MADAME MARCELLA HARDY
A Memorial Tribute
To
the Indian reading public, and especially the South Indian, Madame Marcella
Hardy should be a familiar name. She was born in 1905 in
It
was, I remember, late in 1947 that I first met Marcella Hardy. Years before I
met her I had heard of her; had read her now and again in The Hindu, The Illustrated Weekly of
Denys Val Baker writing in
his Little Reviews: 1914-1943 (P. E. N. Books: General Editor: Hermon Ouid) observes: “The
little review or small magazine is an integral part of literature. It reflects,
far more accurately than the more popular publications, the spirit of a
literary period. Its writers write, not to order–not
to please an audience–but to satisfy themselves, and perhaps, contribute
something of value to art and culture.” ‘rare and recent writings’ was a
little review, and although it turned out to be the briefest
of brief candles, illuminated contemporary Indian writing, in English and English
renderings from some of the Indian languages, at its talented best and to a
certain degree original. The experiment–and experiments are always lively–was
repeated three years after in Chakra, another
little review which Marcella Hardy, P. Ganapati Sastri
(now on the staff of Andhra Patrika), and I
founded as a medium of the Authors’ and Artists’ Association, Madras. (In the
interval Madame Hardy had edited Siipi, an
illustrated Monthly in English devoted to Arts and Crafts of
But
for all Marcella Hardy’s tireless efforts the
Association did not make much headway. Attendance at meetings grew scanty; I
showed my distress at the waning enthusiasm among members although each was
bound with the responsibility of contributing money and labour;
I dilated on the spirit of team-work slowly substituting cactus leaves of
sarcasm for the roses of irony; but ‘progress’ seeming to be but a big doze of ipecacuanha I openly fretted and fumed–all through which
Madame Hardy sat like Patience on a monument smiling at my moods. And in ‘Chakra 4, I let myself go in the editorial:
“We
thought that many more creative minds and talented exponents of the different
cultural and social, aspects of life would invite this
frail but not unattractive journal to find a niche of its own among things that
count in their homes. The reception has been neither warm nor lukewarm. For in
the world the cautious and unimaginative are in a majority: the economic rather
than the aesthetic side of a periodical like ours comes in for much gratuitous
criticism on their part. It has...A child in a joint family is brought up
neither by it, mother nor by its father alone, but by all the
members. So, too, we hope that Chakra will
grow in the lap of Mother India, directing the creative energy within each of
us to proper ends, eradicating the distrust one feels for the other; and with
its stress ever on fundamental values, prevent standardization of all sorts and
push the horizons of thought, transcending national and individual differences,
and make one realize that, to be an integrated being, one should be a true
cosmopolite.”
However,
it was too much to expect a prodigy from the hue and pace at which things
moved; I hinted at throwing the sponge, burning our boats, and blowing up the
bridges. For, during the whole of 1953, the Association did little to justify
its existence, except make a couple of feeble attempts to meet and hit upon
ways and means to somehow rehabilitate itself. “A
reasonable person would, in view of the poor results, ask why the A.A.A. had
not then been wound up”, said Madame Hardy, and herself gave the answer: “Well,
even beneath a heap of ashes, a burning ember can be found, an ember live
enough to revive languishing fires. As it happens, the ashes of the A.A.A. did
conceal just such an ember...” It was herself, undeterred in her faith, and she
filled the empty 1953 with a consolidated Chakra
of numbers 1 to 4 for that year, publishing it in February 1954. Which marked the end of the magazine and of the Association alike.
Pity, in serious art and letters, as distinct from the popular, the phoenix
cannot be too frequent.
The
last piece of work on which we collaborated was the editing of King Henry IV
Part 1, with introduction and notes for the benefit of university students.
