Written by Abu Nuwas
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Soren Kierkegaard
In Trikaal, Shyam Benegal’s sombre film on the end of the Portuguese rule in Goa, the tones are dark and melancholic and it is said that Benegal and Ashoke Mehta, the brilliant cinematographer, shot some of it in candlelight. It was a starkly grim vision that go-go Indians of today are unfamiliar with. They see Goa as not sombre, but salacious; not melancholic, but munificently joyous. A land where bureaucratic rigidities and headachy rules of society are meant to be forgotten; where the highs of feni — that ubiquitous local potent drink — take care of the dull, buzzy hangover that a city life always leaves you with. And then Goa is also the land of Mario, whose intensely vibrant and teeming sketches still adorn many hotels. In fact, Goa, in the national zeitgeist, is not the sepulchral Trikaal of Benegal; it is the jauntiness of Mario, which takes you into a different realm, far away from the weary jadedness of city-blighted life
Mario was a busy cartoonist even before the Indian reforms unleashed a tsunami of liberalisation. In the nineties, his cartoon adorned the front page of The Economic Times, the pink carrier of all the tumultuous headlines announcing the brisk change in the country. Mario’s sketches also acquired a swiftness, in tandem with what was happening across the country. If RK Laxman in TOI and Sudhir Dar in the Delhi papers were quintessential political cartoonists, Mario was a cartoonist of the white-collar work. His drawings were pointed and punchier, especially the stuff he drew for ET. In Goa, where he felt unconstrained by the column size of the paper, his drawings had a different verve and chutzpah. The characters he put on paper were free, bouncy and at times even feni-sloshed. If it was the Hobbesian dog-eat-dog in the corporate sketches, it was Rawslian people-love-people in the Goan sketches . And that’s what found its way on the Goan landscape, very much in tune with the inebriated and effervescent Goan spirit.
Hagnon phengos oporas. The pure light of high summer. These merry words that describe the god Dionysius also imbued the sketches of Mario. As India embraced its neoliberal summer with gusto, Mario stood in the sunnier and littoral climes of Goa, crafting sketches of people who, bored by their neoliberal bliss, came looking for a different kind of nirvana. With a glass of booze in their manicured hands and at times with their paunchier excesses, Mario’s people projected a kind of bespoke ribaldry. The Dionysian excess was there, but it was controlled by his immaculate pen. Mario believed in the confidence and the carefree spirit the reforms brought to the country, but he tempered that insouciance with some louche sketches. Maybe life, according to him, was going up the ladder liberalisation had put in place, but also making the time to climb down for some barnyard pleasure. Liberalisation with levity. That was Mario’s motto, perhaps.
Political cartooning is very Schmittian; it operates in binaries. There is good and there is bad. Mario’s was more of a nebulous realm. He operated in the greys; in the shadows where the brutality of binaries didn’t cast its pernicious light. So Mario was more of a quotidian artist who celebrated the commonplace and revelled in everydayness. He did not show you fear in a handful of dust; he showed you life in a handful of Goan duff. I would much rather hang out in the cafe, says Joe Sacco. That’s where things are really happening. Mario hung out in places where life happened, in all its boozy and brawling and boisterous magnificence.
In this age of super distraction, is there a scope for cartooning? Especially of a teeming variety that Mario excelled in? We live in times of algorithmic bliss, with attenuated attention spans. Our phones have made us slaves to surveillance capitalism. Our tired eyes bounce from one viral image to the next and we, in the process, lose mental vitality. The zip-zap-zoom of words and images makes us addled and we struggle to understand anything. Perhaps that’s the reason why with a nauseating regularity we keep hearing about the sudden deaths of the arts. The novel is dead, someone says one day; the cinema is dead, someone announces the next day. Experience and not information, says Jonathan Haidt, is the key to emotional development. But the profusion of algorithms stop us from experiencing anything, from taking a deep dive into an art form. How many people in these fragmented times can be like Hisham Matar, who went to Siena for a month just to experience and contemplate the art there. We are now more like a thoroughly distracted Forrest Gump who finds himself at various key events, but can’t understand much because his mind is impaired by the algorithmic onslaught. Mario’s brimming and bursting sketches could be like Breughel’s. He would have despaired in these chaotic times.
Already confused by supersonic algorithms, we are now besieged by the age of strongmen. They prefer silence to artistic stimulation; stenography to substance. And that’s one of the key reasons why cartooning has suffered a precipitous decline. What would Mario have done in these strangely surreal times? Probably tucked his pen in his pocket and stayed at home and enjoyed the Goan climes. Or perhaps brooded over a punchy feni about these two ages of algorithms and strongmen and maybe drawn something surreptitiously on a serviette and tucked that too in his pocket. After all, silence is a strong form of protest, sometimes more effective than words, of which there anyway is a superabundance. If neoliberalism and its facile freedoms gave birth to the age of the algorithm, late capitalism and the age of strongmen perhaps would produce sterile art, something akin to Stalinist cultural production. Between the ages, as Gramsci said, is the time of monsters. An age is dying and another is struggling to be born. And in the crepuscular gloom roam ghosts of weary and broken-down artists. And we don’t even have the axe for the frozen sea within us. What we have is silence. A roaring silence; a quiet silence; a whispering silence. And between these silences we loiter, like lost layabouts.
Mario would have loved these layabouts. These deadbeats tossed out by our market-loving competitive age and now lost in Borgesian labyrinths. Mario would have followed them into the mazes and drawn them happily and given them life they do deserve. It is said some parts of Trikaal were shot by Benegal in Mario’s home. In that funereal film too, an age was dying and another was being born. Ghosts certainly abounded, maybe not monsters. Mario was a witness. And somewhere, lurking in the shadows, he still is witnessing. After all that’s the arduous job of the artist. He witnesses.
Abu Nuwas is a writer on art and culture.
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