Fearless Nadia: Alpha female who asserted her space in male-dominated Hindi filmdom

She was one of Hindi cinema’s original action stars, breaking the gender glass ceiling at a time such conversation was far from taken seriously in our pop culture. Australian origin actress-stuntwoman Mary Ann Evans, known to legions of fans by her screen name of Fearless Nadia, also set the template for over-the-top Bollywood action served with a comicbook superhero dash, decades before the genre would capture fan fancy. Nadia defied the odds of ethnicity, too. Despite her foreign features and heavily-accented Hindi she scored with characters having Indian names and set against Indian backdrops all through her glory run that lasted from the mid-1930s to the’50s, when pre and post-Independence nationalism was the defining emotion of the country.

Nadia was born on 8 January, 1908, while 9 January is the day she passed away in 1996. From Hunterwali, her epochal debut film of 1935, to her final starring role at the age of 60 in Khilari (1968), Nadia amazingly kept dodging the trap of being typecast for well over three decades despite broadly playing the same protagonist in 40-odd films. Her appeal, born as much of her exotic screen presence as her daring stunts, was unlike any other female Bollywood star. At a time when coyness was the buzzword for female stardom in Hindi cinema, Fearless Nadia wore the pants, boots, mask and cloak with elan, wielding her hunter and whipping up glorious box office numbers with nearly every new release.

The numbers did add up for Wadia Movietone, the production house that, beyond her unusual appeal, was a vital reason she survived and thrived despite going against the mainstream grain of her times. Nadia found a home turf in Wadia Movietone, the banner launched by brothers JBH Wadia and Homi Wadia, who produced almost every one of her big starrers. Between them, the brothers also directed most of her films. Nadia’s tryst with big-ticket success began with Wadia Movietone’s Hunterwali in 1935. The film would establish the action star as well as the production house. She would eventually settle down with Homi in 1961 and the couple stayed married for the rest of her life. By the late fifties, Nadia had played out the best part of her innings as Bollywood’s most enigmatic star, scoring with a regular flow of hits over the decades, notably Miss Frontier Mail (1936), Hurricane Hansa (1937), Lutaru Lalna (1938), Punjab Mail (1939), Diamond Queen (1940), Bambaiwali (1941), Muqabala (1942), Hunterwali Ki Beti (1943), Stunt Queen (1947), Himmatwali (1947), 11 O’Clock (1948), Tigress (1948), Dhoomketu (1949), Jungle Ka Jawahar (1953) and Circus Ki Sundari (1959).

These films were mostly about stunts, highlighted by the signature fight sequences filmed on Nadia, and the basic idea was to create space for ample action within the screenplay in between a package of drama and slapstick that buoyed an uncomplicated plot. The endearing aspect of the Wadia films, as well as the odd outside production starring Nadia that echoed the brothers’ formulae, lay in the presentation of the star and her fictional world as an experience unlike anything Hindi cinema of the era delivered. Hollywoodish stunts toplined by a white actress bearing an Indian screen identity and spewing Hindi dialogues wasn’t commonplace, but there was more. The Wadias packaged their films with comicbook flamboyance.

In their 1935 superhit Miss Frontier Mail, for instance, Nadia is introduced in the credits as “Indian Pearl White”. The reference is to Pearl White, the Hollywood action queen of the 1910s and ’20s. The film’s villain Sayani Atish, a regular antagonist in Nadia hits, is presented as “Screen Villain No. 1” while his female counterpart Gulshan is the “Screen Vamp”. The comedian Manchi Thoothi, whose brand of clowning in the film primarily pertains to an obsession with chomping on bananas, is the “Champion Banana Eater” in the credits. Such peculiar humour can be noticed in their other films, too. In the casting credits of the 1948 action hit 11 O’Clock, for instance, the Austin car used in the film, a common sight in most Nadia starrers, gets a billing along with the star cast. The car is introduced as “Austin Ki Bachchi” (Austin’s daughter). The Wadias never lost touch with cheeky humour when it came to packaging Nadia, clearly wanting to avoid presenting her brand of screen violence as dark or brutal. In turn, the comicbook-styled action slapstick punch became representative of the Nadia-Wadia films, and a precursor of more polished generic efforts to come.

Hindi commercial cinema of Nadia’s era, more specifically the action film, could seem unsophisticated to today’s audience, and some might even point at tacky production values. Cinema technology was far from advanced back then, and a film banking on stunts often faced a constraint given its lack of scope to display histrionic skills. Most top male stars and their fans did not take the genre seriously for this reason. Nadia’s stature as a female star of Hindi films is naturally curbed by these factors, although she did foray beyond just playing the action hero. She tried her hand at scriptwriting, too, in the self-starring action hit, The Jungle Princess (1942), and choreographed stunts in her successful dacoit drama Lutaru Lalna, besides the 1933 fantasy Lal-e-Yaman, incidentally a rare film coming from Wadia Movietone that did not star Nadia.

More than her shots at establishing versatility beyond acting, Nadia’s significance in Hindi cinema lies in the way her image has resonated in different kinds of larger-than-life stardom that followed. Her characters were social heroes, fighting for the downtrodden or gunning for revenge and justice, or simply protecting her near ones. These formulaic traits have highlighted the average action hero/heroine since the seventies, and found direct or indirect reiteration in generic derivatives as the female dacoit flick and the lady cop drama. Beyond screen stereotypes, Nadia’s image was also the inspiration behind Kangana Ranaut’s role of the 1940s action star Miss Julia in Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2017 release, Rangoon.

Fearless Nadia was the alpha female who asserted her space in a man’s world mixing action hero flair with outlandish oomph. It is an image that continues seeking reinvention in our popular cinema culture, at a time when talk of on-screen gender equality is more relevant than ever. It makes Nadia’s oeuvre worth a revisit.

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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