To the publisher, who did not know a word of English, but insisted that we do
the job (God knows who put him on to us), we said that we were not–his
agent who knew English was by his side–Veritys
and Deightons and Dover Wilsons,
nor lecturers in colleges, some of whom were note writers with a star value,
and if it proved a commercial failure (it didn’t as it happened), he should not
blame us: we would do it in our own way, and we did indeed. “I’ve not much of a
Shakespearean background,” said Marcella Hardy to me, “the burden of the work,
I fear, will have to fall on your shoulders.” “Nor for that matter have I,
speaking of backgrounds,” I said. But then I had read a lot of Shakespeare
plays and Shakespearean criticism for my own pleasure and profit, after leaving
college and forgetting their text-book odour. And for
me, our collaboration led to a delightful revelation: the histrionic talent of
Madame Hardy. She acted everyone of the dramatis personae, fully
saturated, Shakespeare’s prose and blank verse, as spoken by her, achieving a
meaningful harmony, the vernacular its rich juiciness, and the poetry
its intended emotional fervour. We fashioned our
sentences, now the one beginning an idea and the other completing it. We were not
dressed in brief authority. We were humble. We were sorry for Falstaff, the “gross haggis of a man” as we called him. And
we wrote in the course of a short foreword: “In preparing this edition of
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, the editors have endeavoured
to be clear in preference to being learned. They have kept in mind the fact
that English is a second language to the students–and to that considerable body
of the reading public who in a wider sense are also students–for whom this
edition is intended. They have avoided going too deeply into allusions which
must remain obscure to any but an English-born, and which, in many cases, are
matters of dispute even among scholars. To the student who wishes to enlarge
his knowledge of the myriad-minded Shakespeare, it is hoped that this, their
little addition, by way of interpretation of one of the world’s greatest
dramatists for all time, will be a useful comparison.” We were
satisfied with what we had done. “It has been fun discovering Shakespeare in
your company,” wrote Marcella Hardy in the flyleaf of my copy of the
book. She was excited as a schoolgirl–a precocious one–as
excited as she had been early in 1951 at the prospect of meeting Don Salvador Madariaga, her Professor, who had come as a delegate
to the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom which held its sessions in Bombay.
The January 1951 issue of The Triveni Quarterly contains an article by
her, entitled ‘Introducing Spanish Literature’, which she begins by quoting de Madariaga.
Out
of the considerable body of her writings lying scattered in the various Indian
newspapers and periodicals, some now defunct, only two small collections have
re-appeared between covers: one, a book of descriptive sketches of places, Tales
from The Voiceless; and the other, of short stories, Twelve Peas in A
Pod. May I be permitted to quote from the preface which I wrote to the
latter?
“Tales
from The Voiceless, an earlier publication of hers, has India
for its backcloth; the sixteen vignettes which make up this slender volume
recapture India’s past with historic authenticity informed by an exquisite
sensibility–the sensibility of modernity. Urban or suburban, intimate with or
exempt from public haunt, she portrays in these ‘tales’ the life which finds
tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything...Discretion
being the better part of valour, it is discreet not
to attempt any kind of definition of the short story; often there is violent
disagreement among people with regard to it. There are twenty ways of writing a
short story and all of them may be wrong. It is the individual manner that
creates the form, and form is not always the God of gods. A classicist to the
core, Marcella Hardy never writes to produce a sensation; sobre,
austere, she illuminates lives, life–laying bare the tragic or comic kernel of
character and circumstance; making ironic situations, she breaks them gently;
there is never anywhere the slightest hint of harshness. She derives her
steadiness on the plane of imagination from the strength of her intellect: a
balance, but not the blending, of these twin qualities invests her flying barbs
of wit with a special charm. Her forte is portraiture; through a
narrative technique controlled by an absolute economy of words–she shows that
she has no time to indulge in vagueness or verbosity and it is far from her
mind to stun you with dazzling shots and giddy splashes of colour–through
a technique which originates and flows from the depths of individual beings,
rising to a quiet, noble eloquence past time, past place (her pauses are short
in which to test the implications of theme or subject matter), she achieves an
individual stream of consciousness: thoughts, passions, emotions, dreams,
preserved in the amber of memory, helping the even movement of the stream.”
