Mario Miranda birth centenary: Inside the diaries that shaped his iconic cartoon style

The 1949 diary is special. According to his friend, chronicler and curator Gerard da Cunha, that was when the compulsive doodler entered a keen phase of honing “his cartoonist skills with his low key, gentle humour.”

You find here the early signs of the Mario mark his fans’ love. He turns 23 that year. He is living in what he calls a cubicle in Holland House in Colaba. He came to Bombay to join JJ School of Arts, where he spent one day and switched to St. Xavier’s college to study English literature. He was relatively new to English, which he began learning as a school-goer in Bengaluru. The language helped when he eventually found work in English publications where he had to write pithy cartoon captions. A memorable one-liner is from the boss in his business cartoon, “I don’t want to make money. I want to make more money.” And it was sheer fun to watch the cartoonist step out of English and back to present an array of characters with names as strangely Indianised as Rajani Nimbupani, Bundaldass and Moonswamy.

Sketches from The Life of Mario 1949 (Photo: Mario Gallery, Goa)

Mario grew up in pre-liberation Goa, speaking Portuguese and Konkani. Back in 1949, he wrote his diary in Portuguese. A surprise in its abundantly illustrated pages is the absence of the strikingly visual Bombay; no sign of the grand, detailed cityscapes he went on to master. Not
unusual for the city dweller who finds little time to stand back and stare. You see only interiors, tight frames as in our early parallel cinema, where Mario is hanging out with friends in restaurants, cafes, ice cream parlours and cinema foyers, the last most frequented, often for two shows in a day.

Mario’s day begins early with mass at the church and ends, closer to exams, at the study table with piles of text books waiting to be mugged up. All through, the young man is seldom alone. Not even during study time. On the cluttered desk, you can’t miss his bleary-eyed cat staying up to keep him company. More cats, dogs and a bulbul show up when he is back in Goa, which is as often as he can. That is when his sketch pen flies. Animals and birds go on to become a vital presence in his oeuvre that stretches occasionally to accommodate the accidental drop of ink that is quickly converted into a crow.

Sketches from The Life of Mario 1949 (Photo: Mario Gallery, Goa)

Mario notes down everyday activities like any diarist. What animates the mundane, minimal text is the cartoonish illustration of the day’s key activity, drawn for sheer pleasure. His comic cornea is already in place. That is how he sees the world. Almost everything he depicts turns comic. A fine thread of mockery runs through the pages needling friends, family, neighbours, teachers, pastors and pundits. The chronicler himself is no less a target. The artist has started drawing himself as a participant — big nose, extra-long stride, as awkward as the rest of his friends on extended teenage. Under no pressure to ideate and think up clever prose, cook up a plot or structure the narration, Mario’s pages turn with ease and before you know it, you are done with the book.

It is then that you realise that what you have encountered is an unintended surprise — a book-length graphic memoir.

Surely not as layered and complex as the current crop of anime and manga that the young binge-read or the graphic novels that the older lot bend over, Mario’s content makes up for the fledgling form. His is the story of a 23-year-old in the just-freed India sliding freely between overlapping linguistic, religious and ethnic zones — Portuguese, Indian, Catholic, Konkani — with a far-from-pious mind, more inclined to mock than sing paeans to the authorities. The Life of Mario 1949 comes across as a reminder of the nation the founders set out to build.