Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

A cartoonist makes comic drawings. Their drawings must cause ripples of mirth among their viewers, but they must refrain from giving offense to the men and women who are their subjects. They must be amusing without being crude; prick, but not draw blood.

India is, proverbially, the land of the Sacred Cow. Every state, every faith, caste, language, every culture has them, and so have even towns and villages. No writer or cartoonist who has something to say about the life around him can steer clear of them for long because some taboos lie buried in the soil itself, like land mines. So what sort of angry protests, threats, and lawsuits had Mario Miranda been subjected to by those who felt affronted by his poking fun at them? He who had been at it for a lifetime?

“Oh yes,” he told me, “Big trouble. In a street scene I had done, I had shown a bearded man with a turban smoking a cigarette. Some Sikhs wrote quite angry letters to me. I had offended their religious sentiments. Oh, they were really angry.”

“So what happened?”
“It died down, luckily.”
“What else?”
“Well, nothing, thank God! But at that time it shook me!”

This little anecdote may well stand as testimony for the gentleness of Miranda’s cartoons, how he manages to keep within the bounds of the cartoonist’s calling: to poke fun without causing hurt. His own thoughts on the subject are on record. “I am mainly a social cartoonist,” he admits. And that, of course, means he keeps clear of the most sacred of Indian cows - its high-profile politicians.

Sure, he makes cartoons of politicians in general, but not of any person. And when, occasionally, he does portray a well-known political figure, he curbs his propensity to make them look funny: he makes their pen-and-ink portraits rather than caricatures.

“…I am not a political cartoonist,” he is known to have said, “To be quite frank, I am not even a cartoonist. I draw… Give me a pen and blank paper and I will draw… I just love to draw.”

He just loves to draw.