HOW TO READ IQBAL?

ESSAYS ON IQBAL, URDU POETRY

AND
LITERARY THEORY

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

Edited and Compliled
by
Muhammad Suheyl Umar

IQBAL ACADEMY PAKISTAN

 All Rights Reserved

Publisher:

Muhammad Bakhsh Sangi

Iqbal Academy Pakistan
Govt. of Pakistan,
National History & Literary Heritage Division
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Literary Heritage
th
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Off Egerton Road, Lahore.
Tel: 92-42-36314510, 99203573,
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Email. [email protected]
Website: www.allamaiqbal.com

ISBN : 978-969-416-521-9

1st Edition : 2007

2nd Edition : 2009
3rd Edition : 2017

Quantity : 500
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 DEDICATION

In Memory
of
Mushfiq Khvaja (1935-2005)
Great friend, fine scholar,
perfect stylist
 CONTENTS

Preface….Muhammad Suheyl Umar i

Part I
Iqbal Studies

 How to Read Iqbal? 3

 Is Iqbal, the Poet, Relevant to us Today? 49
 Iqbal’s Romantic Dilemma 59
 Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 71
 The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 91

Part II
Review Articles: Iqbal Studies

 A Complaint Against Khushwant Singh’s

“Complaint and Answer” 117
 Iqbal—A Selection of the Urdu Verse:
Text and Translation. 133

Part III
Urdu Literature:
Literary Themes and History

 The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature:

The Contribution of Delhi 141
 Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions:
Urdu Love Poetry in the Eighteenth Century 157
 The Poet in The Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 195
 The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi
and the Changing Order of Things 219
 PREFACE
Faced with the daunting task of writing about Shamsur
Rahman Faruqi one is inclined to reach instinctively to one’s
betters and to latch onto hyperboles and superlatives. I would
therefore try to resist both the impulses and shall proceed
mundanely and work up to what I want to say. The essays
collected in this slender volume under the title How to Read
Iqbal?— Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory address a
very important issue of Iqbal Studies, directly in the first and
second parts of the book, namely, “How to Read Iqbal?” and
“Review Articles— Iqbal Studies” and comes back to it in the
third part, “Urdu Literature— Literary Themes and History”, in
an indirect but wider perspective. The question has been
elucidated by him in the following words.
Is Iqbal, the Poet, Relevant to us Today? The answer to this
question could be “Yes”, or “No”, or “Partly”, depending on what
image of Iqbal one has in one’s mind and also, of course, what sort
of person one is…...It is curious that the Iqbal who is talked about
and discussed by one critic is so different from the Iqbal who
appears in another critic’s writings that one is inclined to wonder if
they are talking about the same poet. Now there is nothing bad (and
in fact everything good) in a poet being approached and interpreted
in as many legitimate ways as possible; the fact that a poet’s work
admits of many interpretations is a sure indication of his being a
good poet. The problem arises when one set of persons believes
that a certain poet is good, while another would have nothing to do
with him. Another problem that arises generally, and especially in
reference to Iqbal is that the reasons that one set of persons, or one
critic, adduces to support the view that a poet is good, are not found
by another group sufficient or even valid to prove that the poet in
question is good. In fact, it often happens that the reasons
somebody offers to show that a certain poet is good, are considered
by some others as proof enough to show that the poet is no good.
As I said just now, these two states of affairs have prevailed more in
Iqbal criticism (and the view of Iqbal that people have) than in any
other criticism.
ii How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

In a more recent article (2004) “How to read Iqbal?” he

formulated the question slightly differently.
It is true that such a question would not be asked by someone who
has the slightest feel for the Urdu language and the rhythms of its
poetry. For even the dullest of Iqbal’s poems rings and reverberates
not just in the outer ear but deep in one’s psyche and sets up
vibrations of pleasure in one’s soul. But the problem arises when
one is made to read Iqbal not for pleasure, but for profit. For Iqbal
is also a politician’s poet, a religious thinker’s poet, and a
philosopher’s poet and much more besides. Iqbal has earned a lot of
praise and not a little blame as well, for being one or other of the
things mentioned above.
The specific issue of Iqbal Studies, that is, “why do critics judge
Iqbal in nonliterary terms”? is then traced back to the perennial
question in literary criticism “Is it legitimate to judge a piece of
literature by extra-literary standards”? It is true that misreading a
poet of the past is more acute in the case of Urdu poetry since its
history, to quote him again, “suffered a major literary cultural
discontinuity in the middle of the nineteenth century,” but the
problem acquires still larger dimensions with “the systematic
misreadings of Iqbal.”
The insights Faruqi offers to the reader are seldom equaled,
and never surpassed, (no escape from superlatives!) and his
arguments are grounded in serene logical acumen and a
tremendous wealth of literary information. The questions he
raises are essential for our understanding of our literary history
and the answers he provides are illuminating. As compared to his
corpus of writings in Urdu these essays appear to be little more
than a fragment but in terms of literary merit and depth and
breadth of scholarship they outshine many a large tome on
literary history and theory.

Muhammad Suheyl Umar

 Part-I

IQBAL STUDIES
 HOW TO READ IQBAL? *

Given a small twist of inflection, the question may very

easily be understood to mean: How can one read Iqbal? The
implication would be that he is such an uninteresting poet, how
could one read him by choice? It is true that such a question
would not be asked by someone who has the slightest feel for
the Urdu language and the rhythms of its poetry. For even the
dullest of Iqbal’s poems rings and reverberates not just in the
outer ear but deep in one’s psyche and sets up vibrations of
pleasure in one’s soul. But the problem arises when one is
made to read Iqbal not for pleasure, but for profit. For Iqbal is
also a politician’s poet, a religious thinker’s poet, and a
philosopher’s poet and much more besides. Iqbal has earned a
lot of praise and not a little blame as well, for being one or
other of the things mentioned by me above.
It is an interesting, though sad fact of literary criticism that
politics seems never to have left poetry to its own devices.
Politicians love to make use of poetry, but are wise enough to
leave alone poets like Shakespeare and Goethe whom they
can’t exploit for their own purposes. Literary critics are less
wise. They try to read politics in poets like Shakespeare and
Keats even who did their best not to profess any political creed
and who made their poems apparently incapable of yielding
interpretations that could be converted into political currency.
That Iqbal should have aroused interest and even devotion
among politicians and political and religious thinkers all over
the Muslim world, and particularly in those Muslim countries
that were trying to come to terms with the modern age and had
been under colonial domination for many long years, is quite
4 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

natural. For Iqbal’s poetry has strong overtones of modernity

and makes serious efforts to find ways of fruitfully negotiating
the postcolonial landscape in society and politics without
losing what he regarded as fundamental elements of Islamic
religious thought and sociopolitical identity. He was also
passionately concerned with the historic reality of Islam and
how its lost effects could be revived and perpetuated in the
modern world. Such a project was bound to appeal to, and have
uses for the Muslim politician as well as the Muslim social
political reformer and activist.
In the Urdu world, Iqbal was and even now is often known
by two appellatives: sha‘ir-e mashriq (Poet of the East), and
hakimul ummat (Sage of the [Muslim] People, or, Philosopher
of the [Muslim] People.) It might be interesting to note here
that the later appellative (hakimul ummat ) used to be and still
is also applied for Maulana Shah Ashraf Ali Thanavi (1863/4-
1943) one of the two most influential Sufis and religious
reformers and mentors of the Muslim community in South Asia
during the first half of the twentieth century. Thanavi was not
much interested in politics (though he favoured Jinnah and the
Muslim League) but his influence can be seen and felt in the
social and religious life of South Asian Muslims even today.
Even the political life of Muslims especially in Pakistan, shows
Thanavi’s influence through the ulema of that country,
particularly those of the Deobandi School who have a strong
presence in Pakistan today.
A few more points are worth noting here about these
appellatives:
Iqbal, the philosopher-activist, political and religious
thinker, active in politics though not a full-time politician, was
seen by the Muslim community of South Asia as performing an
ongoing, meliorist role in the Muslim society of his time which
was qualitatively the same role that was being discharged by
Ashraf Ali Thanavi, practicing Sufi-intellectual, and religious
and social reformer. That is to say, his status as poet
notwithstanding, Iqbal had another niche, or many other
How to Read Iqbal? 5

niches, in the political life and society of the subcontinent. But

what was lost in this assessment was the fact that whatever
other status Iqbal enjoyed had been conferred on him because
of his status as poet. So any literary consideration of Iqbal
could ignore, so far as such a proceeding was possible, the
philosophical or political content of his poetry but could not
ignore its literary content.
To be sure, both sha‘ir-e mashriq and hakimul ummat are
now falling into desuetude, more in India than in Pakistan. That
is, literary and even nonexpert circles do not now use these
appellatives freely. But the reason for this seems to be Iqbal
criticism perhaps believes itself to have grown in sophistication
and subtlety, and these appellatives do seem simplistic if not
naïve. But a reason for their declining popularity with the
common reader could be that he is not all that excited with
Iqbal’s role as hakim, and mashriq also has grown now in
common perception to mean more than what it did five or six
decades ago.
The “East” in sha‘ir-e mashriq (Poet of the East) was not
seen as subsuming anything more than the subcontinent and
maybe Afghanistan and Iran. Similarly, the “Poet” here didn’t
mean something like a “Poet par excellence”. It rather signified
a poet whose poetry presented and represented the political,
intellectual and maybe even spiritual aspirations of the “East”.
Yet, in some sense Iqbal was also seen as the Poet of the
Greater East, that is Asia. Perhaps Iqbal also saw himself as the
Poet of the East and seemed to see in Goethe the Poet of the
West (sha‘ir-e maghrib), that is, Europe. It was for this latter
reason that Iqbal composed Payam-e Mashriq ( Message From
the East, 1923) just as Goethe had sent his greetings to the East
(Iran, in this case) through his West-östlicher Divan (Divan of
the East and West, 1819). Iqbal described his book on its title
page as “Response to the German Poet Goethe” and wrote in
the Preface: 1
The purpose of Payam-e Mashriq is… to present before the
[people’s] eyes those moral, religious and religio-national
6 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

truths which relate to the inner education of the individuals

and peoples.
Thus Iqbal gave advance intimation of his poetic intention
to the reader and desired the poems of Payam-e Mashriq to be
read principally if not solely as didactic-philosophical
documents. This did not help the cause of Iqbal the poet and
led the uninitiated student to believe that the poems were
something like Sana’i Ghaznavi’s Hadiqah, which Browne
characterized (wrongly, in my opinion) as the dullest poem
ever written. Thus the title “Poet of the East” easily flowed into
“Sage/Philosopher of the [Muslim] People”. It would be wrong
to say that Iqbal connived at this result, but it is quite right to
say that Iqbal often professed a lack of interest in his poetry
qua poetry and this encouraged misreadings of his poetry
inasmuch as attention was concentrated on Iqbal’s
philosophical and religio-political message so as to result in a
near exclusion by literary critics of his poetic content and
practical suppression of his claim to be treated as poet, a claim,
one might say that is embedded almost everywhere in his
poetry.
The detrimental effects of this suppression on Iqbal the poet
can be demonstrated by quoting from two important works of
literary criticism on Iqbal, both written from nearly opposing
points of view. A period of a little more than four decades
separates the two. The following is from Majnun Gorakhpuri
(1904-1988), a leading Progressive critic of his time who was
also well known for his expertise in Classical Urdu and Persian
poetry:2
Iqbal, despite his occasional reactionariness, ancestor-worship,
and occasionally taking a turn in the wrong direction, seems to
be to be a poet of Life, Revolution and Progress.
Salim Ahmad (1927-1983) whom I hold in the greatest
respect and affection was a major modern poet and critic noted
as much for erudition as his brilliant wit. He wrote his book on
Iqbal with the avowed purpose of rehabilitating the status of
How to Read Iqbal? 7

Iqbal as a poet. He summed up Iqbal the poet in the following

words: 3
The central problem in Iqbal is nor Self-hood (khudi), nor love
(‘ishq), nor Action (‘amal), nor yet Power and Dynamism
(quvvat o harakat), but rather as opposed to all these, Death is
Iqbal’s central problem. This is the problem that acquaints his
being with a tremor and upheaval that shakes his whole being.
Here lies the foundation of that poetic experience which
generates the poetic world that is peculiar to Iqbal.
Needless to say, neither critic does justice to Iqbal but the
main point is that both critics judge Iqbal in nonliterary terms.
Poets of an earlier age are almost always at risk from misreading.
This is true particularly in the case of Urdu whose history suffered
a major literary cultural discontinuity in the middle of the
nineteenth century. Contemporary or near contemporary poets are
rarely misread. More often than not they provoke bafflement if
not resentment. The great Progressive critic Ehtesham Husain
(1912-1972) once described Iqbal as “a baffling figure” because
he found unrecocilable differences in the philosophical or political
positions taken by Iqbal. But Ehtesham Husain’s bafflement is
nothing compared to the systematic misreadings of Iqbal that have
resulted from his “art” being studied separately, if at all, from his
“thought”. Majnun Gorakhpuri made no pretence of judging Iqbal
on literary merits. He sat in judgment on Iqbal as a fellow
dialectician and a politically committed student of life and
literature. In the space of the ten or twelve short pages that he
devotes to studying western influences on Iqbal, Majnun
Gorakhpuri mentions Goethe, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson,
Wordsworth, Heine, Browning, Emerson, Idealism, Voluntarism,
Activism, Leibnitz, Theory of monads, Dialectics, Marx, Life-
force, Rudolf Eichen (I couldn’t identify him, but Majnun
Gorakhpuri describes as “the famous hakim (philosopher) of
Europe”) in that order.
Salim Ahmad has no such pretensions. He is by his declared
intention out on a demolition mission. He wants to read Iqbal
as poet. He says: 4
8 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Ninety per cent of all that has been written about Iqbal so far
consists of commentary on and explication of his thought and
his theories. Such writings have two fundamental faults: They
do not, as a general rule, address Iqbal’s poetry. Their other
fault is that they present Iqbal’s thought as things that are
already there, ready to use. This latter point needs a bit of
elucidation. Iqbal’s thought (if his thought is at all something
separate from his poetic personality) is a part of his
being….We cannot view his thought as having existence
outside his being, and as if Iqbal has used them in the same
way as we can use merchandise that we buy in the market.
Apart from the fact that here Salim Ahmad flies dangerously
close to T. S. Eliot’s false theory of “felt thought” (which I
think he repudiated later), the point to be noted is in spite of his
good intentions Salim Ahmad can’t do more than indulge in
flights of impressionistic-phenomenological fancy in trying to
tell us why he thinks Iqbal’s Masjid-e Qurtuba is a great poem:
5

Gradually, we find ourselves being submerged in Iqbal’s

experience….Now it is not Iqbal’s thought that we gain
acquaintance with: we go down into Iqbal’s heart, and in its
depths we now experience a vitality of life that we had never
felt before. In the depths of our being we become more
capable of feeling, more disturbed, more alive. Now the
poem’s rhythms become the rhythms of our blood. And the
poem, percolating down from our head softens and melts our
whole being and reverberates even in the soles of our feet.
Well, a little of such writing can go a long way, but we are
not nearer to any demonstrable reason why Masjid-e Qurtuba
is a great poem. If, in determining “death” to be Iqbal’s central
concern and the reason for his greatness (which he denies is the
case with Masjid-e Qurtuba ), Salim Ahmad was being non-
literary, his raptures over Masjid-e Qurtuba leave us a little
uncomfortable and puzzled for here he is being literary in a
superficially belles altruistic and not in any kind of critical
mode.
How to Read Iqbal? 9

Salim Ahmad is not alone in his failure to tackle Iqbal’s

greatness as a poet. In a somewhat uncharacteristic access of
malice, or pique, or both, Salim Ahmad wrote in the beginning
of his book that “most of those who wrote on Iqbal have been
persons whom Urdu literature doesn’t recognize with much
honour or respect.”6 This is not quite true, for Al-e Ahmad
Surur (1911-2002) one of the greatest of Urdu critics, wrote
extensively about Iqbal and he was mostly concerned with
Iqbal the poet. Yet his problem was his inability or
unwillingness to make sustained and focused texts of literary
criticism. His eclecticism obliged to him to look at all possible
aspects of a poem, however briefly. Thus the reader was left
with a multiplicity of impressions. One reason for his not
casting a searching analytical eye on Iqbal’s poetry was that he
regarded the notion of Iqbal’s high poetic station as a given, as
something need not be elaborated too much. This of course was
not the case, especially not in the post-1947 world when in the
young people’s eyes many truths had turned out to be illusions,
much gold of science and philosophy had been shown to have
been the basest dross, and the sensibility of the “third world”
was undergoing a serious change in the face of serious
challenges and inroads by the postcolonial cultural and
economic imperialism.
At such a time in our history, many of us found it difficult to
accept the lofty self-assured tone of Iqbal’s political and
philosophical voice. It was, after all, the voice of a person who
for all his wisdom and sagacity and uncanny ability to predict
the moral and cultural decline of the West, hadn’t actually seen
the second world war, didn’t know about the atomic bomb and
Hiroshima, couldn’t even have conceived of the horrors of
tyranny and genocide in Palestine and Afghanistan and Bosnia
and Iraq and elsewhere. Thus Iqbal’s prophetic voice failed to
carry conviction, if taken on its own.
Things might have been different if our literary critics had
risen to the occasion and told us that Iqbal was a truly great
poet and here are the reasons for his greatness, never mind the
10 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

fact that his “message” and his certainties seem slightly dated
and his “philosophy” sounds somewhat simplistic. His glory
begins with his poetry, even if Iqbal may have occasionally
lapsed into denying that he was a poet in the conventional
sense.7 Unfortunately, our literary critics were apparently so
overwhelmed by the “Poet-Sage-Philosopher of the East and
the [Muslim] People” that they regarded as futile any exercise
to examine and establish Iqbal’s right to be placed among the
poets of the world, and not just the poets of Urdu or Persian.
In a conference on Iqbal organized in New Delhi in 1987,
Al-e Ahmad Surur began his short paper with the words: 8
The emphasis in Iqbal studies so far has been on his thought.
His art has not been given sufficient and proper attention.
Iqbal’s greatness is not because of his philosophy, or because
of the depth and strength of his thoughts, but because of the
thought having been moulded into poetry.
But he hedged his bets and wrote in his concluding
paragraph as follows: 9
Today, when there is greater attention on the breaking and
disintegration of beliefs, expression of [the poet’s] self,
[poetry as] soliloquy, irony, distortion and shattering of
language and free form, we should not ignore the Taj Mahal of
Art that we find in Iqbal and which proves to us that no
exalted purpose injures poetry, provided the content of that
purpose comes to us as [integrated] form and whose thought
observes and follows the rules of poetryness. Again, in this
age of the breaking and disintegration of beliefs, one mustn’t
forget that the authoritativeness of [the truth of] personality
that is the distinguishing mark of true and unalloyed poetry
develops through a taste and joy of certainty.
The problem with most Urdu criticism about Iqbal is it fails
to appreciate the fact that “great thinker” is not synonymous
with “great poet.” In fact it may be easier to write poetry in
philosophy that to write philosophy in poetry. One recalls
Coleridge writing to Wordsworth, “…Whatever in Lucretius is
poetry is not philosophical, whatever is philosophical is not
How to Read Iqbal? 11

poetry…” He was talking about Wordsworth’s Excursion

which was published in 1814 as a fragment of a larger poem
called The Recluse about which he went on to say, “I expected
the colours, music, imaginative life, and passion of poetry, but
the matter and arrangement of philosophy…”10
The philosophical poet’s problem thus was of dissolving the
one into the other, or of “wedding” truth to verse. Coleridge
made an interestng point about the enjoyment of poetry,
particularly philosophical poetry when he asked how could a
person “fully enjoy Wordsworth who has never meditated on
the truths which Wordsworth has wedded to immortal verse?”11
Although Coleridge didn’t explain what he meant here by
“truths”, or how the “truths” should be “wedded” to verse, his
point was that full enjoyment of philosophical poetry is not
possible unless one shares the belief-system of the poet, or at
least has sufficient empathy with it to enable one to “meditate
on the truths set out through that belief-system”.
This is an apparent though not real similarity in Coleridge
and Surur’s positions. Surur seems to imply that Iqbal’s zauq-e
yaqin can be, or in fact should be shared by all his readers.
Coleridge is in fact saying something quite opposite: if one
cannot meditate upon (is out of empathy with) what Coleridge
terms as “truths” one can’t enjoy Wordsworth’s poetry fully.
Surur’s position is simplistic, but can be rescued somewhat by
postulating that it’s possible for all of us to at least respond
emotionally to someone else’s “taste and joy of certainty”. But
Asloob Ahmad Ansari, another major critic who is keen to
establish Iqbal’s position as a great poet, is very nearly naïve in
his formulation: 12
Iqbal’s is great poetry because it has bejewelled artistic
embellishment and is moreover the creation of a great mind
and consciousness, one which has derived inspiration and
benefit from diverse intellectual, philosophical, cultural and
political streams of the East and the West and has imbibed into
the unity of its inner self the fruits of such derivation and has
transformed them from its own standpoint and has stamped the
12 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

impress of its personality on them. And over and above this, it

[the poetry of Iqbal] distills its light and song from values
which are those of a world religion and the civilization based
on that religion.
Well, one can only say about such criticism, if criticism it is,
that having such friends and advocates, Iqbal’s poetry needs no
enemies. The case for Iqbal’s poetry to have “the colours,
music, imaginative life, and passion of poetry, but the matter
and arrangement of philosophy” is at best not proven, and the
demand from the reader to accept the claim that a poetry
should be termed great because “it distills its light and song”
from Islam is like asking him to place all religious and
devotional poetry on a rung equally high with Iqbal, or claim a
special niche of greatness for Iqbal’s poetry and all Islam-
inspired poetry to the exclusion of other poetries springing
from other faiths. Neither position, it is obvious, can be
sustained even for a second. The question of “literary” against
other kinds of merit– philosophical, religious, whatever, still
remains tantalizingly open.
One might like then to discard Coleridge as too old
fashioned and argue for the poetry of belief—any belief, and
say that it is belief (something like Surur’s zauq-e yaqin) which
makes great poetry by itself. One need not share that belief,
and in fact even “suspend” that belief, as Eliot recommended:
13

If you read poetry as poetry, you will “believe” in Dante’s

theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his
journey; that is, you suspend both belief and disbelief.
But Eliot’s counsel on this matter is not disinterested, and is
a dangerous one to boot. He believes that since Dante has a
philosophy so every poet as great as Dante should have a
philosophy too.14 Ignoring the glib oversimpilicity of the
argument and the vagueness of the terms “philosophy” and
“great”, one would still want to know which poets are as great
as Dante, and what are the means to identify them? Eliot
responds with a stunningly nonliterary and loaded answer: The
How to Read Iqbal? 13

‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary

standards”.
Then, as a gesture of Christian grace, he adds in the same
breath: “though we must remember whether it is literature or
not can be determined only by literary standards”.15
Since Eliot has already warned us in his essay on Dante that
one “cannot afford to ignore Dante’s philosophical and
theological beliefs”16, we know which way his critical wind is
blowing. It’ll blow no good to Iqbal, and its Christian
obscurantist odour should have been strong in the noses of our
Professors of literature long ago. As Ezra Pound wrote in his
review of Eliot’s After Strange Gods, “all the implications” of
Eliot’s ideas about man’s “need for more religion” are “such as
to lead the reader’s mind into a fog.”17
In After Strange Gods Eliot was trying to elucidate a matter
that was important to Eliot himself. Peter Ackroyd summarizes
Eliot’s position in After Strange Gods in the following words: 18
What he wished to attack was the absence of moral, and
therefore religious, criteria in the criticism of contemporary
literature. Having at Harvard rebuked the dogmatism of those
critics who considered literature (and especially poetry) to be
some kind of substitute for religion, he was now reversing the
equation he wished to introduce in the appreciation of modern
literature those concepts of good and evil which were part of
the religious comprehension.
The point that emerges now is that to determine the ideas
implied, embedded or stated in a poem as true in a religious,
philosophical or scientific sense and therefore acceptable or
desirable and to decide that the poem therefore is a good one is
actually denial of the true nature and function of poetry.
Richards made this clear a long time ago when he said: 19
The ‘Truth’ of Robinson Crusoe is the acceptability of things
we are told, their acceptability in the interests of the narrative,
not their correspondence with any actual facts….It is in this
sense that ‘Truth’ is equivalent to ‘internal necessity’ or
rightness. That is ‘true’ or ‘internally necessary’ which
14 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

conforms or accords with the rest of the experience, which

cooperates to arouse our ordered response, whether the
response of Beauty or another….It is evident that the bulk of
poetry consists of statements which only the very foolish
would think of attempting to verify. They are not the kind of
things which can be verified….But even when they are, on
examination, frankly false, this is no defect….And equally, a
point more often misunderstood, their truth, when they are
true, is no merit.
In Urdu we often talk of the “universality” of poetry’s
appeal, or of the “universal truths” that poetry deals in.
Simplistic as these notions are, they are even more dangerous
to a proper literary appreciation of poetry because they tend to
be based upon the assumption that a classification of “Truths”
exists and lead us to the further assumption that those “Truths”
that strike us as “Universal” must be truly so, and that they
may even have the force of Science. Thus we have Hamidi
Kashmiri, another leading critic and admirer of Iqbal telling us
in all seriousness that as opposed to his Western counterparts,
Iqbal found himself in confrontation with regional and
collective problems like colonialism and backwardness.20
His appreciation and cognition of these, and other human
problems created by the industrial society, was on a purely
personal, individual level. Thus his poetic being was able to
attain a Truth and Universality which remained denied to other
Urdu poets of that time.
Hamidi Kashmiri is trying to establish that Iqbal “felt” and not
just “thought about” the political and social problems of his times
and this is what gives “Universality” to his poetry. Apart from the
fact that we are not told how “feeling” not “thinking” a problem
confers “Universality” and “Truth” on the end product of the
process, we are left with a somewhat uncomfortable feeling that it
is the “problems” and the “Truth” of their solutions that the critic
wants us to attend to; the poetry will then take care of itself.
That’s why we find him saying a page later that while making
questions of “Nationalism, Patriotism, Sufism or
How to Read Iqbal? 15

