The Art of Mario Miranda

- Ranjit Hoskote

He brings to his art a heightened sense of public life as theatre; he practises a relaxed anthropology that combines piquant observation with humour, gentle exaggeration with a piercing insight into the relationships between genders, races and nationalities. At the heart of his vision stands the crucial and mutually formative relationship between people and their environments. We sense this in his 1980 series, Germany in Wintertime (Pgs 161-174), as he shows us the striptease artist stretching her endless legs at a café and a group of dockworkers enjoying a convivial pipe together in Hamburg; and we sense it, also, in his lyrical evocations of the magnificent yet approachable Mangueshi temple and the intimate domesticity of Fontainhas, which wears its imposing heritage lightly, in his 1982 images for Manohar Malgonkar’s Inside Goa (Pgs 141-150.)

Mario was born in 1926, to a Goan Roman Catholic family of Saraswat Brahmin ancestry, in Daman: his father was Administrator of this Portuguese enclave on the Gujarat coast. He was brought up in Goa, with a powerful sense of his inheritance and his place in an aristocracy that was at once Indic and Lusitanian; and although he spent many years in Bombay before returning to live in his ancestral house in the village of Loutolim, he never lost touch with the Indo-Iberian culture of his birth. So that, even when he lived elsewhere, he carried his sense of belonging to Goa wherever he went (Pgs 87-94). It is instructive to bear in mind the fact that Mario has been nourished by a richly hybrid position that is distinct from the chimera of a generic Indianness which exercises many Indians, and which is defensively nationalist at best and aggressively Hindu-majoritarian at worst.

I dwell with reason on the uniqueness and importance of this Indo-Iberian culture, for it alerts us to an alternative trajectory in the development of modern South Asia. Since the history of colonial and postcolonial India is always told from the viewpoint of the British Empire and the nationalist struggle against it, significant perspectives from those parts of India that came within the domains of the Portuguese and the French Empires have been cavalierly erased from the record. Thus, the discourses on civil entitlement and a liberal public sphere, on artistic possibilities and literary models, on utopian polities and redemptive sciences that were conducted by South Asians in these regions for several centuries have been consigned to invisibility.