Mapusa market, especially on Fridays, throbs with activity. It’s the day when smaller businesses set up their stalls in this market in north Goa, selling trinkets, gifts and other odds and ends. At the heart of it is the enclosed municipal market, which has its usual assortment of vegetable sellers. Above the two main entrances, facing each other, are two murals printed on tiles. Most people who use the market on a regular basis hardly notice these murals, especially since they are not at eye level.
One mural shows scenes of festivities, Hindu and Catholic, with a jazz band in between. The other is a representation of the market itself, filled with buyers and sellers of all kinds and at least one dog.
When it’s a Mario, there usually is a dog. Or a crow.
Born Mario Joao Carlos do Rosario de Britto a Miranda, but known popularly only as Mario, which is how he signed his works, the artist whose creation adorns the walls of the market is also one whose work symbolises Goa in popular culture. His signature drawings are omnipresent—in bars, hotels, walls, on signs, on souvenirs, on everything that needs to validate its “Goan-ness”. A sketch artist, illustrator and cartoonist, Miranda contributed to newspapers such as The Times of India in Mumbai from the 1950s till the 2000s, before he died in 2011.
His is also a style that’s unique, instantly recognisable. It’s often either replicated out of inspiration or just plagiarised—so when you see a Mario, you can’t be sure if it’s a Mario. Gerard da Cunha, who manages the Mario Gallery, which has the rights to use the artist’s images commercially, calls him the most plagiarised artist around. Even the relatively new Manohar International Airport (MOPA) in north Goa, opened with much fanfare and pride a few years ago, uses on its walls the works of an artist whose style is reminiscent of Mario—but is not Mario.
For a generation that lived through the 1960s to the 1990s, especially in Mumbai (then Bombay) and Goa, Miranda’s images shaped popular consciousness. Over time, his works have appeared in different places, in different contexts, always instantly distinguishable. Some murals have survived, some painted over, some destroyed along with their host establishment. Most of his work was in black and white, pen and ink sketches, fluid and intricate on paper. In a few strokes, he could convey emotions, expressions and character.
His murals have been in Colaba Causeway’s Café Mondegar and at The Club’s Bowling Centre, Crossroads Mall, among others in Mumbai. In Goa, at Panjim’s Mayfair Hotel, Park Hyatt’s Miranda Bar, Majorda’s Martin’s Corner, the gallery at Reis Magos fort, on the walls of the Panjim vegetable market that had to be at least once washed off for paan stains, at the art centre of Kala Academy, Ocean Palms, Mapusa Market, the older Dabolim airport, and Cortalim Panchayat, among others.
Mario’s Gallery uses his characters on T-shirts, mugs, umbrellas, bags and fridge magnets, allowing for his works to travel as a souvenir. Their five stores across the state offer collectibles that compete with cashew and feni—or for those who prefer just cashew feni—as things to get from Goa that are uniquely Goan.
In her doctoral dissertation, Making a Public Aesthetic: Heritage, Humour and Regional Identity in Goa (2021), Prakruti Ramesh, while investigating why Miranda was selectively recycled as a form of public art in Goa, started to view “this partially recycled corpus of images as symptomatic of sub-national identity in Goa, and as a means of destination-branding for the purpose of tourism”.
There are some who believe Miranda, whose birth centenary is on 2 May, did not get his due, despite a number of Indian and international awards. Others feel that Goa did not do enough for one of its own, like having a dedicated museum or even a state-driven centenary celebration. Still others argue that in the half-a-century of his public career, he may have missed out on due recognition because cartooning ranks below fine art.
One of the discoveries Ramesh made in the course of her research is that while Miranda created thousands of cartoons and illustrations in different genres and styles, the images one encounters in public places constitute a tiny and repetitive fraction of his oeuvre. “It is deeply ironic that Miranda appears to be celebrated and commemorated in his home-state, even as most of his life’s work languishes in obscurity,” says Ramesh, who is a Shuimu postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing, over an email.
100 YEARS OF MARIO
Painted on the outside walls of a 150-year-old building in Fountainhas, Panjim, is Miranda’s face, surrounded by sketches of character types that he would normally draw. Spray-painted by Solomon Souza, artist F.N. Souza’s grandson, the building owned by Shaun Lobo also hosts a Goan-Portuguese restaurant. In Lobo’s den on the first floor, newly framed works of Miranda’s, covered in anti-reflective glass so they could be displayed for the public, adorn adjacent and opposite walls.
Lobo’s father, Ronnie, who worked at the Taj Mansingh hotel in Delhi from the late 1970s, had met and bonded with Miranda over their mutual Goa connection. But through the 1980s and 1990s, Ronnie had also acquired a lot of Miranda’s art, now inherited by Shaun.