Philosophy…part and parcel of his thought, Iqbal didn’t deal with

them in a doctrinally passive way”, and that is why he: 21
[D]escribed philosophy as being ‘distant from life’, made
Hegel and Bergson targets of his critique, in Sufism he
approved of wahdatu’sh shahud (Unity of Manifestation)
instead of wahdatu’l wajud (Unity of Being)…and as regards
Politics, he granted the critical importance of the Individual in
the shaping of the collective systems and censured
Democracy.
The other problem with this kind of thinking is that it treats
the poet’s philosophical or ratiocinative thinking as scientific,
and therefore reliable and even true. We know now that even
scientific truths are tentative. None after Karl Popper can think
different. But there is a greater problem, as Richards realized,
and as Coleridge dimly understood more than a century before.
Science cannot be reduced to impulses or emotions while
poetry is mainly a matter of impulses and emotions: 22
The essential point, however, is that Science is autonomous.
The impulses developed in it are modified only by one
another, with a view to the greatest possible completeness or
systematization…..So far as any body of references is
undistorted it belongs to science….And just as there are
innumerable human activities which require undistorted
references if they are to be satisfied, so there are other
innumerable human activities not less important which equally
require distorted references or, more plainly, fictions.
Poetry, of course, is fictive in character, and the poet is the
maker of fictions. This was known to Qudama Ibn Ja‘far seven
centuries before Shakespeare and nearly a thousand years
before Richards.23 It is only in our time, and with great but
uncomfortable making poets like Iqbal that such questions are
raised. Denying the fictive character of poetry enables us to
impose our own notions of truth and falsehoods on poetry. As
Richards astutely noted, even poets are not immune from this
temptation. With his characteristic gentle irony Richards
says:24
16 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Many attitudes…can be momentarily encouraged by suitable

beliefs held as scientific beliefs are held….When the attitude
is important, the temptation to base it upon some reference
which is treated as scientific truth is very great, and the poet
easily comes to invite destruction of his work; Wordsworth
puts forward his Pantheism, and other people doctrines of
Inspiration, Ideals, and Revelation.
I won’t say that Asloob Ahmad Ansari or Salim Ahmad
didn’t read these words, but I wish they had remembered them
while writing about Iqbal. And I suspect that even Iqbal fell
into the temptation in some of his poems. But it was up to us,
the literary critics, to read him and love him for his fictions
rather than his lectures.
As we saw above, Eliot said that it is perfectly possible to
believe in Dante’s theology if we read poetry as poetry.
Richards had made this point five years earlier, and better. For
the question is not whether Dante’s theology is believable: the
question rather is whether Dante’s poetry is believable. And a
cognate question is whether it is at all necessary to believe, or
even accept Dante’s theology before we can “fully enjoy”
Dante’s work. Eliot was unwilling to shed the baggage of what
he thought was Christian belief, so he answered in the negative.
Yet both the history and theory of reading poetry belies Eliot.
Richards made this point in his Practical Criticism in the
following words: 25
For it would seem evident that poetry which has built upon
firm and definite beliefs about the world, The Divine Comedy
or Paradise Lost, or Donne’s Divine Poems, or Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound, or Hardy’s The Dynasts, must appear
differently to readers who do and readers who do not hold
similar beliefs. Yet in fact most readers, and nearly all good
readers, are very little disturbed by even a direct opposition
between their own beliefs and the beliefs of the poet.
Such being the case, there seems hardly any need to be
exercised about “proving” or not proving the statements made
in a poem. As Richards pointed out, “disputable statements so
How to Read Iqbal? 17

constantly presented to us in poetry, are merely assumptions

introduced for poetic purposes.”26 Richards went on to say: 27
It is better to say that the question of belief or disbelief, in the
intellectual sense, never arises when we are reading well. If
unfortunately it does arise, either through the poet’s fault or
our own, we have for the moment ceased to be reading poetry
and have become astronomers, or theologians, or moralists,
persons engaged in quite a different type of activity.
But it is a sad fact of the human condition that even literary
critics expect poets to perform like circus artists on the trapeze
of meaning. Sartre once described Baudelaire’s greatest failure
to have been his attempt to achieve and establish a personal
though false concept of good and evil. “Baudelaire submitted
to Good in order to violate it.”28 Somebody made a very good
reply to this by saying that Sartre forgot that Baudelaire was a
poet, and thus had a right to a spurious philosophy. Sartre’s
displeasure was because Baudelaire consciously drove himself
into a dead end, leaving no retreat open. And yet Auerbach
held that “Souls such as Baudelaire are the aimes choisies
[chosen souls] of our time or of a time that is not too far in the
past.”29 And in fact Lionel Johnson gave an even better,
because literary, reply long before Sartre came out with his
indictment. Johnson said that “Baudelaire sings sermons”.30
It is understandable for European literary critics to lapse into
questions of (philosophical, scientific or doctrinal) Truth in
poetry because Plato gave a permanent bad conscience to
European poets and writers. George Steiner says, regrettably
adopting a somewhat patronizing tone about Aristotle that the
only point where the classic view of poetry and drama touched
on the nature of language was: 31
…in the conflict between the Platonic theory of mimesis and
the Aristotelian model of katharsis. The Platonic notion of the
capacity of language, particularly when joined to music to
elicit imitative action, his insight into the possibility that
verbal fictions weaken or corrupt our grasp on what Freud was
to call ‘the reality principle’, his attempt to distinguish
18 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

negatively verifiable and poetic truths—all these raise

linguistic issues of final importance. Aristotle’s rejoinder is
based on a far less penetrating sense of language and inclines
to a cursory identification of form with explicit content.
Yet the issue is hardly linguistic: it in fact relates to the
performatics of language where our presence at a performance
of poetry somehow enables us to participate, or at least be in
some present at the scene being narrated or the occasion being
described. This may be pernicious from Plato’s point of view,
but it only goes to confer a sort of autonomy on poetry as
regards questions of ‘Truth’ or ‘The reality principle.’ The
Arab theorists were quite correct in demanding that poems
have words, rhyme, metre, and meaning. Whether the meaning
was ‘true’ in any particular sense was not the concern of poetry
per se. What constituted ‘word’, ‘rhyme’ and ‘metre’ was the
concern of the everyday language user and the poet. We Urdu
critics who should have found interpretive and explicatory
tools for Iqbal from our own Arabo-Persian-Sanskrit traditions
fell into the error of accepting Plato’s hegemonic role in the
formulation of our modern theories of literary appreciation and
interpretation. The loss has been ours.
2.
So how should one go about reading Iqbal? One thing,
which our Ancients knew all the time but we have of late
tended to forget, is that thanks to literary tradition, all poetry
represents a kind of historical continuity: 32
Every writer writes within a tradition or complex of traditions
and hews the wood of his or her experience in terms
conformable to the traditionally provided matrices
thereof….Literature is identifiable by this conformity of the
individual work to the canon, which determines what will or
can count as literature at any given time, place and cultural
condition.
Salim Ahmad made a brilliantly perceptive remark about
Nazir Akbarabadi (1740-1830), when he said that the “lack of a
How to Read Iqbal? 19

large tradition of nazm writing let one of our great men go

waste.”33 Iqbal was placed better, because he had, among
others, Bedil (1644-1720) in Persian and Mir Anis (1802-1874)
in Urdu.
The mention of Mir Anis may surprise some of us until we
realize it that Mir Anis’s marsiyas34 are the best premodern
model in Urdu of narrative-historical, narrative-lyrical, and
oral-dramatic poetry and Iqbal’s poetry extends and exploits
the possibilities created by Anis. More importantly in the
context of our modern anxieties about poetry’s doctrinal or
philosophical Truth, Mir Anis provides the perfect example by
the very great value placed on his poetry in the entire literary
community. For Mir Anis’s original impulses arose from Shi‘i
beliefs and a generally Shi‘ite view of History. Yet the
majority of his poetry’s lovers have been non-Shi‘i, and the
first major and still current critical articulation about Mir Anis
was Mavazina-e Anis o Dabir (1907) written by Shibli
No‘mani, a staunch Sunni historian, critic, poet, and much else
besides. It was Shibli, and not some Shi‘i divine who said that
“the poetic qualities and merits of Anis are not matched by any
other poet.”35
I myself come from a strict family of Deobandis and had
nothing in my background or environment to prepare me for
the protocols of mourning and tragic lamentation that the
marsiya abounds in. In fact, I still do not find myself fully
empathetic to the “weeping verses” which are an integral part
of all marsiya. It was my father, no great admirer of the Shi‘i
school of Islam, who introduced me to Shibli’s book when I
was very young, and I was able immediately to relate to it, and
to the poetry of Mir Anis. I may not weep, but I can spend days
in raptures at the beauty of verses like the following: 36
The refulgence, the awful splendour, the prime elegance,
The majestic lustre…
Moons of the House of Zahra,
And the Suns for all Times;
And suddenly something dark descended upon the world,
20 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

The sun had not yet receded but they

Went into decline.
These are just four lines, and by no means the best of their
mode in Mir Anis, not to speak of his whole vast oeuvre. I am
aware of the inadequacy of my translation, yet I feel I have
conveyed some of the frisson of the majestic first two misras
(hemistiches) descending into the dark vale of shock and
sorrow of the last two.
Iqbal was aware of his legacy from Mir Anis, as his Urdu
poems from all periods of his poetic activity amply
demonstrate. But I bring up Mir Anis here with a different
purpose. If, in spite of a cultural or even religious cleavage Mir
Anis the poet can remain valid for his myriad readers, should
we not believe that Iqbal, undoubtedly the greater poet, can be
understood and enjoyed in his own right?
What does, then, Iqbal the poet give to his reader? In the
first place, Iqbal lets me have full or partial entry into five
extremely powerful poetic traditions: the Arabo-Persian, the
Indo-Persian, the European, the Indo-Sanskrit, and the Urdu.
The first one is evident everywhere in his longer and shorter
poems like Khizr-e Rah, Zauq o Shauq, Masjid-e Qurtuba, the
ghazals of Zabur-e ‘Ajam, the longish poem Hudi in Payam-e
Mashriq and in much else besides. The Indo-Persian tradition
speaks everywhere in the numbered pieces of Bal-Jibril, the
long poem in that collection in imitation of Sana’i, the
numerous poems of intellectual and emotional probing like
Mihrab Gul Afghan ke Afkar, Lala-e Sahra, Jibril o Iblis, and
of course in the two masnavis, Asrar-e Khudi and Rumuz-e
Bekhudi where Bedil speaks in many disguised voices. These
latter also partake of the Indo-Sanskrit tradition, and their
speculative tone occasionally recalls Swami Bhupat Rai
Begham Bairagi’s (d. 1719) long masnavi sometimes described
as Qisas-e Fuqara-e Hind. The poem clearly mixes Rumi’s
thought and Vedantic thought, and its discursive techniques
too, especially in the dialogue mode, anticipate Iqbal.37
How to Read Iqbal? 21

If the ghazals of Payam-e Mashriq are in the Indo-Persian

mode, its nazms like Tanha’i, Shabnam, Hur o Sha‘ir, and the
general tone of the whole collection recalls Western ways of
poem making and even poem thinking. The long poem Sham‘ o
Sha‘ir is a triumph of the use of the Western soliloquizing,
monologic mode in the Indo-Persian style. Bedil seems to be
much in evidence here again.
Iqbal’s derivations from the Urdu tradition go back not just
to Dagh, but also, and very much more considerably to Mir
Anis, and Ghalib, then Zauq and Sauda. It is not often realized
that Iqbal would have made a very great qasida poet and would
easily have rivalled Zauq and Sauda had he lived in premodern
times.
Let me speak here a bit more of Iqbal’s allegiance to the
European and Indo-Sanskrit poetic traditions. It must be
obvious that all the dramatic poems, and all the dialogue poems
could not but owe their existence the German Romantics and to
a certain extent to Goethe in terms of general technique and in
any case even the conception of writing dramatic poems is
Western, not Indian or Eastern. There does exist a favourite
dialogue device in classical Persian masnavis, and occasionally
in ghazal too. It is actually a rhetorical device called saval o
javab (Question Answer) where the poet frames questions in
one misra and gives the reply in the second. The form is highly
stylized and very often the poet seems to first frame the answer
and then invent a suitable question for it. Whereas in Iqbal, the
dialogue, even a very short one like Subh-e Chaman in Zarb-e
Kalim, middle length ones like Muhavira-e Ilm o Ishq and
Muhavira Mabain-e Khuda va Insan which recalls the
influence of George Herbert in the reverse, or longer ones like
Pir o Murid in Bal-e Jibril, or the truly longer dialogues in
Javed Namah are proper dialogues and vehicles for exchange
of subtle ideas. They have hardly any parallels in the
nonwestern traditions of poetry.
Then we have poems like Iblis ki Majlis-e Shura in
Armughan-e Hijaz¸ where the epic imagination seems at work
22 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

in the Western manner even if briefly. Ek Arzu, and Rukhsat Ay

Bazm-e Jahan and some other early poems of Bang-e Dara,
remind one of he early English Romantics while the hortatory
and celebratory poems like manind-e saba khez vazidan digar
amoz in Zabur-e Ajam, and the short poem Rumi Badle Shami
Badle… in Zarb-e Kalim remind us of Shelley’s passionate
appeals to the Irish peasants. The Javed Nama, of course is a
incredible masterpiece in terms of the fusion of Western and
Eastern, especially Ibn-e Arabi and Dante.
Perhaps it is yet more important to observe that the fusion is
not so much on the level of borrowing of ideas or intellectual
approaches as on the level of creative patterning. Javed Nama
bears the same relation to Dante and Ibn-e Arabi as the
Badshahi Mosque in Lahore bears to the Jama Masjid of Delhi,
or the Sher Dar Madrasa at Samarqand, built at almost the
same time (1630’s), while the Sher Dar Madrasa itself recalls
Mahmud Gavan’s Madrasa in Bidar built in the far South of
India in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Humayun’s
tomb in Delhi bears the same resonances as Hoshang Shah’s
tomb in Mandu in central India, built a century earlier around
1450. It is not so much a question of imitation as of kindred
spirits making their appearance in an inspired series of flights
of creativity.
The astonishing variety of Western modes and techniques,
including experiments in metre and form is rivalled by the
numerous Western subjects, persons, ideas, places, and
political situations that crowd Iqbal’s poetry and give it the feel
and air of a Western metropolis. The sheer imaginative reach
and the wide range of the creative imagination are truly
unparalleled in modern world poetry anywhere. The existence
of such poems in such large numbers shows that Iqbal was
fully comfortable through the vast cultural and literary
hinterland of Europe.
When I talk of the Indo-Sanskrit stream of poetic tradition
also enriching Iqbal’s poetry, I do not merely mean the
marvellous translation of the Gayatri Mantra, in Bang-e Dara,
How to Read Iqbal? 23

or the little gem from Bhatrihari in Bal-e Jibril, nor yet the
presence of Vishvamitra and Bhartrihari in Javed Nama. I do
not even refer to the fact, important in itself, that Iqbal intended
to translate the whole of Ramayana and also the Gita into
Urdu.38 Nor do I refer specifically to poems in Bang-e Dara
like Ram, and Swami Ram Tirath. To my mind Iqbal’s most
remarkable debt to the Sanskrit literary tradition is in his knack
for peopling his poetry with natural or cosmic objects, the sun,
the stars, the moon, the morning, the night, the sunrise, the
flower, birds, the dewdrop, the mountain, the ocean, God
himself, and treat them as characters in a semi-secret play
whose scenes and significance are known only to himself. This
imaginative device is apparent in even the earliest poems like
Insan aur Bazm-e Qudrat, Chand aur Tare, rat aur Sha‘ir,
Bazm-e Anjum, Sair- Falak, the opening stanzas of Javab-e
Shikva in Bang-e Dara and finds absolutely perfect expression
in Bang-e Dara itself in the short poem called Insan. In later
collections we have Lala-e Sahra, Ruh-e Arzi Adam ka Istiqbal
Karti Hai, Mulla aur Bihisht in for instance Bal-e Jibril, and
many others. The first few pages of Payam-e Mashriq yield
poems of bewildering imaginative power in this strain, like
Gul-e Nakhustin, Taskhir-e Fitrat, Bu-e Gul, Sarud-e Anjum.
It is difficult to find such plenitude, such abundance of both
cosmic and non-human on the one hand and earthly and human
on the other within the space of any poetic tradition other than
Sanskrit. A look at the first few pages of a short Anthology
gives us the following (from the Vedas): Ushas: The Dawn, To
Night, To Varuna, For Parajnaya: Bearer of Rain, Aranyani:
Forest Spirit, Two Birds, A Tree in Flashing Heaven; (from
secular verse): Nightfall, Moonrise, Speed, Young Tree,
Flower, and so on.39 The reason for this treatment of the human
and the non-human as one is not obscure or esoteric at all. As
the editors inform us in their Introduction, there are many
strands of unity that form the fabric of Hindu literary and
philosophic thought. One of them is:
24 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

…A world-view which does not allow for a dichotomy

between matter and spirit, man and nature. In this holistic
view all life is one, and inner and external reality are mutually
dependent. This world-view is held by all the languages of
India…
Further on, we learn that Indian thought assumes a
correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm, a
perpetual identification of things create and uncreate with
Being and Becoming. 40
‘Yonder world is in the likeness of this world as this one is the
likeness of that’, says the Aitreya Brahmana. …Man in Indian
literature is operating simultaneously on two planes, one
situated in time and space and the other transcending
both….According to Abhinava Gupta, the most significant
exponent of the Indian aesthetic, Being is neither merely an
atemporal visualisation of itself, nor an absolute separation
from time and space.
It should be obvious that in spite of Iqbal’s great interest in the
philosophy of Time and Being, what is relevant here to his
student is the question of poetic technique, of how Iqbal is able to
draw upon strands of Indo-Sanskrit thought where in Abhinava
Gupta’s words, Being is neither atemporal nor an absolute
separation from time and space. Yet a question might be asked if
Iqbal’s interest in the Muslim philosophical questions of Time
would not by itself have led him to a point where the route might
have become open for him to create a poetic world in which the
cosmic and the non-cosmic, the earthly human and non-human,
all could become characters in his poems?
There are two answers to this: first, there is no other literary
tradition on the immediate horizon of Iqbal’s literary world in
which the human and the non-human world meet and
interpenetrate all the time. The other answer is provided by
Coomaraswamy who suggests the existence of a similarity if
not correspondence here among the traditions of the East. He
says, “There are very few metaphysical doctrines in Islam that
could not, if one made the attempt, be very plausibly derived
How to Read Iqbal? 25

from Vedic or Buddhist sources.” Coomaraswamy quotes

Meister Eckhart as saying, “God is creating the world now, this
instant” and comments that this “might have been said by any
Sufi”. Doubtless, Coomaraswamy is more interested in the
philosophical content rather than what he calls “the literary
history of ideas” but what he says here is sufficient for the
literary students of Iqbal.41 Quoting from the Athirveda,
Coomaraswamy says that Time is not a “duration”, but rather
the “Timeless” to which “all movable time is ever present”.
Coomaraswamy goes on: 42
It is in these terms that the Maitri Upanishad distinguishes the
“two forms” (dve rupa) of Brahman, i. e., aspects of the “two
natures” (dvaitibhava) of the single essence (tad
ekam)….There are, indeed, two forms of Brahma; time, and
the Timeless.
Coomaraswamy concludes his discussion of the Sufi
concept of Time with these words:43
Time, in other words, is an imitation of eternity, as becoming
is of being and thinking is of knowing.
Given such sources for the imagination, Iqbal’s creativity
was bound to take the course that it did. It is not relevant to the
literary critic to ask whether Iqbal actually believed these
things. It is even less relevant for the literary critic to himself
share his or anyone else’s beliefs about Time and Being. All
we need to assert is Iqbal’s poetry gives us imaginative entrée
into more worlds of literary and creative tradition than any
other poetry of the twentieth century.
In addition to the general grace, power and elegance that
Iqbal’ poetry derived from his full use of the resources of the
Indo-Persian tradition, Iqbal’s remarkable intertextuality and
plurivalence owe their power, and maybe even their existence
to the Indo-Persian poetic tradition. It must be remembered that
the main Arabo-Persian literary thought and praxis of which
Iqbal was the indirect but able inheritor did not have much to
say about what Todorov has described as the “overflowing of
26 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

the signifier by the signified.” This he defines as the signifier

of a single proposition leading us to “knowledge of two
signifieds, one direct and the other indirect”.44 Todorov
identifies three kinds of discourse; literal, ambiguous and
transparent45, and brings support for this classification by
invoking Abhinavagupta through K. Kunjunni Raja:46
Abhinavagupta says that when an expression gives its own
literal meaning, and in addition suggests some other sense, we
cannot regard both these distinct senses as conveyed by the
same power. The former proceeds directly from the words,
while the latter comes from this literal sense. Tatparya
pertains to the expressed sense, whereas dhvani pertains to
non-expressive factors also…
That is to say, the poet is able to invest new or unexpected
meanings to the literal meaning and can construct meaning on
two levels between which there may not be any direct
discernible relationship and what is “literal” may not be so
literal after all. This insight came into the Indo-Persian
tradition through interactions between Sanskrit and Persian in
India and through the Indian Style (sabk-i hindi) Persian poets
and is otherwise not to be found in mainline Arabic or Persian
literary theory.
The quest of intertextuality is different, for intertextuality, in
the sense of making poems from poems has been an established
poetic practice in the Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu
classical traditions. By the time of Iqbal the principle and
practice both fell into disrepute, or were at least looked at with
discomfort and suspicion because the poet was now mostly
seen as “doing his own thing” unbeholden to others. Iqbal here
again demonstrated the creative and evocative power of poetry
when images, themes, and poems of the past are made to serve
as the foundation for other images, themes, or poems. With its
wealth of allusion, its direct and indirect echoes of other poets,
and its wide background studded with poems and poets of the
past Iqbal’s poetry feels like a panorama of Persian, Urdu,
Arabic, Sanskrit, German and English poets of the past. And
How to Read Iqbal? 27

there is never any doubt as to who is in control: the presiding

genius is Iqbal and none else. He manipulates, uses, abandons,
re-embraces, refashions, approaches from unexpected angles.
This is not merely learned poetry. This is poetry whose
wardrobe of jewels is like the “metaphor of the mind”
described by Abdul Qahir Jurjani as a metaphor whose
meaning is inexhaustible.
In Tulu‘-e Islam (1922) Iqbal has a verse: 47
The Reality of all things—whether of fire or earth, is the same
Slash the particle’s heart, the sun’s blood will come dripping
forth.
Iqbal went back to this stunning image through a different
perspective thirteen years later in a short poem in Zarb-e
Kalim: 48
Should a maestro of the art so desire,
The grace and plenitude of Art will make
The light drip from the sun’s body
Like dew.
I don’t want to go into the “message content” of these
verses. I want merely to point out that the images actually go
back to the Indo-Persian poet Faizi (1547-1594) through
another Indo-Persian poet Talib Amuli (d.1626). Let’s hear
Talib Amuli first:49
‫زاں ﭼﮩﺮﮦ ﮔﻞ ﺑہ داﻣﻦ اﻧﺪﯾﺸہ ﻣﯽ ﮐﻨﻢ‬
‫ﺧﻮرﺷﯿﺪ ﻣﯽ ﻓﺸﺎرم و در ﺷﯿﺸہ ﻣﯽ ﮐﻨﻢ‬
I gather the flowers of her face in the skirt of my thought,
I squeeze the sun and pour it in my glass.
Now listen to this from Faizi:50
‫ﭼﻮں ﻧﻮر ازل ﺑﺮدل ﺟﺎوﯾﺪ ﻓﺮو رﯾﺰد‬
‫ﮔﺮ ذرﮦ ﺑﯿﻔﺸﺎری ﺧﻮرﺷﯿﺪ ﻓﺮو رﯾﺰد‬
Where Eternity’s light falls ever
On the heart:
Squeeze a particle and the sun
Will drip forth from it.
28 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

