Atul’s Song A Day- A choice collection of Hindi Film & Non-Film Songs

This article is written by Arunkumar Deshmukh, a fellow enthusiast of Hindi movie music and a contributor to this blog. This article is meant to be posted in atulsongaday.me. If this article appears in other sites without the knowledge and consent of the web administrator of atulsongaday.me, then it is piracy of the copyright content of atulsongaday.me and is a punishable offence under the existing laws.

Today’s song is from a stunt film Jungle Princess-1942.

This was a film with Tarzan’s story. The only difference here was that the ‘Tarzan’ was a GIRL ! The story behind this film is interesting.

The original story of Tarzan was written by Edgar Rice Burrows. It was written as a serial story in 1912 in the then popular magazine “The All Story”. It ran in 12 parts and all parts were published as a book “Tarzan of the Apes” In 1914. The book became a Best Seller and was translated in almost all European languages. When the Silent films started, the Tarzan story was picked up. The unknown fact is that this story was based on an actual true story. In 1868, a young English Nobleman – William Mildin was shipwrecked off the African coast. His 11 year old boy was saved and adopted by monkeys-Apes. After 15 years, some adventurers captured this boy, now a young man, and returned him to civilization.

The first silent film was made by MGM in 1918. Until 1929, 8 silent films were made on Tarzan. After the Talkie films started, the first film was also by MGM-“Tarzan-The Ape Man” in 1932. Johnny Weissmuller, a 5-time Gold Medal winner Olympian swimmer was in the role of Tarzan. Along with him, Maureen Sullivan, another swimmer was Jane. This pair did 12 films upto 1948. Later many films with different actors were made on Tarzan, the last being in 2006. The Tarzan story came on stage, Radio, T.V.,in animated form and as Video game.

In India, the first Indian avatar of Tarzan came as ” Zambo- The Ape man” in 1937, followed by ” Zambo ka beta” in 1939. I wonder why Indians are in a hurry to bestow sons and daughters to even fiction heros. Aladdin, Alibaba, Hatimtai and Sindbad were also not left out without a son or daughter ! After 1939, a film with the name Tarzan first time came only in 1963 with ” Tarzan aur Jadugar”. In a spate of Tarzan films, there were 21 Tarzan films till 1964 Another Indian avatar came in 1958 as ” Zimbo”. There were 6 Zimbo films till 1999.

Wadia Movietone was the premier studio making stunt/action films since 1933. It’s not that the Wadias did not want to make a Tarzan film. Their problem was that their STAR was a woman and she obviously could not do a Tarzan’s role. The imaginative Wadias found out a way and planned a film on a LADY TARZAN, who would just replace the male character. The rest of the basic story would be the same except a few changes to camouflage the blatant copy !
In an interview in 1990, Nadia describes how the film began-” One day JBH Wadia took me to a Circus having shows near our studios. He showed me 4-5 lions and said in your next film, you have to work with these,” I was scared to the bones and hurriedly refused point blank. He simply smiled and said ”just think about it “. When we were about to leave, I saw a small girl-about 8-9 years, enter one of the Lion cages and feed the Lion. I was stunned and thought, “If this small girl can do this, why can’t I ? I told JBH that I would do the film and work with the Lions too.”

Thus began the journey of one year training spent with the lions. Nadia became an expert in handling not only Lions, but also Tigers and Elephants.

The shooting of her famous “The Jungle Princess” started in 1941 and the film was released in 1942, around summer in India. This was a very ambitious, big budget Stunt film of Wadia Movietone-the Greatest Nadia film after “Hunterwali”-1935.

Cast of the film was: Fearless Nadia, Radha Rani, John Cawas, Sardar Mansoor, Baby Madhuri, Dalpat, Hari Shivdasani, Jal Khambata, Shahzadi, Mithoo Miya, M.K. Hasan, Jiji Bhai, Habib, Gulshan Sufi. The story was….

A merchant ship is caught in a powerful storm, and as the boat threatens to sink, Sir Mangaldas (M.K. Hasan) places a life preserver around his five year old daughter Lila (Baby Madhuri) just as she is swept out to sea.

The lone survivor among the passengers and crew, Lila finds herself washed up on the beach of a lonely jungle where she is befriended by a lion. Years go by and Lila, now known as Mala by the aboriginals, has grown into a young woman (Fearless Nadia) who rules over her animal kingdom and who has become the adopted daughter of the jungle King of Harambano (Hari Shivdasani).

