The Art of Mario Miranda

- Ranjit Hoskote

Like Marcus Aurelius, the editorial artist working for a metropolitan publication can be lonely even in the midst of a crowd. Typically a creature of the city, its swarming crowds and its concourse of surprises, he is at his keenest when working through the buzz of political events and social upheavals. He is happiest when he deflates the pomposity of a demagogue or satirises the homilies of some self-appointed conscience of the people; and yet he can also wander through the streets of his own city or a place he is visiting, memorialising a neighbourhood in an elegant vignette or paying homage to a quixotic personality in a swiftly executed portrait. Indeed, it can be argued that some of the finest pictorial testimony to contemporary life is to be found, not in the exalted circles of the ‘fine arts’, but in the rough-and-tumble domain of editorial art: in the daily pocket cartoon, the comic strip, and the magazine illustration.

The jubilations and crises of everyday life find their record in these ephemeral registers. Here we find anticipations of the shape of emerging events; approximations of the pace of phenomena that have burst to the surface of collective life, and insights into the changing avatars of public figures. It is only in retrospect, when we have equipped ourselves with a wealth of annotation that we can truly appreciate the crucial role that such images play in the production of opinion in a public sphere hemmed in by violent identity politics, official censorship and censorship by mob action. And when we leaf through the archive of a distinguished editorial artist such as Mario Miranda, we realise just how vital these images have been, in the production of a popular consciousness.

In Mario’s case, his work has been 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 (Pgs 66-67). And in this, it reflects the imagination of an artist who has made himself at home in diverse milieux, regions and periods.