The magistrate had sentenced 15-year-old Chandrashekhar, a student in Banaras’ Sanskrit College and a satyagrahi, to be caned. His hands were tied to a flogging post and a wet cloth was spread out on his naked backside. Each time the whip fell and bloodied Chandrashekhar's back he shouted ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai’, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’. The story of Azad's caning was immortalised in all the biographical memoirs written by his associates. It also appears in the Amar Chitra Katha, where Azad is shown shouting ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, Long Live the Revolution. The slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ came into popular usage following the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in April 1929. The HSRA revolutionaries Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt shouted ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ as they threw crude bombs into the Assembly's well. The coining of the slogan is generally attributed to Maulana Hasrat Mohani, a pan-Islamist scholar who was part of the Khilafat movement and one of the founders of the Communist Party of India. He used the slogan for the first time at the Indian Communist Conference held in Kanpur in 1920. Hasrat Mohani and Bhagat Singh were in contact during the latter's sojourn in Kanpur in year 1924 and perhaps it was from there that Bhagat got the idea to use the slogan. If Azad's caning incident was from 1921 and the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ did not come into popular usage until 1929, why did the Amar Chitra Katha insert the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ alongside ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’?

The Amar Chitra Katha life-narrative of Azad provides us with an interesting entry point into understanding the postcolonial ‘scripting’ of the revolutionaries. Primarily a consequence of a particular reading of their political and propaganda literature and their appropriation by different political groups, the histories of radical and armed colonial resistance had by the late 1960s become part of the celebratory story of Indian nationalism and a footnote in the ignoble history of the colonial state's excesses. Near-hagiographical portraits of the revolutionaries had seamlessly made their way into school textbooks, comics and cinematic adaptations alongside those of Gandhi, Nehru and a bevy of other nationalist leaders facilitating their co-option in the postcolonial state-building project.