Remarks by Ambassador at the inauguration of the India Corner at the Lyceum library of University of Eger

29 September 2026

Rector, Professor Dr. Ilona Pajtók-Tari, distinguished members of the faculty, respected librarians, Indian students of this university, ladies and gentlemen,

Jó napot kívánok. Namaste.

It is a great pleasure for me to be in Eger today, in a hall that has watched over books and ideas for more than two centuries, to hand over a small collection of Indian books to your University Library. I use the word "small" deliberately. What we bring today, some history, some literature, some books on India's economy and its democracy, is modest in size next to the collection already on these shelves. What it represents, I hope, is something larger: a gesture of friendship between two peoples who have always placed a high value on learning.

I want to begin by saying something about this city, because I do not think today's ceremony can be separated from where it is taking place. Eger is known, first, for the courage of its defenders in 1552, when a small garrison held these walls against an army many times its size, and that story has been told and retold in Hungary ever since, in school and in song. But Eger's other, quieter distinction is just as remarkable. Even as the castle was rebuilt after the long years of Ottoman rule, this city set about building something different: a house of learning. Bishop Károly Eszterházy dreamed of a university here, and though the university he wanted was not granted to him in his own lifetime, he built the Lyceum anyway, and he filled its library with books gathered from across Europe, at real expense, because he believed a university without books was no university at all. Look up in that library today and you will see the ceiling he commissioned, and beneath it, shelves that hold manuscripts and letters that scholars still study. A city that fought so hard to defend itself also fought, just as hard, to fill its shelves. I find that a moving thing to think about, and it seems fitting that it is here, of all places, that we add a shelf of Indian books to the story.

There is something in that story that any Indian visitor recognizes. India, too, is a civilization that has never separated the defense of its people from the pursuit of knowledge. Long before the printed book, we had universities at Nalanda and Takshashila, where students came from across Asia to study medicine, logic, and astronomy, and where a single library is remembered in Indian history as having held so many manuscripts that, when it was finally destroyed, it is said to have burned for months. We have always treated the written word, and the person who keeps it, with a kind of reverence. So when I stand in a library like this one, I do not feel I am somewhere unfamiliar. I feel I am in a place that shares, across a great distance and several centuries, the same instinct that shaped my own country's oldest institutions of learning.

That instinct is, I think, what still draws our two countries together today, in more practical ways as well. Every year, more Indian students choose Hungary for their studies, and Hungary sends its own scholars to India through scholarships and training programmes that our government runs for exactly this purpose. None of this depends on grand declarations. It depends on ordinary people, students, teachers, librarians, deciding that it is worth their time to learn about a country on the other side of the world. That is really what I want to say today about libraries, and about this one in particular. A library is not simply a room full of books. It is a record of what a community has decided is worth keeping, worth passing on, worth arguing about for generations to come. The people who make that possible, your teachers and your librarians, do not always receive the credit they deserve. They spend years with books that most of us will glance at once. They catalogue, they restore, they explain, and they do it patiently, year after year, so that a student who is not yet born will one day find what she needs on the right shelf. I have seen enough of this university, and heard enough about the dedication of its faculty and library staff, to know that Eger has been fortunate in this respect.

I am also glad to know that Indian students are already part of this university's community. They are here to study, but I hope they also understand that they are, in a small way, ambassadors themselves, carrying something of India with them into Hungarian classrooms and Hungarian friendships, and carrying something of Eger home when they eventually leave. It is through people like them, as much as through any speech I could give, that our two countries come to understand each other.

India today is the world's largest democracy, with nearly a billion and a half citizens who go to the polls freely and regularly, and it is also, by most measures, the fastest growing major economy on earth. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the country has been going through changes that would have seemed unlikely only a decade ago. Hundreds of millions of people have been brought into the formal digital economy through a payments system that other countries now study and try to copy. Our space programme has landed a probe near the Moon's south pole, the first country to do so. A generation of young entrepreneurs is building companies in cities that were sleepy towns not long ago, and India's cities and villages alike are being rewired, quite literally, with roads, ports, and broadband that did not exist when many of today's students were born. None of this is well known here, not because Hungarians are uninterested, but simply because good, reliable books about contemporary India are not always easy to find on a Hungarian shelf. That is a gap this small collection is meant to help close.

I do not expect this India Corner to answer every question a curious student in Eger might have about India. No single shelf ever could. But I hope it gives them a place to start: histories, some literature, books on India's democracy and its economy, material that a teacher preparing a class, or a librarian answering a question, can reach for without having to search abroad. I hope, too, that it grows. Books can be added, and I would like this to be the beginning of a relationship between this library and India, not a single gesture that is made once and then forgotten. If even a handful of students walk out of this library each year knowing India a little better than they did before, I will consider this donation to have done its work.

I want to thank the leadership of this university, and you personally, Rector, for the openness with which you have welcomed this idea and welcomed our students. I want to thank the faculty and the library staff who will be the ones actually caring for these books long after today's ceremony is forgotten. And I want to thank the people of Eger, who over the years have shown my country's citizens, students and visitors alike, a warmth that we do not forget. This city has a long habit of building things meant to outlast the people who build them: a castle, a library, a university. I hope this India Corner earns a small place in that habit, and that it goes on quietly bringing India and Hungary a little closer together for a long time to come.

Köszönöm szépen. Thank you very much.