Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

In many of Mario’s larger drawings of landscapes one often notices a crow or two flying. As often as not, they too are intruders. “An ink-drop is better camouflaged as a crow,” he explains.

And very occasionally in some scene of crowded life, a cabaret for instance, Mario puts himself in; a figure in the crowd so self-effacing, that you really have to look hard to find him. It is a gesture rather like Alfred Hitchcock making a fleeting appearance in his own films. “I put myself in sometimes just to fill an empty space, as it were,” Mario will admit.

But these intruding figures, crows, dogs, himself, are no part of Mario Miranda’s animal cartoons. The animals in them are not strays, but sleek, well-fed and of known pedigree. Their pictures are more like portraits which seem to pander to the self-image of their sitters. So how did Mario Miranda become a cartoonist?

The simple answer is that he did not become a cartoonist. He was born a cartoonist. The fact is that he has never received any formal training in an art institution. To draw figures has been an irrepressible compulsion of his life.

When he first began to draw figures, he used neither a pen nor ink and paper. He made do with such things as bits of charcoal from the kitchen fire, or even a finger dipped in mud, and drew his figures on the walls or floor of the house, making a thorough nuisance of himself.

It was his mother, who horrified at the way her little son was disfiguring the walls and floors of her immaculate house, bought him a notebook and a box of pencils to work off his urge to paint. Little did she realize that she was setting her son firmly in his life’s calling. Her solution to stop the child from daubing his pictures all over the house was to stand the artist in good stead.

Mario Miranda had begun to draw pictures even before he learned to read or write. He got busy filling those notebooks with his drawings as other moody children might keep diaries to express their thoughts. Indeed Mario himself has always spoken of those notebooks as diaries, which in a manner of speaking, they were. His mother must have kept a stack of them handy. They became a habit. Even at school and college, Mario Miranda went on keeping them… pictorial records of his journey through life.

These diaries were to serve as his stock-in-trade when he began to look for a career. It was after seeing his illustrations in one of these diaries that D.F. Karaka, the editor of The Current invited him to do a weekly cartoon for his tabloid. Later still, it was his drawings in a couple of diaries he carried around that the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon offered him a scholarship which enabled him to live in Portugal to earn a living as a cartoonist.