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Who was Fearless Nadia? Fearless Nadia represented a profound shift in the way women were portrayed in Indian cinema, usually as vamps, virgins or victims, and became what no woman had ever been before -- the hero. Fearless Nadia. (Picture Courtesy: Wadia Movietone) If reports are to be believed, Kangana Ranaut’s character “Jaanbaaz Miss Julia” in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon heavily borrows from the persona of Fearless Nadia — the swashbuckling stuntwoman-actress of Bombay cinema of the 30s and early 40s. Nadia, who did all of her stunts by herself, fought on moving trains, threw herself into raging waterfalls, socialised with the lions and jumped from horseback onto ladders dangling from airplanes. “I’ll try anything once,” she famously said. But until the recent years, this her luminous legacy in Indian cinema largely lay buried and forgotten. Born Mary Ann Evans, in Perth, Australia in 1908 to a British soldier father and Greek mother, she moved to Bombay in...