Date: June 9, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM
Venue: Rabindra Bhawan Auditorium, Mungpoo

Moderator and Coordinator
Dr. Edu Sherpa
Department of English
Darjeeling Hills University
Email: english@dhu.edu.in

In multiethnic and multilingual Hungary, in the early nineteenth century, where various ethnic groups lived together speaking a number of languages, Hungarians became increasingly interested in the issue of their national origins, and in their history. It was in these circumstances that the linguist Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784-1842) and the painter August Theodor Schoefft (1809–1888) unknown to each other at the time, visited India and created the major work of their lives. How this interest came about, and what drove them to create such outstanding work in different modes and languages? How did they relate to their new surroundings and how were they treated by the rulers of the land?

Dr. Margit Köves is teaching Hungarian in the Department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies in Delhi University for thirty five years. She has edited collections of Hungarian prose and poetry in Hindi, many translated jointly with Girdhar Rathi. She also edited two collections of the bimonthly Social Scientist in 2017 and 2018 (vol. 45 & 46) on the work of the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács. She has been working on Buddhism (Buddhism among the Turks in Central Asia, 2010), and Indian and Hungarian Cultural Encounters and published studies about Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, Amrita Sher-Gil, Charles Fabri and Elizabeth Brunner.

Gábor Lanczkor PhD (1981) is an award-winning Hungarian poet and writer, and the editor-in-chief of the online world literature magazine 1749.hu. He has published fifteen volumes so far consisting of poetry, novels and children’s books. His selected poems in English were published in 2016 in Mumbai under the title Sound Odyssey by Poetrywala.