Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856 – 1920) was born in Ratnagiri district of the present day Maharashtra. After completing his BA degree in Mathematics from the Deccan College, he started teaching. Tilak soon started Kesari in Marathi and Maharatta in English which became leading newspapers of the Deccan and the mouthpiece of Indian Nationalist movements. He along with Ganesh Agarkar set up the Deccan Educational Society. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1880 and formed close relationships with Lala Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal. Tilak popularised the concepts of Swadeshi, Boycott and Swaraj much before Mahatma Gandhi. He was referred to as the ‘Father of Indian Unrest’ and was arrested multiple times on charges of sedition.

Nadeem Khan has been a teacher of English since 1973. He was the founder-director of the Western Regional Centre of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, an autonomous institute run by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, from 2011 to 2018. He has translated well over a dozen books-mainly from Marathi into English-including Vishwas Patil's celebrated Marathi novel Panipat and Avadhoot Dongare's Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Swatahala Phaltu Samajnyaachi Gosht. He is the winner of the Valley of Words award for the best-translated book for the year 2020.