We can see that Iqbal is reliving the images for a different

purpose. He invests a moral power and an urgency of action in
both the cases, but what to us is more important is the greater
sensuousness and less abstract treatment. The first image is
almost intolerably violent in its intensity, the next one engages
our senses by its contradictoriness: the sun becoming cool, or
hot, and oozing away his light out of embarrassment or
excitement. Talib Amuli’s image in the first misra was too non-
physical, too bloodless, and too abstract to create a visual or
sensual effect. The purpose or result of Iqbal’s operation on the
particle is to remove the fetter on his being and let it shine forth
in the amplitude of Unity. Iqbal’s poem pulls in reverberations
of caesarean birth and ritual pulling out of the foetus of the
infinite from the body of the finite. Yet there is also the
disturbing suggestion of the sun weeping blood when the heart
of the article is torn open. Thus the other suggestion is it’s not a
matter of identity, but of empathy. The sun weeps when
violence is done to the dust mote and its heart is ripped out.
The “mighty heart” beats for everyone.
In the shi‘r about the miracle of Art, Iqbal is doing much
more with Faizi’s image, again because he is more concrete: it
is difficult to visualize in Faizi “eternity’s light’’ dropping ever
of the heart. Iqbal takes us to a more tangible world which
obeys the rules and laws of Art. And Art’s grace and plenitude
conquers the sun, makes it change its character. It is inevitable
here to recall Yeats’ magic bird which the poet fashions and
which sings of all that is past, or passing, or to come. But the
magic bird can only sing, while the Art of the maestro can pull
the sun down to the level of the human.
Creation of complex structures of meaning, images
fashioned or refashioned anew, making poems so as to make
statements that yield sidereal or even contradictory meanings
are major features of the Indo-Persian, and the Urdu tradition.51
Writing as he did at a time when the Urdu poet was under
constant pressure to abandon his native love of metaphor and
work away from his tradition that valued abstractness and
How to Read Iqbal? 29

complexity and saw poetry mainly as a play of meaning on

ideas many of which could be found elsewhere but would not
often be suspected to carry an extra charge of meaning. Iqbal is
our greatest modern ma‘ni afirin (meaning-maker) poet and
since unlike his younger “modern” contemporaries, Iqbal
makes his meanings within the realm of the Indo-Persian where
poems went beyond “mere images” (in Yeats’s phrase) and
poets went on even to say that not saying something was the
best form of utterance. This was a discovery made by ‘Urfi and
Faizi who had a strong sense of the frontiers to which the
power of the human utterance could be stretched. ‘Urfi said: 52
For the world is a foreign country,
No one here is from my people.
Thus in a world of strangers silence was the equivalent of an
utterance in which meaning was so tightly folded as to make its
unfolding nearly impossible. Ghani Kashmiri (d. 1666)
declared:53
A person who has no understanding,
Were he to glue his eye to a book
He wouldn’t still see meaning’s visage
Even in his dreams. The brainless ones do not
Reflect on poems: the bubble
Has no capability to dive into the ocean.
Iqbal brought this tradition alive for us in all its glory; he
made us feel proud of it. In a place and time when our literary
critics chose to sneer at Bedil, greatest of sabk-i hindi poets for
what was seen as his opacity and complexity, Iqbal wrote:54
Doubtless, Ghalib imitated Bedil’s manner, but Ghalib’s
harvest remained empty of Bedil’s themes and ideas. Bedil
was ahead of his contemporaries in regard to thought.
Evidence can be produced to show that Bedil’s Indian and
foreign contemporaries and the lovers of Persian verse have
been unable to understand Bedil’s view of the world.
Many things are happening here, but I’ll only point out to
one that is not articulated here: In his role as hakimul ummat
Iqbal may have liked to believe that a poet’s meaning should
30 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

be entirely clear. But he had a curious theory for this. He

wrote:55
The lack of clarity in his [Momin’s] (1800-1852) style viewed
in the light of psychology appears as an important but painful
proof of the decline of the Muslims’ urge to rule. It only
among the people who are the ruling power that clarity of
expression is essential. This state of lack of clarity which is so
common with Momin is also found in a somewhat lesser
degree in minds far deeper than Momin’s, for instance, Ghalib
and Bedil…. [Here] ambiguity becomes a source of enjoyment
and inadequacy of expression is savoured as depth of thought.
The import of the above two utterances can be fully
appreciated only when we read them side by side with this
interesting critique of Bedil and others offered by Iqbal:56
Ghalib wouldn’t probably have understood Bedil’s thought.
All [Ghalib’s] admiration and praise of Bedil is just because of
Bedil’s [extraordinary-beautiful] Persian compounds [tarkib],
and that’s it. Ghalib learnt [the art of] tarkib from Bedil. I
myself have benefited from Mirza Bedil in this matter.
So Iqbal as hakimul ummat may have wanted his
prescription for his people to be unambiguous but Iqbal the
poet was like Baudelaire, quarrying the poems and texts of
others for making his own images. Iqbal had no shame in
admitting that he made use of Bedil’s dazzling linguistic and
metaphoric constructions as building blocks for his own texts.
Peter Quennell said of Baudelaire, he was industrious and
workmanlike, recording on little pieces of paper his “linguistic
discoveries”, storing them in a tea chest “against the moment
when they should be embodied in a poem.” Iqbal the poet
seems to have been little different in his love of words.
It was not for nothing that Iqbal chose one of Bedil’s more
obscure verses to explicate and unfold in a delightful little
poem, thus establishing the supreme relevance of Bedil’s
imagination forever in his own poetry. The poem occurs in
Zarb-e Kalim (1935), a collection of Urdu poems whose central
How to Read Iqbal? 31

importance for Iqbal’s literary criticism has not yet been fully
recognized:57
Mirza Bedil
Is this the Reality, or the mischief wrought by my false-seeing
eye?
The earth, the wilderness, the mountain range, the dark-blue
sky,
Some say: It is; others, it is not,
Who knows if this your world exists at all.
How well Mirza Bedil unknotted this knot
Whose unravelling has been so hard for the Philosopher:
“If the heart had enough space, this garden were sightless:
The wine’s hue poured out, the wine-flask didn’t have enough
room.”
So this is how Iqbal the poet gives us entry into our literary
traditions, creatively, challengingly, and recuperatively. Take
care of the poetry, he seems to say, and the philosophy will
take care of itself. More than any modern Urdu poet it is Iqbal
who makes us respect and try to understand the foundations of
our poetics. The structures of meaning that Iqbal makes for us
exist in their own right and also as continuities.
A question might be asked: So what about Iqbal’s
originality? Should not a poet have an “individual voice”, a
“style of his own”? The first answer to this is that a great deal
of truly great poetry passes beyond petty considerations of
“individuality” and “style.” All of us know about Omar
Khayyam’s “individuality” and all of us also know that out of
the several hundred rubais that pass as Omar Khayyam, there
are only about a handful that can with some certainty be
ascribed to Omar Khayyam. We know that some of the most
famous and well-loved shi‘rs and even whole ghazals in the
Divan of Hafiz have now been shown to be not from Hafiz
though they reflect Hafiz’s true “individuality” and “style.” We
know that scores of ghazals of Sauda’s (1706-1781)
contemporaries somehow found their way into Sauda’s mss.
collections and continued to be quoted and studied as part of
32 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Sauda’s work for two centuries and more. So questions of

“individual style” are essentially contextual, not absolute.
That is not to say that Iqbal has no style of his own. One
way of putting the matter would be that he has many styles, he
has different styles for different occasions. The style of Shkiva
and Javab-e Shikva is different from that of Zauq o Shauq
whose style is again very different from that of the ghazals and
ghazal like poems in Zabur-e ‘Ajam. Then there is the grand
Iqbalian manner, especially apparent in the Urdu, but not so
prominent or differentiated in the Persian. These matters can’t
be decided with a few strokes of bureaucratic pens. Nor can we
understand them by counting the so-called patterns of sounds,
labial, or dental, or fricative, or liquid, or whatever that scribal
critics pretend to have discovered in Iqbal. To believe that the
existence of poetry could be accounted for by counting vowels
and consonants is to believe that patterns of vowels and
consonants do not exist elsewhere in the language. In fact, they
would seem to occur more richly in film songs.
Iqbal should be seen as a perfector of different styles in
Urdu poetry, and as the inventor of many new ones, for
instance, the dramatic dialogue, the verse style that is suited to
speech rhythms, the narrative of the imagined landscapes of the
mind. Similarly his nature poems range from formal stylized
narratives that recall the qasidas of Iranian Mirza Habib Qa’ani
(1807-1853) to interior monologue-like poems that seems to
take us back to Wordsworth.
All modes, all manners of poem making are within Iqbal’s
practical range: the celebratory, the narrative, the lyrical, the
dramatic, the hortatory, the speculative, the ironical, the
satirical, the comic, the tender, everything melts in his hand
and takes whatever shape he wants to give it. Nothing is a
stranger here: the intensely introspective, the highly
metaphorical, the plain, or the prophetic, all tones are present
in their appropriate place. Iqbal’s poetry teaches us to
recognize the most distant horizons of Urdu poetry as our own.
How to Read Iqbal? 33

Majnun Gorakhpuri said something perceptive about the

music of Iqbal, and I think he was the first to say that even the
most difficult of Iqbal’s shi‘rs can be sung on the subtlest and
most delicate of musical instruments.58 He didn’t say this in
precise or subtle enough words, but the point, sadly so often
lost in the welter of words generated by us about Iqbal’s
“truth” and “message”, was a valuable one. Iqbal wrote some
of the world’s most mellifluous poetry and that’s a quality that
takes its place right there where the highest poetry is. In fact it
is to be doubted if there ever can be great poetry without the
quality that Amir Khusrau called ravani (“flowingness”).
“Flowingness” has been a quality about which it is
impossible to frame theoretical statements, yet it is clear that
some poem or poets have more of this and some have less of it.
More important, the question of ravani (“flowingness”) has
engaged the attention of many theorists in the Arab-Persian-
Urdu tradition since Khusrau. Even before Khusrau, the Arabs
seem to have devoted some attention to the matter as an
important aspect of literary appreciation. Adonis (Ali Ahmad
Said) quotes from Al–Farabi’s discussion of the musical
quality or the “beauty of sound” in poetry. Among other
elements, al–Farabi identified “purity: where there is nothing in
the melody to spoil it qualitatively or quantitatively;
…suppleness and delicacy in long-drawn-out melodies”, and
above all, the harmonization of vowelled letters.59 This doesn’t
take us very far, for Al-Farabi was speaking as a musicologist,
but Al-Jahiz had a somewhat more penetrating observation as a
literary critic: 60
The letters of the words and the verses of the poem should
seem harmonious and smooth, supple and easy…gentle and
pleasant, flexibly ordered, light on the tongue, so that the
entire verse is like one word, and one word is like a single
letter.
This is very much better, though still quite far from a precise,
prescriptive description. Khusrau had much more to say on ravani61
and by early eighteenth century in Delhi, ravani had become
34 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

accepted as the prime quality of prime poetry. Miscellaneous

attempts to find the principle or principles where ravani may be
located have been made with little success. The fact however
remains that for instance, the poetry of Mir and that of Mir Anis is
recognized to have more flowingness than any of the premodern
poets. Similarly, Iqbal should have been placed at the very highest
pinnacle of ravani had we found time to read his poems as
literature and not philosophical dissertations or politico-religious
manifestos whose truth, real or imagined contradictions and
falsehoods disputatiously analyzed, confirmed, or rejected.
In the delight that he took and gave in the sheer music of
poetry Iqbal reminds me of Mir who is the only Urdu poet whose
ravani is equal to that of Iqbal, and of Coleridge who among all
great critics placed the greatest positive value on the music of
poetry. Hartley Nelson Coleridge remarks in his edition of
Coleridge’s Table Talk that Coleridge had “an eye, almost
exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music: But
his demand from music was “either thought or feeling; mere
addresses to the sensual ear” didn’t appeal to him.62 The exact
meaning of words like “universal”, “thought”, or “feeling” must
differ from person to person, nonetheless, the general principle
enunciated here is entirely sound for it makes an attempt to relate
sound with sense which Richards also attempted to do a century
later. Coleridge spoke of “the music of nobler thoughts”63 and
thus in a way glossed the terms “thought or feeling” used by
Hartley Nelson Coleridge: there can be noble music only where
there are noble thoughts. This is insufficient for it denies the
property of music to satirical or hate poetry which Coleridge
would not have granted the rank of “noble”. We need therefore to
rethink the matter a bit.
It is Coleridge again who provides the clue by informing us
that: 64
But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing
it, is a gift of the imagination; and this together with the power
of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a
series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or
How to Read Iqbal? 35

feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be

learnt.
This implies or postulates a number of fundamental values
of the nature of the music of poetry. The power to sense
musical delight is complimentary to the power of producing it
among others. Musical delight in a poem is obtainable only
when the imagination is at work. The musical delight doesn’t
function in a vacuum, it has to emanate from a thought, or
feeling which itself has the power to pull together a number of
disparate feelings or experiences.
This does not fully explain the nearly autonomous nature of
the music of poetry, or ravani, though later in his discussion of
metre Coleridge throws in another valuable insight in his
typical off hand manner when he says,65
As the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of
increased excitement, so the metre itself must be accompanied
by the natural language of excitement.
Walter Jackson Bate has an extremely interesting annotation
here from Coleridge himself who wrote to Southey on July 13,
1802 as follows: “…Metre itself implies a passion, i. e., both in
the Poet’s mind, & is expected in that of the Reader…”66
At one place in Zabur-e Ajam Iqbal seems to be echoing or
recalling Coleridge in some way when he characterizes poetry
or the music of poetry as “lifeless” without “meaning”, the
term “meaning” here would seem to signify something like
Coleridge’s “nobler thoughts” or “predominant thought or
feeling.” Characteristically, Iqbal also brings in Rumi who
among the Persian poets had perhaps the most to say about
“meaning” (ma‘ni) in the sense of “Reality”. We read the
following verses toward the end of Zabur-e ‘Ajam:67
I do not know where ma‘ni’s origins are,
Its form is apparent and familiar to me
Though; The song that has no meaning is
Dead, its words are from a fire that’s ashen.
The Master of Rum revealed the secret of meaning;
36 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

My thought bends its forehead at his doorstep. “Meaning

Is that which takes you away from yourself,
Leaves you in no want for the form. Meaning is not
That which renders you blind or deaf, or makes
Man even more in love with the form.”
In his dialogue with Bhartrihari in Javed Nama Iqbal makes
the Sanskrit poet and linguistic philosopher describe the poet’s
music or mode of existence to be “the crescendo and
diminuendo of sound”. Other than this, “none in the world
know where the poet is.”68 I think there can be no more fitting
conclusion to our effort to understand the secret of Iqbal’s
music than to leave the matter here with Iqbal’s prayer at the
beginning of Zabur-e ‘Ajam: 69
Make my clod of dirt blaze with the light
Of David’s song,
To every particle of my being give
Fire’s feathers and wings.
If there ever was a poet’s prayer answered, it was this.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Thanks are due to my friend Muhammad Suheyl Umar, Director, Iqbal

Academy, Pakistan, Lahore without whose urgings this paper would not
have seen the light of the day. (Author’s Note)
* (Paper presented at the Iqbal Academy, Pakistan, Lahore: May 1, 2004)
1
Payam-e Mashriq, 5th printing, Lahore, 1944, page kaf (=11).
How to Read Iqbal? 37

2
Majnun Gorakhpuri, Iqbal, Ijmali Tabsira, Gorakhpur, n. d. (circa 1946),
p. 106. Capitals added by me, Urdu has no capital letters but the three words
here seemed to cry out for capitalization at least in English.
3
Salim Ahmad, Iqbal, Ek Sha‘ir, Lahore, 1978, p. 28. The capitalization
here is again mine.
4
Salim Ahmad, Iqbal, Ek Sha‘ir, p. 19.
5
Salim Ahmad, Iqbal, Ek Sha‘ir, p. 105.
6
Salim Ahmad, Iqbal, Ek Sha‘ir, p. 18.
7
In a letter dated January 3, 1919, Iqbal wrote to Syed Shaukat Husain,
“Poetryness in my poems has but a secondary place. I don’t at all have
aspirations to be counted among the poets of this age.” In a letter dated
March 16, 1919, Iqbal wrote to Maulana Girami, “It’s a wonder that people
regard me a poet and press me to say my poems to them, although I have
nothing to do with poetry.” On 3 April of the same year he wrote to
Maulana Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, “The aim of this poetry composition [of
mine] is neither poetry [as literature] nor [the pleasure of] language.” See
Syed Muzaffar Husain Barani, Ed., Kulliyat-e Makatib-e Iqbal, Vol. II,
Delhi, The Urdu Academy, 1991, pp. 43, 67, 78. The letter to Syed Shaukat
Husain was in English. I don’t have the English original before me and have
translated back from the Urdu version in Barani’s book. Another translation
exists in Shaikh Ataullah, M. A., Ed., Iqbal Namah, Majmu‘a-e Makatib-e
Iqbal, Vol. II, Lahore, 1951, p. 254. In this translation, the word translated
by me as “poetryness” is shi‘riyat, while the Barani text has sha‘iri which
strictly means “poetry” but can be translated as “poetryness”, given the
proper context. Anyway, there are other instances where Iqbal clearly
implies that he is a serious poet in his own right.
8
Al-e Ahmad Surur, “Khizr-e Rah, Ek Mutali‘a” in Gopi Chand Narang,
Ed., Iqbal ka Fan, Delhi, Educational Publishing House, 1983, p. 34.
9
Al-e Ahmad Surur, “Khizr-e Rah, Ek Mutali‘a” in Gopi Chand Narang,
Ed., Iqbal ka Fan, Delhi, Educational Publishing House, 1983, p. 43. The
phrase “taste and joy of certainty ” is my translation for zauq-e yaqin. Surur
is alluding to a she‘r in Iqbal’s poem Tulu‘-e Islam (The Dawning of Islam,
1922) printed in his first collection Bang-e Dara (The Clarion, 1924):
Neither weapon nor stratagem works in slavehood.
Shackles are disjointed.
When the taste and joy of certainty develops.
See Kulliyat-e Iqbal, Urdu, Aligarh, 1975, p. 271.
10
Coleridge to Wordsworth, letter dated May 30, 1815. See Coleridge:
Poetry and Prose, selected with an Introduction and Notes by Kathleen
Raine, Penguin Books, 1957, p. 130. Italics Coleridge’s.
11
S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk and Omniana, d., T. Ashe, London, George
Bell & Sons, 1896, p. 407.
38 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

12
Asloob Ahmad Ansari, Iqbal ki Muntakhab Nazmen aur Ghazlen
(Tanqidi Mutal‘ia), New Delhi, Ghalib Academy, 1994, p. 3
13
T. S. Eliot, in “Dante”, Selected Essays, London, 1956, p. 258.
14
T. S. Eliot, in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”, Selected Essays,
London, 1956, p. 135.
15
T. S. Eliot, in “Religion and Literature”, Selected Essays, London, 1956,
p. 388.
16
T. S. Eliot, in “Dante”, Selected Essays, London, 1956, p. 257.
17
Ezra Pound, in The New English Weekly, March, 1934, quoted in Peter
Ackroyd, T. S Eliot, London, 1989, p. 220.
18
Peter Ackroyd, p. 200.
19
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, London, 1961 [1924], pp.
269, 272.
20
Hamidi Kashmiri, Harf-e Raz: Iqbal ka Mutal‘ia, New Delhi, 1983, p. 17.
21
Hamidi Kashmiri, Harf-e Raz: Iqbal ka Mutal‘ia, pp. 19-20.
22
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, London, 1961 [1924], p.
266. Italics in the original.
23
The original sentence of Qudama is ahsanu al-sh‘ir-i akzabuhu,
translated b S. A. Bonebakker as, “The best poetry is the most lying.” It is
quite probable that this formulation is original to Qudama and owes little to
Greek thought. See S. A. Bonebakker, The Kitab Naqd Al-Shi‘r of Qudama
b. Ga‘far Al-Katib Al-Baghdadi, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1956, pp. 19, 36-37. I
am grateful to Professor Nisar Ahmad Faruqi for making this text available
to me. As for Shakespeare, see As You Like It, III, 3, 13-16:
Audrey: I do not know what poetical is. Is it honest in
deed and word? Is it a true thing?
Touchstone: No, truly, for the truest poetry is the most Feigning,
…
24
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, London, 1961 [1924], pp.
274-275. Capitalization in the original.
25
I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, A Study of Literary Judgment,
London, 1966 [1929], p. 271.
26
Practical Criticism, A Study of Literary Judgment, p. 272. Italics in the
original.
27
Practical Criticism, A Study of Literary Judgment, p. 277.
28
Quoted by Francis Scarfe, Baudelaire, Introduced and Edited with Plain
Prose Translations, Penguin Books, 1972, p. xv.
29
Erich Auerbach, “The Aesthetic Dignity of The Fleurs du mal” in Henri
Peyre, Ed., Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs,
N. J., 1962, p. 164.
30
Quoted by Francis Scarfe, Baudelaire, Introduced and Edited with Plain
Prose Translations, Penguin Books, 1972, p. xiv.
How to Read Iqbal? 39

31
George Steiner, Extraterritorial, Papers on Literature and the Language
Revolution, Penguin Books, 1975, p. 139.
32
Hayden White, reviewing Frank Kermode’s An Appetite for Poetry
(1989) in the London Review of Books, October 11, 1990.
33
Salim Ahmad, “Chiragh le ke Kahan Samne Hava ke Chale” in Naya
Daur, Karachi, reprinted in the quarterly Jamia¸ New Delhi, Vol. 100,
number 7-12, Special issue on Mir Anis, p. 464.
34
I use the term here in its strict, formal sense to mean “poems written
about the travails and ultimate martyrdom of Imam Husain, the Prophet’s
maternal grandson, and his companions in the battle at Karbala on 10
Muharram, 61 A. H. [=10 October 680].”
35
Shibli No‘mani, Mavazina-e Anis o Dabir, Allahabad, 1957 [1907], p. 2.
36
Mir Anis, marsiya, “kya ghazian-e fauj-e khuda kam kar ga’i” in Masud
Hasan Rizvi Adib, Ed., Ruh-e Anis, Lucknow 1968 [1931], p. 136.
37
For details about Swami Bhupat Rai Begham, see Dr. Syed Abdullah,
Adabbiyat-e Farsi men Hindu’on ka Hissa, New Delhi, 1992 [1943], pp.
313-349.
38
S. M. H. Burney, Ed., Kulliyat-e Makatib-e Iqbal, Vol. II, Delhi, 1991.
See Iqbal’s letter to Maharaja Sir Kishan Parshad Shad, dated April 25,
1919, and another letter to the Maharaja dated October 11, 1921, regarding
his intention to translate the Ramayana and the Bhagwat Gita into Urdu, pp.
86 and 282.
39
Sachchidananda Vatsyayan and Vidya Niwas Misra, Ed., The Indian
Poetic Tradition, An Anthology of Poetry from the Vedic Period to the
Seventeenth Century, Agra, 1983.
40
Sachchidananda Vatsyayan and Vidya Niwas Misra, pp. 13-14, 31; also
see p. 33.
41
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity, New Delhi, 1990, p. 66.
Compare Meister Eckhart’s words with the Iqbal's famous shi‘r:
The universe perhaps is unfinished yet,
For all the time a Voice is heard:
“Be!” and there it is, becoming.
( Shi‘r 7 in item number 3 [second series, after item 16] in Bal-e Jibril)
42
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity, New Delhi, 1990, p. 8.
43
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity, New Delhi, 1990, p. 70.
44
Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation, Tr., Catherine Porter,
Ithaca, 1986 [1982], p. 40.
45
Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation, Tr., Catherine Porter,
Ithaca, 1986 [1982], p.53.
46
K. Kunjunni Raja, Indian Theories of Meaning, Madras, 1977 [1963], pp.
301-302.
47
Included in Bang-e Dara (1924).
40 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