A part of Lobo’s collection will go up on display at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts in Altinho, Panjim, from 9 May to 13 June, in an exhibition called Growing Up In Mario’s World. A book, Growing Up With Mario, edited by Shaun and with contributions from friends, family and admirers, will be released on the occasion.
Another collector, Aristedes Alvares, is also planning an exhibition and a dinner to mark the occasion. At the palatial 150-year-old Alvares family mansion in Dongrim, about 15km south-east of Fountainhas, one section of the house leading up to Aristedes’ studio is filled with framed works of Mario, with piles of prints stacked at different places. Up the wooden stairs, in his lair where he is busy planning for the event on a scorching Saturday in April, several newly framed prints lean against the wall as carpenters discuss building panels for these prints to be hung on.
A part of Alvares’ collection will be shown at the Clube Tennis de Gaspar Dias in Miramar in a private event on 2 May. Alvares has for long wanted a museum for Miranda, who he met for the first time in the 1990s. He says that the former Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar had sanctioned a plan for the museum before he got summoned to the Centre and the plan fell apart.
According to Alvares, another venue in Panjim, the Adil Shah Palace, has been earmarked for the purpose but will be subject to the slow-moving whims of the state machinery. “This guy (Miranda) has brought to life the culture of Goans,” says Alvares. “That is the beauty of this man. He is an artist who could do caricatures, illustrations, drawings, cartoons, humorous sketches… His portraits are unbelievable. Few people can achieve that mastery of watercolours.”
An Instagram handle, The World of Mario, curated by the Mario Gallery, has also started narrating the artist’s life story chronologically, accompanied by photographs and sketches. Gerard’s Bengaluru-based daughter Nyhna da Cunha, who manages the account, says when she meets people, she has to often explain to them who Miranda is—as an explanation to what she does for a living. “I want people to know who Mario is... If they go through his work,” she says, speaking specifically about the younger generation, “they can instantly relate to him.”
The Directorate of Museums, government of Goa, this week announced an event marking the centenary, with a lecture, an exhibition and film screenings on 2-3 May.
RELATING TO MARIO
“Just get to the church and ask anyone.”
In a state where Google Maps is occasionally untrustworthy and cellular network can be patchy, Raul Miranda’s brief guide to finding his home, his father’s ancestral home, is reliable. At the heart of Loutolim, a small village in the Salcette district of south Goa, the church has multiple roads attached to it. One of them, the most unassuming one, leads to the house that was built sometime in the late 17th century, showing signs of both grandeur and age.
On the ground floor of this roughly 30,000 sq. ft home is Miranda’s office facing the front gate, with a desk that has his nameplate. The walls carry Miranda’s many awards, with family portraits on antique furniture. His sketches and paintings are on almost all the walls of the house, which has a ballroom and a chapel besides his studio on the first floor.
His doodles are scattered everywhere in the studio, many on the floor, which was by Miranda’s choice. In Manohar Malgonkar’s biography of the cartoonist in the coffee-table book Mario de Miranda, first published in 2008, the writer narrates an incident when Miranda had drawn a picture and left it leaning against the wall to dry. “That was when Tommy (one of Miranda’s many dogs) walked to the picture, solemnly raised his leg and formally anointed it.”
Miranda’s sister Fatima, 16 years younger than him, says with a chuckle over the phone from her Madgaon residence that her brother preferred to leave his drawings on the floor—in case any of his dogs wanted to pass their judgement on them.
Miranda, born in Daman started drawing from an early age, using charcoal from the kitchen fire or even a finger dipped in mud, on walls or the floor, according to Malgonkar’s biography. Over time, Miranda’s maternal grandmother got so annoyed by him that his mother gave him a diary when he was 6-7 years old, Fatima says, and the freedom to draw or write whatever he wanted.
“He kept on doing that till his first job (with a weekly magazine The Current sometime in the early 1950s)—and one of those diaries got him the job,” recalls Fatima.
Though Miranda moved to Bombay in 1943 to study art at the J. J. School of Art, he didn’t go through with it and instead got a bachelor’s degree from St Xavier’s College. It took a few years before he landed The Current job. Over time, others followed, notably with The Times of India that also brought out the popular The Illustrated Weekly of India, where Miranda would illustrate short stories. He forged a lifelong friendship with a sub-editor there, Behram Contractor, who led Mario to Mid-Day, and then to The Afternoon Despatch & Courier, which Contractor founded.
In his editorial work, Miranda stayed clear of political satire or rather was careful with it, leaving some of the more biting commentary to his Times of India colleague R.K. Laxman. He preferred social and cultural commentary and “to the largest extent possible, he didn’t get into direct political commentary,” says poet, cultural theorist and art curator Ranjit Hoskote, who knew Miranda well.
“But in the Goa work, there was clearly a sense of an engagement with a history in which he belonged. So that had a more political aspect, for sure.”
