Mario’s Gift: A tribute to the artist-cartoonist on his birth centenary
Movement, exuberance and lively chaos characterised Mario Miranda’s signature style
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How does one remember Mario Miranda? As the cartoonist who gave us some unforgettable characters — Ms Fonseca in all her polka-dotted prettiness; Bundaldass, the quintessential neta; and Rajani Nimbupani, tinsel-town queen? As the artist whose intricate pen-and-ink drawings, vibrant watercolours and exuberant murals transformed every page and wall they touched? Or as the chronicler of everyday life, capturing with equal affection the restless rhythm of the city and the laidback quietude of village life? Perhaps the answer lies in all of these, and more.
Known to the world simply as Mario, he was born Mario João Carlos do Rosário de Britto a Miranda exactly a hundred years ago, in a sprawling ancestral mansion in Loutolim, Goa — a home whose decadent charm would later serve as the setting for Shyam Benegal’s movie ‘Trikal’. Young Mario was an incessant doodler, scrawling all over the walls of his home until his exasperated mother handed him a blank book. That small act would go on to shape both his craft and his discipline. It sparked a lifelong habit: Mario would carry diaries wherever he travelled, filling them with quick observations and sketches — fragments of a world he would later bring vividly to life.
Mario often said he was never bored, even at airport lounges, because he loved to watch people and document a social world constantly in motion. Editor Vinod Mehta has written about his friend’s ceaseless urge to draw. On a trip abroad together, Mehta noticed that Mario would frequently disappear for long stretches from restaurants or pubs. Curious, he once decided to follow him, only to find the artist stationed near a restaurant kitchen, “hand cupped, eyes frenetic, pen busy”, taking notes.
To Mehta’s untutored eye, these were little more than a few hurried lines. But for Mario, they were “homework” — the germ of a future drawing. “He told me that that was the way he worked,” recalled Mehta. If not a cartoonist, Mario would have made a good tailor, Mehta observed, marvelling at the attention he paid to the attire of his characters.
Mario would carry his diaries, since his school and college days, using them to practice and refine his craft. Though drawing was his passion, Mario never pursued formal training. He enrolled at the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay, only to make a hasty exit after a day. Years later, he would meet his future wife, Habiba Hydari, a graduate of the same art school.
Mario’s calling as a cartoonist was formalised when his diaries caught the attention of the editor of the now-defunct Current magazine. He was asked to capture the Can-Can dance craze that had swept through Bombay’s social scene. He did so with characteristic gusto, imbuing the illustration with movement, exuberance and a sense of lively chaos that would become his signature style. The assignment led to his first job as a cartoonist, and there was no looking back.
“India has not seen an artist-journalist like Mario,” says fellow cartoonist and friend Nala Ponnappa, recalling the brilliant watercolours that enlivened the pages of The Illustrated Weekly of India, along with the vast array of quintessential Bombay characters he brought to life across publications in the Times of India stable. Mario took an early break in his career to travel to Lisbon after receiving a year-long art fellowship from the Gulbenkian Foundation. A subsequent stay in London, where he interacted with several artists and cartoonists, proved equally formative, sharpening his craft and worldview.
“He transformed into a new Mario,” says VG Narendra, cartoonist and managing trustee of the Indian Institute of Cartoonists, adding that he came up with his own visual grammar.
“It was a cartooning style that was inimitable yet accessible to both children and grownups,” adds Narendra. He also recalls that Mario played a key role in conceptualising and supporting the Cartoon Gallery in Bengaluru.
Mario’s drawings, in many ways, offer an ethnographic study of cityscapes. He loved to travel “especially when someone else is footing the bill”, he would joke — and possessed a rare ability to capture the distinct flavour of the places he visited. In London, he sketched nightclubs and their curious, foggy-eyed patrons; in Jerusalem, solemn figures moving through ancient streets; in Paris, cafés, bookshops, lively street corners and livelier people; in Germany, the beer halls, strip-tease performers and their distracted audiences.
