India Today
March 28, 2005

Fight Like a Woman

by Kaveree Bamzai

Mary Evans’ life was almost as exotic as her cartwheeling,
whip-cracking roles as Nadia, Bollywood’s first action heroine

FEARLESS NADIA
By Dorothee Wenner
Penguin
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 247

The whip cracks through the air. The enigmatic eye mask perfectly
complements the Russian fur cap, the knee-length boots and swirling
cape, even as muscled thighs peek out from bottom-hugging shorts.
“Heyyy,” she says, just before she swings away on a vine, springs
from a tree or gives her car a kick. The stuff of naughty fantasies?

No. It is just Mary Evans, known to India as Fearless Nadia, avenger
of wrongs, feminist icon and enduring movie star. If the best kept
secret of contemporary Indian history is that some of the finest work
is being done outside Indian shores, then Nadia is Indian cinema’s
oldest star. In the Berlin-based writer Dorothee Wenner’s racy
biography, the actor also emerges as a full-blooded woman, who made
no apologies for what she was. The dirt poor daughter of a Scottish
army volunteer and a Greek belly dancer, Nadia was many things at
many points. An assistant in a departmental store in Mumbai, a legal
secretary, a circus performer, a chorus girl, even-many suspect-an
unwed mother. She was also, in 1935, Indian cinema’s first
Ramboleena, with a film that was appropriately titled Hunterwali.

In a book whose sharp style coincides with its fascinating subject,
more than the early beginnings of Indian cinema are unveiled. It not
only puts Nadia in the context of the Gujarati-speaking,
Hollywood-dreaming beginnings of the Mumbai film industry but also
places her firmly among the early western women adventurers Emma
Roberts and Fanny Parkes, travellers who experienced an extraordinary
level of independence.

Nadia-the name itself was the product of an Armenian fortune-teller’s
fevered imagination-was part of the eccentric Mumbai of the 1930s and
’40s where many divisions came crumbling down. It could be the
all-caste canteen run by the cosmopolitan couple, Devika Rani and
Himanshu Rai, at Bombay Talkies. It could be the beach house in Juhu
which Nadia retired to for weekend trysts with her director Homi
Wadia (she was Catholic, he was Parsi, their relationship was
legalised only when she was 52). Or it could even be the scalpel-like
pen of Baburao Patel, film critic and star-breaking forerunner of
today’s tabloids, who wrote mercilessly about celebrity private
lives.

It was a jungle out there and Nadia emerges as its most alluring
animal. She could do it all-jump, dance, ride horses, race cars, even
carry men on her broad shoulders. In her career, there is no evidence
of the pale, simpering women who unhappily succeeded her on Hindi
screens and who forever forced Indian women to conform to a cultural
stereotype of bimbette/vixen.

The world has already celebrated Nadia mania thrice over, once at the
height of her fame, then as the female James Bond code-named Living
Fireball when she starred in Khiladi in 1968 and then again in 1994
when her great nephew made a documentary on her. What India needs to
do now is to acknowledge her as more than just a stunt queen and an
exotic sidelight. If being a woman is all about recognising power,
then Nadia was its most fearless exponent.

NEW RELEASES
KATHA PRIZE STORIES 13
Ed by Geeta Dharmarajan
Katha
Price: Rs 250
Pages: 254

The prized volume is out, bringing the best of regional writings in
2001-3. The translation of 12 short stories, including two in
Meiteilon, showcases the verve and variety of contemporary Indian
literature.

DIALOGUE AND OTHER POEMS
By Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Sahitya Akademi
Price: Rs 90
Pages: 157

Sahitya Akademi’s two-in-one collection has the poems of Chabria and
Anna Sujatha Mathai. While Chabria’s verse resonates to the cadences
of the Tamil Akam poetry, Mathai does some introspective musings.

MULLAH OMAR AND ROBESPIERRE
By Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
Rupa
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 162

The collection of Rao’s essays on assorted topics touches all the big
names from Plato to Karl Popper. Like the title, the book hits an
esoteric vein as he propounds new ideas in politics, literature and science.