Goa, June 13 -- Vivek Menezes

15 years after his death, we have much to celebrate about Mario Miranda's iconic stature as the celebrated 'people's artist' of Goa, but there's another less savoury aspect to the popular notoriety of some of his "lowest-common-denominator" artworks. Their mass-produced ubiquity has wound up provincialising this hugely significant post-Independence Indian artist so that his historical importance has become obscured.

For the late artist's 100th birthday last month, I wrote "no contemporary Indian artist is plagiarised more, with the worst culprits in his own state (and quite often the government itself), while the deadly slur of "cartoonist" remains perpetually attached, so that all the cash flow generated b...