For generations of readers, Mário João Carlos do Rosário de Brito Miranda, aka, Mario de Miranda served as a chronicler of everyday India. A visual storyteller, his repertoire of bustling streets, crowded cafes, office gossip and neighbourhood characters transformed ordinary life into nostalgia-inducing work of art. Senior cartoonist VG Narendra, managing trustee of the Indian Institute of Cartoonists, remembers Miranda as one of the earliest supporters of the institute. “He was the first to encourage the idea of an institute and gallery dedicated entirely to cartooning in India. He guided me throughout the process and would regularly visit the gallery,” says Narendra who first met Miranda during his younger days in Bombay, when he would visit newspaper offices while trying to establish himself as a cartoonist. In the city, the centenary is being marked with a special exhibition at the gallery, featuring sketches, photographs and illustrations tracing Miranda’s life and artistic journey.
Miranda was born in Damao, Portuguese India, and was known for his lively depictions of Goan life and urban culture. He also had a Bengaluru connection having studied at St Joseph’s Boys’ High School before pursuing higher studies in Mumbai. Veteran cartoonist and illustrator Paul Fernandes, often called Bengaluru’s Mario Miranda for his nostalgic-soaked illustrations of the city, does not see direct similarities between their artistic styles despite the comparison. He, however, credits Miranda with changing the way many cartoonists looked at everyday life. “Mario showed me and a million other cartoonists how to look at life in a humorous way. They were never harsh or overpowering with humour, yet they stayed because of the warmth in them,” he says.
Be it through the frantic, crowded energy of the monochromatic jazz scene or the colour-blocked elegance of a Japanese temple, Miranda captured the soul of a location, together with caricature and architectural detail. Even younger artists who encountered Miranda long after his prime continue to find inspiration in his illustrations. City-based doodle and watercolour artist Basid KP says the liveliness of Miranda’s scenes immediately drew him in and changed the way he looked at illustration. “Every gesture, interaction and background detail carried a story. It wasn’t just drawing, it was life on paper,” Basid shares. On the other hand, illustrator and doodle artist Mounica Tata believes Miranda’s strength lay in his ability to turn ordinary moments into compelling visual narratives. She says his humour emerged from close observations of people and situations rather than exaggerated caricature alone. “Humour is hard. To get a laugh that too without using too many words, you need to be able to look at life closely and have a perspective that’s ever so slightly askew. All of these need to be translated on paper, which is no easy feat,” she says.
The conversation around hand-drawn storytelling versus technology is one several artists associate with Miranda’s practice. Tata also believes Miranda’s work feels especially relevant in a time of AI-generated visuals. “No AI model can capture life better than the people actually living it. There’s an eccentricity and authenticity in hand-drawn storytelling that technology still cannot imitate,” she adds. Fernandes, believes the process of creating art remains inseparable from storytelling itself. “The journey of a drawing and the journey of a story are important to the storyteller. If you use AI to speed that process up, then you haven’t enjoyed the drawing or the story enough yourself,” the veteran cartoonist notes.
Narendra reveals Miranda himself stayed deeply attached to traditional ways of working and never embraced computers despite changing times. “He used to say he was computer illiterate,” he laughs, adding, “He preferred writing letters by hand.” Many of those letters on art and his life remain preserved in his archive.
Artists also point to Miranda’s crowded cityscapes and marketplace scenes as the ones that stay with them most. Narendra highlights the density of details in his compositions where every corner feels active. Fernandes adds that Miranda’s body of work is something he continues to admire, while Basid particularly mentions works like Colour In The Market (1987), admiring how the marketplace scene captures movement, interaction and layered storytelling. Tata, however, cannot pick a single favourite, as she adds that she is a huge fan of his chaotic murals that feel larger than life. Somewhere in this imagined continuity of his world, Miranda is still sketching, the same lively streets and faces, as the scenes continue through the pages.