48
Poem number 5 in Mihrab Gul Afghan ke Afkar included in Zarb-e Kalim
(1935).
49
Ali Riza Zakavati Qarakzlu, Ed., Guzida Ash‘ar-i Sabk-I-Hindi,
(Anthology of Poetry of the Indian Style), Tehran, 1372 (=1993), p. 136.
50
Ali Riza Zakavati Qarakzlu, Ed., Guzida Ash’ar-i Sabk-iHindi,
(Anthology of Poetry of the Indian Style), Tehran, 1372 (=1993), p. 70.
51
Frances W. Pritchett in her Nets of Awareness, Urdu Poetry and Its
Critics, Berkeley, 1994, has examined question relating to Urdu in some
detail. Also see Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “A Stranger in the City: The
Poetics of Sabk-i hindi” in N. H. Jafri, Ed., New Delhi, forthcoming, and
The Annual of Urdu Studies, no. 14, Ed., M. U. Memon, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, forthcoming.
52
Urfi Shirazi, Divan-i Ghazaliyat, ed., Waliul Haq Ansari, Patna, Khuda
Bakhsh Oriental Library, 2000, p. 232.
53
Ghani Kashmiri, Divan, Ed., Ali Javad Zaidi and Muhammad Amin
Darab Kashmiri, Srinagar, 1964, p. 227.
54
Iqbal’s letter to Muhammad Ikram, in Syed Muzaffar Husain Barani, Ed.,
Kulliyat-e Makatib-e Iqbal, Vol. IV, Delhi, The Urdu Academy, 1998, p.
462. There is a clear typo here in the printed text. I have corrected it.
55
Iqbal’s letter to Zia Ahmad Badauni, in Syed Muzaffar Husain Barani,
Ed., Kulliyat-e Makatib-e Iqbal, Vol. IV, Delhi, The Urdu Academy, 1993,
p. 664.
56
Iqbal’s letter to Chaudhri Muhammad Husain, in Syed Muzaffar Husain
Barani, Ed., Kulliyat-e Makatib-e Iqbal, Vol. III, Delhi, The Urdu
Academy, 1993, p. 976.
57
The poem occurs in the section of Zarb-e Kalim entitled “Adabbiyat,
Funun-e Latifa”. The shi‘r translated in quotes is from Bedil. See Mirza
Abdul Qadir Bedil, Kulliyat, Vol. II, ed. Akbar Behdarvand and Parvez
Abbasi Dakani, Tehran, Ilham, 1376(=1997), p. 112. Bedil’s text as quoted
by Iqbal in the poem is slightly different in word order from the Iranian
edition cited by me, but the difference is entirely inconsequential.
58
Majnun Gorakhpuri, Iqbal, Ijmali Tabsira, Gorakhpur, n. d. (circa 1946),
p. 88.
59
Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, Trs. Catherine Cobham, Austin,
1990, pp. 28-29.
60
Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, Trs. Catherine Cobham, Austin,
1990, p. 29. Italics added.
61
See Amir Khusrau’s Preface to his Kulliyat, Kanpur, 1916, pp. 2-5. Also
see, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary History and Culture,
OUP, 2000, pp. 81-105.
62
H. N. Coleridge, Ed., Specimens of the Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge,
London, 1852, p. 267.
How to Read Iqbal? 41

63
Coleridge, in Friend, no. 16, dated December 7, 1809, cited by Walter
Jackson Bate, in the Princeton University Press edition of Biographia
Literaria, Vol. II, 1984, p. 46.
64
S. T. Coleridge, Princeton University Press edition of Biographia
Literaria, Vol. II, Ed. Walter Jackson Bate, 1984, p. 20.
65
S. T. Coleridge, Princeton University Press edition of Biographia
Literaria, Vol. II, Ed. Walter Jackson Bate, 1984, p. 65.
66
Biographia Literaria, Vol. II, Ed. Walter Jackson Bate, 1984, p. 65.
Italics, contraction, and capitalization Coleridge’s.
67
Zabur-e ‘Ajam, in Kulliyat-e Iqbal-e Farsi, Lahore, 1973, pp. 576-577.
68
Javed Nama, in Kulliyat-e Iqbal-e Farsi, Lahore, 1973, p. 758.
69
Zabur-e ‘Ajam, in Kulliyat-e Iqbal-e Farsi, Lahore, 1973, p. 396.



All translations from Urdu and Persian have been made by the
author. Originals of Urdu and Persian texts are given in the
Appendix below.

Appendix

Ĩ㷨 Ĩûä㣡äĨþĨìä㘄äĨᗻ Ĩ㥃Ĩᷩ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ嗚䆨Ĩ塴 Ĩጦ Ĩ㱾Ĩ廎 ◓ Ĩ勀 î þäĨ存 亽ĨÛ㣰➶ äĨü äĨᔊĨęì徉ï Ĩ㌑人Ĩ㥃Ĩ……ù 俬 Ĩûኹ
Ĝ嵗 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ൥ ᔊĨ㊎ ‫܉‬

42 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Ĩ䶵 ĨìṎþ‫܉‬Ĩ㺸 Ĩ嬸 ᱑什 Ĩø ㈲ Ĩ㷨 Ĩė ⯋ Ĩ㔯 Ĩç 㞑þäĨृ ĨîþäĨ⥢ ࿀Ĩø ⬧ äĨÛᴝ îĨ㷨 Ĩ㥙 Ĩ㥙 Ĩᄣ äĨú 㞔ä

Ĝ嵉 Ĩᥢ 峤Ĩû儕 Ĩ㍚ ⹢Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㣰 ᔊĨîþäĨå 夋 äĨÛ䅎 垆ï

 ……嵗 Ĩç 吴 Ĩ㏭ ࢑Ĩ㺸 Ĩ⡞ Ĩü äĨઃ ĨÛ㥵 ═ ĨþĨç 㣡Ĩ婨ĨÛ㐽 Ĩ婨ĨÛ㍮ Ĩ婨ĨÛ嵗 ĨĚì⠩Ĩ婨Ĩ侳 ĨĚ 㨳 亾 Ĩ㥃Ĩú 㞔ä
Ĩ抋 ĨĜ嵗 ĨᎹ᱑峤Ĩĕ 䲇 ĨìṎþĨäîᄯĨ㥃Ĩü äĨ⸞ Ĩᳮ Ĩ嵗 ĨᎹ㨱Ĩî‹þìĨ⸞ Ĩ䰍 䒴ï Ĩð äĨ㱾ĨìṎþĨ㺸 Ĩü äĨṎ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ侳 ĨęþĨ抁
ĨĜ嵗 Ĩᣲ 峤Ĩäጌ ĨĚ ⻸ Ĩç 弄㥃Ĩò 亍 Ĩ㷨 Ĩú 㞔äĨ⸞ Ĩᳮ Ĩ嵗 Ĩì୘ Ĩ㷨 Ĩ๵ ᑋ ĨĚ ⻸ Ĩð ä

Ĩ࿀Ĩç 怰 ᕨ Ĩ㷨 Ĩç 徉塴 ĨîþäĨç 䆨⠯ Ĩ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨ▗ Ĩウ Ĩ㜢 Ĩě 婧Ĩ㥃Ĩð äĨ嵗 Ĩ䅏 Ĩ䞻 Ĩ㨗 ĨṎ Ĩᚪ Ĩå äĨ࿀Ĩú 㞔ä
Ĩ㱾ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢Ĩ㷨 Ĩú 㞔äĨ䰮㑈 Ĩ承 恗ᒌ Ĩ抁Ĩ㲁 Ĩ抁Ĩ夁 Ĩᄵ ĨÜ嵉 Ĩᥢ ᱑Ĩ很 ຩĨ庵 壯ĨĚì୘ ĨþìĨ啵 Ĩė þ恗ᒌ Ĩü äĨĜ嵗 Ĩ俜
ǘ
Ĩ㷩 Ĩጦ Ĩê ㈲ Ĩ㷨 Ĩė þ⑼ Ĩ‫׎‬ǎ૾Ĩୗ Ĩ㱾Ĩç 䆨⠯ ĨþĨç 徉塴 Ĩ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨ啵 Ĩü äĨ㲁 Ĩ抁Ĩ夁 Ĩä⨭ þìĨĜ嵉 Ĩᣲ 䆨Ĩ媎 Ĩ࠻ Ĩ恗ï
Ĩ䟢 äĨ⸞ Ĩ⻂ Ĩ婨ä㍚ ⹢Ĩ㷨 Ĩü äĨç 䆨⠯ Ĩ抁Ĩ㽻 äĨç 䆨⠯ Ĩ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨĜ嵗 Ĩ㉘ Ĩ怯 ᕨ ĨäîíĨç ‫܉‬ĨĚ ⨭ þìĨ抁ĨĜ嵗 ĨᎹ᱑
Ĩ䟢 äĨ⸞ Ĩú 㞔äĨ抁ĨΉ Ĩ⫎ Ĩ慤 ìĨ媎 Ĩê ㈲ Ĩð äĨ㱾Ĩç 䆨⠯ Ĩü äĨ屨 Ĩ……嵉 Ĩ▗ Ĩ㥃ĨìṎþĨ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨᠢ೧ Ĩ嵉 Ĩ⑼ Ĩ弥 㱾
Ĩė þ⑼ Ĩ弥 ૾Ĩୗ Ĩ弥 峤ĨĚ 恔✭Ĩ⸞ Ĩîäï‫܉‬Ĩ屨 Ĩê ㈲ Ĩᳮ ĨÛ峤Ĩ䬊 Ĩ㨱 Ĩú ⤔ äĨê ㈲ Ĩð äĨ嬸 Ĩú 㞔äĨ媎 äĨîþäĨė 峤Ĩ㳉 îĨìṎþ
ĨĜ嵉 Ĩᥢ 㨱 Ĩú ⤔ äĨ㱾

ĨÛᥢ 峤Ĩ媎 Ĩ㡤 äþĨ⸞ Ĩç 䆨⠯ Ĩ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨ屨 Ĩå äĨĜĜĜ嵉 Ĩᥢ ᱑Ĩå þĒĨ啵 Ĩ๵ ᑋ Ĩ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨ屨 Ĩ寖 ßĨ寖 ß
Ĩð äĨṎ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ䟦 Ĩ嬸 峤Ĩð 丣 Ĩ䅎 垆ï Ĩ悇 äĨ愡 äĨ岫 Ĩ啵 Ĩė 径 ä䁔 Ĩ㷨 Ĩð äĨîþäĨ嵉 Ĩᥢ ᱑ĨᔊäĨ啵 Ĩú ìĨ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨ屨 Ĩå ä
Ĩå äĨĜ嵉 Ĩᥢ ᱑峤Ĩę垆ï Ĩęì徉ï ĨÛå 傃 Ĩęì徉ï ĨÛð ╔ Ĩęì徉ï Ĩ啵 ĨìṎþĨᄭ äĨ屨 ĨĜᣗ Ĩ㷨 Ĩ媎 Ĩð 丣 Ĩ嬸 Ĩ屨 Ĩᄸ Ĩ⸞
Ĩ弥 峤Ĩᣲၛ Ĩ㱾ĨìṎþĨě îᄯĨě î屩Ĩ㨱 ĨᔊäĨ媾 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ⨭ Ĩě î屩Ĩ塵 ĨîþäĨ嵗 ĨᎹ᱑Ĩ૽ Ĩ峌 ßĨ㥃Ĩ䫩 Ĩě î屩Ĩ峌 ßĨ㥃Ĩ塵
Ĝ嵗 Ĩ䟦 Ĩ囼 䁐Ĩ啵 Ĩė á᝝ Ĩě î屩

Ĩ媎 Ĩᡀ ⡜Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㡈 þĨîþäĨç ㍛ Ĩęì徉ï Ĩ㨗 Ĩå ìäĨþìî äĨḽ Ĩ嵉 Ĩ嵗 îĨ悎 äĨĖ 䪫ĨᔊĨęì徉ï Ĩ䰍 äþĨ䟊 Ĩ࿀Ĩú 㞔ä
ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ噓 ᄲ

Ĩä⻸ Ĩ㺸 Ĩㆈ ⓥĨîþìĨ㲁 Ĩ媎 Ĩ寣 ä⠩Ĩ抁Ĩ㠰 Ĩ䶵 ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ㳅 îĨ⚜ ĨĚ 婧᯳Ĩ愡 äĨ丰 ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢Ĩ啵 Ĩû㫤Ĩě 哶
ĨĜ峤Ĩî⾛Ĩ೧ Ĩä哶 Ĩ啵

How to Read Iqbal? 43

Ĩî㥃þ⨭ Ĩ㨗 Ĩ⸞ ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢Ĩ䶵 Ĩ奡 䆨ⓥĨ嵉 Ĩᥢ 㨱Ĩ庫 䰮㘄Ĩ㷨 Ĩ⻸ Ĩ⸞ Ĩ䶱 Ĩ㨱 Ĩ⯞ Ĩ㍚ ⹢Ĩ䶵 ĨĖ 䪫Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩᗕ

ĨĜ媎

Ĝü ‫܉‬ï Ĩ婨Ĩ嵗 ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢Ĩ婨Ĩ㥃Ĩ弥 䁐Ĩ⻸ Ĩð äĨì凇

ĨĜ䅋 Ĩ㷨 Ĩ媎 Ĩṏ ᠢĨ㡜 äþĨîä㟥Ĩ࿀Ĩ㛸 Ĩ㺸 Ĩü äĨÛ嵗 Ĩ˥‫ٱ‬ǎ Ĩ徉ìĨ࿀Ĩ㚧 Ĩ㷨 Ĩü äĨîþïĨęì徉ï Ĩᚪ Ĩå äĨ啵 Ĩ䙾 傑 Ĩ㺸 Ĩú 㞔ä
Ĩ巢 ĒĨ啵 Ĩ⻸ Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㛋 Ĩ徉Ĩ୐ Ĩ⻸ Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㚧 ĨÛ媎 Ĩ⸞ Ĩṏ þĨ㷨 Ĩ弥 ä䁔 ĨîþäĨ弥 ä䅝 Ĩ㷨 Ĩî㚦äĨÛ㛋 Ĩ㺸 Ĩü äĨ㎪ Ĩ㷨 Ĩú 㞔ä
ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ⸞ Ĩṏ þĨ㷨

Ĩ࿀Ĩûî㖵ĨìäïßĨÛ恀 îĨþĨ⽈ Ĩ㷨 Ĩü ‫܉‬ï ĨÛ(Irony)Ĩ勉 宪 ĨÛ和 㫤Ĩì⠩ĨÛç äíĨî㌀ äĨÛ⽈ Ĩ㷨 Ĩě ㏠ Ĩ᱓ Ĩé ß
Ĩ‫ ܫ‬᯳Ĩ抁Ĩ嬸 Ĩᳮ ĨîþäĨ嵗 Ĩ剡 Ĩė 抂 Ĩ㺸 Ĩú 㞔äĨṎ Ĩ嵖 ‹Ĩ嗚㨱Ĩ婨Ĩïä垆äĨ塴 Ĩ㱾Ĩ之 Ĩé ᎹĨð äĨ㺸 Ĩ㛸 Ĩ岫 ĨÛ嵗 Ĩṏ ᠢĨęì徉ï
Ĩ啵 Ĩ㚧 Ĩ㷨 Ĩð äĨîþäĨ很 ßĨ㨱 Ĩ૽ Ĩûî㖵Ĩìä吴 Ĩ㥃Ĩð äĨ㊯ ࣢ ĨᎹ㨱Ĩ媎 Ĩê þ䶊 Ĩ㱾Ĩ徰 ⻸ Ĩ准 Ĩ抁ຩĨઔ Ĩ弥 㱾Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ徉ìĨ㨱
Ĩ啵 Ĩ⻂ Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵕 ‹Ĩ䨆೥ Ĩ媎 Ĩ೧ Ĩ抁Ĩ啵 Ĩîþì Ĩ㺸 Ĩ⽈ Ĩ㷨 Ĩě ㏠ Ĩᇆ ĨĜė 峤Ĩ䅍 Ĩᥢ ࢑Ĩå äìßĨ㺸 Ĩ徰 ⻸
Ĝ嵗 ĨᎹßĨ⸞ Ĩ愝 Ĩù þíĨ㩴 ĨÛ嵗 Ĩü ᄲ Ĩ㷨 ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢ĨĚ 㴒 ĨṎ Ĩì⥊ ä

承 ෂ ᔇĨ婨Ĩ承 ⾥ Ĩ嵉 Ĩᣲ ßĨû㥃Ĩ婨Ĩ啵 Ĩ和 㔢
承 團 ï Ĩ嵉 Ĩᣲ ᱑Ĩ㦣 ĨᠢĨäጌ Ĩ愝 Ĩù þíĨ峤 ĨṎ

Ĩîäþäጌ Ĩ㷨 Ĩî⻿ ĨîþäĨ岭 íĨě ࢓Ĩ愡 äĨìä仮 Ĩ࿀Ĩ彫 ᔌĨþĨㅅ ᔊĨ㜋 Ĩᄣ äĨęþĨ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ䰋 Ĩð äĨĚ ࢓ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢Ĩ㷨 Ĩú 㞔ä
Ĩ㺸 㨱Ĩ㝊 Ĩå 㦀 äĨ⸞ Ĩė 慢 ᒌ ĨîþäĨç 嗚唻 Ĩⴣ ⴤĨîþäĨ㗚 ᰉĨÛĚ㚧 ĨÛ㐍 Ĩ乾 Ĩ㺸 Ĩå 克 ĨþĨù 俬 Ĩ嬸 Ĩᳮ Ĩ嵗
ǖ
Ĩᄣ äĨ࿀Ĩð äĨ㺸 㨱 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ塴 Ĩ备 Ĩᄭ äĨƮnjǎƸŐƨƲĨ㷨 Ĩü äĨîþäĨ嵗 Ĩ䬊ĨⰊ Ĩ啵 Ĩç ╌ þĨ㷨 Ĩ㊂ ‫܉‬Ĩᄭ äĨ㱾Ĩç äᰣ Ĩ㺸 Ĩü ä
Ĩ䦡 ㌑Ĩ愡 äĨṎ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ䅋 Ĩ㷨 Ĩ⸞ Ĩîä㟣 äĨü äĨ㪮 Ĩ㷨 Ĩ墶 ĨþĨî婧Ĩð äĨ㺸 Ĩü äĨÛėß࢑Ĩ恔仁 ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ徉ìĨ㨱 Ĩᔶ 亾 Ĩ壸 Ĩ㥃Ĩ⻂
Ĝ嵉 Ĩîä㟣 äĨ㷨 Ĩ徊 ᠬ Ĩ䱐 Ĩ࿀Ĩð äĨîþäĨ孈 亽

44 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Ĩð äĨĜ㷩 Ĩ࿀Ĩ⩥ Ĩᣲ äíĨ䕯 ⛪Ĩĕ äîìäĨ㥃Ĩ廝 仅 Ĩęì㨱Ĩäጌ Ĩ㺸 Ĩ徊 ᠬ Ĩ倱 Ĩ……啵 Ĩ㋖ ីĨᔊĨⵧ þĨ愡 äĨ嬸 Ĩė 媈 ä
Ĩþìî äĨ㺸 Ĩ㑷 Ĩð äĨ⸞ Ĩᳮ Ĩä峤Ĩå 咍 㥃Ĩ啵 Ĩ嬸 㨱Ĩラ ⓥĨ㣵 㖵ßĨîþäĨ弥 ⧲ Ĩ悇 äĨ愡 äĨìṎþĨ婨ä㍚ ⹢Ĩ㥃Ĩü äĨê ㈲
Ĝ嵗 îĨûþ丙 ……ä⻸

ǖ
Ĩü äĨĜĜĜ慥 ìĨ婨Ĩ㨱 峤Ĩäîþ䰮Ĩ⸞ Ĩç äíĨᄣ äĨ㱾Ĩ㚧 Ĩ⻴ Ĩ೧ Ĩ㩴 ĨÛ㛆 Ĩ徉Ĩ峤 Ĩø ᖯ ĨÛƮ ǎƸŐŪĨ徉Ĩ峤 Ĩ㊐ þĨ嬸 Ĩė 媈 ä

ĚîþìĨ⸞ Ĩ䅎 垆ï Ĩ㛆 Ĩ嵗
Ĩ嬸 Ĩė 媑 äĨ……㲢 îĨ媎 ĨäþîĨ㱾Ĩ抜 þîĨ婨ä卬 Ĩç ㏠ Ĩ徉Ĩ䬉壔 äĨ很 峤Ĩᥢ ૾Ĩ㚧 þᳬĨ㱾
Ĩì䕘 äĨç ╌ þĨě ‫ ޤ‬Ĩ㺸 Ĩ抜 塴 Ĩ㺸 ĨìṎ䪫äĨç ╌ þĨø ᖯ ĨÛê ㈲ Ĩⴣ äĨĜ徉૾Ĩ婨堆 Ĩ㥃Ĩ៶ Ĩ㱾Ĩė 㽿 ࢑ĨîþäĨ崣 ĨîþäĨ㲂
Ĩ䰋 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ婧Ĩᕹ Ĩ㷨 Ĩû塳 Ĩ㑽 Ე äĨ嬸 Ĩė 媈 äĨ啵 Ĩð äĨÛ嵗 Ĩᗻ Ĩ㥃Ĩ⣜ ⴤĨᚪ Ĩė Ṑ Ĩ……㷩 Ĩú 㞩 Ĩ㱾Ĩ抜 塴 Ĩ㺸
Ĝ徉૾Ĩ䱰 剚Ĩø 寀Ĩ㱾Ĩ徰 îᷙ ĨîþäĨ㷩 Ĩᔯ Ĩ㱾Ĩç 㣡ĨĚìä壅 ä

ĨĜ徉ìĨ㨱 Ĩ庾 ㅨ Ĩ和 ìßĨä࢓Ĩ愡 äĨ嬸 Ĩ䅎 ìṎ吴 Ĩû㍗ Ĩ㷨 Ĩ徰 äþîĨĚ ࢓Ĩ㷨 ĨĚî妊Ĩ塵 Ĩ啵 ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢Ĩþìî ä

Ĩ媎 Ĩ啵 Ĩû㫤Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㩴 ĨîþäĨÛ嵉 Ĩᥢ ᱑Ĩ很 ຩĨø で þäĨî㟣 Ĩᳮ Ĩ㺸 ĨĚ ㍚ ⹢Ĩ啵 Ĩû㫤Ĩ㺸 >嫄 ä哶 @Ĩü ä
ĨĜᥢ ᱑Ĩ很 ຩ

å ᎹĨþĨå ßĨęþĨ壮 þîĨęþĨú ᵮ ĨęþĨî婧Ĩęþ
å 㖻ßĨ㺸 Ĩ嬸 䰮ï Ĩ垆‹Ĩ㺸 Ĩ䂺 Ĩ㺸 Ĩä寄ï
˥‫ٱ‬ǎ Ĩ⋳ Ĩ⡜Ĩä帻 垆äĨ啵 ĨėṐ Ĩ෵ Ĩ愡 Ĩ࢕
䅏 ĨßĨᄰĨü äĨú äþï Ĩ㲁 Ĩᡁ Ĩ婨Ĩ巋 ĒĨ೧ Ĩü ì

Ĝ嵗 Ĩ㥃Ĩ䟊 Ĩ啵 Ĩþìî äĨ㱾Ĩ‫ راﻣﺎﺋﻦ‬ęìäî äĨä哶

Ĝ嵗 Ĩ㠔 Ĩ㥃Ĩ嬸 㨱Ĩᷗ ᔊĨþìî äĨ㥃Ĩ‫ﺘﺎ‬６‫ﮔ‬ĨᠢĨ㷨 Ĩç ㍗ 仅 Ĩ嬸 Ĩ嬸 䰮ï

恔⹢Ĩ嵗 Ĩûᝯ嗚Ĩ೧ äĨç 弄㥃Ĩ抁
ė‫ٵ‬ƬĽǎƶƓĨ㯴 Ĩě äĨウ ĨûìĨ䰮ìĨ嵗 Ĩ峭 îßĨ㲁

How to Read Iqbal? 45

峤ĨĚî婧Ĩ㲁 Ĩ峤Ĩ㷨⛪Ĩ㷨Ĩご Ĩ寄Ĩ嵗 Ĩ愡 äĨ◟

承 ⑺ Ĩú ìĨ㥃Ĩě îíĨ㽻 äĨᦑ Ĩ㥃Ĩ〙 î⠩Ĩ䫩

⸞ Ĩ㥵 ࢑Ĩ㷨Ĩ㛸 ĨᠢĨ嵗 ‹Ĩ㛸 Ĩⓦ で Ĩęþ
㇌ Ĩê ㈲ Ĩ㷨 Ĩ⹰ Ĩ⸞ Ĩ呅 Ĩü ࢌĨᦑ

㱦 Ĩ和 Ĩ悫 垆äĨ匇 äìĨ୤Ĩ㾧 Ĩę⋖ Ĩė äï
㱦 Ĩ和 Ĩ〡 ĨîìĨþĨûî㘚 Ĩ和 Ĩ〙 î⠩

ì恙î þ㘄Ĩ恔þ᱑Ĩú ì࢑Ĩú ï äĨî婧Ĩė⋏
Ǖ
ì恙î þ㘄Ĩ 〙 î⠩Ĩ Ěî‫ٱ‬ĴƟƖǎƸnjƱĨ ęîíĨ 㽻

嫆 Ĩ䰮Ĩûì亾 ĨïäĨ㨵 Ĩ⣜ äĨ徊 㓲 Ĩ劖 Ĩ㺭

å ষ ìïþࢌĨⅳ Ĩ㽻 äĨ㜒 Ĩ๵
Ĩå ä⠩ĨîìĨ儭 Ĩě þî 恔ì 垆ä噫
ė ä兌 Ĩ๵ Ĩ⨛ ĨîìĨ㱩 Ĩî㕽Ĩ㺸
å ⓧ îþ冼 Ĩ 嫆 Ĩ ࡃ Ĩ ㄹ ä㕽

