NANI DAMAN: The young choristers at the 16th century Church of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios in Daman had never heard of Mario de Miranda. But after seeing his artwork on my phone, and learning that the renowned artist and illustrator was one of their own, having been born in the formerly Portuguese enclave at the northernmost tip of the Konkan – and it was his birthday on that very same day – they sang Parabéns Nesta Data Querida to celebrate the occasion with soulful enthusiasm. Later on that same evening on May 2, some of us gathered for a more formal celebration of Mario’s centenary at the Chapel of the Holy Cross that was built by his maternal grandfather in 1896, just around the corner from the (now demolished) old house where he arrived into the world, and into an eclectic and artistic Indo-Portuguese family, culture and society that laid the foundation for his distinguished oeuvre of over six decades.
The experience of slow time in colonial Daman – always Damão to Mario in the original Portuguese – is key to understanding how the artist came to his unique, archival and affectionate style. This ancient cosmopolitan trading post is shoehorned next to what is effectively the holy land of Indian Zoroastrians – Udwada, Sanjan – and the very young artist was surrounded by colourful characters across many different backgrounds, beliefs and ethnic origins. His profound affinity for the Parsis started here, much before his famous Bombay years and lifelong friendship with Behram “Busybee” Contractor. “There was always singing, and Mario read voraciously,” says his much younger sister Fatima Miranda Figueiredo. “He religiously kept up a visual daily record – and when my mother saw the quality of his drawings, she started giving him purpose-made hardback diaries with good drawing paper, and his name and the year embossed in gold on the cover.”
Those diaries were the making of Mario de Miranda, and although still essentially unknown and unacknowledged by the Indian art world, they are undoubtedly one of the greatest treasures of our 20th century visual archive. Each page unfolds another day of close, careful, utterly delightful observations about the people and places the young flâneur encounters in the years after Indian independence, in that awkward period when the Estado da Índia still lingered in Goa.
By now, the Mirandas had relocated to their paternal ancestral seat amongst the landed Luso-Indian gentry of Loutolim. It was there, fuelled by American comics and an unresolved ambition, that this self-taught artist (he later acquired an English Literature degree from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay) developed the densely hatched drawing style that sets him apart, and, from the beginning, he showed an unusual gift for satire that can make everyone smile including the victim. Mario told his friend Manohar Malgonkar that one particularly cantankerous padre did complain to his mother, insisting she take him to the Bishop for a scolding, but the senior priest only “convulsed with laughter when he saw it. He told my mother not to do anything to stop her son from making drawings. He has a natural talent. Let him develop it.”
It did not take long, “baby sister” Fatima told me, for this non-stop chronicling to earn Mario an early celebrity in his milieu, including the seniormost dignitaries of Goa. “Every January, the previous year’s diaries did the rounds from the Patriarch Dom José da Costa Nunes to the Governor of Portuguese India, Fernando de Quintanilha e Mendonça Dias.” But when he took those same precious volumes to Mumbai in the cusp of the 1950s, they failed to stir up suitable employment, and the artist was compelled to draw picture postcards that his fellow Bomoicar (the Konkani term for Goans in Bombay) and close friend Policarpo “Polly” Vaz sold to tourists to make ends meet. The disheartened duo started saving up to migrate to Brazil, but that is when Dosabhai “Dosoo” Karaka, the Oxonian bon vivant and founder-editor of The Current made a consequential commission: “I want you to attend a dance at the Taj Mahal Hotel, and do a scene of the people dancing this new dance that has become a craze, the Can-Can. If I like it, I will publish your picture.”
It is that precise combination of elements which catapulted Mario from picture postcards to pure magic. Just as newly independent Indians were being thrust together in unprecedented ways, here came an artist capable of observing and reading all the nuances. Working fast in intense concentration, he represented what he saw with an innate genius that defies easy classification but clearly possesses an almost universal appeal. His work became instantly beloved, and ubiquitous across Anglophone India. From the 1960s onwards, young Indians learned to read English from Bal Bharati readers filled with his illustrations, and they grew up with his work omnipresent across the (then-dominant) Times Group publications, where he’d been invited to join by the perceptive art connoisseur Walter Langhammer. Alongside, there were also important, impactful suites of works to accompany books by Dom Moraes, HM Lala and Manohar Malgonkar. Iconic is putting it mildly: this is nothing less than the defining body of work about self-consciously “modern” India.
