Umrao Singh Sher-Gil

Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia (1870–1954) was an Indian aristocrat, scholar of Sanskrit and philosophy, and photographer. He was known as one of the pioneers of photography in India, leaving behind over 3,000 prints, including the hundreds of family portraits and over 80 self-portraits staged in a mise-en-scène style.

His daughters included the artist Amrita Sher-Gil and Indira Sundaram. In India, a photography grant named after him was instituted in 2015.

Early life Gil was born in 1870 to Surat Singh of Majitha, near Amritsar in then British India. His younger brother Sundar Singh was an industrialist and a politician, who was later knighted by the then British Indian government. Having inherited the title as the head of the Majitha family, he travelled to England in 1896, and again in 1897 to attend the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. He also attended the Delhi Darbar in 1903 and in 1911. He was an admirer of Russian author and activist, Leo Tolstoy, after whom he modelled his approach to humanism and even his looks. He was also a friend of the poet Muhammad Iqbal.

Works Gil was one of the pioneers of photography in India, when he began photography in the early 1890s. He experimented with some of the then latest techniques including autochrome prints and stereoscope cameras. He produced hundreds of photographs of his family which were intentionally staged mise-en-scène, a format that he pioneered, with his home as the backdrop. His own self-portraits and the portraits of his family were noted for their residual sadness which further increased after the death of his daughter Amrita Sher-Gil in 1941 and the death of his wife in 1948.

Gil experimented with various toning methods and left behind over 3,000 prints and negatives, including over 80 self-portraits, chronicling life across Europe and India in the early part of the twentieth century. Gil documented the family's life in Europe extensively through his photography and continued to do so after the family's return to India. These works spanned Paris, Budapest, Shimla, and Lahore, and presented a view into an aristocratic-bourgeois life across continents.

Gil was a scholar of Sanskrit, and one of his works include a manuscript on Pāṇinīyaśikṣā, a treatise of Sanskrit phonetics which is attributed to Pāṇini and Pingalacharya. The manuscript was published by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1930 in Paris, where he had then relocated his family for his daughters to study in the city. A letter that he wrote to Hungarian scholar, Ignác Goldziher, which is now held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, shows his engagement with prominent scholars of the time.

A photography grant named after him was instituted by his family in 2015.

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Personal life Gil married his first wife Narninder Kaur (1870s-1907) at the age of 13. Kaur died in 1907. The family lived in Hungary through the First World War, and then returned in 1921 to India, where they lived in Shimla. The family returned to Europe in 1929 moving to France, living in Paris, where both his daughters studied.

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