Arpana Caur is a leading Indian painter and graphic artist.She comes from a Sikh family who fled the Pakistani West Punjab to the Republic of India in 1947 during the confusion over the partition of British India.
Her mother is the writer Ajit Kaur (born in 1934), who writes in Panjabi.
Kaur or Caur (pronunciation kor) is a religious surname worn by all female Sikhs.
She has not had her first name Arpana since her birth, but she adopted it at the age of fifteen, as an expression of a personal development process.