Ĩõ䏸Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㚧 Ĩú ව ĨĜ孆îĨᠽ Ĩ匇 äìĨ㥃Ĩð äĨ⸞ Ĩ媛僂 Ĩ㺸 Ĩú ව Ĩ䮵 Ĩ㷨 Ĩîþㆈ Ĩ䬉壯Ĩ㷨 Ĩï㈲ Ĩ㺸 Ĩú ව Ĩ嬸 Ĩ䆪 㓈
Ĩ㺸 Ĩ岳 Ĩü þෂ ĨîþäĨ岳 Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ⫌ ᱑Ĩ㷨 Ĩጦ Ĩç ì⿣ Ĩ啵 Ĩç ᯷ Ĩ㺸 Ĩ亾 äĨð äĨĜᡁ Ĩ䆎 ßĨ⸞ Ĩė þ㎄ Ĩ屨 Ĩᄭ äĨ⸞
ĨĜ嵉 Ĩ嵗 îĨエ 㞑Ĩ⸞ Ĩ⯧ Ĩ㱾Ĩç ⚒ Ĩ抁塴 Ĩ㺸 Ĩú ව Ĩⴣ î㖵Ĩ塵 Ĩü 㻠ìä䒭ìĨ憇 ìĨîþäĨ戆 エ 僂

Ĩ䮵 Ĩ屨 äĨ愡 äĨ㥃Ĩ媛ä◷ Ĩງ᳨ Ĩ恗྿Ĩô坞 äĨ㺸 Ĩė 婧侃 Ĩ媛⣝þ岳 Ĩ㯌 Ĩ㷨 Ĩ┍ ㅨ þĨ啵 Ĩü ൞Ĩïä垆äĨ㺸 >匇 吴 @ Ĩü ä
Ĩ㷨 Ĩ┍ ㅨ þĨ惠 ĨÛ㹓 Ĩ抁ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ亾 äĨ和 ï 䆨Ĩ愡 äĨ┍ ㅨ þĨ㷨 Ĩî㌀ äĨ啵 Ĩû㣡Ĩ㭸 ⓥĨø エ ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ೧ Ĩç ᯷ Ĩĕ 嗚Ĩ徰 íä
46 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Ĩᣲ ßĨ塴 Ĩ೧ Ĩ啵 Ĩė 峖 íĨ㑎 Ĩęì徉ïĨ㲝 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ匇 吴 Ĩᡀ ⡜Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㯌 Ĩî㟣 Ĩ㩴 ĨÛ嵗 Ĩû㌑Ĩî㟣 Ĩð äĨė 抂 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ匇 吴 ĨṎ Ĩ㯌

ĨĜ嵉 Ĩ䬮 Ĩę仁 Ĩ㨱 Ĩ⯞ Ĩ弥 ä䁔 Ĩ㱾Ĩ媛൞Ĩᖁ ĨîþäĨ嵉 Ĩᥢ 峤Ĩïþ垆äĨ䗚 Ĩ⸞ Ĩû୥ äĨĜĜĜú ව ĨîþäĨ䆪 㓈ĨΉ Ĩ嵗

Ĩ㷪 ᔊĨ嬸 Ĩ䆪 㓈ĨĜ࢕ ĨîþäĨ嵗 ĨᰨĨþĨê 人Ĩ⡞ Ĩ䰋 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㷪 ᔊĨ丰 ĨĜ㻠峤Ĩ⯟ Ĩ婨Ĩ䆬㓈Ĩ䆪 㓈ĨÛ㛆 Ĩ㥃Ĩú ව
ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ㷩 Ĩęì⤚ äĨ啵 Ĩě î‫܉‬Ĩð äĨ⸞ Ĩú ව Ĩäï亾 Ĩì⠩Ĩ嬸 Ĩ啵 ĨĜ嵗 Ĩⶈ Ĩ⸞ Ĩü ä

ú ව Ĩäï亾
ì㘈 Ĩ㥃Ĩ๥ Ĩ㔯 Ĩⅳ ĨĚ亾 Ĩ徉Ĩ◟ Ĩ嵗
ì㥖 Ĩë ⅁Ĩ抁ĨÛî㲊 Ĩ抁ĨÛ⺍ ìĨ抁ĨÛ啵 ï Ĩ抁
嵗 Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㲃 Ĩ弥㱾Ĩ嵗 Ĩ媎 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㲃 Ĩ弥㱾
ìṎþĨ㥃Ĩ媜ìĨĚᤑ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ媎 Ĩ徉Ĩ嵗 Ĩ⛭ Ĩ㷩
ę㽻 Ĩ抁Ĩ䬉㶠 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ൝⠩Ĩ㨵 Ĩ嬸 Ĩú ව Ĩäï 哶
ì㪨 Ĩ㷨 Ĩᳮ Ĩ峭 îĨ倏 Ĩ୧ Ĩ࿀Ĩ◳ Ĩ尪 ä
≸ Ĩ承 äĨìୢĨė堆 Ĩ๵ Ĩ⩷ þĨ⺍ äìĨ和 Ĩ㽻 äĨú ì 
ìୢĨ᠊ Ĩ啔 Ĩࢸ Ĩï äĨ堍 Ĩėþෂ Ĩ喆 Ĩ妉 î

ĨĜ峤Ĩ⫈ Ĩ᱑Ĩ婨Ĩ徉㻠Ĩ࿀Ĩï⡜Ĩĕ ï 嗚Ĩ⸞ Ĩĕ ï 嗚ĨṎ ĨᎹ峤Ĩ媎 Ĩ恜 äĨö 值 Ĩ愡 äĨ㥃Ĩú 㞔ä

⣜ ⿆ßĨ䰮‫܉‬ĨþĨäጌ Ĩᕌ îㄯ ⣜ 㧭Ĩ ï äĨ 娙ä垆Ĩ äîĨ 儭 Ĩ ラ ä
恡 äĨ ęì㘍 äĨ ᕌ ßĨ þäĨ ï Ⳣ 恡 äĨ ęì亾 Ĩ ìî ä垆Ĩ 儭 Ĩ 㽻 Ĩ 墴
ì⧤ îìĨ 堅 ⣝ßĨ ࢑Ĩ 匇 Ĩ 㚧 ì㪨 Ĩ 和 þîĨ ⻎ 亾 Ĩ 儭 Ĩ ï äî
äᔊĨ垆äì㽻 Ĩ壸 Ĩï äĨï 媜Ĩ๵ äᔊĨ 垆Ĩ ࢛ Ĩ 㲁 Ĩ ⻎ ‫܉‬Ĩ ėßĨ 儭

㰘 ĨᔊĨ⼲ ㌑Ĩ壸 ࢑ĨäîĨì亾 㰘 Ĩ㨱Ĩþ î㱾Ĩ㲁 Ĩì嗼 ĨėßĨ儭

⣜ ä婧 恗ï ĨþĨૐ  ï äĨþäĨ‫ک‬
ì࿀ ⣜ 㧭Ĩ㍚ ⹢ĨėṐ ĨîìĨ垆ä垆Ĩ㨵

How to Read Iqbal? 47

⣜ 㧭Ĩ ㍚ ⹢Ĩ ėṐ Ĩ îìĨ 垆ä垆Ĩ 㨵
⣜ ä婧Ĩ 恗ï Ĩ þĨ ૐĨ ï äĨ þäĨ ‫ک‬
ì࿀
 ǔ
ǘǔ
ïþ㘄࢑Ĩ ìáäìĨ ‫ٱ‬ŖŮƍƲĨ î婧Ĩ ୤Ĩ 㭸⛪
ęࢌĨ î ⻑ Ĩ ú ‫܉‬þ࿀Ĩ ä亾 Ĩ ‫ک‬
îíĨ 寄

 IS IQBAL, THE POET, RELEVANT TO US
TODAY?
The answer to this question could be “Yes”, or “No”, or
“Partly”, depending on what image of Iqbal one has in one’s
mind and also, of course, what sort of person one is. When I
say this, I do not have in mind any special theory of identity,
nothing of the sort that Russell had in mind when he said that
the King, in asking whether Scott was the author of Waverly,
was in fact asking whether Scott was Scott. It is however,
curious that the Iqbal who is talked about and discussed by one
critic is so different from the Iqbal who appears in another
critic’s writings that one is inclined to wonder if they are
talking about the same poet. Now there is nothing bad (and in
fact everything good) in a poet being approached and
interpreted in as many legitimate ways as possible; the fact that
a poet’s work admits of many interpretations is a sure
indication of his being a good poet. The problem arises when
one set of persons believes that a certain poet is good, while
another would have nothing to do with him. Another problem
that arises generally, and especially in reference to Iqbal is that
the reasons that one set of persons, or one critic, adduces to
support the view that a poet is good, are not found by another
group sufficient or even valid to prove that the poet in question
is good. In fact, it often happens that the reasons somebody
offers to show that a certain poet is good, are considered by
some others as proof enough to show that the poet is no good.
As I said just now, these two states of affairs have prevailed
more in Iqbal criticism (and the view of Iqbal that people have)
than in any other criticism. The nearest parallel would be Fani,
about whom some people used to rave and grow ecstatic
50 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

because he was such a “sad” and “pathetic” poet, and some

would turn up their noses in near disgust precisely because he
was so “sad” and full of “pathos”. Even serious critics found it
hard to steer clear of this dualism. One is not sure that the
famous title conferred on him (yāsiyāt kā imām = the chief
priest of the cult or theory of hopelessness) was respectful, or
derisive, or both.
The case of Iqbal is even worse. Here are some typical
examples:
(A) Iqbal speaks to the Muslims and exhorts them to action and
awakening. He is therefore a great poet.
(B) He is therefore not a great, or even a good poet. In fact, his
adulators seem to revere him more as a rabble rouser than a
serious man with a message.
(A) Iqbal has a message for all mankind. So he is a great poet.
(B) No, messages to mankind do not necessarily make a great
poet. And what do we need a message anyway?
(A) Iqbal gave the message of peace and equality among men.
Therefore he was a great poet.
(B) No, his was not really a message of peace, but of one
superman dominating the rest of mankind. He was, indeed, a
reactionary. And even if he did give a message of peace etc.,
let him be awarded some prize as a great statesman, why insist
that he was a poet?
(A) Iqbal wanted Man to be perfect, to be master of his own
destiny. So he was a great poet.
(B) No, he in fact advocated a supreme egoism, he was an
enemy of the masses.
(A) Iqbal was a revolutionary, he championed the cause of the
wretched and the downtrodden, and taught them self-respect
and self assertion. Therefore he was a great poet.
Is Iqbal, the Poet, Relevant to us Today? 51

(B) No, this only means that he was an enemy of the

individual and believed in the blind power of mass hysteria.
(A) Iqbal was a great critic of the West and wanted the East,
especially the Muslims, to regain world leadership. He wanted
a morally ordered world, against the materialistically ordered
world of the West. So he was a great poet.
(B) No, such things do not make a poet; they only make a
social reformer.
(A) Iqbal talks in universal tones, he is not fettered by local or
individual considerations. He has the impersonality that marks
a great poet.
(B) Not at all; this only means that he cared little for human
relationships. His poetry, if it is, poetry, is sterile moralizing.
He does not respond to individual human suffering; he has no
heart.
One could go on like this. The most interesting aspect of
this state of Iqbal criticism is that while some of the adverse
opinions have been stated explicitly (and sometimes modified
or even given up later due to change in fashion or owing to
political expediency) most, if not all, can be deduced from the
writings of the Iqbal worshippers themselves. In their zeal to
praise him for what they think is the essence of his philosophy
or theology, they often say contradictory things or gloss over
the contradictions which are everywhere in Iqbal, and more
prominent in Iqbal than in almost any other poet of his type. I
mean, a poet who used ideas more often than everyday human
experience as the basis and the source of his poetry.
Another interesting point is that the canonization of Iqbal (I
almost said deification, when I thought of Pakistan) has been
going on in Urdu criticism with relentless pressure. His
admirers have brought every possible argument (or at least
mentioned every possible thing) from ontology to the occult,
from theology to thermodynamics in support of their belief.
52 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

This has left a vast but mute majority of readers gasping. It

always needed great courage to find fault with Iqbal; but now it
needs three separate kinds of courage to do so: the courage of
conviction, moral courage and (in Pakistan) physical courage.
The conviction of the best of us would be shaken to see yards
and yards of Iqbal criticism, with every inch packed with the
names of all metaphysicians from Plato to T. H. Huxley, all
theological philosophers from Thomas Aquinas to Shah
Valiullah, all Sufi thinkers from Ibn ‘Arabi to Ashraf ‘Ali
Thānavī, all political scientists from Aristotle to Marx. Not
many of us would remain undaunted in the face of the
onslaught on your ears and eyes carried on day in and day out
by the adulators of Iqbal. And none in Pakistan (and not many
in India) would risk the very real danger to life and limb that an
adverse criticism of Iqbal would entail.
But there can be no doubt that the mute majority exists,
shaken by the noise and bewildered by its lack of response to
Iqbal, its failure to find in Iqbal someone with whom they
could come to terms on a human level. Scores of people have
told me, and quite a few poets and critics and serious students
of poetry among them, that Iqbal leaves them cold. Their
reaction is sometimes expressed apologetically sometimes
diffidently, sometimes defiantly. But as individuals they all
think that they are in a minority, and are therefore silent.
This is why I said at the beginning that the answer to a
question about Iqbal’s relevance could be in the affirmative, in
the negative, or equivocal, depending on which Iqbal you had
in mind, or what sort of Iqbal reader you were. But my point is
that by raising the question of Iqbal’s relevance, we betray an
uneasiness, an uncertainty, about the status of Iqbal as a poet,
and also about our status as his readers. Is Iqbal a poet or a
reformer? Is he a politician or a philosopher? Are we his
readers or his disciples and devotees? Are we his readers or his
followers? For we know that reformist schemes are relevant to
a time and a place; they flourish, then they wither and die or
lose their potency. We know that political ideas gain and lose
Is Iqbal, the Poet, Relevant to us Today? 53

currency; or they become modified or superseded with the

change of time and place. We know that philosophies become
popular or unpopular, fashionable or unfashionable, influential
or weak. They are written about, affirmed, refuted, accepted,
rejected, expanded, contracted, pruned, so forth. We know that
reformers, political thinkers, philosophers, do not have readers
in the way novelists have readers. They have followers,
disciples, advocates. The tragedy of King Lear or the ghazals
of Ghalib can be written about or discussed, but they cannot be
rejected or refuted or accepted or expanded or contracted or
modified or superseded. In short, reformist schemes, political
theories, philosophical formulations can be relevant at one time
or in one place, and not relevant at another time or in another
place. And at all times and in all places, they can be rejected or
accepted or modified. They can be, and are, articles of faith or
unfaith. One can believe, or not believe, in them and order
one’s life accordingly. King Lear or the ghazals of Ghalib do
not need to be believed in, in any sense of the term, except in
the sense that one has to believe that they exist on some level.
But they do not need to be believed in (or refuted) as doctrines.
In other words, the question of relevance does not at all arise in
regard to them.
So the question about Iqbal’s relevance is in fact a
euphemistic version of the question: Is Iqbal a poet? For we
know that doctrines and programmers suffer from the condition
of relevance. If Iqbal were surely known to be a poet, one
would not ask: Is Iqbal relevant to us (or to any one)? Now the
question about Iqbal’s relevance (and therefore his status as
poet) can be raised due to one of the several reasons:
(1) Iqbal is really not a poet, but it would be a pity not to
grant him that status after all a vast bulk of his writings is in
metre—so let’s try to find reasons why we should crown him
as a Poet.
(2) Iqbal is really not a poet, let us have it out, and say that
he was a philosopher or whatever.
(3) Iqbal is an inconsequential poet: we should read him as
54 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

students read philosophy. He can’t stand on his poetry alone.

(4) Iqbal is poet as well as philosopher; his poetry is
relevant, his philosophy may or not be.
(5) Iqbal is really a poet; so the question of his relevance is
irrelevant and unreasonable, and let’s say so.
I quarrel with the first reason on the grounds of its being
hypocritical. I admire the second and the third for their
honesty, but disagree with them for they are not true. I dislike
the fourth because it is shallow and uncritical. The philosophy
(if any) is in the poetry. We cannot separate the two and say
that one is relevant while we don’t care if the other is so or not.
I take my stand with the fifth reason, and hold that the question
of Iqbal’s relevance is irrelevant. I go further and say that the
question has been raised because Iqbal criticism has done a
great disservice to him and to Urdu literature by turning itself
away from poetry and engaging itself in fruitless speculations
or investigations about Iqbal’s “concept” of time, Iqbal’s
“views” on selfhood, on Man, on the Regeneration of Islam,
Iqbal’s debt to Nietzsche, Bergson, Rumi, and so on. Is it not a
pity that we are made to read Iqbal’s long poem “Masjid-i-
Qurtuba” as a statement on the theory of Time and Man’s
selfhood as expressed through ‘Ishq, and not as a poem? Is it
not a pity that the critics debate the ideas expressed in the poem
as true or false in philosophical, and not poetic terms? Does
one, should one, read Iqbal’s line zulmat kade men mere shab-e
gham ka josh hai, as true or false in philosophical terms? I
have no quarrel with philosophy, but I do not want to substitute
it for poetry; just as I do not want to substitute poetry for
philosophy. Would philosophers agree to have, say, Critique of
Pure Reason read as a poem? Philosophers have, in fact,
always inveighed against metaphor (which is the source of all
poetry) and have sought to ban it from rational argument. Then
why should literary critics agree to have poetry read as
philosophy? Why should they try to gain “respect” for poetry
by insisting that it is not poetry?
Anyway, the question has been raised, is Iqbal relevant to us
Is Iqbal, the Poet, Relevant to us Today? 55

today? Let’s try to answer it from outside. Let’s say that Iqbal
is relevant because the things that he talks about are relevant.
Let’s try to reduce his poetry to its main themes, which, some
people say, are its essence. This method is not entirely new in
literary criticism. It was made influential by St. Beuve and is
still considered respectable in France. Thus Jean Prevost, after
devoting years of study to Baudelaire stated (1953) that his
main themes were Death, Evil and Love. But he also said that
Baudelaire does not have so many themes as Victor Hugo, and
in fact Flowers of Evil would be intolerable if it were twice its
present size. No doubt he meant it as a tribute to Baudelaire,
but he leaves us guessing if the intolerability would be because
the themes are too few, or because the themes cannot be
sustained artistically over a larger book. So this kind of
criticism always raises the problem of the comparative intrinsic
merits of themes, and also their absolute merit. Can one
compile a list of the themes that make great poetry, and can
one say to what extent a theme or certain themes should be
treated to ensure greatness? The answer is, obviously and
emphatically, No. We can’t really achieve much by listing
Iqbal’s themes. But may be the list will tell us something
negatively? For example, we know that there is no Love in
Iqbal’s poetry (in the sense that it is in Baudelaire), and very
little Death (except in the conventional sense of people dying
and affording Iqbal opportunity to moralize about the
transience of things, life after death, and [occasionally] about
regeneration). Also, there is no Evil in Iqbal. Even his Satan is
sometimes a figure theatrically decked out in tinsel and silver
foil, at other times he is an abstract concept very occasionally
he is the symbol of revolt and self-determination. So Iqbal’s
themes are not Baudelaire’s themes.
But perhaps it is unfair to mention Baudelaire against Iqbal.
Let us say Dante. Now what are Dante’s themes? The Soul’s
spiritual journey, Christ’s vision as the Saviour, the existence
of a moral order in the universe. These themes (except that
instead of Christ as Saviour, we have Muhammad as the
56 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

perfect leader and the source or all knowledge) are to be found

in Iqbal too. But do we question Dante’s relevance? If not, why
do we feel concerned about proving or not proving that Iqbal is
relevant? Obviously, Dante is Dante because he used certain
themes. Just as Iqbal is Iqbal because he used certain themes.
But the readers and critics of Dante know that he was a poet
not because he used certain themes, but because he used them
in a particular manner. The mere use of the themes did not
make him a poet. Many ideas and a large part of The Divine
Comedy’s scheme are common between Ibn ‘Arabī and Dante.
But while Dante is a poet, Ibn ‘Arabī is not a poet. (I am
talking about two categories of persons, one not necessarily
superior to the other.) So the point is that mere enumeration of
themes will not help to prove a person’s being a poet, or even
being relevant. For a theme may be treated in such a way as to
show that though old, yet it is still relevant. The matter finally
hinges on how a certain theme has been used.
But the moment we talk about how a theme has been used,
we have moved away from the realm of idle philosophic
pronouncement about the comparative merit or usefulness or
relevance of themes. Rather, we are in the realm of literary
criticism. We are no longer concerned with true or false
statements or with teachings and doctrines which can be
rejected or accepted or modified. Rather, we are concerned
with metaphorical statements. For the only way that a certain
theme can be used more than once (by the same poet or by
more than one poet) without compromising its essence and yet
making it seem or sound different is to state it metaphorically.
Once stated metaphorically, the theme passes from the realm of
relevance, because we judge of things’, relevance in terms of
their being true or false in a certain time and at a certain place.
(Hegel made much of this; he declared that a thing that is true
today need not be true tomorrow. I suspect that those who talk
of poetry’s relevance are Hegelians without knowing it.)
Metaphorical statements make no claim to being true or false
(or testable and modifiable). They represent states of mind;
Is Iqbal, the Poet, Relevant to us Today? 57

criteria of validity do not apply to them. A statement can be

metaphorical because it uses metaphors and/or because it itself
is a metaphor. Sometimes a metaphor can be used to express
another metaphor too. But the main point is that a metaphorical
statement need not strike us as true in terms of either sense-
data or logic or axiom or a priori knowledge; that is, in terms
of whatever means we usually employ to know about the
existence of things.
It is true that many philosophers of language have tried to
prove that a metaphor also is a true or a false statement and so
can be used to convey knowledge. They deny that metaphors
convey any special kind of knowledge which cannot be judged
in rational terms. But to deny that metaphors convey a special
kind of knowledge does not prove that metaphors can be true
or false statements. Other linguistic philosophers hold that
metaphors do not exist, in the sense that there is no such thing
as a metaphorical statement; all statements are literal. Yet
others hold that there are no separate metaphorical statements,
for all language is metaphorical. These theories
notwithstanding the fact remains that in poetry we do
encounter metaphors whose literal content is very different
from what they seem to “say”, and even if all language is
metaphorical, a certain language seems to be more
metaphorical than others. To me it seems saner and safer to
stand with Hobbes, Locke and others and assert that
metaphorical statements are useless for rational discourse. For
this affirms the primacy of metaphor in poetry.
Iqbal, and all other persons, in so far as they are poets, let us
into a world that lives on metaphor. One might almost say it
lives metaphorically. Questions of relevance or irrelevance do
not apply to such a world. The question that applies is whether
it lives. Edgar Allan Poe denied that there could be a long
poem because it was not possible to sustain the intensity of
poetic creation for any length of time; Valery denied for more
or less the same reasons that there could be something which
was wholly a poem. These denials were really warnings. For
58 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

they meant that metaphoric vision was very hard to sustain;

“reality”, or whatever we call it, broke in again and again.
Poets at all times have fought against the tendency of “Reality”
to destroy metaphor. Yeats is a classic example of it. Iqbal did
not fight too often and too hard. He seems to have thought that
“reality” was valuable, even if drab. To the extent of and
according to the number of times that he let go of metaphor, he
laid himself open to inquiries about his relevance. Even a
casual comparison of a few pages of Bāl-i-Jibrīl with a few of
Zarb-i-Kalīm will make my point clear.
 IQBAL’S ROMANTIC DILEMMA

The problem that I want to tackle here can be stated briefly:

