Mario de Miranda was born in 1926, two years after Nissim Ezekiel, the poet, critic, and early champion of Mario’s work. Just as Ezekiel was a forebear of modern Indian English poetry, Mario too stands as one of the forebears of modern Indian cartooning. On his birth centenary, Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Cartoonists has a show of his prints titled “Mario@100” running at its gallery until May 23. The gallery itself is an odd, one of a kind institution trying to keep the art of cartooning alive in public consciousness. Run by the veteran cartoonist V.G. Narendra, it is located in the basement of a building—an appropriate location given that cartooning has become a marginal art form in our print media, and barely survives today through digital platforms. A few visitors trickled in when I was there.

The exhibition consists of a few photos from Mario’s life, including one with V.S. Naipaul, examples of his cartooning work, and other illustrations. There are the famous characters he created—Miss Fonseca, the film star Rajni Nimbupani, the Boss, the clerk Godbole, the politician Bundaldass—alongside the illustrations he produced out of his travels, and those where he collaborated with others, such as with Dom Moraes, on Karnataka (The Open Eyes, 1976). There is a smattering of portraits of people in pen and ink. All in all, a very modest exhibition for such a singular figure in Indian cartooning.

He seems to be the first and last of a kind. How does one assess such a unique body of work?

Let me begin with my own encounter with Mario’s drawings. As a child I used to copy cartoons that came out in newspapers and magazines. The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Economic Times were part of the household supply of magazines and newspapers, and Mario’s cartoons appeared in them. Something stood out immediately to my novice eyes: the tiny black dots strategically placed in the negative spaces of a picture. At first glance, they looked like tiny ink spills, but of course they were not. I wondered why he used them.

Looking at them again, years later, I see that they work somewhat like the symbolic forms that are routinely used by cartoonists—such as sweat beads, speed lines, stars over the head, etc. In his case, they seem to activate the negative space and animate the air around a picture. They work to infuse more life into the image. The black dots as little particles of life dust.

His pictures are teeming with life. The crowd is the typical Mario subject. Figures are packed into a picture with no room to breathe, bodies collide against one another, producing an almost abstract tapestry of humanity. All the figures are “types” of one kind or the other. The viewer’s eyes have to work through every single body, since there is no centre of interest. This feature is apparent even in his earliest diaries entries, made when he was in his 20s (they are written in Portuguese, the language of his family).

Mario is drawn to spaces where people congregate—cafés, parties, bazaar, airport, a church procession. The sense of place seems to be central to his image-making. If the location negates the possibility of a crowd—such as a room—objects fill it up, doing the job of a crowd. Later, when he started doing vistas of the places he travelled to, the emptiness of a landscape without people would be filled in by the line itself—by meticulous, densely packed cross-hatching. In some ways, these late drawings of people and places are poignant. Gone are the vibrant, over-the-top characters. Human figures tend to become minuscule, almost merging with the pen and ink of the cross-hatching.

The idea of the cartoonist as record-keeper and diarist is played out in his oeuvre. Indeed, it was his early habit of drawing in diaries that got him his first jobs and opened doors. As a cartoonist for The Current (edited by D.F. Karaka, a very interesting personality himself) and then for the Times Group, with which he worked for the longest time, Mario shaped his habit of creating caricatures based on observation into a distinct type of cartooning, instantly recognisable as his. It took a while to develop that aesthetic.

Standing apart

Initially, Mario wanted to be an artist and study in Paris. A trip to Lisbon turned into a year-long stay, with a visit to London (where Abu Abraham was already working with The Observer) and an attempt to enroll in a Parisian art school aborted by the lack of funds. The diaries saved him, as a scholarship was offered on the strength of his sketches. It is this Europe sojourn that gave him confidence. His distinctive style began to evolve gradually after he returned to India to resume work with the Times Group.

Goa’s accession to India in 1961 coincided with his homecoming. I feel that the development of his mature style and the end of Indo-Portuguese culture are co-related. The Miranda family were Indo-Portuguese elites. Several generations worked in the Portuguese colonial administration, as did Mario’s father, who was the administrador of Daman. Mario himself was prodded to sit for the IAS exams. Prior to the Portuguese conquest and their conversion to Roman Catholicism, the family were Sardesais (revenue collectors) and Saraswat Brahmins by caste. The more than 300-year-old ancestral mansion at Loutolim remains intact: it was to this childhood home that Mario returned with his wife Habiba in 1996, and he lived there until he died in 2011.

The unique perspective of his cartoons seems to come from his awareness of himself as the last of a breed. The presumed “gentleness” of his humour is probably related to his perception of the dying cultural legacy of his family. He is also acutely aware of the fact that Indians tend not to laugh at themselves. “We cannot laugh at ourselves, which makes us all the more laughable,” said Khushwant Singh in an introduction to one of Mario’s cartoon books.

A noticeable feature of Mario’s cartoons is his busty women with protruding butts. Beginning with the village girl at the well, based on his first crush as a teenager, to characters like Miss Fonseca, there is a type of female figure that pops up everywhere, even in his illustrations of far-flung cities of the world. His drawing of a Belur temple sculpture displayed at “Mario@100” provides a clue. This kind of slim-waisted, big-breasted, broad-hipped female figure is a staple in medieval Indian temple sculpture. Mario draws them less as caricatures and more in a spirit of admiration—as if in the sea of distorted figures, these women, carrying the stamp of the male gaze, are still a redeeming sight.

In one of the Doordarshan documentaries made on Mario, one of his large drawings hangs on the walls of his Loutolim residence. It is a foundational image, showing the arrival of Portuguese ships to the Goan coast. On the land are curious villagers looking at the giant ships with tall masts. Only one woman at the bottom right of the picture looks directly at the viewer and not at the ships. She is bare-breasted, and stares intently. For me, Mario’s singular vision is contained in this one picture.

Bharath Murthy is a comics author and an independent comics editor-publisher as part of Comix India.

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