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. == Gallery ==