Miss Nimboopani, Sweet And Sour

Ever since there has been popular drawing in India, there has been Mario Miranda. In barber shop Illustrated Weeklies, in the Times of India, a Mario drawing leapt out at you with all its excesses: Miss Nimboopani, big-breasted and full-lipped; obese politicians, shifty-eyed and small-brained—Mario’s tableau underscore his conviction that nothing is sacred: people, religion, politics, history, taste, aspiration. Everything under the sun is potential target for lampoon. The book charts the extraordinary facility of the man. From diary sketches and cartoons that take playful potshots at small-town life and small-minded communities, to elaborate renderings of Goa that are complete stories in themselves, the pages are filled with energetic and teeming statements of Indian situations.

The artist in Miranda is driven by two impulses. To make a cartoon, spare and focused by humour, or to construct an elaborate drawing, painterly in intent, and defining space. Between the two, there are limitless explorations of human conditions—politics, religion, and the happy hypocrisy and humbug that define urban life. Known for the etching-like drawing style, the sketchbooks exhibit a variety that is as much M.C. Escher as Le Corbusier or Canaletto. As much Punch as they are The New Yorker. And of course, as much Mario.

At the outset Mario admits,"I just love to draw." Few people today would echo such a sentiment. In an age when Photoshop and Corel Draw have replaced the skill of drawing, few give it the attention it deserves. Yet with Mario there is the perennial artistic impulse to experiment with expression for its own sake. The travel series that includes New York, Japan, London, Paris is perhaps his most varied. Each scene is viewed from an outsider’s vantage, and deliberately constructed in outlines that resemble engravings. In some, lines are layered to create the effects of a painting; others evolve as vivid prints, filled with an animated light, graphic and precise.

His Goan record, drawn with loving care, is his most prolific and detailed. The darkness of church interiors, the white light on pastel houses, pudgy and self-absorbed holiday crowds—each fleeting moment consolidates into multiple and cumulative impressions. Mario records Goa like a doting father, faithfully recording every change into the family album. Growing up under its tropical lushness and pastel colonialism, the Goa drawings are a longing—a benign and pastoral hankering for the slow life, the Goa of childhood, where "there was music, love and laughter". The care with which each scene is constructed invariably resounds with celebration—weddings, feasts, funerals—and links you to a time before murder and drugs also became synonymous associations.

The excesses of Indian life at times overwhelm Mario’s art. In some of the more elaborate and overworked drawings it is hard to distil a single idea. And the distinction between ugly, beautiful, grotesque, delicate, brutal, or fanciful, all becomes clouded in superfluous detail. Is the artist deliberately confusing the viewer, or is he merely making a truthful representation of life’s messiness? Mario’s skill lies in the masterful austerity of line in his less finished drawings and the incisive wit of his cartoons.

I’ve always admired the artist’s deformations of Indian life, the perennial exaggeration of scenes from naughty to obscene, the delicate flourishes that mark out stereotypes. Drawing has been for Mario the first reaction—an intimate and spontaneous reflection of daily life made visible. In a career spanning five decades, few urban Indian homes have not resounded with the laughter of a Mario view of their local world. Even today many of the cartoons—devoid of politics and regional character—are fresh. The book is a pungent record of India, laced with infinite compassion. A bellyful of laughs and stinging truths, without cynicism or despair. An artist—a human first—sharing his provocative reflections with others in his own drawing room.