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E. O. Hoppé:
The Indian Subcontinent on the Cusp of Change
Curated by Dr. Pratapaditya Pal and Graham Howe
E. O. Hoppé was one of the most renowned portrait photographers of his day, as well as a brilliant landscape and travel photographer. His strikingly modernist portraits describe a virtual Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and politics in Great Britain and the US between the wars. His photographic books about Fair Women, (1922) Great Britain (1926), United States (1927), Germany (1930 and 1932), and Australia (1931) were influential on other important photographers who followed Hoppé including Bill Brandt, Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans and others.
In the winter of 1929 Hoppé spent several months touring the Indian Subcontinent traveling as far north as the Khyber Pass though the Hindu Kush mountain range linking what is now Pakistan with Afghanistan, and as far south as Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then named. From Assam in the East to the Nepal and Bhutan regions of Tibet in the northeast, he documented the diverse geography and material cultures of these regions.
Documenting across the social ladder from intellectuals to street beggars, Hoppé gives us intimate views of an intensely nationalist Rabindranath Tagore and his students at Tagore University in Shantiniketan; Calcutta natives bathing in the Hooghly River at the old Howrah Bridge, workers at the Tata Steel Works, Jamshedpur; the black and white Jews of Cochin; Tibetan beggars in Market Square, Darjeeling; the Malayali brahmins and the untouchables of Mysore.
Hoppé shows us how integral the ancient religious monuments (some of which were rarely accessed by Westerners and many that have since become designated World Heritage Sites) were to daily life. Among others we see the ruins of the Buddhist monastery at Sanchi, the Rock Temple at Trichinopoly, the Vishnu Temple at Kumbakonam and the Sri Meenakshi Temple at Madurai. Also depicted are the Somnathpur Temple at Mysore, the Seven Pagodas at Mahabalipuram, the Hazari Rama Temple, Hampi, the Ajanta Caves, the 16th Century Fort of Bellary, Madras, Jag Mandir Palace, Udaipur and the Great Buddha in the sacred city of Polonnaruwa, Ceylon.
Hoppé’s photographs support a diverse view of India portrayed with a socially sensitive and visually poetic eye. The unique achievement of this work lies in its intelligent documentation of life during India’s transformation from an agrarian culture to an industrial nation. Some of the images show life as it had been, unchanged for over 200 years; others the promise of what it has since become.
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