Miranda’s work naturally evolved over time, influenced by current affairs, his observations and travels. The sketches in his 20s, which were mainly biographical, of people or scenes from the village, got more defined lines and themes by the time he was working for The Current. Bombay street life featured prominently in the 1950s through the 1970s with The Times of India.
Hoskote remembers a particular kind of Bombay culture of the late 1980s and 1990s with artists, musicians, architects, theatre makers, filmmakers, forming “this lived ideal of Bombay cosmopolitanism”. “The minute you use that particular kind of figuration, you’re conveying something about a certain kind of cosmopolitan Bombay everydayness. The figures have some of his characters, just passed into normal parlance, at least for a certain generation.”
One aspect that makes his work unique is it offers a subjective window into the social and political evolution of Goa from about the 1940s until the 2000s, says Ramesh. Hoskote agrees, saying: “In India, somehow you see everything through a British Raj lens. But it means that if there are people who came from Lusophone India, or Francophone India, you don’t really understand them in their fullness, unless you make an effort.”
Miranda’s observations from the world of newspapers, advertising and other aspects of social life gave rise to memorable characters. Like the secretary Ms Fonseca, in her polka-dotted dress, was created to be a typical Goan, Anglo-Indian secretary who reported to Boss. Other comical figures like Godbole, the clerk in love with Ms Fonseca, the actress Rajni Nimbupani, the composite politician Bundaldass and his assistant Moonswamy, made repeated appearances in Miranda’s work.
“It was a newly independent country,” says Lobo, “so he captured the aspirations of people. This is the work he did in the 1960s.”
But Lobo clarifies that Miranda’s work was critical, reflective, and deeply human. The upcoming exhibition at Sunaparanta, where multiple rooms highlight different themes or periods from Miranda’s career, also includes works from the late 1960s. At this time, Lobo says, Miranda explored darker themes like starvation, depictions of societal inequalities in Bombay, where the opulence of the rich contrasted with the struggles of the common man, starvation, guilt, etc., seen in works such as The Wrath of Miguel Vaz, Court of Inquisition, and The Ruin of Old Goa.
In the coffee-table book Germany in Wintertime, first published in 1979 from Miranda’s trip to the country in 1977, dark, intricate and detailed sketches depict everyday life in the country—at airports, coffee shops, flea markets, strip clubs from Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich.
“His drawings in Germany, France are great works of art,” says Subodh Kerkar, the founding director of Museum of Goa (MOG), who formerly held the Mario Miranda Chair as a visiting research professor at Goa University. “He created a unique style of his own—nothing of the sort existed. Whether depicting Goa life in an interesting style, the fish market or ferry crossing, his drawings are unforgettable. Mario’s work lingers.”
Kerkar points to the drawings Miranda made for Malgonkar’s book Inside Goa, exquisitely evocative and detailed, which has one of his favourite pieces, The Coming of the Portuguese. The drawing is of the ship carrying the colonisers, the distinctive Cross of Christ on its sail, nearing land where a few locals watch out for them from behind a coconut tree.
One limitation Miranda was confronted with as a creative artist, writes Ramesh in her email, is that while much of his commentary was aimed to satirise and expose the dangers of an over-reliance on tourism and real-estate sectors as linchpins of the Goan economy, “especially under conditions where state- and corporate-actors colluded for private gain… Miranda relied also on commissions that he received from state- and corporate-actors who were directly involved in the tourism racket. So, while he was critical of tourism and of government corruption, financial duress meant that some of his most popularly replicated work was actually produced for publications that intended to ‘sell’ Goa as a tourism destination.”
A SKETCH IN TIME
Miranda moved back to Goa, after spending most of his adult life in Bombay and travelling abroad, in the late 1990s. His family and surviving friends say his heart never left Goa, always yearned for Loutolim.
Raul remembers his father being lost in his own world, a person who couldn’t swim, drive or “even open a microwave”. Miranda would take his sons, Raul and Rishaad, on walks in the village, to Bombay by boat, never pressuring them on academics.
“He said, do what you want but don’t get into trouble with the police,” says Raul, cracking up with laughter, seated at the desk that was once his father’s throne.
Raul moved back to Loutolim a few years ago after spending a couple of decades as a hair stylist in New York. As the lone survivor from the immediate family—mother Habiba died a few years ago followed by younger brother Rishaad soon after—he is also the guardian of the ancestral abode, which Miranda adored.
He shares the house with about half-a-dozen dogs, a love that he inherits from his father. Both brothers dabbled in painting too; some believe that Rishaad was as good—if not better—than his father.
Everyone remembers Miranda as a man of few words, with a wry sense of humour, a sketchbook always in hand and deep in observation. “Susan, my wife, was once watering the garden when it started to rain,” says A. Gomes Pereira, a family friend who knew Miranda from the late 1970s in Bombay. “Mario arrived at that point and noticed that Susan had continued to water the garden in the rain. He immediately drew that and it was so charming.”
