Those Were The Days: The bodybuilder from Pudukkottai who became the Raja of silverscreen

Hailing from the then Princely State of Pudukkottai, PK Nagalingam was trained as a gymnast and bodybuilder. This gave him a wonderful physique and made him perform feats of great strength. 

Impressed by his performance as a bodybuilder, the Gaekwad of Baroda one rewarded him Rs 1,000. As successful as it was, his career as a man of muscle was nothing compared to what he was about to achieve as the actor, director and producer that began in the era of silent films.

It all began when BG Horniman, the Bombay-based British journalist who exposed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in defiance of the censorship, published an article on the young man that made him famous. This came to the attention of a group of businessmen in Bombay, who appointed him as their personal trainer. That was when he became interested in the emerging world of cinema.

There was a demand for well-built Indian men to act in silent films produced here, which worked in Nagalingam’s favour. He thus began as a stuntman. Story has it that he walked into the office of SN Patankar’s National Film Company and asked for a role. When asked to take a screen test in a stunt scene, he literally beat up those playing the villain characters. Patankar had to explain the difference between acting and reality.

In the end, he got the role in the 1922 film, Bhaktha Bhodhana, for which he was paid a princely salary of Rs 101. Thus was launched his film career. Nagalingam adopted the stage name Raja Sandow – inspired by the world famous strongman Friedrich Wilhelm Müller who used the name Eugen Sandow.

In the following years, Raja Sandow acted in about 70 of the earliest silent films, most of them shot in Bombay in the 1920s. He was an action star, who performed his own stunts. In many of them, he was paired with the Ruby Myers, a silent film actress of Jewish ancestry, better known by her stage name Sulochana, the highest paid in her times. He also worked with the A-list heroines of those days like Zubeida, Gauhar and Putli.

After very successful career as film actor, director and producer in Bombay, Raja returned to Madras in the years between silent films and talkies. 

He directed and acted in a number of silent films, all of which had reformist themes echoing the times when the independence movement was gathering strength. Raja could play the hero and antihero roles with equal ease. In Vishnuleela, for instance, he played a triple role of mythological villains.

As a director, actor, scriptwriter and producer, he held tight control. Not surprisingly, his films were often compared to a circus, with him being the ring master. He would not hesitate to shout and even slap his cast and crew, including actresses. But he also made lasting changes to the Tamil cinema industry. The first to acknowledge star value, Sandow was the first Tamil film director to use actors’ names in film titles.

Sandow also introduced intimate scenes and revealing costumes to Tamil cinema. In the movie Menaka, the first acknowledged social (rather than mythological) film, Raja Sandow introduced a scene where TK Shanmugham had to kiss his co-star KT Rukmani 12 times.

Shanmugham was so nervous that there was a chance that the scene could be dropped from the script – till the director himself acted out the scene to calm him.

Sandow liked making films with social themes. The screenplay reflected the life of the common man so much that he would advertise “Don’t miss to see your own picture”.

As early as 1931, he used published novels which he developed into screenplays. An example was Kothainayagi’s Anathai Penn that he made into a film under the same name.

Chandrakantha was perhaps the first Tamil movie in which the actresses appeared in swimsuits. It was about fake godmen and their harm to society. It was the first film to be screened in more than one theatre in a city.

As the director, Sandow would do anything to get the best out of an actor. In one scene in which an Anglo Indian actress had to laugh but did not understand the dialogue, Sandow removed his slippers, placed them on his head and danced behind the camera. The actress laughed and the scene was a hit.

He was enlisted to direct MKT’s Sivakavi. Having made MKT’s Thiruneelakantar a mega hit, Raja believed Sivakavi would mark the pinnacle of his career. But half way through the shooting, he developed a difference of opinion with the producer SM Sriramulu Naidu and was unceremoniously fired. This affected him a lot and he died of a heart attack before the movie was completed.

Much later, Tamil Nadu government acknowledged his contribution to Tamil cinema and instituted an annual award in his name, Raja Sandow Memorial Award, given for outstanding services to Tamil cinema.