Lila’s uncle Mohanlal (Dalpat) has decided to have the girl and her father finally declared legally dead so that he can become the heir to Sir Mangaldas’ estate. But then, word comes through that Lila might be alive! So a search party, led by Surendra (John Cawas), heads out to find her.
Traipsing through the jungle, Surendra comes face to face with a ferocious lion and kills it. Mala learns of this and has the group arrested for murdering her animal friend. Surendra is able to free them all, however, when he is allowed to fight a dangerous tiger as penance for his crime.

Surendra falls in love with Mala, not realizing she is the girl he and his party have been searching for, in fact they have all been led to believe that Meena (Radha Rani), the king’s treacherous consort, is in actuality the missing Lila. Meena traps the group in the palace and forces them to accept her as Lila or die. Mohanlal agrees to this, but the rest decide to attempt an escape resulting in Mala being wounded and the king ordering the execution of Surendra and his cohorts. It is a pride of Lions which attack the soldiers and free Mala and the others. In the fighting Mohanlal and Meena die. The team of Surendra, Mala and others return to the city happily.

The story of Jungle Princess was written by Fearless Nadia who also acted as dance director on the film.

In the 1930s, just when the silent era was giving way to the talkies, there appeared on Hindi film screens a blue-eyed blonde who caused men to shame. Among the first of cinema’s audacious feminists, she challenged male dominance with such rousing lines as: “Don’t be under the assumption that you can lord over today’s women. If the nation is to be free, women have to be freed first.” This was in 1940, in a socialist-themed film titled Diamond Queen. The heroine was a 27-year-old upstart called Nadia.

Nadia leapt from windows, jumped off cliffs, swung from chandeliers, fought atop speeding trains, lived among wild lions and routinely lifted men and flung them like a wrestler. Above all, she acquired fame as a woman who cracked the whip. She did all this on her own, without any safety measures and health insurance. A messiah-like figure unfailingly coming to the rescue of the downtrodden and weak, Fearless Nadia was the female Robin Hood of her time.

Astride her pet horse, named Punjab Ka Beta for comic effect, the masked, whip-wielding Nadia was a sensation among filmgoers in the early era of Hindi cinema. A devout Catholic, born in Perth, Australia, Nadia or Mary Evans was voluptuous but athletic and “supple”, as she puts it. It is a matter of great debate how she found acceptance as a major Bollywood star in the conservative 1930s. It was a strange phenomenon, unparalleled in the history of Hindi cinema. Strange, because it involved a White woman breaking into a Brown male bastion. And strange also because it happened so early in the day, a time when the cinematic taste of British-ruled India was in infancy. Nadia was an experiment that somehow worked at a critical time in Indian cinema’s history.

“For the Indian public, Nadia was a visual disconnect from their reality. Maybe that’s why they cheered her on. I doubt if an Indian-looking woman would have been received in a similar manner,” surmises Roy Wadia, her great-nephew who was introduced to ‘Mary Aunty’s’ pictures as a young boy. And pictures, she made many.

Nadia was a creation of Wadia Movietone, a studio founded by Roy’s grandfather Jamshed Wadia that specialised in making stunt and mythological films. The studio made a fortune on the back of her swashbuckling stunts. It was quite by chance that she came into contact with the Wadias. Born of a Scottish father and Greek mother, she arrived in Mumbai, then Bombay, as a toddler. Her father, a soldier in the British army, was transferred to Bombay’s Elephanta Island in 1912. Shortly thereafter, the family occupied a small flat in Colaba. It is interesting to note that Nadia, who would endear herself to the masses as a stuntwoman, at first wanted to be a singer and dancer. At a young age, writes Dorothee Wenner in the actress’ German language biography Fearless Nadia, she ‘learned polkas and Scottish dances from her father and her first Greek songs from her mother.’

She went on to sing in church choirs in school, her real talent of swords-and-whips still years away. In 1915, her father’s untimely death at the hands of Germans during World War I prompted the family’s move to Peshawar. It was here that Nadia developed a soft spot for animals that found expression in her movies. Even as a girl, she was different. While girls her age played with fluffy soft toys, she kept a pony who became her best friend. The family was uprooted yet again when Mary and her mother decided to return to Bombay for good, barely after a few years of stay in Peshawar.

