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Born in a well-to-do family in Akiripalli in Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh, on 14th October 1909, his formal education ended with a B.Sc. in physics from Nizam College, Hyderabad.

At a time when India was making a bold foray into scientific world on its own with several world-reckoning scientists, Bhagavantam could join the highly acclaimed Sir CV Raman laboratory at Calcutta with only B,Sc qualification.

The talent of the man speaks enough from the fact that he could do it only by virtue of his scientific temper and devotion to physics. Later, he went on to obtain the rest of qualifications by only research not academics. When Bhagavantam joined the Ramans, the great Raman effect research was almost in final stage. But he had a ringside view of it.

Later, when Raman wanted to detect the spin of photon by studying rotational Raman scattering, he chose Bhagavantam as his collaborator. To Bhagavantam goes the credit for the first serious study of Raman spectrum of diamond.

He narrated with a touch of his typical sense of humour, that how he guarded the diamond during experiments and how, when the results were reported by an abstracting service, the editor put four exclamation marks after the weight of the diamond to mean his bewilderment that a hard-up Indian physicist could have access to so rich a precious stone.