Mario Miranda

Biography

As a child Mario Miranda drew straight onto the walls of his parents’ house, until his mother brought him a blank book. From the age of ten he kept diaries and sketched everything he saw around him.

He was born on 2 May 1926 in Daman, in Portuguese India, to Goan Catholic parents. His full name was Mário João Carlos do Rosário de Brito Miranda. In the 1930s and 1940s he made personalised postcards for friends for a token sum, and at school he got into trouble for drawing Catholic priests. He studied at St. Joseph’s Boys’ High School in Bangalore, then took a bachelor’s degree in history at St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, with the Indian Administrative Service, the country’s senior civil service, as his goal. At his parents’ insistence he began to study architecture, but soon lost interest. In 1949 the first small commissions came, and portraits of the people around him filled his diaries. He liked good food and red wine in moderation, but he went to eateries and taverns mainly to draw the patrons.

Miranda worked in an advertising studio for four years before turning to cartooning full-time. The Illustrated Weekly of India printed his first drawings. They brought him an offer from the magazine Current, and a year later The Times of India offered him a slot, although it had rejected him at first. His characters Miss Nimbupani and Miss Fonseca appeared regularly in Femina, The Economic Times and The Illustrated Weekly of India.

Then he won a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and spent a year in Portugal. After that he moved to London, where he worked for various newspapers and even in television animation. During his five years there his caricatures were published in Mad, Lilliput and Punch. Afterwards he travelled widely, working or holding exhibitions in many countries.

In 1974, at the invitation of the United States Information Services, he went to America. The trip let him promote his work, meet American cartoonists, work with Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, and meet Herblock, the editorial cartoonist of The Washington Post. Miranda held solo exhibitions in more than 22 countries, among them the United States, Japan, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, France, Yugoslavia and Portugal.

In the late 1980s he returned to India for good, and The Times of India in Mumbai took him back to his old job, where he worked alongside the noted cartoonist R. K. Laxman. About then he met the artist Habiba Hydari, a granddaughter of Akbar Hydari. They married.

His early cartoons showed scenes from the life of Goan villages, and that theme remained the one he is best known for. He watched people in eateries, taverns, at weddings, bus stops and post offices, and recorded their daily lives. The artist Aaron Renier, who created the Google Doodle for Miranda’s 90th birthday in 2016, described his best-known manner as “very flat with criss-crossing interactions”: in the picture you try to work out who knows whom, who is watching whom, who is annoyed by whom. The critic Uma Nair sees a cubist geometry in his lines and restraint in his colours. He often drew women as curvaceous, with bulging eyes, and was criticised for this as a sexist stereotype. He never turned to political cartoons.

Besides newspaper work, Miranda painted murals on buildings in Goa and elsewhere in India. In the 1990s the owner of the Mumbai café Mondegar asked him to decorate two opposite walls: one shows life in Mumbai, the other the atmosphere of the café itself. When the new municipal market in Panaji opened in 2004, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar invited him to paint its walls, and Miranda refused to charge the government a fee. Late in life he took up painting, which drew a wide response. He published the books Laugh It Off, Goa with Love and Germany in Wintertime, and illustrated books by Dom Moraes, Manohar Malgonkar and Mario Cabral e Sa, as well as children’s books by Uma Anand and school textbooks. In 1951, together with the Sanskrit scholar Jose Pereira and the civil servant Alban Couto, he prepared a special issue of the journal Marg on Goan art and culture. On the set of the film The Sea Wolves he was a creative assistant.

Miranda’s house in Loutolim appears in Shyam Benegal’s film Trikaal (1985), which is loosely based on the story of his family. In 1988 he appeared in the national integration video “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara”, and received the Padma Shri; in 2002 he received the Padma Bhushan, and later a lifetime achievement award from the All India Cartoonists’ Association. The King of Spain, Juan Carlos, awarded him the Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, and in Portugal in December 2009 he became a Commander of the Order of Prince Henry.

After retiring, Miranda lived with his wife in the ancestral home in Loutolim, in Salcete, and went on appearing in Mumbai publications. He died there on 11 December 2011. The President of India presented the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award, posthumously on 4 April 2012. In 2013 a road junction in Mumbai was named after him.