A visual diary of an artist
CHITRAPU UDAY BHASKAR
MARIO DE MIRANDA: Pub. by Gerard da Cunha and Architecture Anonymous, House No 674, Torda, Salvador do Mundo, Bardez, Goa. Rs. 2700.
On May 2 this year, one of India’s most accomplished artists — it seems so inadequate to introduce Mario Miranda as a mere ‘cartoonist’ though he is better recognised as just that — turned 83.
And what a plethora of delightful, rib-tickling, satirical, quirky, reflective and ruminative images this unassuming man has produced over the last 56 years since he first began freelancing for The Current in Bombay (as Mumbai was then called) in 1952! We would not have known of this stupendous body of work but for the painstaking labour of Gerard da Cunha and Bevinda Collaco who pored over 8,000 drawings and related compositions and then distilled them into this sumptuous volume.
Social chronicler
Arranged into 45 sections that are a visual feast, interspersed with essays written by Mario aficionados, the volume walks the reader through the artist’s life and his evolution as one of India’s best known social chroniclers. Mario was born in 1926 in Daman, then a Portuguese enclave, in a Goan Roman Catholic family of Saraswat Brahmin origin. His family was part of the local aristocracy as senior government officials and the senior Miranda was the Administrator of Daman. Consequently the young lad imbibed the best of two cultures — that of distant Portugal and the indigenous Goan ethos and this rare multi-cultural empathy is more than evident in his later work.
Manohar Malgonkar’s biographical essay is rich in personal detail and offers an insightful overview of the artist and the spatio-temporal context in which he was groomed — from Goa to Bangalore to Bombay and then to Lisbon and London before he finally dropped anchor in Bombay again after the liberation of Goa in 1961. Many have wondered as to how and where Mario learnt to draw such spontaneous cartoons — and Malgonkar tells us: “The simple answer is that he did not become a cartoonist. He was born a cartoonist. The fact is that he has never received any formal training in an art institution. To draw figures has been an irrepressible compulsion of his life.” The little boy who made a ‘nuisance’ of himself by drawing charcoal figures on the walls of an impeccable house was encouraged by his mother to fill up notebooks with his sketches and squiggles.
Observer
Right from 1947 when the picture folio begins, to the current century, the various sections in which the cartoons and other compositions have been arranged provide a breathtaking visual diary as it were of the last 60 years. Mario prefers to describe himself as a social cartoonist — as opposed to a political one — but to my mind he leavens the two streams in a very subtle and unobtrusive manner. Above all, Mario is the ultimate ‘observer’ — mindful of the smallest detail and imbued with that uncanny retinal ability to notice the slightest human foible and quirky trait and render the vignette with wit devoid of malice.
Over the decades, Mario’s cartoons acquired an individual identity and he was soon embellishing the pages of India’s best known newspapers and magazines published from Bombay and I recall being introduced to his work in mofussil India in the early 1960’s through the pages of the now forgotten Illustrated Weekly of India. Most of his work has been grouped in the form of personal visual diaries that range from Goa and Bombay to New York and Paris and as the artist notes, where others took recourse to word, he recorded his life through images.
Viruosity
Well-known critic Ranjit Hoskote in his brief essay on Mario’s art makes a perceptive observation when he avers: “I am not given to hyperbole; believe me when I say that Mario’s Diaries provide the connoisseur of images with very rare excitement. Every page comes at us with ebullient energy…these superbly executed drawings and watercolours, [some] made when the artist was in his early 20s, are proposals for the narration of a world that is at once intensely local and unselfconsciously international in its tenor.” We can take Hoskote’s word as gospel. One minor quibble though — some of the Portuguese captions could have been translated into English.
The pompous politician, the buxom secretary, the winsome Goan lass — Mario’s images have now become legendary but there is more to the man than being just a cartoonist. He is an artist of rare virtuosity and his huge body of work includes some very poignant portraits and vibrant murals. There is a strong case to accord Mario his rightful place in the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Mumbai branch would be the appropriate place to begin with.
The last word on Mario must go to Nissim Ezekiel, who in a very brief but poetic introduction to a 1968 book on the artist confessed: “The total effect on me of an hour with Mario’s cartoons is hallucinatory. I feel exalted. The ego collapses. I no longer trust the commonplace images of the world as it appears to my eyes but accept the images in the mirror of Mario’s art.”
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