He drew city scenes, seamlessly combining stone structures with teeming life.
He seemed to love the verticality of structures, whether it be the gothic marvels of Portugal or the skyscrapers of New York. Each place found its way into Mario’s sketchbooks, rendered with humour and an unerring eye for detail — works that remain especially cherished by generations of architecture students. Among them, Gerard da Cunha was inspired to open a gallery in Goa dedicated to Mario, ensuring that his legacy endures.
The Tinto (1982).
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For all his travels, two places remained closest to Mario’s heart: Goa and Bombay. Goa couldn’t have had a better brand ambassador. His visuals of the place, with its happy blend of Indian and Portuguese cultures, remain firmly embedded in popular imagination. In Goa, from five-star hotels to beachside shacks, everyone has their Mario. In his drawings that celebrated the 1970s and ’80s of a developing Bombay, he had space for everyone: from the social butterfly to the dhabawallah. “It was as if he were observing the city from a passing train: in one corner, one could even spot a man relieving himself against a wall. How many cartoonists would notice, let alone capture, such a fleeting detail?” says Ponnappa.
Mario was a wonderful writer too, his prose as vivid and imaginative as his sketches. Sample this line from his book ‘Goa with Love’: “Those were the days when the lady of the house, in this case Dona Serafina do Sacramento Soares, paid her annual visit to the beach, accompanied by her maid Bostiana, her husband Caraciolo and her grandson Bartolomeu, not forgetting the dogs Romeo and Rabicho.” One can’t help but visualise a tableau of characters parading to the shore. Mario also collaborated with writers such as Manohar Malgonkar (‘Inside Goa’), Ruskin Bond and Dom Moraes (‘The Open Eyes: A Journey through Karnataka’), among others, enriching their texts with illustrations.
Miss Fonseca and the Boss.
In New York, the Mecca of cartooning, as he called it, he met many cartoonists, including Charles M Schulz, creator of the Peanuts strip, and his favourite Pat Oliphant. The American trait of laughing at oneself was something he found lacking in India, and hoped Indians would emulate that. Which is also why he shied away from making any exaggerated caricatures of Indian politicians, preferring to draw them in their own likeness. Like Oliphant, who preferred to describe himself as an artist who also drew cartoons, Mario enjoyed drawing more than cartooning. Largely uninterested in the rough and tumble of Indian politics, he resisted the biting cynicism often associated with political cartooning, choosing instead to see himself as a “social cartoonist”.
“Where there is humour, I will do a cartoon,” he once observed. His cartoons were very much like the man himself — humorous, simple and pleasant. “There was no negativity, anger or animosity in his cartoons,” says Ponnappa, remembering him as a gentle, soft-spoken human being, without airs, and remarkably generous in his appreciation of younger artists like him.
That generosity of spirit pretty much touched everything he drew, including animals. After his pet dog Tommy died, he penned a beautiful tribute in the Afternoon Despatch and Courier, where he was then working. The Mirandas were known to have kept several pets at their various homes. These included roosters, cats, turtles, squirrels and even a pig! In his preface to Mario’s book, ‘A Little World of Humour’, friend and poet Nissim Ezekiel wrote: “In Mario’s world, even houses, trees, dogs, cats and crows are funny. One may presume he has no malice against them. Everything is transformed into caricature, but nothing becomes unreal.”
When one enters Mario’s world, one cannot simply amble through it and move on. Each line, each curve, each gesture invites the viewer to pause and savour it. For, each drawing bears the imprint of not just the artist’s painstaking craft and love of his medium, but his genuine affection for the world around him. Mario honoured his art and his art commands you to honour and appreciate the world in an unpretentious way.
As Ezekiel says, “The total effect on me of an hour with Mario’s cartoons is hallucinatory… 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.”
— The writer is based in Bengaluru
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