A single-storey building stands tall amid greenery off the 60-Feet Road at Ramanathapuram in Coimbatore. A signboard announces the building’s name as ‘Sri Veeramaruthi Thegapayirchi Saalai’, a gym started in the 1930s that offers fitness classes even today. Inside, the first floor is stacked with gleaming karla kattais (wooden club bells), a traditional fitness training tool, and other tools of self-defence like swords, surul swords (spring swords), and silambam sticks. A number of black and white photographs that grace the walls turn the spotlight on a popular film personality from Coimbatore whose beginnings in the film industry started at this very gym, which he founded in 1935. He was ‘Sandow’ M.M.A. Chinnappa Devar.
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While Devar excelled in silambam, weightlifting, sword fight, wrestling and surulkathi fight that earned him the title ‘Sandow’, he also taught kushthi to a young boy from Kerala. This young boy was M.G. Ramachandran, who later became a dashing and revered hero in Tamil films. MGR and Devar forged a lifelong bond of friendship, later made films in Chennai, and shot to fame. After MGR started playing significant roles in films, he recommended Devar for the films he worked like Madurai Veeran where the sword fight sequences between the two became a big hit.
