Students surround writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) at his university, Visva Bharati, in Santineketan, West Bengal, India, 1929. Photo by E. O. Hoppe/Getty Images (Under copyright).

Munich born Emil Otto Hoppé (1978-1972), German photo-portraitist, had by the second decade of the last century established himself as a photographer of repute. Having learnt painting under Hans von Bartels, Hoppé travelled to Paris and Vienna in the last years of the 19th century before he settled as a banker in London. Soon he left his life as a banker and concentrated on his vocation as a picture-taker— as early photographers would be called. Over the next decade, his various collaborations with Alvin Coburn, Henry Robinson, George Davidson, EF Griffin and Sir Benjamin Stone had borne fruit large enough for him to go alone on his way towards establishing a photographic studio on Baker Street in London in 1911, not far from the apocryphal address that housed the world’s most famous detective. It is here that he is said to have been visited by a touring Indian poet who was in England to explore possibilities of promoting his new poetry collection in English which he had recently translated as the Geetanjali. It is another story that the poet found an noted Irish man of letters called Yeats leaping up to his lyrics and in about two years the Nobel Committee bestowed the literature prize on the bearded bard from Bengal. Our story instead concerns Hoppé and how he, genuinely impressed by the poet’s work, promised to make a trip to India with his camera in tow. He had taken a few photographs of the fifty-nine-year old poet during the latter’s England visit in 1920, though after 1911, they are said to have met briefly in 1915 as well.

Once captured in shades characteristic of Hoppé, Tagore found himself in the robust gallery of faces that included Thomas Hardy, GB Shaw, Ezra Pound and his former protégé TS Eliot, HG Wells, Albert Einstein etc, all of whom having had the distinction of posing, wrapped in shadow and light, for Hoppé’s camera. By 1922, after his famous 221-portrait exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in London, Hoppé had become widely celebrated as a portrait photographer.

By the time he arrived in Santiniketan in 1929, to photograph the famous Indian Nobel Laureate’s now-famous university, Hoppé was already drawn towards the man who helmed it, much like others across the globe who had been attracted to the munificence, the intellectual charm and colossal humanity of Tagore’s writings. “Long before it was my privilege to visit Tagore at his university in Santiniketan, I had been deeply impressed by the sheer beauty and sincerity of his writings which conveyed so vividly to the West the emotions of the people of his native Bengal”, Hoppé wrote in one of his essays on Tagore in 1941.

Though he could not completely eschew his gifts as a portrait artiste, Hoppé’s camera, mostly small, handheld contraptions that he used in Santiniketan, stand out in their stark depiction of the landscape and the setting, something that portraits often conceal. As Graham Howe writes in the introduction to the Hoppé catalogue published by the Marg Publications, “Hoppé captured a body of remarkable images that are the first to show a natural, spontaneous and distinctly Modernist view of Indian life.”

Hoppé himself recalled Santiniketan very fondly for years to come after his visit showing that the place had touched a special core of his heart, a sensation that worked fulltime behind the sensitive and artistic documentation on a small patch on Bengali, nee Indian life. In what is a remarkably precise exposition of the philosophical cornerstone that made Santiniketan what it is, Hoppé writes: “The Santiniketan school… was born with a great scholastic tradition behind it — one that stretches far back into the shadows on ancient India, when colonies of learned men withdrew to the forests to meditate in open seclusion on the meaning of life and man’s place therein. According to the poet himself, the school was the materialisation of the intense desire of his own childhood to escape from the prison of classroom walls and fetters of academic scholarship to the freedom of communion with nature and absorption of knowledge through her influences.”

Little is known about the visit and the details of their stay in Santiniketan. Perhaps both Tagore and Hoppé intended the photos to speak for themselves. It is clear that Hoppé has access to the nook and corners of the university which was famous for the open air classrooms, its tradition of practical and vocational engagement and the genteel quietude of its faculty. What attracted Hoppé further was the fact that the sage-like setting of the university was never a barrier to its attraction for the progress in sciences and the arts worldwide. As Hoppé writes, “Evening debates on art, literature, or the current problems of the day are popular and in these students, professors and occasionally the Poet himself freely participate. As knowledge of the world’s progress is brought to the doors of the Santiniketan not only by means of its fine and up to date library but also through the living witness of teachers and visitors who come from every civilised country, drawn by the magnetic charm of this cultural centre of the world.”

Hoppé’s Santiniketan is surprisingly serene and orderly for its claim to being the cultural centre of the world. But perhaps that is what its attraction had been and that is what brought teachers from across the globe, as the foreign faculty in Hoppé pictures amply exhibit. What Hoppé also manages is to capture, in changing or in constant light, the centrality of the Poet in a setting that he has himself helped create. Tagore stands tall in most of his pictures, whatever is the setting and the surrounding.

Also, in a series that captures in close detail studying and working in Santiniketan as well as Tagore amongst his students, one portrait of Tagore’s brother Abanindranath sitting on a recliner and looking at the horizon is no short of being a masterpiece of portraiture.

It really goes to the greatness of Poet that he could attract a talent like Hoppé, who had found fame and fortune in Europe, all the way to Bolpur and helped him leave behind a legacy that is a treasure for all of us who have ever had anything to do with poetry, Santiniketan and of course Rabindranath Tagore.