Actress Mary Evans, better known as the whip-cracking ‘Fearless Nadia’ of Hindi films, regaled audiences as the masked do-gooder in the first ever masala film made on Indian soil that featured a woman vigilante.
The opening scene of the 1940 black and white classic Diamond Queen is typical of Bollywood potboilers—when someone attacks a young school teacher, a muscular arm shoots out to tackle the wrongdoer. Fists fly all around and the bad guys get a taste of their own medicine. The camera then pans to reveal the heroine who not only takes control of the situation, but delivers a monologue on women’s rights as well.
Actress Mary Evans, better known as the whip-cracking ‘Fearless Nadia’ of Hindi films, regaled audiences as the masked do-gooder in the first ever masala film made on Indian soil that featured a woman vigilante. She rode horses, leapt from moving trains and had salon fights where she would soundly beat up the villains. “To those of us who grew up watching her films, Fearless Nadia symbolised courage and strength,” said filmmaker Subash Ghai. He is screening Diamond Queen at his film institute, Whistling Woods International (WWI), as part of a three-day festival celebrating the 100 years of Indian cinema.
Among the other Hindi classics that will be screened at the WWI festival is a documentary called Fearless: The Hunterwali Story shot in 1993 by Nadia’s grand nephew and filmmaker, the late Riyad Wadia. Screened at numerous film festivals around the world, it combines interviews with Nadia, her director husband Homi Wadia, and other luminaries of Hindi cinema. The film also shows footage from her films and several photographs that chronicle the life and legend of Fearless Nadia.
In an article written after Riyad’s death, his elder brother, Roy, recalled that when he and his father Vinci set about restoring the Wadia Movietone archives, they realised that perhaps their most precious gems were her films. “Mary Aunty was still alive in the early 1990s when Riyad decided to make the documentary about her life. It brought Nadia back into the public eye in her final years, delighting an old lady who thought the world had forgotten her,” Roy said.
The documentary has nuggets like how Evans, who was born in Australia to a British father and a German mother and later migrated to Bombay, told the Wadias at their first meeting that she was willing to try anything once on screen. Homi’s elder brother Jamshed, the man behind the Wadia Movitone Studio, wanted his heroine to go beyond the submissive characters Indian women usually portrayed during those times.
He saw potential her, especially since it was easy for Indian audiences to accept a white woman carrying out fearless histrionics on screen.
In one of her most memorable films Hunterwali, a mask-wearing, sword-wielding, chandelier-swinging Nadia performed all her own stunts. In the following decades, she starred in several action-adventure films including Miss Frontier Mail, Diamond Queen and Jungle Princess. Her last film was Khiladi in 1968. Unfortunately, the prints of most of her films are now damaged beyond repair.
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