Azad – The Invincible

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With a writing career spanning over fifty years, Dr. Babu Krishnamurthy is a gifted novelist,thinker, researcher, columnist and journalist. He has been associated with several noteworthy Kannada periodical publications.

Dr. Babu Krishnamurthy is a recipient of Karnataka Sahitya Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award-2020 for notable contribution in Kannada Literature. Tumkur University (Karnataka) bestowed an honorary doctorate (2011) upon Dr. Babu Krishnamurthy for his remarkable contributions to Kannada literature and journalism.

Dr. Babu Krishnamurthy currently serves as the director of Sri Yogi Nareyana Indological Centre. He has been the Editor of several Kannada periodicals such as Mallara, a monthly magazine in Kannada that is devoted to spiritual and personality development, Karmaveens, a weekly magazine, Mangalam Publications, whose publications include Mangala (Kannada Weekly), Balamangala (Children's Fortnightly), Balamangala Chitrakatha (Children's illustrated fortnightly), and Gilivindu (Nursery Children's fortnightly).

Dr. Babu Krishnamurthy has many critically acclaimed and popular biographical novels in Kannada based on the lives and times of warriors and heroes of India, including, Adamya (about Vasudev Balvant Phadke, a pioneer of the revolutionary movement), Rudhrabhisheka (a mammoth novel about the revolutionary hero Bagha Jatin), Mahasadhaka (about Srila Prabhupada, founder of ISKCON movement) and Vishishta (about Sri Ramanujacharya, the great proponent of Visishthadwaita philosophy). Additionally, he has written sketches about many freedom fighters, collected in a four-volume anthology titled, Heroes of Freedom Struggle. He has translated The First War of Indian Independence, written by Savarkar, from English to Kannada and Yogadrashta Bhagath Singh from Hindi to Kannada. He has penned 12 books for children.

The year was 2015. I was in London for several weeks to commence my research on the famed revolutionary and freedom fighter Swatantryaveer' Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. During the course of the research at the British Library's India Office collections, the curator led me to a cellar downstairs to rummage through some of the proscribed literature of the twentieth century. She dumped into my hands a bunch of papers and files and asked me to look through them and figure out if the documents that I was looking for on Savarkar were in this pile. The very fact that I was holding in my hands these treasured documents of our ancestors who had penned such powerful prose and poetry that had been deemed dangerous enough to be banned by the British Government of the time, and to find this now in a foreign country, was a deeply cathartic moment for me. But among this pile, I found the poem that had always never failed to stir me emotionally each time I heard or read it in popular media-Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab humare dil mein hai, dekhna hai zor kitna bazu-e-qatil mein hai (The desire for revolution is in our hearts, let us see what strength there is now in the arms of our executioner!). Involuntarily, my eyes welled up and I had gooseflesh going through the 11 stanzas of this powerful poem that was composed by the legendary revolutionary leader Pandit Ram Prasad Bismil. Scores of several such electrifying essays, poems, newspaper articles by our revolutionary forefathers caught my attention for the next several hours. I forgot completely about the Savarkar research that I had come there for and sat absorbed in this literature, as also some iconic posters of the time that the revolutionaries had prepared. One of them that never fades from my memory is a poignant one of how Bismil, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and others were voluntarily, and with a smiling face, slicing off their own heads and making an offering of them to Mother India, Bharat Mata. I remember returning to my hotel room that evening, deeply disturbed, and breaking down uncontrollably, imagining the hardship and immense sufferings that these young bravehearts had dergone so that we in India, today, can breathe free air. Yet there y sofele that we in India knew about numerous such young men and women who unhesitatingly sacrificed their everything for our h What an ungrateful nation are we, I ruminated. Barring a paragraph e in our textbooks, what do young Indians today know about the life and of so siggles of an Arad or Ashfaqullah, I wondered.

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