That
was Marcella Hardy, her writings as gentle and sensitive as was her nature; she
was a born writer; and if a writer is entitled to reveal himself as much as he
desires in his work, she did so in hers with her convictions, her principles of
creation and criticism–and, where her convictions were concerned, she could be
curt and uncompromising–never inflicting her theories of authorship, her
obsession with her mission, her endless vigils with her art, on others, all or
any of which, if she had, must have lain hidden in a domain of deep discipline.
Two
episodes. I am never tired of relating, would illustrate her quality of being
brusque at the slightest sign of discourtesy from others, and that side to her
nature avid for the dramatic and the picturesque. Sometime during December 1949
her friend Marjorie Sykes who was in Northern India had written to her to say
that Vera Brittain, English novelist and pacifist,
was visiting Madras and would she (Marcella) like to meet her (Vera). Miss Brittain (in life Mrs. George Catlin),
it may be recalled, was one among a group of distinguished persons, selected on
a world-wide basis, who came to India to study the work of Mahatma Gandhi.
During her Madras visit she was the guest of the Sarans,
at their house, The Palms, in Haddows Road, Nungambakkam. (Mr. Raghunandan
Saran, lately come from Delhi, was Managing Director of Ashok Motors and Motor
Industries. He met with a tragic death in the Nagpur
air crash in December 1953.) Marcella Hardy wished me, in my capacity as an
Important One of the Authors’ and Artists’ Association, to accompany her when
calling to see Miss Brittain, and it was about ten o’
clock in the night, after witnessing a dance recital in the City, that we
reached The Palms. We were aware of the late hour and of possible inability on
the part of the English authoress to meet us, but she wanted to see it
through–“for dear Marjorie’s sake,” as Madame Hardy said. The first difficulty
rose formidably at the gates of the villa which stood in its own grounds some
distance away. The moment we stepped into the drive, two wolf-like dogs began
to bay, not the full moon overhead, but at us. Fortunately they were in leash
and the servants silenced them. “Not one hound of the Baskervilles,
but two, dear Watson,” I joked, at which Madame Hardy could not hold back her
suppressed laughter. We saw the English lady, a small-made man in snow-white achkhan, and another lady in saree, dark, curly-haired, and inclined to embonpoint, sitting
in rattan chairs in the open space beneath the verandah, engaged in
conversation. The three stood up as we came to a halt before them. Marcella
Hardy quickly announced herself to Vera Brittain who,
I noticed, seemed to be a trifle surprised at a white woman wearing saree and obviously not knowing when to call on persons.
The name of Marjorie Sykes was mentioned. “Oh!” exclaimed Vera Brittain. “What can I do for you?” “Nothing,” replied
Madame Hardy, and even for one soft-spoken as her, I detected a sharpness in
her tone. “This is Mr. Isvaran, an eminent writer. We two belong to an
association called the Authors’ and Artists’ Association of Madras. We thought
you’ll be interested in what we are doing. At least Marjorie thought so.” “Oh!”
from Miss Brittain again. “Mr. Saran.” “Mrs. Saran.”
We all moved up to the drawing-room where Miss Brittain
introduced Madame Hardy and me to her husband, Professor George Catlin. “We would like you to come to our Association, 16 Brandsons Gardens, Kilpauk, if
you find this is possible,” said Marcella Hardy to Vera Britain, “and then we
shall talk for a while about writing and authorship.” Miss Brittain
agreed. We got out. The wolf-hounds were silent. “What d’you
think of the interview, Bhaiji?” Marcella
Hardy asked me. She always addressed me thus, and I her, Behn.
“Ripping,” I answered; I didn’t know you could be that curt.” She laughed.
“Something of a glacier, isn’t she? Have you read any of her novels? I
haven’t.” “Indeed, I have.” And forthwith I reeled off the names: The Dark
Tide, Not without Honour, Honourable
Estate, Account Rendered, Born 1925, concluding: “All turgid stuff,
enlarged pamphlets in which creative imagination has no play. But I liked her
autobiography, Testament of Youth. Not much of a glacier in it.”
The
succeeding evening Vera Britain and her hostess Mrs. Raksha
Saran visited 16 Brandsons Gardens. There was a
select group of Indian writers. Miss Britain saw us in our setting; acquainted
herself with the nature of our work; spoke warmly, and I noticed that a thaw
had set-in in her. Marcella Hardy smiled a Mona Lisa smile at my impression.