There is also an anomaly here, however. Looking back from the vantage of this centenary year, we can see an unexpected twist in Mario de Miranda’s remarkable artistic and life trajectory from Nani Daman to a kind of global recognition, the Padma Shri (in 1988), Padma Bhushan (2002) and Padma Vibhushan (posthumously, in 2012). All those who see it tend to love his work even now, and his archives enjoy huge merchandising success with Indian urbanites of every age, but there has never been any corresponding recognition from the Indian art world. They failed to understand his worth even while he was alive – and he was certainly hurt about that – and they continue to remain stubbornly blindfolded. “Mario has not received the homage that is due him as an artist,” acknowledged Ranjit Hoskote in his perceptive 2008 essay The Art of Mario Miranda.
Hoskote wrote: “In a society less addicted to taxonomy than our own, it would have been widely and immediately recognised that Mario’s gift far transcends the deadline-driven, wit-on-tap, demand-and-supply logic of editorial art. It would be far more accurate to shift the contextual frame that has been placed around him, and see him as an artist who, partly by choice and partly by happenstance, channelised much of his energy into the mass media. This should not detract, in any way, from the significance of his vision and his contribution; nor should it place him at a disadvantage in relation to those of his contemporaries who entered the gallery system and found a place and made a career there. He represents the lineage of the gadfly-provocateur and the witness to caprice and reason, whose standard-bearers include Goya, Hogarth and Daumier.”
The art world has not budged, but history itself has taken another turn since Hoskote wrote that essay for the first large-scale retrospective publication on Mario. Filled with hundreds of artworks from across every phase of his artistic life, it was published by the architect Gerard da Cunha, whose ship-shaped Houses of Goa Museum is a quirky cultural highlight of India’s smallest state. Via email earlier this week, the publisher told me he became more involved with the artist’s estate immediately after the book came out as “Mario got Parkinson’s disease, and also lost his job at the Economic Times. Like some artists, he wasn’t at all commercially minded and had little savings. Habiba [the artist’s late wife] approached me, and asked me to find a way to financially support the family, and that is how it began. If Mario had been financially secure, I never would have started the Mario Gallery and my involvement would have ended with the publishing of the book.”
In fact, there is nothing else quite like Mario Gallery anywhere in India, where da Cunha has created several outlets across Goa that maintain brisk sales of an astonishing array of Mario memorabilia: reproductions, objets d’art, housewares, furnishings, keepsakes and collectibles across every price range. He told me, “I’m not an art critic and was not judging his work. My job was to monetise it. It has been a blast. To do the book I amassed 8000 drawings, which was my reference. I had some previous experience as a publisher, and so I felt that I could support the family by publishing a number of books. So, I brought out five small books on Goa, Bombay, Travels and Best Cartoons, then followed it up with three of his visual diaries. Books hardly sell, so I started making merchandise: posters, post cards, paper weights, fridge magnets, key chains and many other products. Fortunately they sold, and I opened five stores and a production facility.”
The bottom line, says da Cunha, is that “Mario’s work hangs in homes – probably a hundredfold of any of the other great Indian artists. This may be a bugbear for art critics. I do feel a sense of satisfaction that I have been able to keep Mario in the public eye, and introduce him to a new generation. We have done 10 books on his work which is probably more than any great Indian artist, and the Mario Gallery has assisted a scholar getting a Phd, with one more on the way. We have also built a great archive which people can access freely. I am happy to know the Goa government intends to build a museum for Mario. I have not been involved in it, but it is still in the early stages. A good museum for Mario would be a great idea.”
(Vivek Menezes is a photographer, writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival.)