Why does not Iqbal appeal to the younger generation in the
same way as for instance Ghalib does? Iqbal appeals to me
(though I do not respond to all of him as I respond to all of
Mir) but he holds no attraction for many of my age group. I am
no longer a member of that much misunderstood band called
the “younger generation”. Yet the fact that some of my own
age group do not take kindly to Iqbal shows that the
comparative coldness toward Iqbal of most people under thirty
and of practically all non-native young students of Urdu poetry
is a phenomenon not entirely local or entirely new. Is it only a
swing of the historical pendulum? Or has Iqbal been so long
and so much venerated and adulated that he has become a sort
of forbidding father figure, to be given respectful obeisance
from a distance but with whom close encounter must be
avoided? Has he become something like Milton whom every
one acknowledges but nobody reads or enjoys? But Milton, we
see, is bouncing back into the arena of literary taste, very much
alive and very much a figure of our time. We are informed in
C. A. Patrides’ Milton’s Epic Poetry that “it is Milton, not
Donne, who is the poet of our time, who speaks in our idiom”.
It is not many years since Iqbal’s death. Our language or
even poetic practice has not changed so much since his time as
to make him an alien figure in our midst. So far as moral or
metaphysical content is concerned, Iqbal’s and Milton’s God
are not very different because Milton too placed “the divine
beyond the reach of the human” in the sense that God’s reach is
every-where but man can reach God “or is able to enter into a
60 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

relationship with him . . . only to the extent that God has made
available certain ways of understanding or certain forms of
relationship”. Yet Iqbal leaves most young people cold while
Milton, so claim his modern admirers, speaks to us in the way
that we would like to be spoken to. Thus the problem is not
entirely of Iqbal’s so called philosophical or metaphysical ideas
or his highly formalised language. The answer must be found
elsewhere. I think it is partly in the history of Iqbal criticism
and partly in Iqbal himself.
A formidable mass of exegeses has grown on and around
Iqbal, dealing with him mainly as a philosopher, a reformer, a
political prophet, a champion of Islam, a mystic, a seer, a man
devoid of most human weaknesses. Trivial details of his day to
day life and his sayings have been documented in loving,
almost idolatrous, detail. Iqbal the poet has been largely
ignored. A pseudo-Iqbal has been built up and his readers have
been expected to believe that Iqbal the poet subsists through
the medium of this pseudo-Iqbal. This enterprise worked with
the earlier generation. It worked so well that even the
Progressives, who initially condemned Iqbal as a fascist and
reactionary, later on found reasons to admire what they thought
was his revolutionary outlook and his celebration of Man as the
champion of progress and the enemy of the dark forces of anti-
revolution. But this does not satisfy the younger people who
demand that poetry should be good as poetry, not as
philosophy. They prefer a doubtful philosopher but good poet
like Baudelaire to a good philosopher but bad poet that Iqbal’s
idolaters seem to imply him to be.
Even on the purely literary level, Iqbal has often been
admired for wrong things or wrong reasons. For example, he
has been described as a symbolist i.e. either a user of symbols
or a follower of the French poets who called themselves so. Yet
neither kind of symbolism prevails in Iqbal. D. W. Harding
says that “a symbol is a representation of which the general
nature is evident but the precise range and boundaries of
meaning are not readily specified, perhaps not usefully
Iqbal’s Romantic Dilemma 61

specified”. A symbol-word is a kind of incomplete key to a

mystery, but the symbol-word makes this much clear: both the
key and the mystery are charged with significance. As Bedil
said:
O there are so many meanings that because of the alienness
of language
Remained motionless behind curtains of mystery in spite of
all their restless playfulness
Harding might be elucidating Bedil when he says: “If it is in
any sense a symbol we may neither of us, reader or author, be
confident in detaching a limited or translatable meaning
because we are not certain what aspects of the event and what
associations of the words describing it can be ruled out as
irrelevant”. Iqbal lacks the sense of mystery, of the
unknowable, that symbolist writing so often reveals. The
moment we are told that Iqbal wrote in symbols, we feel
sceptical because in spite of his frequent verbal complexity
(which also has been often ignored) we find that his voice
generally speaks to us in plain, often too plain tones.
In the introduction to their vast compendium entitled The
Modern Tradition, Ellman and Feidelson have said that though
all romantics are not symbolists, yet all symbolists are
romantics of some kind. This points toward the basic issues
from which Iqbal’s creative problem emerges. “Whatever else
he may affirm, the symbolist holds that human imagination
actively constructs the world we perceive or at least meets it
more than half way, and does not merely reflect the given form
of external objects . . . As an exponent of imagination . . . he is
likely to be impatient with abstract reason, the God of
philosophic idealism, and to disparage all mental powers
except the concrete imagination. At his most extreme, he
would say that the logic is mere police work and memory mere
book keeping . . . . He would contend that . . . the verbal
symbol, the language of a poem– is the key to the relation of
mind and nature . . . and that its maker, the artist, is the truly
heroic man”. It is obvious that in spite of his insistence on
62 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

direct knowledge through ishq (Love) and his condemnation of

the false, indirect knowledge through ‘ilm (philosophy or
science), Iqbal believes in no such idealised role for the poetic
word that the symbolist assigns to it. To the symbolist, the
word is not merely the vehicle of expression; it is expression.
The symbolist doctrine is basically a doctrine of the language
of poetry. As M. H. Abrams has shown, different views about
the poetical word lead to different kinds of poetry and different
theories about it.
Did Iqbal have a conscious poetic to work from? We do not
know for certain, but I think not. His observations on the
theory and practice of poetry as reflected in occasional remarks
in his letters, prefaces and lectures reveal a singularly uncritical
mind. (This of course does not reflect on him as a poet, but that
is beside the point). He makes such routine remarks about the
uses of poetry as one would expect of an uncritical disciple of
Plato. Salim Akhtar devotes one whole chapter of a book to
what he is pleased to call “Iqbal’s critical sensibility” but can
find nothing better than his famous remarks apropos of Hafiz
that “if a poet’s writings aid and help the purpose of (social)
existence, then he is a good poet and if his poems are opposed
to life or have a tendency to weaken and depress the force of
life, then that poet is harmful, especially from the national
point of view”. About rhyme and metre, Iqbal’s remarks are
equally inane. He is opposed to blank verse and states that
rhyme as well as end rhyme (radif) are good for ghazal and
ruba‘i: Nazm does not need end rhyme, but must have rhyme.
Consider this simplistic-dogmatic conventionality against the
objections of Milton and Blake to rhyme and its defence and
affirmation by Valéry who states that “rhyme establishes a law
independent of the poem’s theme and may be compared to be a
clock outside of it”. John Hollander discusses this and other
views about rhyme and comes up with the conclusion that
rhyme has a dialectical function. “Rhyme links syllables and
thereby words, and thereby lines, and thereby large versified
structures, and at each level of linkage, it performs another sort
of ‘musical’ or ‘rhetorical’ work”. I do not say that Iqbal
Iqbal’s Romantic Dilemma 63

should have thought or said these things. I want only to

emphasise that a symbolist has a particular kind of poetic
which is based almost on a deification of the word and which
flows from a deep sense of the mystery of the external world.
By describing Iqbal as a symbolist we do him injustice and put
off the reader from Iqbal when he finds that contrary to what he
has been taught, Iqbal was no symbolist.
Iqbal’s tragedy was not that he did not know or practise the
symbolist doctrines. Rather, he was a romantic, but by avoiding
overt Romanticism and rejecting or not exposing himself to
symbolistic ideas, he closed off from himself a wide vista of
expression which his nature as a romantic demanded and
yearned for. Since all symbolists are romantics, it follows that a
romantic symbolist would have greater resources at his
command than a mere romantic. His greatest advantage would
be that he would be free to dream and to lament if his dreams
were taken away from him. Plato said that while dreaming, the
wild beast in us becomes rampant and our untamed
lawlessnesses reveal themselves in dreams. This is not very far
from Freud, but in Plato this becomes the raison d’etre for his
distrust of the poet as dreamer. Iqbal apparently disliked
Platonic idealism; he says:
Plato is pining, restless between absence
and observation by presence;
Since eternity the place of reason-worshippers
has been betwixt and between.
Yet Iqbal’s own view of art is generally Platonic. Instead of
dreaming, he tries to theorise; instead of discovering or
uncovering, he tries to believe that he knows. Northrop Frye
defined the lyric (and by implication, the romantic) poet as an
“isolated individual”, talking to himself or a personal friend or
even to an object. The romantic impulse is inward looking and
is often sad without cause. Germaine Brée, quoting Camus, has
summed up the entire modern-romantic artist’s situation.
Camus said that “the writers that preceded us, when they
doubted, doubted their own talent. Today artists question the
64 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

very meaning of their art, their existence”. Van Tiegham, who

found no less than one hundred and fifty definitions of
Romanticism in the teeth of Valéry’s assertion that “only a
person who had lost all sense of precision could attempt to
define” it, was yet able to distinguish dissatisfaction with the
contemporary world and restless anxiety in the face of life as
the fundamental features of Romanticism. Nietzsche described
the Romantic Truth very well in saying that art was the “cult of
the untrue” which made tolerable “the insight into delusion and
error as conditions of intelligent and sentient existence” that
science has given us. “We must rest ourselves occasionally by
contemplating and looking down upon ourselves”. Nietzsche
held that all “great spirits are sceptics. . . Men of conviction are
not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions
of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons”. The symbolist
claims to see the word as The Mystery; the romantic doubts the
validity of most things, except perhaps dreams. In poetry, they
both reject Reason as well as Mimesis. Now where does Iqbal
stand in the back-ground?
I will attempt to resolve this question by quoting from three
poems in Bang i Dara, each dealing with the state of man. The
first is entitled “Insan aur bazm i qudrat” (Man and the
Company of Nature.) Man asks Nature:
The morning is truly and wholly a song of thy power,
There is not even a sign of darkness underneath the Sun.
I too am an inhabitant of this city of light;
Why did then the star of my destiny burn itself out?
Then Nature, who is obviously Iqbal’s own theological self,
draws upon a couple of Quranic verses and a hadith and
reproves the protagonist for being caught in the web of
yearning and desire and says that he would not be “black of
day or deed” if he knew his essence:
If thou knewest thy essence,
Thou wouldst not be black of day or deed.
Iqbal’s Romantic Dilemma 65

The second line can also be translated as “There would not

be black day or deed then”. But the intent is unmistakable. That
a poet, grown up in the early days of European modernism and
exposed in comparative youth to the German modernists like
Hoffmansthal who had said in 1893 that modernism is both
“analysis of life and the flight from life” and it is “the
instinctive, almost somnambulistic surrender to every
revelation of beauty, to a harmony of colours, to a glittering
metaphor, to wondrous allegory” could still think of such
simplistic solutions to existence, is somewhat surprising. But
the Romantic attitude is still evident in the invention of a
dialogue between the protagonist and Nature who actually ends
up as the main figure in the poem. It is not a very good poem,
not only because it hands out platitudes about the world,
beautiful through the bounty of the Sun, and about Nature
really being a mere creature of God and whose well-being
depends upon the bounty of the Sun, while Man’s inner self is
illuminated through his own powers. The poem has some
minor distinct stylistic faults too and seems to be suffering
from an excess of words. Despite the Romantic device of
dialogue and personalization of the inanimate, the facile
conclusion of the poem shows Iqbal the Romantic in abeyance.
The spirit of questioning is quickly made quiescent by
preconceived logic. It is an immature romantic poem,
reminiscent of Shelley in his weaker moments. The poet’s
assumptions about man and universe are elementary and
uncritical. The didactic content is not integrated into the poem,
but is plainly superimposed.
But the second poem, entitled “Insan” (Man) is of a
different order altogether:
It is a peculiar irony of nature that
It made man a mystery and yet
Kept the mystery hidden from him.
Restless and eager is the desire and love of knowing,


This line can also be translated as “it made man a seeker of mystery”.
66 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Yet the secret of life opens itself not.

Wonder is the beginning, wonder the end
What else could a mirror-house contain?
The poem starts with questioning and wonder. Man himself
is a mystery. The mystery is hidden from him, thus man
himself is hidden from himself. The universe is like a mirror-
house, reflecting a multiplicity of images; yet everything is
unreal because all images are unreal and also because one does
not know whose images these are, reflected thus in
endlessness. Although the mirror-house is mentioned casually
and not fully exploited as it would have been by Ghalib or
Bedil, yet it performs its basic function of’ pointing up the
hopelessness of wondering because although a mirror-house
reflects images, it itself cannot evaluate them. It may ultimately
become the image itself, but cannot know its nature. Wonder is
a quality of the mirror also, because the figure reflected in it
keeps silent, as wonder-struck people are. The clearer the
mirror, the sharper the image; and the sharper the image the
greater the wonder because it is the clarity and sharpness of the
image that makes the mirror and image wondering, and
therefore silent. Then the mirror is like the fourth dimension; it
may show a door where no door is, it creates the illusion of a
passage, a direction, even though all is looked and barred. Man
lives in a mirror-house, or man himself is a mirror house, a
mystery being. Yet nature, which the next few lines of the
poem celebrate, is an open harmony, a joyful companionship
and everything in it is intoxicated with the wine of being. The
waves journey happily within the river; the river merrily
traverses its way to the sea; the cloud sits astride the wind
which flies it from place to place; the stars are imprisoned in
the sky but are intoxicated with the wine of their own destiny
and happy in their imprisonment; the early rising sun drinks the
goblet of dusky wine hidden behind the western hills.
Everything fulfils itself, drunk on its own existence and in the
joy of companionship.
Iqbal’s Romantic Dilemma 67

This is an extraordinary poem, even from Iqbal’s standards.

Not one slack word, not one wasted image and the total
contrast shocks because it is so casually stated. There is
harmony and order in the macrocosm, but disorder and
loneliness in the microcosm which is supposed to be but an
image of the macrocosm. Is then the picture of harmony in the
universe an illusion, or is there really nothing common between
a supposedly sentient universe and sensitive, intelligent
mankind? The poem shows not a world in which “things fall
apart” and “the centre can-not hold” but a world which never
had a centre, in which things never were together. The poem
abounds in images of movement and light and restlessness, but
all light and movement is in the external world. Inside of man,
all is dark alienation. This feeling comes through later too in
some pieces of Bal-i Jibril, but only in tones of muted protest
because by that time Iqbal had assumed the mask of a prophet
and had ensured that all bad little patches and holes where
ordinary human feeling comes through were carefully papered
over. Christ, whose figure has moved all Romantics as a
symbol of human suffering and loneliness (O my God! O my
God! Why hast thou forsaken me?), is kept out of Iqbal’s
scheme of things because Iqbal tried to believe that Rumi and
Ibn ‘Arabī’s convictions were sufficient to dissipate all doubts,
all shadows. He took Rumi to be his mentor, and imagining
himself a Dante, journeyed through the inner universe in
Rumi’s train. But man, simple man, with his “tenderness, joys
and fears,” whose distorted and tortured self obtrudes even in
such a poem of belief as Four Quartets, was jettisoned by Iqbal
somewhere on the way. Consider T. S. Eliot:
Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailings,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
(The Dry Salvages: 49-54)
68 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Four Quartets did not reach the tear-drained and passion-

spent finale of “all manner of things shall be well” and “the fire
and rose are one” without passing through an ordeal of fire. In
contrast, Iqbal in his “Man and the Company of Nature”
reduces everything to trite simple-mindedness. Man is no
longer man, but a concept. Yet in the other poem, the
simplification is of a different order because there the question
has been reduced to essentials and answers are left out. Since
“Insan” (Man) is infinitely the better poem, I conclude that the
Romantic self of Iqbal wanted to write poems of this type, yet
his social and official self led him into dreary deserts of the
moralising expressed in bad poems like “Insan aur Bazm-i
Qudrat” (Man and the Company of Nature). This was Iqbal’s
dilemma and he could never resolve it.
Let’s now consider a third poem. Again entitled “Insan”
(Man), it is a good example of Iqbal’s rhetorical style. In
contrast to “Man and the Company of Nature” which moralises
unashamedly, this poem celebrates man’s potential to reach out
across time and space and become infinite. This is a typical
Sufi thought, and has assumed almost the nature of convention.
Iqbal’s rhetoric forces him into generalities, statements which
lack the power of apocalyptic vision. Using the artificially
conventional images of the blindness of the nargis flower and
immobility of sanobar tree, Iqbal triumphantly declares that
man is superior to them because:
Whatever else is in the world, is slave to submission;
All and each power of man is active demanding and asking.
This particle has at all times a lust for expansion,
May be it is not a particle but a shrunken wilderness.
The thinness of the metaphor brings down the poem almost
to the level of statement. There is no vision here, nothing of the
revelatory, nothing of the mystical Rumi who has been there
and comes back to tell the world what he has seen. Consider
for example Rumi when he enunciates the concept of the
limitlessness of Man because he is a part of the eternally bright
light of God:
Iqbal’s Romantic Dilemma 69

We were vastly spread out and all of one Essence,

There we were all headless and legless.
Like the Sun, we were all one Being,
Pure and unknotted like water.
And when that pure Light assumed appearances,
It became divided like shadows of minarets.
My translation is inadequate but it does bring out the
revelatory tone. Image is piled upon image, metaphor upon
metaphor– and all have been used as simplifying, not simplistic
devices. Iqbal’s rhetorical fulminations reveal a conscious
purpose, a schematic approach, and therefore degenerate into
platitudes.
My point is not that Iqbal’s poem too should have expressed
the doubt and loneliness befitting Romantic poems, true to
Iqbal’s real cast of mind. My point is that in such poems Iqbal
seems to be too facilely believing, too much given to surface
statements which do not really come from the innermost depths
of his existence. He seems to declaim too much, as if trying to
convince himself. That is why the poetry is lost in flat
conceptual statements which do not reveal an ontological but
rather a schematic preoccupation with Man, based inevitably
on formulaic notions which fall short of even a priori notions
and are nowhere near being revelatory.
The problem of Iqbal was that he was essentially a mystic-
romantic like Bedil. But he imposed upon himself the role of a
politico-socio-philosophical person with a message and
practical purpose in life. He had therefore to suppress his
Romantic leanings which would have led him through the
wilderness of Hell before he would hope to win through to the
gates of Heaven. He adopted the voice of a prophet, a solver of
riddles, one who lays down the laws and rules for all things.
Actually he was a soul in distress, as most modern poets have
been. Sacrificing poetry and his own self to politics (in the
most general sense), Iqbal became the victim of his own
conscious mind. C.M. Bowra says that political poetry is the
antithesis of all poetry which deals with the special, individual
70 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

activity of the Self, but even such poetry “must take account of
purely poetical values, must eschew rhetoric and make no
concession to public opinion”. In pouring forth secrets of the
Self and dilating upon the role of Islam in the world, Iqbal
thought that he was giving to the people what he wanted to
give them. But in fact, he was unconsciously playing to the
political environment. Doubtless, his distrust of Western
civilization and faith in Muhammad was a mainspring of his
thought. But then this did not necessarily require the
cacophonous insistence on belief, self-improvement, urge to
power, the commitment to moral and political success, which
we find in his inferior poems. After all, Yeats was very like
Iqbal in many ways. Yet he did not give up his poetic role, he
made “after the manner of his kind/ Mere images”. Iqbal, by
contrast, set out to construct a philosophy. And unfortunately it
is his “philosophical” poems which are held out by critics as
his best. “Masjid-i Qurtuba” (The mosque of Cordova) is a
magnificent but soulless edifice. Yet it has been written about
ad nauseam while a truly great poem like “Zauq o Shauq”
(Desire and love and loving) has been largely ignored. Even in
many of his philosophical poems Iqbal is a great poet, but
because of his poetry rather than his philosophy. He felt like a
romantic, and often wrote like one. In his best work he shows
the same delicate feeling for complex words which is the hall
mark of Shakespeare, the greatest Romantic of them all. Yet he
liked to imagine that he was a thinker first and fore-most, and
that was his dilemma. Pare away the rhetorical and the
philosophical verbiage and the great poet emerges in all his
glory of doubt and anxiety, of vision and apocalypse.
 IQBAL, THE RIDDLE OF LUCRETIUS,
AND GHALIB

It was, I think, Shaikh Abdul Qadir who first drew a

parallel between Ghalib and Iqbal. In his preface to Bang-i
Dara (1924) which was Iqbal’s fourth book of verse
(although his first in Urdu), Abdul Qadir wrote: “Who knew
that after Ghalib, there will again be born in India, a person
who would inspire a new spirit in the body of Urdu poetry
and because of whom Ghalib’s unrivalled imagination and
unique way of saying things would again come into being and
would be instrumental in the growth and strength of Urdu
poetry”. He concludes this paragraph with remarks about the
lucky stars of Urdu poetry and Iqbal’s universal fame. He
starts the next with the simple observation that “there are
many things common between Ghalib and Iqbal” and goes on
to say, reverently if somewhat naively, that had he believed in
metempsychosis, he would have held that Ghalib’s spirit had
been reborn in Iqbal’s body.
This is all or nearly all, on which the whole myth of Iqbal’s
being a poet similar to Ghalib, or at least in the Ghalib
tradition, rests. Some of the standard efforts to establish and
embellish this myth can be found in the writings of Shaikh
Muhammad Ikram, Syed Abdullah, Jagan Nath Azad, Sardar
Jafari and Hamidi Kashmiri. As Hamidi Kashmiri notes in his
Iqbal aur Ghalib (1978), Abdul Qadir’s remarks are general
and unsupported by illustrative examples; Abdul Qadir forgets
that all great poets have “unique styles” and “unrivalled
imaginations”. Kashmiri might also have noted that Abdul
Qadir virtually ignores the Persian of both Ghalib and Iqbal
72 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

and only mentions Ghalib’s “love” (not mastery) of Urdu and

Persian poetry as an after thought in the context of his
metempsychotic fancy, and not as specific point of similarity
between Ghalib and Iqbal. Hamidi Kashmiri rightly says that
the efforts of Ikram, Abdulah and Azad, although more
sophisticated, are no better. Unfortunately Kashmiri’s own
attempt too, occasionally brilliant and mostly right-minded
though it is, fails because it seeks to find what is not there. I
say right-minded because Kashmiri does try to get to the
poetry, rather than the philosophy, and refuses to be content
with such crass or simple minded similarities (if similarities
they are) as “powerful mind and heart”, “thought represented
as feeling”, “special kind of madness,” “patriotic sentiments”,
“knowledge of the self” and so on. But the alternatives that
Hamidi Kashmiri suggests are feeble in their own way, for he
tries to outline the creative and thinking processes of the two
poets and wants to show that it is in this context that Ghalib
and Iqbal are similar as poets. Unfortunately, we know little or
nothing about the creative or thought processes of either Iqbal
or Ghalib, and not much about the creative process in general.
And similarities of poetic devices or practices can be shown in
poets existing as far apart as the Arabs and the Greeks, but
such magnifying glass techniques would not make Imraul Qais
an Arabic Pindar; and a fondness for elaborate similes would
not prove that Homer and Kalidasa wrote in the same tradition.
My point is: granted that being great poets in the same
language, and being great poets in general, Ghalib and Iqbal
should have certain similarities. They do. Also, there should be
certain immanent similarities in all great poetry. There are. But
does this mean that all poets, or any two poets, are necessarily
of the same type, if not the same tradition? The answer is,
obviously, no. Yet since Iqbal has so often been presented by
the critical establishment as the true inheritor of Ghalib’s
sword and mantle, the matter merits a somewhat closer look.
Let’s begin from Iqbal himself. He has an early poem, probably
as early as 1900, on Ghalib. It is a typical poem of Iqbal’s early
period: glittering with hard, high-sounding Persian words
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 73

