The Art of Mario Miranda

- Ranjit Hoskote

Despite having attained iconic status as a chronicler of Bombay, Mario has not received the homage that is due to him as an artist. It would be worth exploring the reasons for this negligence of the fullness of his activity as an image-maker. In the course of a public career that spans 56 years, Mario has articulated himself largely through editorial art, an idiom that the conventional hierarchy of art-making ranks below the so-called fine arts. Editorial artists are regarded with some dismissiveness as being narrowly purpose-driven; it is believed that they are tainted by having their work embedded, as lightweight relief, within a popular medium with its compulsions towards entertainment and advertisement. Taxonomy is a terrible thing. Once people have slotted you under a certain label, it becomes very difficult to persuade them to see you through another prism. This is remarkably unfortunate, for it does great injustice to an artist like Mario Miranda, whose art has assumed many forms and unfolded in various contexts of meaning.

In a society less addicted to taxonomy than our own, it would have been widely and immediately recognised that Mario’s gift far transcends the deadline-driven, wit-on-tap, demand-and-supply logic of editorial art. It would be far more accurate to shift the contextual frame that has been placed around him, and see him as an artist who, partly by choice and partly by happenstance, channelised much of his energy into the mass media. This should not detract, in any way, from the significance of his vision and his contribution; nor should it place him at a disadvantage in relation to those of his contemporaries who entered the gallery system and found a place and made a career there. He represents the lineage of the gadfly-provocateur and the witness to caprice and unreason, whose standard-bearers include Goya, Hogarth and Daumier.

I am not given to hyperbole; believe me when I say that Mario’s Diaries (Pgs 27-53) provide the connoisseur of images with a very rare excitement. Every page comes at us with ebullient energy. Here is a prodigious talent, bursting in various directions, testing genres, linking observation to intuition, getting a sense of the raw life of desire and design concealed beneath the skin of civilisation and the costume of caste and class. These superbly executed drawings and watercolours, made when the artist was in his early 20s, are proposals for the narration of a world that is at once intensely local and unselfconsciously international in its tenor.