This is one of the first in a series of paintings by Bhupen Khakhar that affectionately critiques the Indian middle class to which the artist belonged. It features rare portraits of Khakhar’s parents, dressed in the simple, formal attire of the conservative professional establishment, in front of his home in Baroda. The variation in scale and perspective is deliberate, quoting the Indian miniature tradition, while distortions of the figures, landscape and architecture are the product of the artist’s sense of humour – a way of visually destabilising structured middle-class life. For Khakhar, personal identity was more complex than generic understandings of what it meant to be Indian. In contrast to the mythic or essentialising depictions of the country that were popular in the modern art of the time, Khakhar focused on moments of individual lives, from the humble to the intense, rendering them in eccentric, layered compositions about love, desire and human relationships.