Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

Tourists come to see the house, not the man. This three hundred and thirty year-old house built in the late 17th century by a Miranda ancestor, has been occupied through the centuries by his descendants. A beautiful mansion elegantly appointed with handcrafted furniture and a banquet hall that once sparkled with fine food, fine music and fine wine, when the Mirandas entertained the most powerful in the land.

The heritage status of this house is widely acknowledged by the place of prominence it is given in all works of Goa’s Portuguese past, or architecture. It also got its first public showing, with Shyam Benegal’s film Trikaal. Much of the film’s action takes place in or around this house.

And indeed it is more than likely that, after doing their round of the house and their filming, few of the tourists have realized that the man who opened his house for their inspection is a high-profile luminary, one of India’s best known and perhaps the most exuberant and prolific of cartoonists, Mario Miranda.

His full name is Mario Joao Carlos do Rosario de Britto a Miranda. But he is known to the public only as ‘Mario’, his first name.

Now, any creative artist, painter, composer, dramatist or novelist who is known to the public only by a single-word name is deemed to have achieved superstar status. Mario Miranda being known to the general public only as ‘Mario’ has a simple explanation: that is how he has always signed his drawings ever since they first began to appear in print fifty years ago.

Since then Mario Miranda has been steadily producing his cartoons for an ever-wider readership. It is not easy to assess just how many drawings he has made during these years, but it is safe to say that their number runs into tens of thousands. Fifty thousand would be a fair estimate.