Vera Brittain autographed for me my copy of her
latest novel, Born 1925”. The following year we read her book, Search
after Sunrise, dealing with her “experiment in understanding”–as she called
her traveler’s story–of the New India, and in which she wrote with much
affection about Madras (in spite of the Cooum being a
sewer), about “the wide green lawn and pots of poinsettias beneath the
verandah” of the Sarans’ villa in Haddows
Road. “The driving tensions and bitternesses of the North
evaporated in this soft, pleasant climate, where no extremes of torrid heat and
searching cold came to exacerbate the nerves and weary the
spirit.” Was the thaw we noticed in her caused by the “pleasant” climate of
Madras? “Still a glacier,” remarked Marcella Hardy.
Now
about the other incident, which revealed her passion for the picturesque and
dramatic, and that will never cease to be a marvel to me: All-India Radio,
Madras, had invited me to broadcast a talk on Bull-chasing–a sport which, in
the land of the Tamils, goes by the name of Jallikkattu
or Manjuvirattu. I made a rough
draft of the script, and before giving the final touches to it consulted
Marcella Hardy to know at first hand something about the Spanish bull-fights
that would come in useful to my subject for providing a colourful
detail or two, although I had read Blood and Sand by Ibanez.
Reminded at once of her stay in Spain at the time she was an undergraduate, she
told me that she had seen a few bull-fights, notably the celebrated fighting of
Seville when the mournings of the Holy Week end and
rejoicings begin again marking the return to normal life. It seems but
yesterday though it was four years ago, I sitting in the drawing-room of her
house, fixedly attentive to what she recounted while the twilight deepened
outside. “Excuse me a moment, Bhaiji,” she said
rising, and vanished into the adjoining apartment. I was so absorbed in the
descriptions she had given, revolving in my mind the lightning movements of the
toreador and matador and bull, the tense play with death, that I didn’t hear
her return to the room. She coughed lightly, I looked up, and was astounded out
of my wits. There she stood before me, lovely as an apparition, tall, majestic,
dressed like a Spanish lady of the highest rank, in flowing white skirts, in
whose pleats stars wrought with silver lace turned and twinkled, a high comb on
her head enveloped in a thin, misty, black veil, a mantilla of cream-coloured silk embroidered with crimson and blue and golden
flowers peeping among emerald leaves, reticulated and tasselled
at the edges and swathing her shoulders, and an elfin fan spread like a
half-moon fluttering in her hands. I held my breath. “Now, look,” she cried,
sitting on the chair, one leg riding over the other “I’m a Spanish lady among
the vast con-course of Spanish ladies and grandees gathered to see a
bull-fight. Visualise the bull, now pausing and
switching tail, now snorting and charging, and the dexterous steps of the
matador as in a waltz in the arena. All creation is rushing towards a final
shudder. But really the tenseness of the moment is when bull and matador face
each other, standing stockstill, and even then nobody
can predict the certainty of the end. The case is not of man against beast but
a materialised abstraction in which horror has no
place. It is fascination pure and simple. The moment dies, the bull dies, the
air is thunderous with applause and the victor stands in the ring, aloof in his
dignity. And the ladies throw their rich mantillas to him in tribute for his
bravery...thus,” she cried, and I who was almost spellbound by her action and
description found it broken of a sudden by the soft heaviness of the mantilla
she was wearing on her shoulders falling into my lap. “Am I the triumphant
matador?” I asked, my voice low and faltering. “Yes,” she said, smiling. “A
matador of a writer who has to fight not one philistine bull but many.
Godspeed!”
The
mantilla she gave me is my most precious possession today, and whether I take
it in my hands to look at it or stow it away in the clothesbox
among sachets to preserve it, it will continue to release a vision for me, a
vision of faith and courage, as bright and beautiful as itself, and hold
steadfast the memory of one who was every inch a lady and every inch a woman,
tender, strong, forgiving, and whose independence of spirit made for her own
individual fulfillment.