As Bhadrachalam tells it
Bhadrachalam, Telangana · 3 min read
On a hill above the Godavari there lived a woman of the Koya people called Pokala Dhammakka, who herded goats and kept to herself.
One night she dreamed that a dark young man with a bow came and stood by her bed.
"I am here," he said, "on this hill, close to you. I have been here since I walked through this forest long ago. Find me."
In the morning she went looking. Near the top of the hill, in the bushes, she found a tall anthill, and something in it caught the sun. She broke it open with her hands. Inside were three small figures in stone: Rama with his bow, Sita, and Lakshmana.
She carried water up from the Godavari and washed the earth off them, and set them under a palm-leaf roof, and gave them what she had, which was forest fruit and flowers. Every day for the rest of her life she climbed up to them.
Rama came to her in another dream.
"One day," he said, "someone will build me a real temple here. Wait."
She waited, and died, and the thatched shrine stood on the hill for a long time after her.
In the 1600s the country belonged to the sultans of Golconda, and the tax collector of that district was a Brahmin called Kancharla Gopanna. His uncles were ministers at the sultan's court. One day he came on the little shrine on the hill, with the roof falling in and the three figures under it, and stood there a long time.
"This will not do," he said.
He had no money of his own. But he had the district's taxes. He spent them, six lakh gold coins of the sultan's revenue, on a temple of stone for Rama on the hill, with walls and a tower and jewels for Sita, and finished it in 1674.
When the sultan Tana Shah heard what had become of his revenue, he had Gopanna brought to Golconda in chains and shut in the fort.
"You will stay there," said the sultan, "until the money is paid."
He stayed twelve years. He was beaten. And in the cell he sang to Rama, songs in Telugu that asked him, over and over, why he did not come, whose money it was anyway, what he had done wrong.
One night, the story says, two young men came to the sultan's palace, dark and fair, dressed as servants, and said they had come from Gopanna. They poured gold coins out on the floor in front of the sultan, every coin that was owed, and took a receipt, and went away. The coins had Rama's name on them.
Tana Shah went himself to the prison and let Gopanna out, and fell at his feet, and gave him the rest of the gold for the temple.
"Who were they?" Gopanna asked, when he heard.
Nobody could tell him. He went home to Bhadrachalam and sang for the rest of his life, and the people called him Ramadasu, Rama's servant.