Doddavaram, a village in the Prakasam district of coastal Andhra Pradesh, gave Indian cinema one of its most complete talents. Bhanumathi Ramakrishna was born there on 7 September 1925, into a family where music was not entertainment but discipline. Her father, Bommaraju Venkata Subbayya, was a keen student of classical music and trained his daughter from early childhood, drilling her in Carnatic technique and later exposing her to the Hindustani tradition as well. By the time she was a teenager she had a trained voice and an unusually confident stage presence — the two things that would carry her through six decades of an industry that had almost no room for women behind the camera.

From Doddavaram to the studios

She entered films at fourteen. Her debut came in 1939 in the Telugu picture Vara Vikrayam, in which she played Kalindi, and within a few years she was among the most sought-after leading actresses in south Indian cinema. On 8 August 1943, during the making of Krishna Prema, she married the film editor and director P. S. Ramakrishna Rao. It was a professional partnership as much as a domestic one, and it altered the shape of her career decisively.

Marriage in the 1940s usually ended an actress's working life. Bhanumathi's did not. The director B. N. Reddi persuaded her to return to the screen for Swargaseema in 1945, and the performance re-established her at the very top of Telugu cinema. From that point she was, in effect, the industry's first female star in the modern sense: an actress whose name alone could finance a production.

The Bharani years

With her husband she founded Bharani Pictures and later Bharani Studios, named after their son. It made her the only woman in India of that era to own a film studio outright, and it gave her something rarer than stardom — control. Under the Bharani banner she produced and starred in a run of films that defined mid-century Telugu and Tamil cinema, including Ratnamala in 1947, Laila Majnu in 1949, Prema in 1952, Chakrapani in 1954 and Batasari in 1961.

Her performances outside her own productions were equally celebrated. In B. N. Reddi's Malliswari in 1951, opposite N. T. Rama Rao, she gave what many still regard as the finest performance of her career, and her singing in the film became part of the permanent repertoire of Telugu music. Vipranarayana in 1954 confirmed her standing as an actress who could carry devotional and classical material without stiffness. She worked steadily in Tamil cinema too, and appeared in Hindi and Kannada films, moving between languages with the ease of someone who had learned to act with her voice as much as her face.

The first woman behind the camera

In 1953 she directed Chandirani, becoming the first woman to direct a Telugu feature film. The production was audacious even by the standards of the time: it was shot simultaneously in Telugu, Tamil and Hindi, with Bhanumathi directing and playing a double role. She returned to direction in 1975 with the Tamil film Ippadiyum Oru Penn, for which she also composed the music.

Music composition was another field she entered when almost no woman had. She scored Chakrapani in 1954 and Ippadiyum Oru Penn, and as a playback singer she recorded roughly three hundred songs across Telugu, Tamil and Hindi films, most often for her own characters. The combination of acting, singing, composing, producing, directing, editing and studio ownership in a single career is close to unmatched in Indian film history, and it was assembled by a woman working in the 1940s and 1950s.

Her later screen work included Antastulu in 1965 and a long series of character roles as the industry changed around her. Her final film appearance came in 1998 in Pelli Kanuka, nearly sixty years after her debut. In all she appeared in well over a hundred films.

The writer

Bhanumathi was also a genuine literary figure in Telugu. Her collection of short stories, Attagari Kathalu, built around a sharply observed mother-in-law character, became a popular classic of Telugu humorous writing and was later adapted for television. She wrote memoirs, essays and verse, and she is one of the few Indian film personalities whose books are read on their own merits rather than as celebrity curiosities.

Honours and later years

Recognition came from every direction. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 1966 and the Padma Bhushan in 2001. Andhra University conferred an honorary doctorate on her in 1975. Tamil Nadu named her a Kalaimamani in 1983. Andhra Pradesh gave her the Raghupathi Venkaiah Award, its highest honour for lifetime contribution to Telugu cinema, in 1985, and she received a Nandi Award for direction in 1986.

Her husband died in 1986, and she withdrew steadily from public life thereafter. Bhanumathi Ramakrishna died in Chennai on 24 December 2005, aged eighty. India Post issued a commemorative stamp in her honour in 2013, and another marking her birth centenary in 2025.

What she left behind is not simply a filmography. She demonstrated, at a time when the question had barely been asked, that a woman in Indian cinema could be the author of her own work rather than its subject — writing the songs she sang, directing the scenes she played, and owning the studio the film was shot in. The village of Doddavaram claims her, and the claim is a large one.