“We would go often to the family house,” says Pablo, Miranda’s godson and whose father Lucio was Miranda’s cousin. “Whenever we went there, he would always be in his studio. Everyone would say don’t disturb. But he would let me in and show his work.”
Pablo remembers that each picture had a story. “He would sit and talk—and most I would not understand—but he would obsesses over each picture and its story.” While dining, says the chef who runs the restaurants Makutsu and Antonio 31 de Janeiro, Miranda would look at the spilled curry stains and say it looked like a piece of art.
One of Pablo’s favourite sketches is of a man playing the guitar on the patio, perhaps serenading a young woman. Pablo believes that image is based on his father Lucio, who was an architect and a memorable musician.
EVERYBODY LOVES MARIO
Editorial cartoonist Satish Acharya’s introduction to Miranda’s works was through The Illustrated Weekly of India. As a student in the mid-1980s, this was his window to the world of cartooning. Miranda’s drawing style and detailing, “which in turn is his distinctive style,” attracted him along with the “adorable characters”.
“He introduced us to Goa (also Mumbai) through his amazingly intricate sketches and lovely characters taken straight out of the villages in Goa,” writes Acharya, who freelances as an editorial cartoonist for publications such as Sportstar, Dainik Bhaskar and Frontline among others, over an email.
Since there are hardly any schools teaching the art of cartooning, most cartoonists from his generation and even now, writes Acharya, learnt by copying the works of masters like Laxman and Miranda, among others. “It wasn’t easy to copy Mario’s works as he would fill his artworks with loads of details,” says Acharya. “So, I mostly copied his characters. Gradually, I developed my own style of drawing, (but) I feel there’s still a shade of Mario’s influence in my characters.”
Gerard da Cunha, a celebrated architect, says Miranda was aware of the number of artists who either were influenced by him or blatantly copied him. But he didn’t seem to mind most of the time. “Once when I told him (Miranda) that this guy (another artist) is copying your work, he said, ‘yeah, but he does it nicely, you know’?” says Da Cunha, seated at his gallery in Salvador-do-Mundo. “Everybody in Goa believes that Mario belongs to them. Mario didn’t mind himself except, only once. He put a notice in the newspapers saying I will sue if anybody copies my work.”
Only once has the Mario Gallery sent a legal notice—a few years ago to local authorities and organisers of the G20 Summit for using Miranda’s artworks without permission. Most others, used in smaller scales in smaller settings, go unnoticed.
“His works over a period of time, his particular style has been used by so many people, for inspiration or for copy. It’s become like an urban vernacular,” adds Hoskote.
The number of works Miranda did is staggering. For the book Mario de Miranda, Da Cunha collected about 8,000 scanned copies of Miranda’s works. Lobo has a couple of hundred of his drawings, while Alvares does not reveal his numbers.
During his lifetime, Miranda did not care much for money till wife, Habiba, got his matters organised. Salaries in newspapers were—and continue to be—low. Lobo says he has a letter from the 1960s in which Miranda requests an editor to increase his salary from ₹18 to ₹25.
“Mario was a bon vivant, enjoyed life but never thought of money,” says Pereira, who does not have much of Miranda’s works because the artist would not charge him and he didn’t want to take advantage of his generosity. Pereira adds with a smile, “But he would make invitation cards for my birthday. That I accepted for free.”
The value of Miranda’s works today are difficult to gauge. In a 2020 Saffronart auction called World of Mario, the highest value achieved by the artist was for a drawing called Jazz Band which sold for ₹7,55,400. Over time, the auction house has had 159 lots in auction, and sold all.
But Miranda has not received the homage that is due to him as an artist, Hoskote writes in Mario de Miranda, because editorial artists are regarded with some dismissiveness as being narrowly purpose driven with compulsions towards entertainment.
“For many artists, it’s only what you see in their galleries,” says Hoskote over a call. “There’s a lot else that doesn’t make it to that level. But in Mario’s case, it was the opposite. I think there was a lot that should have made it to the gallery, but never did, because he got somehow caught up in this image of the chronicler of Bombay for cartoons.”
Mario Gallery recently opened a sixth store, in the quaintly picturesque Fountainhas. Da Cunha didn’t intend to, but a few months ago, he was approached by the owner of the property, who said that Miranda had painted that house, in a work called Street in Fountainhas. The landlord thought it was only appropriate that the house was rented by the Gallery. It was a sign, for Da Cunha, that the Gallery can’t be stagnant. It needs to grow, so Miranda can reach more people.
“All the bars have his works. I am proud, I feel on top of the world,” says Raul, when asked what he feels seeing his father’s work in public places. “I say, that’s my dad’s, man.”
Arun Janardhan (@iArunJ) is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.