He was born in a highly orthodox brahmin family though this father Mahidhara Surya Narayana was a follower of Brahmo Samaj.
Surya Narayana named his eldest son after a famous social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
Inspired by revolutionary spirit of his family, at the age of 10 Mahidhara abandoned his studies in 1919 and joined Indian Freedom Struggle.
Though he quit his formal education, he acquired scholarship of multiple languages including Telugu, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, English, Russian mostly through self study using dictionaries.
He teamed up with his brothers and started a publishing house called Viswa Sahitya Mala (Garland of world literature).