A hundred years ago, in these same days of early November, a tired man of sixty-five sat beside this lake and watched the light move across the water. He had come to Hungary in the middle of an exhausting European tour, and his heart was failing him. Professor Sándor Korányi sent him here, to the sanatorium that is today your Heart Hospital. He stayed a few days. When he left, he was well.

That man was Rabindranath Tagore.

I can't think of a better place, or a better week, to open an exhibition by two Hungarian women who followed him to India and never really came back. Though, as these walls will show you, in the end they did come back. They came back through their paintings.

Tagore never forgot this town, and this town has never forgotten him.

Before he left, he planted a linden tree near the sanatorium. There is an old belief that a man who plants a tree will live to see it in leaf. Tagore lived almost fifteen more years. He left a short poem for that tree, and I would like to read it to you, because it says more than any ambassador could:

When I am no longer on this earth, my tree,
Let the ever-renewed leaves of thy spring
Murmur to the wayfarer:
The poet did love while he lived.

The tree is still here, and so is the promenade you named after him. For decades, Indian presidents and prime ministers have come to stand under that linden and plant trees of their own beside it. Each time, the tree keeps its promise. It tells them the poet loved, and it tells them he was loved here too.

In a letter to a young Hungarian painter, Tagore wrote that he had seen almost every country in the world, yet nowhere had he found "such a beautiful harmony of the sky and the water" as on the shore at Balatonfüred. The painter was Elizabeth Brunner. So in a way, the story of this exhibition begins right here, on your shore.

Elizabeth Sass Brunner was a painter from Nagykanizsa. Her husband Ferenc was a painter too, and their daughter Elizabeth, born in 1910, grew up in a house of painters. The First World War broke something in that family, as it did in so many Hungarian families, and the mother went looking for a way to mend it.

Late in 1928 she had a vision of an old man with a silver beard. A year later she sat down and wrote a letter, in Hungarian, to the one name she knew in India: Rabindranath Tagore. It began, "Dear Master." Tagore answered at once and invited mother and daughter to Santiniketan.

They arrived in February 1930. Elizabeth was nineteen. There, Sass Brunner was shown a portrait of Tagore's father, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, and recognised the face from her vision. You may believe that story or smile at it. I confess I do a little of both. But the paintings are real.

For two years they lived at Santiniketan, close to Tagore, in the community he had built around his school and his university, Visva-Bharati. They painted the Bengal countryside and the people who lived in it. And they painted the poet, many times. In these rooms you will see India as two Hungarian women saw it, day after day, at close range.

There is a lovely coincidence here. In 1930, the year the Brunners arrived, Tagore was himself becoming a painter. That spring, close to seventy, he held his first exhibition, in Paris. Two painters from Hungary had come to a poet just as he was learning to speak in colour.

After Santiniketan they kept moving. They crossed India, lived for a time in Japan, where in 1935 a Japanese edition of Petőfi's poems appeared with their pictures, and exhibited in Asia and America. Then the Himalaya took hold of them. During the Second World War they were interned as citizens of an enemy country, and later allowed to live in a small house in Nainital, in the hills. Some of Sass Brunner's most beautiful mountain paintings come from those hard years. She died in India in 1950. Her daughter stayed for the rest of her life.

Their canvases became a kind of diary of India, kept by two people who had stopped thinking of themselves as visitors. Elizabeth painted Mahatma Gandhi, who asked her, with his gentle humour, whether she meant to paint his soul. They painted members of the Nehru family and the Dalai Lama. They painted the Buddha again and again, and ordinary people in the light of ordinary days. Their India is seen with wonder, and with patience. An eye trained in Hungary met the light of Bengal and the snow of the Himalaya, and what came out of that meeting belongs to both countries.

Elizabeth Brunner said it better than I can: "I was born a Hungarian girl and became an Indian painter, and I love them both."

She never forgot Nagykanizsa. When the Indian Prime Minister visited Hungary in 1972, she brought with her paintings Elizabeth was sending home, for the Hungarian National Gallery and the museum in Nagykanizsa. Many more followed. Today the Thúry György Museum looks after close to a thousand works by this family. The two women who left Hungary in 1929 came home after all, one canvas at a time.

Why did Tagore say yes? He had never met them. A stranger wrote to him in a language he could not read, and he answered: come.

The reason lies in what he believed. All his life Tagore argued against the walls people build between themselves. He loved India with his whole heart and still distrusted any nationalism that teaches people to fear their neighbours. He gave his university an old Sanskrit motto, Yatra vishvam bhavatyekanidam: where the whole world meets in a single nest. And in his best-known prayer he asked for a country "where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls."

For Tagore, humanism meant an open door. So Santiniketan filled with people from many countries. In those same years the Hungarian scholar Gyula Germanus was teaching there, and two Hungarian painters arrived in sandals, with their brushes and very little money.

Hungary had opened its own door to Tagore first. In the 1920s more than thirty volumes of his work appeared in Hungarian. In 1926 he lectured at the Academy of Music and met your writers and thinkers at the Fészek Club. He remembered those Hungarian days with gratitude for the rest of his life, and the days by Lake Balaton most of all.

That is why I believe this exhibition shows the friendship between India and Hungary at its very best.

Relations between countries are built from trade, investment, visits and agreements. These matter, and we work on them every day. But under all of it there has to be something older and quieter: curiosity, and a willingness to be changed by what you meet. Between our two countries that willingness has a long history, and Hungarians wrote much of it.

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma set out on foot for Asia two centuries ago, gave the world its first Tibetan-English dictionary, and lies buried in Darjeeling. Ferenc Hopp travelled around the world five times and brought Asia home to Budapest; Amrita Sher-Gil, born in Budapest to a Hungarian mother, became one of the pioneers of modern Indian painting. And two women from Nagykanizsa crossed half the world because a poet wrote back.

Anyone who spends time in Hungary notices this. Hungarians are curious in the best sense. You read, you translate, you ask questions and you listen to the answers. Your language has no close relatives among your neighbours, and perhaps that is why Hungarians have always reached so far to understand the world. India has felt that interest, and that warmth, for well over a century.

Tagore 100 is our way of saying thank you. This exhibition shows that the friendship Tagore began on this shore did not end when he left. It went to Santiniketan with two Hungarian painters, lived in India for seventy years, and came back in their pictures. A century on, it has brought us together in this gallery, on a November day not so different from the ones Tagore spent beside this lake.

So let me say thank you, properly.

To Mayor István Bóka and the people of Balatonfüred: thank you for looking after Tagore's tree, his promenade and his memory for a hundred years. Few towns anywhere hold an Indian poet so close, and India knows it.

To the Vaszary Gallery and to Dr. Imre Lázár, the curator: thank you for the care and scholarship in these rooms. Dr. Lázár has been writing about the Brunners for many years, and this exhibition carries that work forward.

To the Thúry György Museum in Nagykanizsa: you are the keepers of the Brunner legacy. You have kept these paintings safe in the city the Brunners came from, and you have brought them to the shore of Balaton. Thank you. My thanks also to the Hungarian National Gallery and the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asian Arts for their efforts.

Let me end where Tagore ended, with the tree. He asked it to tell every passer-by that the poet loved while he lived. These paintings say the same of Sass Brunner and Elizabeth Brunner. They loved India while they lived. They loved Hungary too, and they never saw a contradiction in that.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honour to join the Hon’ble Mayor in declaring open the exhibition Tagore 100: Hungarian Artists under the Spell of the Bengali Poet.

Köszönöm szépen. Thank you.