[Reader-list] who made? who watched? who acted?

[Monica Mody]

I am enthralled by the story of a big, beautiful blonde who kicked and
punched her way to folklore and movielore, becoming famous as
"hunterwali". Fearless Nadia, who could always be counted on to take
the side of the oppressed, who first announced without a tremor in her
voice, "auraten kamzor nahin hoti!"

An ilk-defying icon of the 1930s and 40s, I watched her in action
today on a sound-gone-bad DVD where all the interviews were rendered
in an uptempo whirr. That did not take away from the magic of the
story of Mary Evans, aka Nadia Hunterwali, unfolding amidst the times
when films had not yet become commodities; movies were miracles of
technology that took an amorphous imagination by the scruff of the
neck and nailed it to materiality and posterity.

The film, "Fearless: the Hunterwali Story" (by late Riyad Vinci
Wadia), raised other interesting issues. Most of the film posters
seemed to be in English. So were the films meant chiefly for the
consumption of the English-speaking class? Did the British watch them
as well? Did they have a parallel endeavor where they made films in
India starring Englishmen and -women? Apart from Nadia, were there
other actors of European descent in the pre-independence days? And if
so, how did they fare post-1947?

I thought the Readers-List would be a good place to bring all my
questions. Forgive me if some of the answers are common knowledge. I'm
afraid I have really slipped in my Stardust reading.


-- 
http://insmallpieces.blogspot.com