India’s 80th Independence Day in Budapest Opened With a Hungarian Poet

An embassy garden is a small piece of theatre. A country gets a few hundred square metres of borrowed European soil and about 90 minutes to explain itself to whoever shows up. What it chooses to say in that window is worth paying attention to.

On the morning of 15 August 2026, at Búzavirág utca 14 in Budapest’s 2nd district, the Embassy of India marked India’s 80th Independence Day. The tricolour went up at 09:00. 79 years earlier, at midnight on 15 August 1947, British rule over the subcontinent ended.

The notable thing about the Budapest ceremony is how much of it was Hungarian.

An Indian mission opens with a Hungarian poet

Before the flag, the embassy quoted Sándor Petőfi. “As the great Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi wrote, life is dear, but liberty is dearer,” the remarks ran. “His timeless words beautifully resonate with the spirit of both of our nations.”

That is an English rendering of the idea at the centre of Petőfi’s best known epigram, written in 1847, in which he says he would give up his life for love and give up love for liberty. Petőfi is not a decorative choice for a foreign mission. He is the poet Hungarians reach for when the subject is freedom. In March 1848 he wrote the Nemzeti dal, the National Song, and read it aloud as the Hungarian revolution against Habsburg rule began. He was 25. He disappeared the following summer at the Battle of Segesvár and his body was never found. The daguerreotype below, made in 1847, is the only known photograph of him.

The parallel the embassy drew is real, and so is the gap in it. Hungary’s revolution was crushed inside 18 months. India’s independence movement, a century later, won. What connects them is the premise rather than the result, that a people’s dignity is not something handed down from above.

A Hungarian choir sings India’s national song

Then came Vande Mataram, sung in the garden by Hungarian friends of India alongside the Indian community in Budapest. In the photograph below the sashes are tricolour, the faces are Hungarian and Indian in roughly equal number, and everybody has the words.

Vande Mataram, which renders roughly as “Mother, I bow to thee,” first appeared in print in the Bengali journal Bangadarshan in November 1875. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay later placed it inside his 1882 novel Anandamath. Rabindranath Tagore set it to music and sang it at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress, and independent India’s Constituent Assembly adopted it as the national song in 1950. India is currently in the middle of a year-long commemoration of its 150th anniversary, which opened on 7 November 2025 and closes on 7 November 2026.

The painter who belongs to both countries

The embassy’s cultural arm in Budapest is the Amrita Shergil Culture Centre, and that name is the tightest knot between the two countries.

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest on 30 January 1913. Her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, was a Sikh aristocrat and a scholar of Persian and Sanskrit. Her mother, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, was a Hungarian singer. The family left for India in 1921. Sher-Gil trained in Paris, then turned away from European subjects and gave the rest of her career to painting Indian villagers. She died in Lahore in 1941, aged 28.

She is not a minor figure in either country. In 1976 the Archaeological Survey of India named her one of 9 artists whose works are National Art Treasures, which means her paintings held in India are barred from leaving it. A painter born in Budapest is, in legal terms, part of India’s patrimony.

What the ambassador chose to leave behind

Ambassador Anshuman Gaur read the President of India’s address to the nation, which credits “dedicated students and teachers, scientists and engineers committed to development, doctors and healthcare workers providing health services, industrious workers and our annadata farmers” with building the country. Annadata means food giver, and it is the respectful term for farmers.

Asked afterwards what the day meant to him personally, Gaur went to the plainest version of it. “To be the masters of your own destiny is what this fight was all about,” he said. “Someone who was born in a free India, you can understand the feeling that comes with it. And today we pay homage to all those who fought for it to make sure that we were born as free Indians.”

Asked what he wanted Hungarians to understand about India, he turned down the tourist-brochure answer. “It’s big, it’s noisy, it’s colourful, but it’s more than just a place or a geographic entity,” he said. “It’s a feeling which anyone who fights for freedom, any place people are fighting for their dignity, we identify them as Indians.”

Gaur joined the Indian Foreign Service in 2001 and served as India’s Chief of Protocol from 2022 to 2025 before coming to Budapest. He is also a published poet. His collection Isthmus of Time was launched in New Delhi in July 2017 by the then Vice President of India, M. Hamid Ansari.

Asked for a poem, he passed on his own work and reached for Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, the Hindi poet India calls Rashtrakavi, the national poet. Dinkar’s line, in the ambassador’s rendering, is that Bharat is not the name of a territory. It is the spirit of freedom and democracy inside people.

Which is roughly where the morning started. An Indian embassy in Budapest opened by borrowing a Hungarian poet to describe an Indian idea, and closed with an Indian poet arguing that the idea was never about ground in the first place.

Who was in the garden

About 8,700 Indian nationals live in Hungary, according to the embassy, more than 2,000 of them in Budapest, with roughly 1,200 students at universities in Budapest, Pécs, Szeged, Miskolc and Debrecen. Most of the working community is in IT, with others in manufacturing joint ventures and agriculture.

Beside the flagpole, the embassy handed out Certificates of Appreciation to members of the community.

That is who filled the garden on Búzavirág utca, along with the Hungarians who came to sing.

Thanks to Praveen Kumar, First Secretary for Political and Press, Information and Culture at the Embassy of India, who coordinated the interview with the ambassador. This video was produced in partnership with Daily News Hungary. Ray attended in place of Daily News Hungary co-founder and editor in chief Alpár Kató, who could not make the ceremony.