Ferenc Zajti (b. 1886, d. 1961) was a painter, librarian and Orientalist whose main interest was the origin of the Hungarian people. Having graduated from the Reformed College in Debrecen, he attended Simon Hollósy's painters' schools in Munich. He studied under the guidance of Sándor Kubinyi and, after his return to Hungary, István Bosznay. He participated in three collective exhibitions in the National Salon. In the 1910s he was in contact with Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka. He had joint exhibitions with Gyula Rudnay in Constantinople and Ankara.
He continued to paint throughout his life; however, he considered research into the origins of the Hungarians as his principal task. He started to deal with prehistoric research in 1905. To accomplish his aims, he took a degree at the Reformed Academy of Theology, where he studied languages and comparative history of ancient religions. In 1918 his work 'System of Beliefs of the Ancient Hungarian' was published; a year later he published the prayers – the oldest part – of Zoroaster's Avesta in his own translation. In 1925, he launched the Avesta Library Series, which comprised , among others, the studies of Aurél Stein, Ignác Goldziher and the Parsi professor Jivanji Jamshedji Modi. It was Zajti who in 1928 welcomed Rabindranath Tagore to Budapest. In 1929 Zajti, having returned from India, became Vice Chairman of the newly established Hungarian-Indian Association. At the beginning of the 1930s he conducted research in the field of Turkish-Hungarian relationship in Ankara; later, he was elected a member of the 12-member Turkish Association of History. From 1933 on he was for 13 years keeper of the Oriental Collection of the Municipal Library of Budapest. The summary of his research was published under the title 'Hungarian Millennia' in 1936.
It was after a twenty-year preparation process – of studying languages, collecting reference literature and publishing books on the ancient history of the Hun and Hungarian peoples – that Zajti left for India. His intention was to prove his theory that the origins and relatives of the Hungarians are to be sought in the Northern regions of India, with evidence to be collected in situ. In winter 1928 he arrived in Bombay, where he gave lectures on his research. He headed for Rajasthan and Gujarat, where he visited the descendants of the Rajput clans, the 'Gujar Huns', who were considered to belong to the Turanian group of peoples and to the Hun-Scythian race. He thought he would find a branch of the Turanian people – that is, people living in the Turanian Plain, situated in the vicinity of the Caspian Sea – who, according to his theory, were related to the Scythians and had settled in this region of India at a very early period. He believed that these ethnic groups were directly related to the Hungarians. He tried to trace linguistic similarities in the region of Magara in Central Rajasthan.
Before that, however, he left for the South: he went to Gujarat. Having visited Baroda and Ahmedabad, where he paid a visit to Gandhi's house, he went to Jongral where he took numerous photographs of the village and its inhabitants . After his return to Rajasthan, he visited the fort of Mount Abu and the school of a village called Bhim. After that he arrived in the princely city of Udaipur, known as 'the Venice of India'. From here, he set out on what was probably the most interesting expedition of his journey : a trip to the 8th-century temples of Baroli in the company of Shobhalalji Shashtri, director of the Archaeological Museum of Udaipur. He also took part in the wedding ceremony of the Prince of Bhainsror and the festival held in honour of the Prince of Kota. In the company of J. J. Modi, professor of the University of Bombay, he visited the Parsi city of Naosari, where he was able to gain an inside view of aristocratic Parsi families.
He returned to Budapest in March 1929. In the same year, he organised an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts of the considerable amount documents and other material related to ethnography and cultural history which he had collected and the photos he had taken in India. The surviving part of his Indian textile collection enriches the Indian textile collection of the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts.
Our virtual exhibition shows a selection of the pictures taken by Ferenc Zajti on his Indian journey. The photos are preserved in the Documentation Department of the Museum.

Krisztina Czugéber
top