(though none of them exotic, and never in new or startling

combinations, as was Ghalib’s method), it impresses at first
reading but does not say much. Close reading shows that many
words are mere padding, and that the poem’s deep
reverberations are not of meaning, but of words used in an
unusual, unconventional way, without much regard to meaning.
For example, he talks of “the reach of the wings of the bird of
imagination”. It is obvious that where the bird is, his wings too
will be: so there’s no need to mention the: wings. Then, Ghalib
was spirit or soul “through and through” and “the poetic
assembly was his body”. Here again, the poetic assembly
should have been seen as a gross body, full of charlatans and
dilettantes and clever poetasters and a few genuine poets. So it
could not have really been a fit body for a poet who was spirit
or soul through and through. These are hyperbolic expressions
suitable for a Qasida, not for a tribute to a great predecessor.
Anyway, the most important lines are:
It is not possible to equal you in felicity of expression,
Unless perfect thought be the boon companion of
imagination.
From this we can deduce that Iqbal wanted imagination to
be supported by “perfect thought”, a hazardous enough procee-
ding at the best of times. Coleridge would of course have been
indignant: his “imagination creatrix” worked from what he
called “the shattered fragments of memory” through the
“steamy nature of association”, and for him, the dim “vestibule
of consciousness” or the “twilight realms of consciousness”
were the workshops of poetry. But Iqbal’s own beliefs do not
matter just now. What matters is to know whether Ghalib too
would have agreed that his poetry was, or that poetry in
general, should be the expression of imagination supported by
“perfect thought”; or, more important, is Ghalib’s poetry the
expression of such an imagination? These questions have
always been evaded by critics of Iqbal and Ghalib.
It is undeniable that for Iqbal, Ghalib was always a figure of
fascination. Iqbal’s love of Bedil seems to have waned but
74 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Ghalib seems to have grown in his esteem over the years. Thus
in Javid Nama (1932) we find Ghalib among the few persons
of symbolic power and significance that the Zinda Rud (who is
Iqbal himself) encounters in his journey of the heavenly and
ultra-heavenly spheres. Ghalib inhabits the sphere of Jupiter,
his companions are Hallaj, the mystic and poet who was
declared apostate and murdered by the theologians of his times,
and Qurratul Ain Tahira, a poetess, roughly contemporary with
Ghalib, who was put to death for her adherence to the Babi
faith. What Ghalib could be doing in this mixed company is
any body’s guess. We can presume that Hallaj speaks for all
three when he says (Arberry’s translation):
The free man who knows good and evil,
His spirit cannot be contained in Paradise.
The mullah’s Paradise is wine and houris and page boys,
the Paradise of free men is eternal voyaging;
One assumes that this is also what Iqbal considers Ghalib’s
beliefs to be. That is, Iqbal represents Ghalib as a seeker after a
new order where Paradise may be a place not of conventional
luxury, but of self-understanding, or whatever should be the
true man’s aim. This assumption is confirmed when we see
Iqbal putting into Ghalib’s mouth one of Ghalib’s own ghazals
which seems to call for a new world-order. (It is the famous
ghazal: “Come, let’s reverse the laws of Heaven”. Arberry fails
to note that Ghalib’s address to Zinda Rud is not Iqbal’s, but
Ghalib’s own composition). But Iqbal has unscrupulously
excised some Lines from this ghazal, which now appears to be
a call to a new world-order, instead of the frankly erotic-
invitational ghazal that it really is. Iqbal has excluded verses 2,
3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 15. The 15th verse is the maqta and
makes the meaning very clear:
I and union with you! Ghalib doesn’t really believe this;
Come, let us reverse the laws of Heaven.
Ghalib is not writing a spiritual or political manifesto; he is,
like Whitman, singing of “the body electric”. There is no trace
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 75

of the so called “perfect thought” that Iqbal seemed to admire

so much in Ghalib. Later in the same episode, Iqbal makes
Ghalib address him as “the knower of the mysteries of poetry
like me” (that is, like Ghalib). But Ghalib in fact denies
permission to Iqbal to enter higher mysteries and says that it
would be a sin to say more. He says (Arberry’s translation):
These words overstretch the string of poetry;
the poets have adorned the banquet of words,
but these Moses lack the White Hand.
It is clear that this is Iqbal, not Ghalib, speaking. Ghalib all
his life was a worshipper of words, seeing in them the ultimate
instrument to reveal all meaning. “Poetry is creation of
meaning” was his famous credo. According to Iqbal (as quoted
above) poetry is mere words; it solves nothing. Poets lack the
White Hand of Moses: they have no miracles to perform.
So we see Ghalib and Iqbal working from two different sets
of assumptions. Much has been said by our critics about
Ghalib’s philosophy of life, which does not really exist, and too
little about his very real sense of the livingness of words.
Undoubtedly Ghalib’s poetry has an intellectual vigour
unparalleled in Indo-Iranian poetry, but Ghalib himself had no
claims to philosophical erudition. His friend and contemporary,
Hazrat Ghamgin Khudanuma, a mystic of Gwalior, tried to
express some abstruse aspects of mystic thought in his poetry
and produced ghazals and rubais which are very difficult to
read and understand. Ghalib did not attempt even this much.
There is no such thing as ordered thought in Ghalib. In fact he
disdains mere thought and prefers to talk in terms of
experience. What is often mistaken for philosophy in Ghalib is
just his esoteric and abstract way of looking at things. His
obscurity and ambiguity are admiringly, delightfully or
deprecatingly described as the result of his philosophical cast
of mind. Similarly, his apocalyptic tone is mistaken for a
philosophical way of saying things. Most of Ghalib’s poetry
reveals him as a Romantic, his feelings tempered by a certain
respect for the intellectual and material superiority that
76 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Victorian England had achieved through scientific inquiry. Yet

even this admiration had a certain childlike naiveté, a tendency
to romanticise. Witness his exhortation to Syed Ahmed Khan
not to write about the derelict archaeological remnants of
Delhi, but to observe the “Sahibs of England” who had
launched ships of iron into the seas and made them run by the
power of steam. Iqbal, on the other hand, always liked to adopt
the role of a hard bitten anti-western intellectual who had been
there and had been thoroughly disillusioned. He admired
Nietzsche, yet did not approve of his godlessness and ultimate
madness. In Bal-i Jibril, Iqbal calls Nietzsche “the inspired
madman of the West” and describes him further as “the famous
inspired-mad philosopher of Germany who could not properly
assess the experiences of his heart and so his philosophic ideas
led him astray.” Yet it is precisely where he goes astray that
Nietzsche would seem to meet Ghalib. In Payam-i Mashriq
Iqbal describes Nietzsche as one who:
Dropped a hundred new upsets in the West:
A madman got into a glass maker’s shop!
For it was a consciousness of madness round the corner,
madness in the scheme of things, that oppressed all romantics
from Baudelaire to Wordsworth to Ghalib and Yeats. Contrary
to the happy discovery of Robert Frost that “poetry begins in
delight and ends in wisdom”, Wordsworth wrote:
We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.
Coleridge, in celebrating the state of dreaming as “the
shifting current in the shoreless chaos of the fancy in which the
streaming continuum of passive association is broken into zig-
zag by sensations from within or without” was in fact anti-
cipating the manifesto of the surrealists, the greatest Romantics
of them all. We see Baudelaire cultivating his madness “with
terror and delight” and Yeats coming to terms with the world,


Italics Coleridge’s.
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 77

as Frank Kermode shows, “at the cost, the world being what it
is, of immediate extinction”. Yeats attempts this feat because,
like Iqbal, he lives in the world of politics and reality. Unlike
Iqbal, however, he knows that one can come to grips with only
one thing at a time: life or poetry:
Nor law nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds;
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seem waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death
(An Irish Airman foresees his Death)
It is tempting, though unfair to Iqbal, to compare this with
Iqbal’s rather weak poem, “A Haji on the way to Madina.” Yet
the comparison is legitimate, for both poems spring from the same
kind of impulse; neither law nor duty impels the airman, nor is the
Haji moved by either to go to Madina. Both are driven by the
“lonely impulse of delight”. Yet Iqbal only sermonises and
pontificates. Although he too rates the impulses of the heart above
the cautioning of mind (or reason), he cannot leave the Haji’s
impulse to speak for itself. Like all autocratic spirits, Iqbal does
not trust his subject: he keeps firm control. And the poem comes
out soggy with sentiment and heavy with sermonizing:
The traveller across the wilderness of Hejaz has no fear:
This is the secret in the self-exile of him who lies buried
in Yathrib.
Though security lies in being with the royal train,
Yet the pleasure of love is in the diminution of life that
danger brings.
Oh, this Reason, how clever it is, always weighing
losses!
And. the impulse of man, how bold that is!
So we see that Iqbal’s disdain for reason is merely
78 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

hyperbole, merely a conventional poetic stance. He in fact

preferred to come to terms with life, or philosophy, and let the
madness go. Ghalib did otherwise and so declared boldly and
bitterly:
God, that is, one who is kinder than father,
We roamed from door to door for we were no good.
Iqbal didn’t care for those who were no good: all must do
something. Though Ghalib did not know madness, he certainly
knew despondency and fear and uncertainty. He had also seen
madness, both individual and collective, at close quarters. His
own brother was mad; he nursed him affectionately until his
death. He also saw the British holocaust of the post mutiny
months with his own eyes. (“Delhi is not a town any longer, it
is a camp, a cantonment, an army”, he cried in one of his
letters, even at the risk of displeasing the censors). He also
knew the utter wastefulness, the ultimate futility, of existence.
His poetry is full of the sorrow of unfulfilment, aware of the
final subjection of life to death. In a very early three-part
ghazal he wrote:
Blood not apparent in the heart, I have grown pale;
I am myself like the nest of the colour-bird that has flown,
My face shows signs of regret:
Like the comb I have bitten the back of my hands, all over.
To those who were killed, I give by my poetry the desire to
be restless,
For I am plectrum to the veins of the throat that was cut.
My eyes opened wide, and the garden so eye-alluring;
But no avail, for I am the dew drop that has seen the sun.
The real source and cause of my restless quest never
becomes apparent,
I am tongue-cut, like watery waves.
I, without art or craft, was really the brilliance-principle of
the mirror.
But am a deeply hurting thorn in the foot of people’s eyes.
I sing because of the heat of the joy of my imaginings:
For I am the bulbul of the uncreated garden.
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 79

It is not possible, ever, for me to rest:

In the wilderness of sorrow, I am the deer that has spied the
hunter.
In freedom or bondage, I am full of pain,
Sometimes I am the sigh that is drawn, sometimes the tear
that drops.
Asad, just as the rabid one is scared of water,
I am scared of the mirror, for people have bitten me.
It is not possible, in this brief essay, to even attempt an
analysis of the force and power of the numerous verbal skills
displayed, of the metaphors and images deployed, of the
associative values of the various words drawn freely from
mysticism, esoterism, tradition and environment. But we can
see here the whole spectrum of the Romantic attitude, from
alienation and madness to the voyage of discovery, the love of
the unknown, the tragedy of the failure of communication, the
pressure of dreams, the celebration of unreason, of direct
vision. Iqbal’s poetry is of a different order altogether. No one
who has read these verses (and a thousand similar ones) can
ever seriously believe that Ghalib and Iqbal have the same way
of looking at or thinking about things.
For better or for worse, Iqbal is essentially a poet of hope;
Ghalib is not. Ghalib is a poet of Romantic revelation: Iqbal is
not. Iqbal is a poet with a message; Ghalib is not. For the sake
of the message, Iqbal can sacrifice poetry. Ghalib has no such
problem. For Ghalib, words are the ultimate reality; for Iqbal,
they are the means to another end. Ghalib is the poet of
compression and introspection; Iqbal the poet of dilation and
explication. Both use metaphor, both use verbal skills, but in
different ways. Iqbal’s greatness is in his poetry, not in his
ideas. But the poetry comes from a different drawer: it is in the
tradition of the great Iranian Qasida and Mansavi writers. This
can be seen clearly in his failures in “Lala-e Tur”, the first
section of Payam-i Mashriq. The quatrains are mostly
explicatory or admonitory or verbose. Sometimes I feel
astonished by Iqbal’s ability to stuff so much verbiage into four
80 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

short lines. Yet the longer poems are of a different calibre

altogether. “The Conquest of Nature”, “The spring”, “Song of
the Stars” are outstanding poems by any standard. Though the
ghazals of Zubur-i Ajam and Bal-i Jibril have been very highly
rated, they cannot be said to surpass his best longer Urdu or
Persian poems.
We must remember, as A.A. Suroor has said, that in Iqbal
the philosopher was always engaged in a battle with the poet.
Suroor breaks down the components of Iqbal’s personality into
poet, philosopher and man of religion. And insofar as in Islam
religion and politics are indivisible, it can be said that Iqbal’s
polities was his religion. Like Yeats, Iqbal too was a practicing
politician. But Yeats (as I have mentioned above) chose either
politics or poetry at different times, and finally chose poetry
only. Ghalib had no such conflicts to face, for Ghalib had no
desire to explain the world: he was content to reflect it through
his consciousness. Iqbal’s desire to explain and thus conquer
the world enmeshed him in many contradictions which Suroor
has pointed out, particularly with regard to Nietzsche and
Bergson. He was, as I have tried to show elsewhere, a romantic
at heart, but he chose to repress his romanticism most of the
time. Ghalib had no such constraints.
The images of man which emerge from the two poets’ work
are strikingly discordant, and well illustrate my point. Iqbal is
the poet of man triumphant, even rampant. Ghalib is the poet of
man speculant, not passive, but certainly not interested in doing
things– someone like Rodin’s Le Penseur. Man in Ghalib is
harried, maddened, driven from pillar to post, finally coming to
rest in thinking over his estate. Ultimately the experiencing self
becomes one with the tired, feeling self:
Dry lips of those who died in thirst,
Pilgrimage spot of’ those whose hearts are sorrowful;
Despair through and through, mistrustful through and
through,
I am the heart of those who were cheated by love.
From head to toe, I reflect brokenness;
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 81

I am the intent of those who were unutterably sad.

In appearance sophisticated, in effect regret
Asad, I am the smile of those who wither.
Now Iqbal naturally couldn’t countenance this vision of
man. He could be bitter against the injustice and rapacity of
men, particularly Western men: he could be distrustful of
modern science and scientific thought; he could be
contemptuous of individuals who did not seek uniqueness. (He
wrote in a famous letter to Nicholson that God’s kingdom on
earth was nothing but a democracy of unique persons, presided
over by the most unique individual possible). But he could
never see man as defeated, or lost in abstract thought or in
general despair. This is both his strength and weakness.
Ghalib’s man was his strength and weakness, but the two
hardly ever meet. (Needless to say, I like Ghalib’s man better;
for one thing, he had a sense of humour!)
Two poets can be said to work in the same tradition, or to be
similar to one another, if their poetics and poetic practice are
largely similar; or if their vision of life is similar; or then if
either or both flow from the same compulsions of literary
tradition and ethnic environment as reflected in their poetry.
For Ghalib and Iqbal, none of these conditions obtain. Ghalib
wrote within the essentially Romantic tradition of Sabk-i Hindi
(Indian Style). Iqbal at his best has been compared to Rumi,
Hafiz, Sa‘di, even Firdausi. Nothing could be farther from the
Sabk-i Hindi. Iqbal was undoubtedly a serious poetic craftsman
and artist even in his weaker poems. But his poetics was
different from Ghalib’s. I have already touched upon this and
also upon the vastly different visions of Man in the Universe as
they emerge from Ghalib and Iqbal. Let us now look at some
specific aspects of the poetic practice of both.
Ghalib’s intellectual vigour has always been commented
upon. The superiority of his mind is so obvious that even the
most obtuse reader can not fail to notice it. Iqbal’s mind also
often impresses us as superior. But while Iqbal’s mind is ratio-
cinative, Ghalib’s is entirely inductive. This becomes clear
82 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

when we set Iqbal side by side with Shakespeare, who also

loves to speculate and ruminate, and who often invests even the
most obvious things with a dignity that marks all speculative
utterance, as opposed to mere descriptive or summarising
statements. Let me quote from one or two sonnets: the themes
are two perennials—the transient nature of things and evil in
this world:
When I consider that everything that grows
Holds in perfect but a little moment,
That this large state presenteth naught but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked by the self-same sky;
Vaunt in their youthful sap at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
(Sonnet 15)
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity.
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
(Sonnet 66)
Iqbal has used both themes, but the first one recurs more
frequently. In his mother’s elegy he has occasionally combined
the two. Consider these lines:
Alas, this world, this house of lament for old and young!
In what enchantment of yesterday and tomorrow is man
imprisoned!
How difficult is life, how easy death,
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 83

In the garden of life death is cheap like the wind.

There are earthquakes and lightnings and famines and
ailments;
What daughters does the Mother of-Days have!
Death in poverty’s dungeon, death in the mansion of wealth,
Death in the wilderness, in houses, towns, gardens and
wastelands.
Death creates disturbances in the silent sea,
Ships drown in the very arms of the waves.
Neither courage to complain have we, not power to speak,
Is it life, or a neck-band that chokes the throat?
The caravan has nothing but the lament of the bell;
All our possession is naught but a weeping eye.
The force of these lines must be clear even in this
translation; also their banality. It must be obvious that Iqbal
can only deal in generalities; even his metaphors are
generalized. (Lamentation house for old and young;
enchantment of yesterday and today; Death creating
disturbance in the silent sea; life as a throat-choking neck-
band; caravan having nothing but the cry of the bell.) The
moment he comes to specifics, Iqbal sinks into total bathos.
(“There are earthquakes and lightning and famines and
ailments”). He is conscious of time, but not of the passing of
time: all things are stagnant in his world. In spite of the many
kin aesthetic images, the death and destruction is not seen as
growing decay, but as calamity. Rather than guiding him, his
power of association occasionally leads him astray. (Having
written the wonderful line about the silent sea, he must mention
ships sinking in the embrace of waves.) Where his associative
power does not lead him astray, he conceives a finalizing
image. (No power to complain or speak, for life is a throat-
choking neck-band.) Yet the force of this stanza remains on the
surface, for there are no specific images or objects to
concentrate it and drive it inward. Yes, there is injustice and
pain in this world; yes, man is stupid and evil and helpless; yes,
life is always snuffed out by death. But these are mere
statements, fortified by generalized metaphor. A similar
84 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

example can be found in “The Royal Graveyard.”

In a handful of dust, the soul is belaboured by tyranny;
The moment breath moves through the alleys of the flute, it
becomes a lament.
Man’s life is like a sweet singing bird:
Alighted on the branch, warbled a moment, gone.
Alas, what our coming into the garden of Time, what our
going!
Budding forth from the bough of life, we bloomed and
withered.
Death is the meaning of every beggar and king’s dream.
The cruelty of this cruel being is the picture of justice.
Here again, we see the same type of mind at work: a mind
that revels in generalisations and occasionally pulls off a
metaphoric tour de force. (Note the first two lines and the first
hemistich of the last.) There is no coming to grips with the
effect the subject (death, and ephemerality of life) has on those
who suffer it. The contrast with Shakespeare must be obvious.
Our impression of Iqbal’s superiority of mind comes from the
fact that he can generalise grandly. In some other poems, it is
also due to his vast learning and frequent classical and modern
allusions: he talks about Einstein and Goethe et al as his equals
and not as remote, godlike beings. But the poems that I am
discussing here leave no lasting effect, for there is virtually
nothing for the sensory or speculative faculty of the reader to
hold on to. Against this, Shakespeare creates a chain, either of
growth (as in sonnet 15), or of parataxis (as in Sonnet 66),
based on objects or objective-like realities. In Sonnet 15 he
begins the chain of images of organic growth and decay by
introducing “grown” in the very first line. And he starts with
consideration, not declamation. (“When I consider”) The
progression of growth and decay is contrastively presented by
the image of the huge state being only as show (shadows)
created by the sky or even perhaps in the sky. And all shows
(plays) have their end implicit in their very beginning. From “a
little moment” to “wear their brave state out of memory” is a
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 85

double play, and both are dependent on time and decay. (Even
“little moment” is contrastive of “memory” which is supposed
to perpetuate the moments.) In sonnet 66 the parataxis is
carefully controlled, one image leads to the next, and all are
drawn from life, with additional imagery thrown in, again from
life. (Guilded honour; rudely strumpeted, strength by limping
sway disabled; doctor-like folly; captive and captain etc.)
Iqbal’s poems seem thin by contrast, but they come from a
different tradition. As I said, his is the tradition of the great
Qasida and Masnavi poets of Iran. Consider Khaqani lamenting
the plunder and pillage of Saljuqi Iran by the Turks:
Tears of blood have risen forty yards high,
No, they have risen forty steps higher than the moon even.
Both the image of security and the imprint of peace have
disappeared from the beholder’s eyes.
Cool your heart against Time, for Time has become the
friend of mischief;
Be fearful of the elephant, for it’s been having nightmares.
Where should the wise man go, for the world has become
the house of tyranny?
Where should the honey bee draw sustenance from, as all
vegetation has become pure poison?
I need not labour the similarities of technique and manner
between Iqbal and Khaqani, but must stress their love of
generalization and declamation.
Shakespeare worked from image to metaphor; Iqbal
generally worked from metaphor to rhetoric. Ghalib, and other
poets of Sabk-i Hindi, did neither. They worked from metaphor
to image, or from metaphor to metaphor. They loved to
compress and exemplify. Rather than work with concrete
objects, they loved to make abstract things concrete. The best
example in Ghalib of the theme of ultimate desolation and
decay is of course the famous fragment “O you new comers to
the carpet-spread of heart’s desires.” I will not quote it here for
it is extremely well known. I need only mention that Ghalib
86 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

uses all the conventional objects (saqi, music, wine, singer,

gardener, flower-seller, candle) as metaphors, not as specific
objects, as Shakespeare does. That he too achieves a
Shakespearian effect is another matter.
It has been said, often as a desperate last resort rather than
as a qualitative judgement, that Iqbal resembles Ghalib in his
Persianism. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very
far. Ghalib uses Persian in the Indo-Iranian manner: his Persian
causes bewilderment among Iranians more often than
admiration. But it is correct and idiomatic Persian within the
Indo-Iranian tradition. Iqbal writes more often in the Iranian
manner. So far as Urdu is concerned, Iqbal’s Urdu is more
Persianised than most Urdu poets’, but his word combinations
are more often Persian and Arabic words strung together with
izafat (semantic or linguistic device to indicate relationship.)
He rarely invents new or long combinations, as Ghalib does.
Also, Iqbal does not use some peculiarly Persian tricks like
omission of izafat or its inversion, or using one set of izafats
with another. Ghalib does all these things as child’s play.
Hamidi Kashmiri, among others, has listed some of the more
telling combinations in Iqbal. (In fact it has been a favourite
pastime among critics to list out such combinations in Ghalib
or Momin or Anis or Iqbal.) But Iqbal’s Persianism does not
really run in this direction. He revels in using rare, individual
words or phrases unexpectedly; most such words, or their
contexts; wouldn’t occur to Ghalib. For example, he describes
hawa as aasuda, darya as narm sair, aujum as kam zau, khizr
as the knower of asrar i azal. He talks of the tilism of the moon
and afsun of the night, waves as mast i khab. (All this in the
first stanza of “Khizr-e Rah”) Similarly, words and phrases like
zamistani hawa, parvezi hile, sawad-e rumatul kubra, shan-e
dilavazi, bedaulati, zujaj, kasad, jan pur soz, tare aware-o kam
amez, zard ru chand, namud-e simiai, ibnus sabil, kasul kiram,
junud, thughur, rahil, rahiq, kar kusha, kar afarin, nuri nihad,
saada o raushan jabin, ismat i pir i kanisht, digargun, tailsan,
asar (pl. of ‘asr) khurafat, filazzat, tihi kadu, atash i rafta,
ghiyab, zamir, khamosh be kakh o ku, shuub, yuraq, zunnari,
and so on, would never occur to Ghalib. The large number of
Arabic or Arabian origin words must also be noted in the above
list. Because Iqbal is the only poet since Ghalib whose
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 87

vocabulary is so distinct from the common vocabulary of Urdu

poets, critics are apt to conclude that Ghalib and Iqbal have the
same kind of vocabulary. In fact, Iqbal’s Persianism is simpler
with more elements of direct or indirect borrowings from the
Arabic. Iqbal has a larger number and greater variety of words
at his command than Ghalib. But he uses them in
comparatively less artful ways. In the three-part ghazal of
Ghalib that I have referred to above, we find: khun dar jigar
nihufta, bazardi rasida, ashiyan i tair i rang-e parida, sar i
tapish, mizrab i tar hai gulu i burida, chasm va kushada,
gulshan nazar fareb, shabnam khurshid dida, only in the first
four shers quoted. Such complexity and elaboration are simply
not Iqbal’s metier. Also, Ghalib is equally at home with both
kinds of combinations, the izafi (genitive) and the tausifi
(identifying.) Often his combinations can be read both as izafi
and tausfi at the same time. The instant chashm va khushada is
a case in point. It can also be read as chashm-e va khushada to
give a slight shift of meaning. Iqbal cannot handle this kind of
izafat fluently and his poetry affords few examples of it.
By putting two representative pieces side by side, we can
see the Persianism of Ghalib and Iqbal in action and analyse
the differing predilections of the two poets. From Iqbal, I have
chosen the most highly Persianised stanza in the “Masjid-e
Qurtuba”, itself a very Persianised poem. From Ghalib, I have
taken the famous ghazal shabnam ba gul i lala from his so
called “authorised” divan; it is a comparatively late ghazal and
so cannot be dismissed as atypical (as most of the earlier,
“suppressed” and extremely Persianised ghazals can.) Since
Iqbal’s stanza has eight shi'rs, I have picked the first eight from
Ghalib’s ghazal too. The results are interesting:
Genitive (tarkibi) izafats in Iqbal: Haram i Qurtuba; mojizai
i fan; khun i jigar; qatra i khun i jigar; khun i jigar; sina i
adam; kaf i khak; soz o guduz i sujud; naghma i Allah hu (Total
9, including repetitions; effective, 7; or at best, 8.)
Genitive (tarkibi) izafats in Ghalib: Gul i lala; dagh i dil i
bedard; nazargah i haya, khun shuda i kashmakash i hasrat i
didar; badast i but i badmast; baandaz i gul aghosh kusha;
hawas i shola; afsurdagi i dil; kaf i khakistar; qafas i rang;
nishan jigar i sokhta; wahshat i dil; dava i giriftari i ulfat; dast
i tah i sangamda; paiman i wafa; hal i shahidan i guzashta;
88 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

tegh i sitam. (Total 17; no repetitions).

