One of the most significant Indian painters of the twentieth century, and the man who painted the eleven-foot portrait backdrops for Master Phoolmani. Born in Bombay in 1934, Khakhar qualified as a chartered accountant in 1960 and kept the day job for years while teaching himself to paint; he moved to Baroda in 1961 for a course in art criticism at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. University. He is widely described as India's first Pop artist, painting shopkeepers, watch-repairers and middle-class neighbourhoods with a directness Indian art had not seen, and later making some of the first openly gay imagery in Indian painting. He received the Padma Shri in 1984 and the Dutch government's Prince Claus Award in 2000, had a retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2002, and died in Baroda in August 2003. Tate Modern gave him a full retrospective in 2016.