“I was fat and the best way to lose weight was to dance,” recalled Nadia, a plumper figure by now, well past her prime as she spoke in an interview for Roy’s brother Riyad Vinci Wadia’s documentary on her, titled The Hunterwali Story. Originally screened as part of a Nadia film festival in 1993, the documentary is a comprehensive look at her life and times. Since then, Riyad, too, has passed away.

As a young woman, Mary joined a troupe of the Russian dancer Madame Astrova. She had earlier tried her hand at a job in the Army & Navy Store in Bombay as a salesgirl and had at one point wanted to learn “short-hand and typing to get a better job”. Astrova’s troupe performed for British soldiers at military bases, for Indian royalty and for other crowds in dusty small towns and villages. She mastered the art of cartwheels and splits, which came in handy later during her film stunts. With circus experience under her belt, Nadia was ready for bigger things. It is believed that Mary changed her name to Nadia on astrological advice. An Armenian fortune teller had foretold her that a successful career lay ahead but she would have to choose a name starting with the letter ‘N’. Nadia was finally chosen because it was “exotic-sounding”.

Nadia’s fortunes did rise. The Lahore cinema owner Eruch Kanga spotted her in a performance and reported this to Jamshed and Homi Wadia, the Wadia Movietone brothers. An appointment was fixed and a nervous Nadia, togged up in a blue dress and sunflower-decked hat, took a tram from Wellington Mews in Colaba to the Wadias’ original studio in Parel.

The Wadia brothers, of an elite Parsi family, were shocked by how visibly Western she was. How can a White woman even think of becoming a heroine in Hindi films? When Jamshed told her that he had never heard of her before, she shot back: “Until now, I hadn’t heard of you either!” Impressed with her attitude, they decided to put her to the test. Initially, she was given walk-on parts in studio productions that were in progress at the time. Later, she was hired at a weekly salary of Rs 60. Once in the Wadia fold, she was instructed to learn Hindi.

“She always had difficulty speaking Hindi and had a very strong accent, but for some reason, the audience did not object,” says Roy. The Wadias, who were raised on a diet of American Westerns and who idolised Tom Mix, Francis Ford and Eddie Polo, started preparing to launch Nadia in a big way. And Hunterwali, the dramatic story of a princess trying to rescue her kidnapped father and salvage his empire, was considered perfect material for her launch. Inspired by Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, it was an unconventional, even radical, subject for Indian viewers. Jamshed Wadia wanted to model Nadia on American heroines like Pearl White, Grace Cunardand Helen Holmes. A progressive intellectual who entered film production despite his family’s objection, Jamshed Wadia was the brain behind her success.

“In the film’s publicity campaign, [he] hyped her as a stunt queen. For a long time, Wadia Movietone was known only for Hunterwali,” says Roy. The film opened at Super Cinema, in Bombay’s theatre hub of Lamington Road. Thrilled at seeing a White woman don a mask and crack a whip at her father’s tormenters, the male audience was left thirsting for more. Director Homi Wadia had landed a magic formula. And Nadia became Fearless Nadia, which, as Wenner mentions, was carefully ‘built into the publicity strategy.’ Through her career, her audience remained predominantly male, the working class to whom she provided entertainment, deliverance and catharsis in equal measure.

Hunterwali was only a prelude to a remarkable career. Emboldened by its success, in film after film, Nadia took up the cause of social injustice, education, women’s emancipation, corruption, land-grabbing and exploitation. With each film, her stunts became more daring and death-defying. “Homi made her do more and more outlandish stunts. She would be told to lift men up because of her strength and she would do it, without any fuss. She would just do a little sign of a cross on her heart like any devout Catholic and jump into the scene,” says Roy.

“I will try anything once,” she used to say.

The former editor of the film periodical Screen, BK Karanjia recounts visiting the sets of one of her films (possibly Diamond Queen). “To my considerable amazement,” he is quoted as saying in The Hunterwali Story, “she did every stunt in a sort of bindaas manner. She didn’t take herself seriously. She did not take her stunts seriously. She was never afraid, always laughing, whistling and joking.”

On a number of occasions, Nadia risked her life in the line of duty. “It came with the territory,” says Roy. In Hunterwali, she had to swing from a chandelier. She did the rehearsal perfectly but fell flat on her face from a great height during the final scene. Once, she almost got swept away in the strong currents of Bhandardara Falls near Bombay.

