Vivek Menezes
15 years after his death, we have much to celebrate about Mario Miranda’s iconic stature as the celebrated ‘people’s artist’ of Goa, but there’s another less savoury aspect to the popular notoriety of some of his “lowest-common-denominator” artworks. Their mass-produced ubiquity has wound up provincialising this hugely significant post-Independence Indian artist so that his historical importance has become obscured.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
For the late artist’s 100th birthday last month, I wrote “no contemporary Indian artist is plagiarised more, with the worst culprits in his own state (and quite often the government itself), while the deadly slur of “cartoonist” remains perpetually attached, so that all the cash flow generated by the merchandise operations in his name has still done nothing for his artistic reputation. Meanwhile, we keep on bleating Goa, Goa, Goa as though the old Aldeia was the sum total of his life experience, and there’s an equally wrong and ridiculous push to push this explicitly modern Indian artist into some kind of antediluvian Portuguese.
All this has resulted in “a painful situation, which makes Mario’s centenary distinctly bittersweet – the heavily touted people’s artist has been let down by his own people.
Bittersweet doesn’t mean beyond redemption, however, and in what will be remembered as an invaluable intervention, several hundred original Mario Miranda paintings, drawings and sketches have emerged to public scrutiny for the first time, and this astonishing archive of treasures that seems certain to reconfigure Miranda’s place in Indian art history. This great trove was secured by the late Ronnie Lobo – the renowned hospitality pioneer who was one of Mario’s closest friends and augmented by his son Shaun Nicholas Lobo, himself an astute collector of Indo-Portuguese art, who has become an assiduous custodian of the Miranda legacy.
Lobo says, “Mario’s legacy has sadly been reduced to cheap quality grotesque prints where the colours are changed, and made completely garish to appeal to trinket-seeking tourists.” With his own spectacular collection of originals, he wants to highlight “all the styles Mario had, and his role in documenting Indian aspirations from the 1960s to the 1980s. My earliest works in this archive are from Paris, when Mario was on his Gulbenkian Scholarship in Europe. Other early works are from the Illustrated Weekly of India and journals like Filmfare in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them are from the iconic Sketchbook about life in Bombay, depicting the very different lives led by elites and the common man. Then, from the 1980s, he reinvented himself as a book illustrator and muralist. I have some of his works from this era, and several others that were done abroad in countries like America, Israel, and Germany.”
Some of the works Lobo mentions are on exhibition at Sunaparanta at Altinho sadly today is the last day – and there are some obvious conclusions to be drawn from examining them. First, and perhaps most important, is many of these originals are in another category altogether from their reproductions, and no matter how much you think you’re already familiar with them, another look is absolutely required. Several are magnificent, absolutely museum-quality, showing clearly how this passionate artist kept toiling tirelessly to develop his talents, while depicting and even shaping the cultural life around him. En famille in Loutolim, then Bombay, where he was plunged into popular media and the making of the modern Indian imagination, and became an influential eye on the post-Independence world. In those highly productive years housed in Colaba, while it is true Goa was always close to heart, his impact was India-wide and international. These works make that home truth undeniable once again.
I have chosen two artworks from Lobo’s archive to point us in fresh directions and new ways to think of Mario Miranda, an attempted tiny liberation from the clichéd caricatures Goa has ensnared him in (which is also why I’m using the spelling of his name that he used throughout his career, without the posthumously appended Portuguese affectations). So, yes, that is our coastline in the stirring drawing once reproduced in Illustrated Weekly in 1966, but there are no caricatured rustics, and what you see instead is sheer artistic ambition. For no good reason, these kinds of works were denied access to the gallery system back in the 60s, and it definitely rankled Mario, who kept on trying unsuccessfully to cross over for another 40 years. Seen today, they’re a slap in the face of that entire blinkered system, which has obviously clearly failed abysmally, and I am confident these works will lead to Mario being reassessed as the giant of contemporary Indian visual culture that he always was in the first place.
The second is more whimsical, and very personal, reproduced in his hometown newspaper because some of our readers will have known our Mario, and recognise his irresistibly handsome twinkle in this delightful portrait. It is by the Bangalore-born artist Jean de Lemos – he called her ‘Chips’ she called him ‘Popat – who was romantically involved with Mario in the 1950s, a bit before he met Habiba Hydari (who would become his wife and lifelong support). To me, this lovely artwork also represents promise and possibilities, even if sometimes unrealized. Art has the power to continue to speak, even years or lifetimes after the moment of creation. Mario’s originals in Lobo’s archive demonstrate an unmistakable commitment to posterity, and they give us an inherently painful insight about why the artist was hurt that his calibre was not properly recognized by India in his own times. Let’s correct that now, once and for all.
