Once the King of Mountains Meru and his wife Menaka were blessed with twins. They were called Bhadran and Neelan. Both turned out to be ardent devotees of Lord Vishnu. Once Bhadran was meditating on the banks of the river Godavari. Pleased with his devotion, Lord Vishnu appears before him as Lord Rama with his consort Sita and brother Lakshmana. He tells Bhadran that the place where he worshipped Him would be known as Bhadrachalam henceforth. He also said that those who worshipped the Lord at this place will be cleansed off their sins. So saying he vanished and reappeared as an ant hill. Bhadran took care of the ant hill which also housed the statues of Rama and Sita.
Meanwhile, in the same town lived a woman by name Pogala Tamakka, who was a staunch devotee of Rama. One day she was searching for her adopted child and reached Bhadragiri where she came upon the ant hill. She looked inside the ant hill and saw that there was a statue of Rama and Sita inside. In her elation on finding her Lord, she fainted. When she came to, she took the statues and also found her adopted child near her.
When she reached home, while sleeping, she saw sage Bhadran in her dream. He told her that a devotee of Rama would arrive at her doorstep and would build a temple for Rama. “Till then worship Rama in the open”, he said. Tamakka also followed the advice of Sage Bhadran and did not build a shrine on her own for Rama.
A few years later, Gopanna, the Tahsildar of the Golconda Nawab Abdul Hassan Shah arrived in Bhadrachalam. Tamakka had a premonition that Gopanna was the devotee mentioned by the sage in her dreams and she requested him to build a shrine for Rama.
Being a Tahsildar, Gopanna had a lot of tax money which people had given him to be paid to the Nawab. He uses that money to build a temple for Rama. The Nawab on finding that a temple had been built with the tax money, he jailed Gopanna in the Golconda fort.
A few days later, two men visited the Nawab and said that Gopanna had sent them to repay the tax money he had taken. The Nawab was surprised and went to meet Gopanna in jail. When he learnt from Gopanna that the Lord Rama himself had returned the money, he fell at the feet of Gopanna and apologised for his folly. Gopanna in turn fell at the feet of the Nawab saying that he had the good fortune of meeting the Lord in person. From that day he came to be known as Bhakta Ramadas.
(Bhadrachalam is a small town in Andhra Pradesh. The temple is in Khammam, en route to Hyderabad from Chennai. The deity here is known as Vaikuntaraman)
There’s a Telugu movie starring Nagarjuna, called Bhakta Ramadasu. It was released last year, I think. It did quite well.
I’ve been to Bhadrachalam – there’s a post on my blog with the pix – How Green Was My Valley, it’s called.