Awara biography chandra chatterjee messiah sarat

Be it Srikanta, Devdas or Sabyasachi, most of his male protagonists resemble his own bohemian self — the Awara Masiha, a name rightly given to him by the late Hindi litterateur Vishnu Prabhakar who wrote his biography by that name.

His female characters were all women of substance — affectionate, caring and chaste, sometimes oppressed and sometime rebellious.

On the sobriquet Awara Masiha, Prabhakar had said he wanted to tell the world how the vagabond free spirit became the saviour of the oppressed souls.

“A vagabond has a lot of qualities but is directionless. The day he gets that direction, he becomes the messiah,” Prabhakar wrote about his protagonist who thought ill of none.

On his 139th birthday, here is a look at some of the works that made Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay immortal.

Srikanta

First serialised in 1916 in Bangla monthly magazine Bharatbarsha, the travelogue o