Halmos István indiai gyűjtése
Indian collection of István Halmos

Summary/Abstract: The collecting of the objects from and the research on the Carpathian basin in Hungary has taken two forms. One was directed at the search for an ancestral home, and the other searched for exotic items. The first objects of the Hungarian National Museum’s Ethnographical Collection originate from these different expeditions, which were often connected with ethnographical collecting. The number of objects rose dramatically until the First World War. Nowadays collection units from different continents (Europe, Africa, America, Asia, Indonesia, Oceania) can be found in the Museum of Ethnography’s Regional Collections. In these collections the objects are selected not according to their type, but according to who collected them. Among the objects there are more than 2000 musical instruments from all over the world. The Asian Collection is very poor in the case of Indian musical instruments as well as in classical and folk musical instruments. In these collecions, it is possible to find some church musical instruments like flutes and drums thanks to the collecting of Xantus János, and there are also five rattles from the collecting of Tóth Jenő. Halmos István undertook two significant rounds of fieldwork before he started his Indian collecting. He was in Venezuela with Boglár Lajos in 1967–1968, and after that he gathered an important collection in Pakistan in 1978. After that, between 1985 and 1986, he organised partly official, partly private collecting in India. During this three-month fieldwork, he tried to keep good contact with the local musical institutes, he gave lectures, and he brought four musical instruments which were given to him as a present to the Musem of Ethnography in 2014.

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