Systems into mainstream university curricula. Three central universities now exist for Sanskrit alone. In October 2024, classical language status was extended to Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali, bringing India's recognised classical languages to eleven, a decision that will fund chairs, dictionaries, editions and awards in precisely the languages many of you work in. And the Gyan Bharatam Mission is surveying, conserving and digitising more than ten million manuscripts into a National Digital Repository; its portal was launched by the Prime Minister last September, and a nationwide manuscript survey followed in March, inviting families, monasteries, temples and libraries to place their holdings on the map. The governing idea, to explore the past through technology, grounded in evidence, is philology's oldest principle, restated at national scale.

The frontiers are genuinely exciting. Computational philology and machine recognition of Indic scripts are changing what a critical edition can be. Archaeological science, archaeobotany, isotopic and materials analysis at Rakhigarhi, Sinauli, Keeladi, Vadnagar, is placing hard data where inference alone once stood. Epigraphy and numismatics are being re-read; the histories of Indian mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and medicine are being written with proper technical rigour; maritime and Indian Ocean studies, environmental history, and the multilingual literary history of Prakrit, Apabhraṃśa, Persian and the vernaculars are all opening up. And Pāṇini, remarkably, has become interesting to computer scientists once more.

India and Hungary are old friends, and ours is a friendship built substantially by scholars, poets and artists, from Kőrösi Csoma to Rabindranath Tagore's stay at Balatonfüred, whose centenary falls this very year. Our Embassy, through the Amrita Sher-Gil Cultural Centre, is firmly committed to supporting Hungarian institutions that teach Indian languages and study Indian civilisation: through scholarships, visiting faculty, teaching materials and joint academic work. In that spirit, I am glad to announce that the Embassy is presenting sets of Indian books to the university libraries at Eger and at Debrecen, so that students beyond Budapest, too, may have India within reach on the shelf.

 To our visiting scholars, welcome to Budapest, and welcome to a city that has taken India seriously for two hundred years. To the organisers and to the research team whose four years of labour culminate here, thank you, and congratulations. May your deliberations be rigorous, generous and long-remembered.

 I can only close with an injunction from the Rig Veda- and also the motto of my college.

 आ नो᳚ भ॒द्राः क्रत॑वो यन्तु वि॒श्वतोऽद॑ब्धासो॒ अप॑रीतास उ॒द्भिदः॑ ।

दे॒वा नो॒ यथा॒ सद॒मिद् वृ॒धे अस॒न्नप्रा᳚युवो रक्षि॒तारो᳚ दि॒वेदि॑वे ॥

Rig Veda Samhita, Mandala 1, Suktam 89.

May good concepts come to us from every side, un-beguiling, unhindered, and beneficial, that the Gods ever may be with us for our benefit, our guardians unceasing everyday in their care.

Thank you.