Rabindranath Tagore with his granddaughter, Nandini

There is a familiar photograph of Rabindranath Tagore in which his face, a cap on his head and curled hand on his cheek, fills the frame as he gazes piercingly at the lens. This was taken by Emil Otto Hoppé in his London studio in 1920. The Munich-born London-based photographer, called “the most famous photographer in the world in the 1920s”, was deeply impressed by Tagore, and later accepted the poet’s invitation to visit Santiniketan. The photographs from his visit in 1929 are on display in the Portrait Gallery, Victoria Memorial Hall till May 30, the exhibition having been organized by the Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta and The Marg Foundation, Mumbai.

The mature Tagore must have been both enormously tempting and extremely difficult as a subject. His aura was inescapable, so however he was photographed, he looked like a celebrity. Hoppé was especially valued in his time for his portraits of celebrities: he could simultaneously capture their unique magnetism and their humanness. It is said that his “bedside manner” was remarkable, he would get to know his subjects with patience and ceaseless observation, his hand unobtrusively on the shutter string. But his celebrity portraits went hand in hand with democratic interests and sympathies — a friend of George Bernard Shaw, he was firmly progressive in his politics.

The Santiniketan 1929 collection is a fine illustration of the intricate balancing of Hoppé’s many-sided brilliance and interests. Tagore is seldom alone in the photographs in which he figures, and when he is, they are not exactly portraits. In one, the poet is in his distinctively ‘ethnic’ sitting room with his face caught in natural light, seated on a low, carved, spacious, gleaming, wooden sofa from the west of India, comfortably bordered with fat bolsters, a low centre table with curving legs on a woven rug before him, the walls around covered with woven reed, two Thai Buddhas on two pieces of furniture behind him, together with a tall, delicate, bell-metal lamp-holder among other equally striking objects. It is like a redefinition of the poet in a world far removed from the London portrait, where the cerebral and aesthetic impact of his face was the only focus of interest.

It is a redefinition demanded by the photographer’s response to Santiniketan. Tagore here is the benign centre of an unusual community in a rural environment, surrounded by students and craftsmen, who draw Hoppé’s curiosity and sympathetic but quietly neutral camera almost as much as the poet does. The close-up portrait here is of an unnamed student, shadows framing his innocent, bony face and shining, wavy hair, while the camera lingers repeatedly on young men and women writing, drawing, sewing, making music in the light streaming through the windows of their simple rooms, where they sit surrounded by the most basic tools of living and working. Without drama, Hoppé conveys a sense of energy and beauty within austerity — perhaps the spirit of Santiniketan as he sensed it. A craftsman working on a piece of leather in the tannery and a lacquer worker are evidence of Hoppé’s insight into Tagore’s vision.

Tagore is relaxed, surrounded by students, or with his granddaughter, and even when posed in a group with girls, or Buddhist monks, or overseas guests. Hoppé records classes under the trees from different angles, ironically catching the university buildings in the distance, as girls and boys, seated separately in the latticed shade of neem or mango trees, struggle with maths and history. The camera captures the shine of water and the haunting solitude of palm trees on the horizon as typical Bengal countryside, and bamboo trees bend to form the frame for another image where two figures with bundles on their heads stride through a flat, tree-bordered landscape suffused with a dreamy light. One photograph looks on to the daoa of a long mud hut with its bamboo pillars and tiled roof from a slightly sideways angle, as if to preserve the elegance of Bengal’s cottages in the rhythmic black, white and median tones created by dark overhanging leaves and peeping light. Hoppé’s love for the beauty of Bengal’s scenery is expressed in a photograph where four unnamed figures look across the countryside stretching to the horizon from the corner of a terrace, their backs to the camera.

Beside the unusual photograph of Amiya Chakravarty with his family, and another of his Danish wife playing with their baby, is the far more well-known profile of Abanindranath Tagore on his easy-chair. But the viewer may be disappointed in the sparseness of the titles, the lack of names and locations — Abanindranath could hardly have been in Santiniketan in 1929 with the beautiful frontage of his southern balcony reproduced before him. It may have to do with the fact that Hoppé’s work, however popular during his lifetime, had long been forgotten, and is undergoing a revival in recent years. It is a varied and huge collection. But that cannot explain the dearth of information regarding photographs of Tagore and Santiniketan in an exhibition held in Calcutta.