Mário and his Times
Mário’s long tryst with Mumbai began at the Times. He had spent his graduation years at St Xavier’s College, but saw the paper up-close on his return to the city in 1952. With 18 years of visual diaries under his belt, he visited newspaper and business offices. He began as a freelance cartoonist with The Current and sold his handcrafted postcards of the city landmarks at the Flora Fountain to make extra money.
The 26-year-old Goan cartoonist’s versatility, spontaneity, and detail created a significant buzz. Before long, editor C.R. Mandy and art director Walter Langhammer invited him to the Times group of publications. The Illustrated Weekly of India was his first stop. Soon, sister publications like Cocktail, Femina, Filmfare, The Evening News, and The Economic Times began to use Mário’s skilful depictions of movement and sound, often featuring his trademark dog.
The rest is history. Mário would soon rank among the best of India’s cartoonists. The job seemed easy, and everything grist to his mill, but finding humour was no mean task. ‘There are times when you don’t feel funny, or may not feel like laughing, but still have to produce a funny cartoon – like a clown who has got to make people laugh all the time, although he doesn’t feel like laughing,’ said Mário.
Add to it the fact that political bigwigs were breathing down his neck—and he had a sure recipe for disillusionment. Mário learned early on that lampooning power involved high risk. When he toned down the humour, cartooning became a ‘serious’ business. ‘Cartoonists are very serious people, and cartoons, no laughing matter,’ he quipped. That’s when Mário began to see himself mostly as a social caricaturist, turning his lens to fashions, crowded trains, music, films, the bustling life of Irani cafés, and so on!
Past the initial scramble for work, Mário began to yearn for the blissful freedom of his diary sketching. He travelled to Portugal and England, drawing merrily. He did cartoons for Mad magazine and ITV and was featured in Punch. He made fast money and friends, but most importantly, his idol Searle’s injunction — ‘Stay on in England, but stop copying me!’— infused him with the confidence to go by himself.
On Mário’s return in 1962, R.K. Laxman, the reigning deity of The Times of India, ‘subtly ensured that the pedestal was not for sharing,’ says Bachi Karkaria. Mário made his mark… ‘His hilarious work is packed with characters from the contemporary scene and his greatest gift is that he makes us laugh at ourselves,’ said a review in a 1960 issue Cocktail, adding, ‘His illustrations too have polished perfection and have been such a success that all our writers want Mario to illustrate their work.’
The period saw the rise of Mário’s characters to iconic status: the efficient secretary Ms Fonseca, the Boss and his crony Godbole; the corrupt politician Bundaldass and his sidekick Moonswamy; the glamorous Bollywood star Rajni Nimbupani and co-star Balraj Balram. For generations of Indians, these characters were more than ink on paper; they remain a mirror to the nation’s quirks, even if changing sensibilities put a negative spin on some of them.
In 1964, the Times of India Press published Mário’s book of sketches, Goa with Love. Successive editors of the Weekly—Khushwant Singh, M.V. Kamath and Pritish Nandy—held him in high esteem. While his literary background and travels gave him a broad outlook, he wore none of that on his sleeve. Vinod Mehta said that Mário abhorred ‘intellectual talk’, his forte being ‘the accumulation of trivia judiciously and harmoniously composed.’
By and by, Mário got excited about capturing moods and ambiences for his pictorial travelogues. To make time for travel, he first joined a new tabloid, The Midday, where his close friend Behram 'Busybee' Contractor was the editor; and then took to freelancing for The Afternoon Despatch & Courier, founded by humorist Busybee. Countries around the globe invited him to hold solo exhibitions. He also illustrated books for the likes of Ruskin Bond, Dom Moraes, Manohar Malgonkar in Bombay, and for several writers in Goa. There was perhaps no other Indian cartoonist whose works turned into murals that now adorn the urban landscape.
In 1996, after Mário and wife Habiba retired to the quiet of Loutulim, the quintessential Goan artist was instrumental in setting up a museum of Christian art at Rachol (now shifted to Old Goa) and restoring the Reis Magos Fort. But the homecoming far from ended his love story with Mumbai, as he continued infusing The Afternoon Despatch & Courier and The Economic Times with his peerless humour.
The Times was thus his first and last stop. In 2011, India grieved when the icon that had humoured it in good times and in bad fell silent… Thankfully, Mário still provides a timeless window into the local and the global. He is an artist for all times and climes.