Her films usually had recurring stock characters, doing the same sort of stuff that viewers expected of them. There was the pet horse, Punjab Ka Beta, and the old faithful Gunboat, a sprightly dog. Her jalopy bore the name (again, rather comically) Rolls Royce Ki Beti. The villain was almost always the wicked Sayani, who in Homi’s words, “acquired a following of his own, famous as he was for scratching his jaws with an evil look in his eyes. His stock line, ‘Dekha jayega’ had become a catchphrase.” Typically, a Nadia film also starred John Cawas and Boman Shroff, two heavyweight bodybuilders who desperately sought acceptance as actors. There was also a ubiquitous father figure, a simpleton in dhoti, kurta and turban. How the blonde could pass off as an Indian villager’s daughter is beyond anyone’s comprehension.

Hunterwali was only a prelude to a remarkable career. Encouraged by the success of ‘Hunterwali’, films were made on the cause of social injustice, women’s emancipation, corruption, land grabbing and exploitation of the poor. She always played roles like King Arthur and Robin Hood.

Her films had a set of characters. There was her pet horse – Punjab Ka Beta, Gunboat the Dog and her jalopy was called Rolls Royce Ki Beti (later when Homi Wadia started Basant Pictures with her, there was Horse Rajput, Dog Moti and the car – Austin Ki Bachhi). In her films, usually the villain was Sayani (his stock line was “Dekha Jaayega”). John Cawas and Boman Shroff – the heavyweight bodybuilders usually played the Heroes.

Her stunts became more dangerous and death defying with every film. She did all her stunts herself, breaking her bones many times while performing them. From 1933 to 1968 she did about 43 films. Her pet name in many films (starting with ‘Hunterwali’) was Madhuri.

She had married and divorced early and also had a son. Later she was in love with Homi Wadia, but could not marry him due to the opposition of his mother. They married in 1961 after his mother died. She was 53 years old by then.

In her last days she was frequently seen in the lanes of Colaba in Bombay, taking her dogs for walks. In 1993, her great grand nephew Riyad Vinci Wadia made a documentary on her, in which she had appeared.

She was born on 8-1-1908 at Perth, Australia. She died on 9-1-1996 at Mumbai. (Adapted from various sources like an article by Shaikh Aiyaaz, blog cinemajadoo, book cinerang by Isak Mujawar, writings of Riyad Wadia, wiki and my notes.)

I met FEARLESS NADIA !

Nadia has a special place in my memories. Sometime in 1972, one of my friends, Mahesh Sharma, who lived in Colaba, Bombay, told me that he frequently sees Nadia in a Garden where he went for his morning walks. She lived near his apartments. Anxious to meet her and talk to her, I stayed with Sharma ji overnight. Next day morning, we both went to that garden. Sure enough, after some time Nadia entered the garden with two of her dogs. She sat on a bench and her servant took the dogs for their walks. Mahesh had a casual acquaintance with her. He greeted her and said ” this is my friend Mr. Deshmukh. He is your great fan”. I greeted her and recited names of her 10-15 films which I had seen. She looked suitably impressed. She smiled and we talked for a few minutes and left. Alas ! In those days, there was no Mobile phone, otherwise I would have had my photos with her as a prize possession. Anyway, I will never forget my meeting with her- the great Stunt Queen, The Fearless Nadia !

Let us now enjoy a song by Sardar Mansoor, from this film…..

Song-Kis maarag se jaanaa musaafir (Jungle Princess)(1942) Singer- Sardar Mansoor, Lyricist- Pt. Indra, MD-Madhavlal D.Master

Lyrics

kis maarag se jaana musaafir
kis maarag se jaana
na tumhen apni manzil ka poora pata thhikaana
na tumhen apni manzil ka poora pata thhikaana
kis maarag se jaana musaafir
kis maarg se jaana

tu kise dhoondhne aaya
kisne tujhe bulaaya
tu kise dhoondhne aaya
kisne tujhe bulaaya
kis par tu ho gaya deewaana
kis par tu ha gaya deewanaa
kaun tera deewaana
kaun tera deewaana
kis maarag se jaana musaafir
kis maarag se jaana

kya seekha teer chalaana
kya seekha teer chalaana
jo lage na thheek nishaana
jo lage na thheek nishaana
do pag seedhhi do pag tedhi aisi hai ye raah
idhar udhar jo laga dekhne wo hoga gumraah
idhar udhar jo laga dekhne wo hoga gumraah
na mitey(??) musafir khaana
na mitey(??) musafir khana
kis maarag pe jaana musaafir