Prakruti Ramesh is a doctoral student affiliated to the program in Anthropology, International Area Studies and the Study of Religion in Aarhus University, Denmark. She is a visitor to Heidelberg University from May to October 2016. Her PhD project seeks to account for the unexplained popularity of cartoonist Mario Miranda’s work in Goa, a state in coastal west India famous for its tourism. She is interested in the question of why Mario Miranda’s cartoons receive such a quantum of public and private endorsement, and what this endorsement signifies about the idea of Goa that his cartoons convene and sanction. She suggests that Mario’s cartoons are popular not just because they peddle in stereotypes that are conveniently co-opted by Goa’s tourism industry, but also because they underline Goa’s significance as a space of difference – if not ‘deviance’ – from a ‘conservative’ national norm.
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