Award-winning Kannada biography of Chandrashekhar Azad to be released in English

PTI, Jul 23, 2021, 5:38 PM IST

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New Delhi: Noted Kannada author Babu Krishnamurthy’s award-winning “Ajeya”, biographical novel on the life of revolutionary Chandrashekhar Azad, will be released in English in the first week of August, announced publishing house Garuda Prakashan Friday on the freedom fighter’s 115th birth anniversary.

The book, “Azad: The Invincible”, is translated into English by Manjula Tekal. It builds a comprehensive portrait of the revolutionary through anecdotes, letters, his contemporaries’ biographical references, and news sources from pre-Independence India.

“Azad: The Invincible” is the exciting, thrilling and ever inspiring saga of Chandrashekhar Azad, the embodiment of courage, conviction and heroism of Indian freedom movement which is ‘stranger than fiction’. It keeps the reader on tenterhooks from first page to last page,” said Krishnamurthy.

Originally published in Kannada in 1974, the book, which has seen numerous re-prints, also won Krishnamurthy the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award.

According to the publishers, the book details Azad’s life and times, “from being born in a small village to poverty-stricken parents, running away from home as a young boy, becoming a coolie in Mumbai, learning Sanskrit in Varanasi to his beginnings in the freedom struggle through participation in the non-cooperation movement”.

“It also details the politics at that time and looks into the questions like how and why he moved from being a Gandhian to a revolutionary, choosing the path of armed revolution instead as the means of combating the British colonial rule,” they said in a statement. P