Self-taught painter, ceramist, teacher and writer, born in Bombay, India, the family’s straitened conditions being exacerbated by his father’s early death. While qualifying as a chartered accountant Khakhar became absorbed by literature and art and, despite family opposition, in 1962 enrolled for an art criticism course at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. Began painting in a popular figurative, narrative style, holding the first of a series of solo exhibitions in Bombay in 1965; he was widely represented in group shows in India and abroad. Khakhar went on to exploit his lack of formal training to produce irreverent, apparently naïve art, at times employing ready-made images and graffiti, featuring everyday life and ordinary people, targets including the bourgeois existence.