In the autumn of 1929 Hoppé spent several months touring the Indian Subcontinent and Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) to document the diverse geography and material cultures of these countries. Hoppé’s appearance in khakis and a plinth helmet clearly marked him as an outsider but his skill photographing, especially in the highly populated cities, was more than simply a technical achievement. Using mostly small, hand-held cameras, his photographs show unusual sensitivity and insight into the peoples, and a spontaneity heretofore absent from most photographs of India.

With great sympathy to nuances of these Asian cultures, Hoppé presents a social and cultural fabric of the Indian Subcontinent in regions that had been characteristically unchanged for centuries. He also records the effects of British colonization, especially in the cities. Documenting across the social ladder, from intellectuals to street beggars, Hoppé gives us, for example, Rabindranath Tagore and his students at Tagore University in Santiniketan, Bengal, people bathing in the Hooghly River at the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, workers at the Tata Steel Works in Jamsehedpur, the black and white Jews of Cochin, Tibetan beggars in Market Square in Darjeeling, and the Malayali Brahmins and the Untouchables of Mysore.

One of his great achievements in this work is that it shows how the ancient religious monuments, many of which are now designated as “World Heritage Sites,” were once used as an integral part of daily life. Among others we see the ruins of the Buddhist monastery at Sanchi, the monuments at Hampi, the Ajanta Caves, the 16th Century Fort of Bellary in Madras, the Jag Mandir Palace in Udaipur, and the Great Buddha buried in the sacred city of Polonnaruwa, Ceylon.

Although Hoppé made a vast body of exemplary photographs of the Indian Subcontinent and Ceylon, he did not make his own book to match those he had done on America, England, Germany, and Australia. In 1935 his photographs were published in a volume by American author Katherine Mayo, who visited India to “observe the common things in daily life.” Even though the text of her book was biased and unpopular in India, Hoppé’s photographs enriched it enormously by showing the “truth” about India of the late 1920s with a sensitive and poetic eye.