Mumbaicha Mario
On Mario de Miranda's centenary, rediscovered originals reframe his artistic legacy and profoundly impactful engagement with a transforming BombayNext weekend, on May 2, is the 100th birthday of Mario de Miranda, the iconic artist and illustrator whose vibrant, whimsical oeuvre remains deeply beloved and highly influential even 15 years after he died in 2011.
Miranda's merchandising sales have kept growing via multiple Mario Gallery outlets selling hundreds of products in several Goa locations, but an uncomfortable paradox nonetheless plagues his artistic legacy. The work is world-famous, but the artist is regularly sidelined and dismissed as a "cartoonist." That injustice always rankled greatly, but now, just in time for his centenary, an extraordinary treasure trove of his original artworks has emerged to correct the record. A 100 of them will go on display from May 8 at Sunaparanta in Panjim, with another iteration intended for Mumbai later in the year. Here is Mario Modern, very different from Postcard Goa, and these works demand an urgent historical reassessment. They are an immensely moving and impressive testimony to how hard this ambitious young Indian artist worked from the 1950s onwards, growing in mastery and confidence alongside Bombay morphing into megacity Mumbai.
"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," says Shaun Lobo, who built this stunning corpus from works first acquired by his late father Ronnie, a close friend of the artist. He wants to showcase "all the styles Mario had, and his role in documenting Indian aspirations from the 1960s to the 1980s." Lobo says, "My earliest works in this archive are from Paris, when Mario was on his Gulbenkian Scholarship in Europe. The collection is a reflection of his career. 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."
Several of these images are already relatively well-known in popular reproduction, including the wonderfully original Mumbai map experiment that accompanies this column. However, the originals are another thing altogether, revealing a great deal more about the artist and his times, and their impact on our own contemporary imagination.
In a 2008 assessment of Mario, Ranjit Hoskote said this work is "central to the development of postcolonial Bombay's sense of itself as a multiethnic and multilingual metropolis in which local and cosmopolitan impulses play out an intricate dance of antagonism, mimicry and collusion. As in the Bombay-centric poems of his somewhat older contemporary Nissim Ezekiel, there is space for the global traveller and the supercilious secretary in Mario's art, but there is also room for the wry pavement-dweller and the industrious dabbawallah. Mario's Bombay is capacious and kaleidoscopic, an epic that dismantles the divides of class and ethnicity. And in this, it reflects the imagination of an artist who has made himself at home in diverse milieux, regions and periods."
Hoskote added, "Despite having attained iconic status as a chronicler of Bombay, Mario has not received the homage that is due to him as an artist. It would be worth exploring the reasons for this negligence of the fullness of his activity as an image-maker. In the course of a public career that spans 56 years, Mario has articulated himself largely through editorial art, an idiom that the conventional hierarchy of art-making ranks below the so-called fine arts. Editorial artists are regarded with some dismissiveness as being narrowly purpose-driven; it is believed that they are tainted by having their work embedded, as lightweight relief, within a popular medium with its compulsions towards entertainment and advertisement. Taxonomy is a terrible thing. Once people have slotted you under a certain label, it becomes very difficult to persuade them to see you through another prism. This is remarkably unfortunate, for it does great injustice to an artist like Mario Miranda, whose art has assumed many forms and unfolded in various contexts of meaning."
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