Story of Mário, the Miranda (Part 4/6)
(L-R Dockworkers in Germany; Charley's Corner, NY; the Wailing Wall; a street in Portugal; open-air cafe in Paris)
Compulsive Traveller
Mário was a persistent seeker of the funny side of life, as A Little World of Humour (1968) and Laugh It Off (1975) make it amply clear. He was never bored, even if stuck at an airport or a railway station; ‘watching people is an experience,’[53] he said. Bombay’s hustle and bustle had brought him face to face with crowds all right, but he only loved watching them, not being in them![54] He enjoyed walking around, be it in the village or the city; to him, walks were ‘life’s mini-journeys that could be turned into a movie’, says Rishaad.[55]
Mário drew from observation, from life, prompting Nissim Ezekiel to remark: ‘No escape if Mario is looking at you.’[56] In his illustrations always teeming with human specimens, each had their own story to tell. However, sometime later, began cherishing moments away from the madding crowd, say, by slipping into the anonymity of a movie hall.[57] Was it plain overload or a midlife crisis that had suddenly brought on the feeling that ‘life is not funny as all that’[58]?
Fortunately, there was an upside to the behaviour change. Mário got less and less interested in cartooning and more and more excited about capturing moods and ambiences for his pictorial travelogues.[59] He made no bones about his travel mania – ‘especially if someone else is footing the bill!’ as he would say in jest.[60]
In 1979, a year after a major trip to Germany, he quit the influential Times Group and joined a fledgling tabloid, Midday, under Contractor’s editorship. From 1985 onwards, he was a freelancer with the same editor’s The Afternoon Despatch & Courier: not only did his cartoons gel with Busybee’s humour, the paper’s relaxed pace permitted him and wife to travel and draw at will. Sometimes, Habiba and the sons joined him on cross-country jaunts, which were truly memorable, says Raul.
Mário’s wanderlust brought forth the sublime artistry of his pencil and brush, ink and paper – fascinating enough to fill a book. Generally, after he had spotted his themes, his pen would scribble just a few hasty lines, later turning them into finely detailed and nuanced sketches, thanks to the artist’s photographic memory for faces and buildings[61] (he especially loved old people and ruins). Mário’s traditional line art had by now got stylised into neat, black ink pen illustrations, sporting straight graphite lines with flat cross-hatching for tonal variations.[62] Mário said, ‘If you see my early work and compare it, you’ll see I always enjoy experimenting.’[63]
Over a span of three decades, Mário put up more than thirty solo exhibitions across the country[64] and the world.[65] Vinod Mehta saw no contemporary illustrator or cartoonist in India coming close to Mário’s command over the grammar of drawing; the alleged ‘lack of venom’ in his repertoire spoke for his ‘objective perspective’.[66] In the year 2000, Fundação Oriente in collaboration with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations organised a Mário retrospective titled Goa and Other Works[67], honouring the man who for years had served as a cultural link between Portugal and India (Figure 4).[68]
Acknowledgements: (1) I am indebted to Fátima Miranda Figueiredo for her knowledge and patience translated into many hours of whatsapp chats about her brother Mário and the family; and to Raul and Rishaad de Miranda for their warm welcome and lively conversation. (2) Banner picture: Portrait Atelier Goa (3) Article first published in Revista da Casa de Goa, Lisbon, Series II, No. 12, Sep-Oct 2021
[53] FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit.
[54] ‘The Last Interview’, op. cit.
[55] Personal interview, 9.7.2021.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Pritish Nandy, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/mario-miranda-the-man-who-made-miss-fonseca-famous/articleshow/11075146.cms
[58] Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 3 (Outtakes), 26.6.1991, op. cit.
[59] Germany in Wintertime (1980); Impressions of Paris (1985); Desenhos e Aguarelas (1987); Spain (2007), et al.
[60] ‘Tale of Two Goans’, op. cit.
[61] ‘The Last Interview’, op. cit.; for Mário sketching in loco, cf. Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 1 (Outtakes), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBTrDEU9gEQ
[62] ‘The Last Interview’, op. cit.; for Mário at work in Bassein cf. Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op. cit..
[63] ‘Tale of Two Goans’, op. cit.
[64] His first countrywide tour, ‘American Sketchbook’ (1975), included Panjim, Calcutta, Madras and New Delhi.
[65] In Paris, New York, Lisbon, East Berlin, Singapore, Muscat, Jerusalem and Macau, among others.
[66] Vinod Mehta, ‘Tomorrow is another day’, in Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 140.
[67] [Lisboa]: Fundação Oriente, 2000.
[68] Mário was the local coordinator of Fadista Amália Rodrigues’ visit to Goa, in 1990, sponsored by Fundação Oriente, as a prelude to setting up office in Goa. Also cf. ‘From Lisbon with Love’, by Mário, in Goa Today, February 2001, pp. 18-19, describing his exhibition and stay in Portugal in the year 2000.