Sardar Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a pioneer figure of modern Indian photography and the father of the famous painter Amrita Sher-Gil, was born in 1870 near Amritsar. He was the eldest son of an aristocrat and landlord Raja Surat Singh of the Majithia clan.
Sher-Gil was a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian languages and had varied creative interests, including carpentry, calligraphy, yoga and above all, a deep passion for photography.
His photographs form an intimate record of his life and surroundings. He admired Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, going to the extent of copying his style of wearing a tunic and getting photographed. His self-portraits revealed a man deeply absorbed in reading and writing, often seated calmly in his study, reflecting his thoughtful and introspective personality.
His photographs also captured his immediate family, centring around his second wife Marie and his two daughters, Amrita and Indira, as well as the different places where the family lived, including Shimla, Budapest and Paris.
Today, Sher-Gil’s photographs are regarded as valuable records of a Sikh-European family within the modern archive of Indian photography.
Personal life
Sher-Gil received his early education in Amritsar before attending the famous Aitchison College in Lahore. There he developed a lifelong friendship with Muhammad Iqbal, who later became one of the best poets of the century. The two shared similar intellectual interests and were known for their nationalist ideas and anti-British sentiments.
Sher-Gil’s father passed away in 1881 when he was only eleven years old, after which he inherited the position as head of the family. At a very young age Sher-Gil was married to Narinder Kumari who died in 1907. They had four children: three sons, Balram, Satyavan (Vani), and Vivek (Bikki), and a daughter, Prakash Kaur (Praki). He had one younger brother, Sunder Singh, who later became an industrialist and established a successful sugar factory near Gorakhpur.
As the patriarch of the Majithia family, Sher-Gil was invited to England as a special guest to attend the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. He also attended the1903 Delhi Durbar, the Coronation of King Edward VII as emperor of India. The event was attended by the highest- ranking guests, British monarchs and Indian Princes.
In 1911, Sher-Gil met a Jewish-Hungarian opera singer, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, who travelled to India with Princess Bamba Duleep Singh. Marie, who came from a noble family, spoke several languages and had formal training in music and opera.
During the social gatherings in Lahore and Shimla, they met and developed a liking for each other and finally got married in 1912. Soon after their marriage, the couple moved to Budapest, where their daughters, Amrita Sher-Gil and Indira Sher-Gil, were born.
During his stay in Europe, Umrao Singh’s links with the Ghadar Party were discovered by British intelligence. This eventually led to the confiscation of much of his property in India, as the Ghadar Party was considered responsible for an armed uprising against the colonial regime.
Due to the outbreak of the First World War, the family got stranded in Hungary for several years. As things improved, they moved back to India in 1921 and settled in Shimla, a home they called, “Holme”.
Europe had an attraction for the Sher-Gil family, as in 1926, they again moved back, for their daughter's education before finally returning to India in 1934.
Tragedy struck the family in 1941 when Sher-Gil’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Amrita Sher-Gil, died unexpectedly. A few years later, in 1948, his wife Marie also died by suicide in Shimla. These tumultuous incidents impacted Sher-Gil a lot and he moved from Shimla to his daughter's home in Delhi, where he spent his final years before passing away in 1954 at the age of eighty-four.
His work
Umrao Singh Sher-Gil created what appears almost like an album of memories devoted entirely to family life. He left behind more than three thousand vintage photographic prints, hundreds of family portraits and over eighty self-portraits. His surviving archive consists of 1,536 prints, 308 glass plate negatives, 245 film negatives and 16 autochromes.
Though he was not known as a consummate photographer during his lifetime, his works are today exhibited and preserved in collections across India, Canada, France, Spain and the United Kingdom.
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