Sands Of Time - Part 5 | What A Female Superhero Film From The 40s Had To Do With India’s First Openly Gay Film

She was India’s first caped crusader and she was created a good 4 years before Batman was conceived for the first time by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Batman first appeared on the pages of Detective Comics (later DC) on March 30, 1939. Hunterwali released in Indian cinema halls around May 1935. The posters screamed, “Wadia Movietones presents Hunterwali, featuring Fearless Nadia”. It featured a woman sporting a mask, hot pants and boots, wielding a whip with abandon. Thereby a superstar and an abiding franchise was born. On the screen, Fearless Nadia was swashbuckling her way to glory, handling whips, guns and swords with equal panache, and displaying acrobatics the average Indian had never witnessed.

Born In Australia to a Scotsman father and a Greek mother, Mary Ann Evans washed up on the shores of Bombay in 1913. Her father, employed by the British Army, was posted in India. When her father was killed in action, she was shipped off to the Northwest Frontier Province of undivided India, an area which is now known as the Khyber Pakhtunwala province of Pakistan. Growing up in the midst of tribals, warriors and battle-worn animals, Mary picked up skills like horse riding, hunting, shooting and fishing. She could also sing and dance with equal dexterity, which held her in good stead later.

Within a few years, she was back in Bombay, participating in a ballet dance troupe and making her living doing odd jobs. She also found employment at the Zarco Circus. It was one of her performances that drew her to the brothers Jamshed Wadia and Homi Wadia, who had just started a cinema studio called Wadia Movietone. Moviemaking was this shiny new trade which many enterprising youngsters across the country were warming up to, and the Wadia brothers were no exception. Their family was in the shipbuilding business, but Jamshed, known in the annals of film history as the visionary J.B.H. Wadia, chose to opt for this new trade which was just shaping up.

The Wadias teamed up with Mary. By this time, she had started using a stage name - Nadia. J.B.H picked it up, and whipped up the sensational title “Fearless Nadia”. In the first few films, she played walk-on roles with a few lines of dialogue, which gave her an opportunity to brush up her Hindi and Urdu. Come 1935, and Wadia Movietone launched Fearless Nadia with a bang, in a film called Hunterwali, “hunter” being an allusion to the whip she carried. The mask and general demeanour was modeled after Douglas Fairbank’s Zorro, but all in all Hunterwali was a fresh new masked vigilante. The film gave her abilities a free rein, allowing her to pull off stunts like jumping atop a moving carriage, and fighting goons while astride her horse. She did all her own stunts and did them with great flourish. The concept of stunt doubles didn’t exist, and the there were no green screens or CGI to spice things up. She jumped, hopped, rode, cycled, and even had a fierce battle cry of her own. For the next decade or so, Nadia appeared in film after film, playing various versions of the masked vigilante or warrior princess, showcasing breathtaking daredevilry on screen. In 1943, there was a sequel to the original Hunterwali called Hunterwali ki Beti, in which Nadia played the daughter as well.

By the 1940s, Wadia Movietone was past its prime, unable to keep up with the fast-changing world of moviemaking. Legend has it that when the studio was up for grabs, V. Shantaram bought it ans set up his own Rajkamal Kalamandir there. Jamshed and Homi split, and Nadia went home with Homi. In 1961, Nadia and Homi were married. Homi established his own banner called Basant Pictures. In his heydays, J.B.H. Wadia patronised many new faces who went on to make a splash in the industry, including the likes of Feroz Khan, Mumtaz, Helen, Rekha, Prithviraj Kapoor. But with Hunterwali and Fearless Nadia, J.B.H. had challenged gender stereotyping even before the Hindi filmy trope of the “sati-savitri-suhagan” had taken shape and dominated mainstream cinema for decades thereafter.

For the next half-a-century, one doesn’t hear a lot about Wadia Movietone. It was a sepia-tinted picture on the moth-eaten pages of Bollywood history. It was in the early 1990s that JBH’s grandson Riyad Vinci Wadia revived the banner, and he did it by demolishing gender stereotypes of a whole different kind. For the longest time - for entire decades - Indian cinema blissfully refused to have anything to do with homosexual relationships. It was as if it as if the LGBT experience was never a part of fundamental human experience. In popular cinema, the third gender existed only to evoke laughter, disgust or (eventually) menace. Back in the 70s, the New Wave promised to shake the foundations of society by telling stories of the marginalised and the oppressed. Even then, none of these path-breaking filmmakers even tried to talk about queers.

There was just one film from 1971 which resurfaced many years later in 2020 at a Berlin film archive, called Badnam Basti which hinted at two males characters being in a relationship. Though suffering from choppy execution, it handled the subject - adapted from a Hindi novel by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena - with a sensitive palette. But presumably to avoid an uproar, the relationship is not directly dealt with - only indicated through some scenes of physical proximity. Though the film did get some positive reviews when it came out, there is nothing to indicate that the critics or social commentators of the day even gauged that it is a film dealing with homosexuality in any way.

Riyad Vinci Wadia

Back to the 90s. Riyad Vinci Wadia came upon a poetry collection called One day I locked my flat in Soul City by writer and gay rights activist R. Raj Rao. By this time, Riyad had made a documentary about Nadia called Fearless: The Hunterwali Story (1993) which was widely acclaimed. He now wanted to make a film around the gay experience in Bombay, and release it under the banner of Wadia Movietone. This was the time when a conversation about queer rights and legalization of homosexuality in India had begun to heat up. Riyad invited R. Raj Rao to work on a gay-themed script, but it had to be put on the back burner for lack of funds. While they waited for this to materialise, Rao came up with another collection of poems called Bomgay. This gave Riyad an idea. Why not make a short film about the poems at a shoestring budget? Getting actors who’d like to play openly gay characters on screen (there was a lovemaking scene in a library) was not an easy task, especially in the 90s. Riyad knew some names in the advertising industry - he pulled a few strings and finally got hold of some models and actors who were ready to experiment. Finally, Rahul Bose, Kushal Punjabi and R. Raj Rao himself featured in the film, also called Bomgay.

The film was a collection of six segments, showcasing different aspects of the life of gay men in Mumbai, cruising in public toilets, railway tracks and maidan, constantly at the risk of being ostracised. It flows with the poetry of Rao being a constant companion to what unfolds on screen. There’s no shying away from anything…whether it’s the sex, the exploitation, the prejudice, the shaming, the legalese, everything is dealt with front and centre. It’s unabashedly candid, and yet absolutely beautiful in its execution. Bomgay found only a limited release in India, but it traveled a number of film festivals across the world, and made quite a splash in Indian media of the time.

Riyad passed away in 2003, barely 36 years old. With him, his grandfather’s banner flew high one more time.