The Art of Mario Miranda
- Ranjit Hoskote
The singular images as well as the tableaux and fabliaux that Mario presents here are crammed with quirky detail and veined with a felicitous understanding of individual psychology and community life. There are expressionist portraits of individual figures here, which combine astuteness and slyness, hauteur and hauntedness; there are festoons of narrative that offer a first-hand account of village and small town life. Even as it processes and articulates the close-knit textures of community, we sense that this is an artistic imagination caught between the impulse to belong and the impulse to leave.
In 1951, Mario left. Moving from Goa to Bombay, from Portuguese territory to a nascent republic, he soon found anchorage. In 1952, he joined The Current, edited by the redoubtable polemicist D F Karaka. Eventually, he was invited to The Times of India group of publications, contributing to institutions such as The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Evening News of India and, later, Midday, and The Afternoon Despatch & Courier. In his work for these publications, as well as the various departures and detours that he has undertaken through the decades, Mario has played the roles of citizen-rapporteur, flâneur and informal historian. His art has borne the impress of humour as well as reportage, wit as well as compassion; he approaches his subjects with empathy rather than savagery.
Mario has a fine eye for the intersections between the individual’s private predicament and his or her place in a lifeworld at large. His antennae are tuned to the quixotic and the oddball; and he shows us how these seeming aberrations or departures weave in and out of the established structures of normality. Consider, for instance, his Impressions of Paris (Pgs 175-198), a city of infernal night as well as radiant day; in his images, we meet punks in their grotty finery, sporting chains, goggles, Apache haircuts and Nazi symbols; but also the elegant lady who barely notices the world, keeping it at bay with her poised umbrella and her disdainful cigarette holder as she walks her dog, with supreme disregard for the man in the unwieldy trenchcoat struggling to clean his shoe. Mario’s is an absurdist vision, but it is a humanely absurdist one; he is inclined to look indulgently upon human folly and foible.