Genitive izafats in Iqbal with more than one izafat in a
group; qatra i khun i jigar; (total, 1.)
In Ghalib: dagh i dil i bedard; khun shuda i kashmakash i
hasrat i didar; badast i but i badmast; nishan i jigar i sokhta;
dava i giriftari i ulfat, dast i tah i sangamda, hal i shahidan i
guzhashta; (Total, 7; no repetitions.)
Unusual combinations in Iqbal: Sozo gudaz i sujad (Total,
1.)
In Ghalib: nazargah i haya; khun shuda i kashmakash i
hasrat i didar; baandaz i gul aghosh kusha; qafas i rang; dast i
tah i sangamda; aina i tasvir numa; (Total, 6, no repetitions).
Identifying (tausifi) izafats in Iqbal: ‘arsh i mu‘alla, sipihr i
kabud; paikar i nuri; kafir i hindi; (Total, 4; no repetitions.)
Identifying (tausifi) izafats in Ghalba: dil i bedard; jigar i
sokhta; dast i tah i sang; shahidan i guzashta; aina i tasvir
numa; (Total 5; no repetitions.)
Izafats in Iqbal that can be read as both genetive and
identifying: Haram i Qurtaba; kaf i khak, naghma i Allah hu
(Total, 3; no repetitions).
Same in Ghalib: Dil i be dard, kaf i khakistar; qafas i rang;
tegh i sitam; (Total, 4; no repetitions.)
Genitive and identifying izafats occurring in the same group
in Iqbal; Nil.
In Ghalib: dil i bedard; nishan i jigar i sokhta, dast i tah i
sangamda (Total, 3; no repetitions.)
Constructions in Iqbal which are peculiarly Persian: raft o
bud, (Total, 1.)
In Ghalib: Shabnam ba gul i lala; khali ze ada, nazargah i
haya; dil khunshuda; dast i tah i sangamda; (Total, 5; no
repetitions)
The above analysis will show clearly that Iqbal’s Persianism
is different from Ghalib’s both in quality and quantity. Iqbal is
less complex, less elaborate, less unusual, less versatile and
less Iranian.
Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib 89

A look at the two poets’ use of the conjunctive letter waw

will show that Iqbal revels in the use of this conjunctive and
Ghalib uses it sparingly:
In Iqbal: raft o bud; khisht o Chang: harf o saut; soz o surur
o sujud; soz o gudaze sujud; zauq o shauq, salat o darud; salat
o darud; rag o pai; (Total nine; including one repetition and
one having two. Effective total seven plus one).
In Ghalib: kaf i khakistar o bulbul; mashuqui o behauslagi;
majburi o dava i; (Total 3; no repetitions, but in two cases, the
conjuctive has occurred with izafat and in the remaining one
instance, it joins two unusual words, mashuqi and behauslagi).
The fact that Ghalib uses the conjunctive in elaborate
constructions does not invalidate the observation that Iqbal has
much greater propensity for it. In fact, Ghalib’s elaboration
proves that while Ghalib would use the conjunctive in question
only when he must, Iqbal uses it at all available opportunities.
In my opinion, half of Iqbal’s Persianism is in these
constructions with conjunctives and the other half in his use of
comparatively unusual Persian or Arabo-Persian words.
Ghalib’s Persianism is a compressive as well as decorative
device, rooted in the Indo-Iranian attitude to language. Iqbal’s
Persianism is used more for shortening than for compression,
and very rarely for deliberate decoration. Yet an interesting
point is that while Iqbal’s Persianism rarely falls below a
certain minimum in quantity, in any given poem, we may find
‘the Persian content in many ghazals of Ghalib to be lower than
what the high Persianisation of many other ghazals might lead
us to expect. In other words, there is greater difference between
the maximum and minimum in Ghalib than in Iqbal so far as
Persianism is concerned. Similarly, Ghalib has never used in
his Urdu ghazal the typical Persian metre munsarih matvi
maqbuz maksuf (mufta‘ilun fa‘ilun, mufta‘ilun fa‘ilun) which
the Persians used almost only for Qasidas. Some of Iqbal’s
most remarkable Urdu poems are in this metre. The inference
should be obvious.
Fundamentally, a poet stands or falls by his style—that is,
how he uses his words, how meaningful and associative and
interesting he can make them. And style reflects the poet’s
poetics, both as the theoretical foundation (conscious or
90 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

unconscious) of what he values as poetry and as the extra

literary considerations that affect what he says and shapes the
way he says it. We have seen that Iqbal and Ghalib have
different sets of poetics, different assumptions and different
practices arising out of those assumptions. Iqbal’s poetry, for
better or for worse, cannot be considered entirely in isolation
from his philosophy and politics. The danger lies in valuing the
philosophy and politics for their own sake, and not for the
poetry’s sake. There is equal danger in playing with the
philosophy and politics extrapolated from his poetry; that is, of
considering the poetry valuable because it has such a lot of
philosophy and politics. The concept of a poetry of ideas
existing side by side with, or even against, a poetry of
experience is all very well, but our critics have been all too
prone to stress the ideas and ignore the poetry.
“Whatever in Lucretius is poetry is not philosophical,
whatever is philosophical is not poetry”, Coleridge wrote to
Wordsworth in 1815. One might almost say that this was the
riddle that Iqbal had unconsciously set himself to solve, and
which Ghalib never had to consider. Nabokov solved it in his
own way when he made the first person protagonist in one of
his stories declare: “I will contend until I am shot that art as
soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks
to the level of any ideological trash.” Plato would have
preferred the ideological trash, but Nabokov’s mistrust flows
from a genuine apprehension. Unfortunately, in our case, it is
mostly the critics of Iqbal and Ghalib who have been writing
ideological trash. I’d prefer both Ghalib and Iqbal to exist
separately as great poets.
 THE IMAGE OF SATAN IN IQBAL AND
MILTON

...what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument,
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
(Paradise Lost; I., 22-26.)

Thus spoke Milton, almost in the very beginning of his great

effort, to prove that God is always right. As has often been
pointed out, Milton conformed to the accepted classical manner
in stating the theme of his epic before proceeding to tell the
story. But, as Dennis Burden says, the simple claim to assert
eternal providence and justify ways of God to men leads into a
complicated poem. “The assertion of divine providence is the
assertion that God’s goodness, justice and mercy are not
contradicted by the spectacle of the world that he has made.
The poem is thus an exercise in classification, finding system
and order in what could, if wrongly taken, appear to be random
and inexplicable”. This exercise in logical theology, in order to
succeed, needed two things. First “to tease rationality out of the
Genesis account of the fall” and second, to show that the
misery of Adam and Eve was relieved by God in his goodness
and that God’s goodness extends and purifies all men through
the Messiah. Although the sin of Adam and Eve made the
Satanic tragedy possible, yet things are not entirely hopeless:
God’s mercy, like his wrath, has good reasons, and mercy
always prevails in the end.
92 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

That Milton failed in his first enterprise, and since he had

attempted to give a logical foundation to his poem, he failed in
the second enterprise too, has been a commonplace of Miltonic
criticism, particularly among those whom (for the sake of
simplification) I will call the Romantic critics. Their ancestor
in this view was Blake who maintained in his “Marriage of
Heaven and Hell” that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters,
when he wrote of angels and God and at liberty when of devils
and hell is because he was a true poet of the devil’s party
without knowing it.” Blake here consciously identifies the Poet
with the Romantic Rebel, that is, as one who disregards logic
and rationality, discards received knowledge, acts in what
Weber called the value-rational manner and who gives to
independence of mind precedence over all things. Blake must
have sensed that Milton was trying to create a logically, and
therefore mathematically, coherent myth. He had condemned
mathematical form as “the dead form” as against the “Gothic”
which he declared to be the “living form”. It was therefore,
natural that Blake should have seen Milton “in fetters” when he
was writing traditionally about angels and God and “at liberty”
when writing dramatically of devils and hell, because the “true
poet” is supposed to be a Rebel and an individualist, as was
Satan.
The main point, if there can be one main point in literary
criticism, is whether we should read the poem in terms of what
Milton set out to do or in terms of what he actually did. It can
be said that what Milton actually did should be taken as what
he set out to do, his own avowals to the contrary
notwithstanding. But there are certain, and rather deep, pitfalls
in this approach, particularly in the case of Milton. For
example, Milton wrote within a certain theological and
philosophical framework. Our understanding of what he
actually did is bound to be incomplete if we ignore that
framework. There is no doubt that even unintended meanings
are valid meanings if the poem supports them. But in a poet
like Milton and in a poem like Paradise Lost we are more than
unusually inclined to find inner evidence for meanings which
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 93

do not really exist. This is because most of us do not like to be

considered old fashioned. We are afraid that if we read
Paradise Lost as a Protestant epic or even as a Christian epic,
we would be sneered at as country bumpkins lacking in critical
insight. Doubtless, purely “literary” readings of Paradise Lost
have tended to produce a vague impression that Milton really
did admire Satan. And it is certainly more jolly to be faintly
diabolistic than an ardent deist. Literary criticism must, as
Helen Gardner says, come to terms with the phenomenon that
“most readers of the poem [Paradise Lost] who approach it
without the aid of scholarship concur in finding its main
imaginative appeal in the figure of Satan. . .” Indeed there
should not have been much difficulty in coming to terms with
this fact. It is not so much scholarship as a dispassionate view
of Milton’s theology which is required. All or almost all good
religious poems can be interpreted so as to become enjoyable
and acceptable to people of widely divergent religious
persuasions. Let us not forget that even Greek tragedies are
basically religious poems. Milton’s failure was not that he
intended to write a poem about the fall and eventual
redemption of man but ended up by producing a glorification
of Satan in which (as Coleridge said) he gave Satan “a
singularity of bearing, grandeur of sufferance and a ruined
splendour. . .” Coleridge admitted that Satan finds in “self the
sole motive of action.” He, as a “mighty hunter of mankind”,
has a “lust of self”, yet Milton some how invests him with “the
very height of poetic sublimity”. Coleridge thus seems to imply
that where Milton failed as theologian, he succeeded as poet.
Shelley found “Milton’s Devil as a moral being” to be far
superior to his God presumably for the same reason. And in our
own time Empson pithily said that “the reason why the poem is
so good is that it makes God so bad.” These and numerous
others are really judging the theology, not Milton– yet they are
somehow disinclined to look at the framework of belief and
rationality on which Milton constructs his theology. Milton
sincerely believed that he could make his poem a theoretical
model of the Universe into which everything would be
94 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

rationally and reasonably explained. For him Christian belief

and rationality were true because the Christian God differed
from the pagan gods who were only irrational and vindictive.
Indeed, literalism was the standard Christian doctrine.
Calvinists had made it even more restrictive. Thomas Aquinas
stated clearly that “We must hold to the historical truth of the
narrative as a foundation of whatever spiritual explanation we
may offer.” Patrides comment on this: “Protestants agreed with
marked enthusiasm, expressly permitting allegorical
interpretations only when the matter is before proved by other
firm testimonies’ or—in plainer terms—when the allegory is
rightly grounded upon the literal sense.’ A strong minority
were even more restrictive, persuaded with Calvin. . .This
attitude... testifies to the ever present Christian concern lest the
allegorical approach to the Bible should deprive Christianity of
its uniquely historical character. . .”
Thus, according to Milton, all that happened was hard
history and as Aristotle said, if an improbable event comes
to pass, the very fact of its occurrence is proof of its being
probable and true. Milton, as Patrides asserts, was not
writing even a Catholic poem, but a Protestant poem which
required a more strict doctrine and which made greater
demands on man’s ability to believe unseen and indirectly
experienced things. Milton believed that since his views
were true, they made logical sense as well. All he had to do
was to operate the logic in the poem. He went so far as to
claim that he would justify the ways of God to “men”—that
is, all individuals in their individual capacity since the dawn
of creation. This enterprise was somewhat similar to the
attempt of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in his commentary on the
Qur’an to rationally explain all the myths and miracles
mentioned in it. Sir Syed failed, and Islamic scholars were
perceptive enough to see that he failed precisely because the
myths and miracles of the Qur’an did not need any rational
explanation. Milton failed to realize this fully and his
Romantic admirers the more so. In fact, Milton had a faint
understanding of this position, but he limited it to the rather
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 95

routine concept of the inscrutability of God, whose

motivations man cannot fathom but whose handiwork he
should admire. He writes in the Argument of Book VllI:
“Adam inquires concerning celestial motions, is doubtfully
answered, and exhorted to search rather things more worthy
of knowledge.” This wry bit of prose is followed by some
incomparable poetry. Adam wants to know why this whole
machinery of Universe should grind endlessly only to
produce day and night for “this earth a spot, a grain/an atom,
with the firmament compared.” Raphael somewhat coldly
replies:
To ask or search I blame thee not, for heaven
Is as the book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wondrous works, and learn
His seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years:
This to attain, whether heaven move or earth,
Imparts not, if than reckon right, the rest
From man or angel the architect
Did wisely conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire;
(Paradise Lost, VIII, 66-75)
It is obvious that what is involved here is the physical, not
metaphysical or moral aspect of things. Adam only wants to
know what makes the Newtonian machine work and is gently
rebuked. This is further borne out about a hundred lines later:
be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
(Paradise Lost, VIII, 173-174)
Adam does not ask: Why does man suffer? Why was he
created? These and similar questions will be resolved by the
poem. God as an engineer may be inscrutable, God as ruler is
not.
So Milton’s consciousness of the impossibility of understanding
or attempting to understand and justifying God’s ways was not
96 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

really acute enough to make him appreciate the futility of his

exercise. His critics have failed almost to a man to face the
conclusion that Milton’s Satan is more imaginatively appealing
than his God not because Milton was an admirer of Satan, but
because his theology let him down. Had he not been overridden by
the notion that religious beliefs were historical truths and therefore
could be made the basis of a logical model, he would have written a
poem more positively full of belief and the joy of believing without
reason. Pascal, with his cautious reasoning joining hands with his
mysticism, had said that the proofs for the truths of miracles are at
least as strong as those for their falseness. Milton was no mystic.
He was not even a Dante who was no mystic either but who had
learnt a point or two from Ibn ‘Arabi.
And this brings me to Iqbal. Since it was fashionable to
visualize the place of all poets with the rebels, Milton was
identified with Satan. In this, as I have attempted to show
above, Milton himself was an abettor by his insistence on
Reason. Ignorance of the Christian tradition within which
Milton worked also made its contribution to the myth. There
was no such case with Iqbal. In the case of Iqbal, however,
the Islamic tradition which was his source of inspiration
was, or rather should have been, well known to the Urdu
critics. But following the dictates of fashion and a misguided
zeal to discover an outsider in every poet, they averred that
Iqbal, despite his meagre and occasional treatment of Satan,
was an admirer of Satan something like Milton. Needless to
say, both pictures are false. I do not say that Iqbal was a
standard Muslim (a momin). He had his moments of doubt
and anxiety—perhaps more than Milton—and this makes his
poetry the more warmly human. I certainly do not say that
Iqbal was a great poet because he worked the Islamic
doctrine into his poems, just as Milton was not a great poet
because he was a Christian or a Protestant poet. But I do say
that the tradition within whose parameter Iqbal broadly fits
has no place for an admiration of Satan or even an attempt to
rationalize divine motivations– an attempt which in Milton’s
case created a false impression of near diabolism. Had Iqbal
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 97

tried to rationalize, he too might have ended up with a low-

key Paradise Lost. His two famous poems, “Jibreel o Iblis”
in Bal i Jibreel and “Taqdeer” in Zarb i Kalim only deal
directly with the Fall. In fact the latter poem runs no such
risk of diabolism even at the hands of the most ardent
Satanite because it is borrowed from Ibn ‘Arabi of whom
Milton was ignorant, much to his cost.
“God out measures our conjectures and imaginings” is a
famous Persian saying. It is based on a prophetic tradition in
which Muhammad advised Umar and some others, not to
speculate about esoteric and metaphysical questions relating to
God’s existence and man’s freedom or choice. This theme has
been stated again and again by Islamic theologians and Sufis. It
was most tellingly stated perhaps by Nizammuddin Auliya of
Delhi when he said that if God is merciful to his subjects it is his
grace (Fazl), and if he is wrathful, it is his justice (Adl). Put in
such unequivocal terms, the doctrine destroys for ever all attempts
to explain, justify or defend God’s actions. That Iqbal believed
this doctrine need not be asserted. In spite of his insistence on the
power of the Self, Iqbal makes it clear that whatever the Self
becomes it becomes only by turning towards God and by his aid.
Man takes only what God gives but God cannot be held
answerable for what he has or has not given. In his “Pir o Murid”
(The Sage and the Novice) which has a strangely Baudelairean
effect, he quotes Rumi:
Man is but seeing, the rest is skin
Seeing the Friend is what truly seeing is.
and again:
Wings take the falcon to the king;
Wings take the crow to the graveyard for carrion.
Obviously God makes man see and gives one kind of
creature wings to fly towards the king (spiritual elevation) and
makes another’s wings take it towards carrion. Neither can
complain.
Working with these assumptions, or rather beliefs, Iqbal had
98 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

no need to rationalize. It is clear that he is not worried about

the fundamental events of man’s creation and fall. He has no
questions to ask. The Christian thinkers were hard put to
explain the “why” of things. Why should have God permitted
Satan to rebel and have let him seduce Eve into eating the fruit
whose “mortal taste” gave birth to death and “all our woe”?
Milton explained that out of evil comes good because Satan did
nothing but
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to other, and enraged might see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown on man ... .
(I, 215-219)
But Milton dexterously skirts the questions: Why did Satan
rise in rebellion? Who gave him power to do so? Milton’s
theology would not be complete without resolving these issues,
but he only conforms to the pseudophilosophy of Christian
apologists (Calvin not excluded) that “God’s permissiveness in
no way reduces control over the created order”, as Patrides puts
it. This is only begging the question. On the contrary, the
Qur’an, from which all truly Islamic traditions receive
authority, does not raise this issue but states plainly that all
angels “except Iblis” refused to pay obeisance to Adam. The
paradox of free will and God’s eternal providence is not
mentioned, the implication being that it does not matter. Iqbal’s
poem “Satan and God” in Zarb-i-Kalim touches both questions.
But he makes no attempt to philosophize. Making explicit what
could be claimed to be implicit in the Qur’an, he merely states
that Satan was free to choose. He does not ask if this freedom
was innate to Satan or was vouchsafed by God. These
considerations are unimportant because in Iqbal’s scheme one
accepts or rejects totally. One does not temporize or
prevaricate. Not that Muslim theologians (mutakallimin) had
not tackled these problems. They had, but Iqbal had nothing to
do with them and worked on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The
poem is worth quoting in full:
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 99

Satan: O Lord of creating and all that was created,

I bore no grudge against Adam,
Oh he was but a prisoner of far and near, late and soon.
Words of pride were possible not in thy presence
But yes, thou hadst not ordained my obeisance!
God: When was this mystery discovered to thee, before or
after thy denial?
Satan: After, O thou from whose splendid luminousness
spring the maxima of being!
God: (Looking towards the angels) His baseness of nature
has taught him this argument; Says he “Thou hadst not
ordained my obeisance!”
He terms as helplessness his own freedom.
The cruel joker gives his own burning flame the name of
smoke!
In letting Satan argue on the premise of lack of free choice,
and thus making God himself responsible for the fall of man,
Iqbal briefly touches upon the paradox of providence which
had troubled both Christian and Muslim (not specifically
Islamic) thinkers. Christian theologists affirmed that Satan was
only God’s slave. He did what he did because God willed so.
They further explained it by saying that God did so for the
good of man. God “turns evil into good; and fetches good out
of evil”. In Paradise Regained particularly, Milton seems to
substantiate God’s permissiveness by letting Satan claim that
he has “large liberty” even to the “heaven of heavens”:
...but that oft
leaving my dolorous prison I enjoy
Large liberty to round this globe of earth,
Or range in the air, nor from the heaven of
heavens
Hath he excluded my resort sometimes.
(Paradise Regained, I, 363-367)
It is noteworthy that Milton makes God the active agent in
conniving at or at least not preventing Satan’s “resort” to the
highest heaven. Thus God becomes the author of evil not only
100 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

on the terrestrial earth, but also in the ramified heavens. It is

not surprising that Empson thought Milton’s God bad or evil.
But this conception of God is directly related to Christian
theological thought and not to Milton’s alleged predeliction
towards Satan. Iqbal smoothly dismisses all this by
characterizing Satan’s argument of lack of free will as an after
thought. His God coolly places the onus on Satan whose
burning flame (of pride or knowledge or individualism) denied
him the pliability so characteristic of other angels. Milton’s
Satan finds “permission from above” and leaves us holding a
riddle which no amount of rationalisation can unwind:
Thy coming hither, though I know thy scope,
I bid not or forbid; do as thou find’st
Permission from above: thou can’st not more.
(Paradise Regained, I, 494-496)
Iqbal’s refusal to admit consideration of Satan’s lack of
choice is nowhere more apparent than in his famous Persian
poem “Taskhir-e fitrat” (Conquest of Nature) in Payam-i-
Mashriq. The poem has been quoted as an example of Iqbal’s
so called celeberation of Satanic individualism and rebellion
against authority. Critics with vested interests have gleefully
referred to the third canto where Satan tempts Adam not with
sin but with visions of liberty and dynamism against the
confinement and eventlessness of heaven. Thus, according to
them, Satan is the catalytic agent who fires Adam’s heart with
a flash of self-consciousness; he plays a positive role in
weaning Adam from his innocent but abject dependence on
powers that exist outside. Thus Satan awakens the man-ness
latent in Adam.
Apart from the fact that this somewhat fanciful reading of
the poem disregards the Qur’anic version of the myth which
was never far from Iqbal’s mind, we must note that the Adam
of the poem is not really the first human being of the Qur’anic
legend, nor is the Iblis that fire-creature who refused to give
homage to Adam. In “Conquest of Nature” Adam and Satan
are mere ideas, allegories. All allogory, as C.S. Lewis says,
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 101

travels from the inner to the outer plane of things. Iqbal

objectified his ideal of the dignity and power of man and his
capacity to outsoar his limitations, both physical and spiritual,
by finding the conveniently allegorical characters of Adam and
Satan. According to Iqbal, man should be eternally questing.
Restless travel towards heights that transcend the highest of the
heavenly bodies, a burning of the heart that illumines the soul,
a rising up of the fiery intellect (the al-qalb of the Sufis) is
what man is made for and is that towards which he should
strive. Thus ‘Conquest of Nature” (as the very name suggests)
is not a theological poem as Paradise Lost or as Iqbal’s own
two dialogues, one between Satan and God (which I have
quoted above) and the other between Satan and Gabriel, which
I will refer to presently. “Conquest of Nature” gives expression
to Iqbal’s own peculiar ideas about the cultivation of self
consciousness by man. It is an existentialist poem, just as
Iqbal’s observations on the story of the Fall are marked by
thoughts existentialistic in character, making reference as they
do to “man’s transition from simple consciousness to the first
flash of self-consciousness.” In fact, lqbal confirms the free
choice of Adam and thus of Satan in his Reconstruction of
Religious Thought in Islam. The life of soz o saz (which can be
loosely translated as inner fire and the music of joy) which
Iqbal considered the highest mode of existence is also
celebrated by Adam in “Conquest of Nature” after his ejection
from heaven:
How pleasurable is it to make soz o saz of all life
and to soften the heart of hill and forest and desert by just
one breath!
“Conquest of Nature” ought to be placed side by side with
that rather neglected but extremely lyrical and mystically
majestic Urdu poem “Angels bid farewell to Adam for
Heaven”. (Farishte Adam ko Jannat se Rukhsat Karte Hain) in
Bal i Jibril. This poem does not have the rhapsodic (and
sometimes rather vague) joyousness at Adam’s “liberation”
that is so characteristic of the Persian poem. It is a bitter-sweet,
102 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

yearning farewell in which the angels try to awaken Adam to

his potentialities. It is less a Fall than a period of trial which
Adam is to undergo. (This again is borne out by Islamic
tradition). The angels say to Adam:
Thou hast been vouchsafed restlessness over day and
night,
We know not if thou art of earth or quicksilver,
We hear thou hast grown out of dust but
Thy nature is of stars and moon.
Would that thou saw’st thy beauty even in dream
Thy sweet sleeping would then be sweeter than a thousand
wakings!
Thus Iqbal is able to disregard the entity of Satan in Adam’s
farewell. This he could do because Satan’s theological persona
presented no problems to him. He had no dilemmas like
Milton’s to resolve. Otherwise Iqbal almost always refers to
Satan as the evil principle, the symbol of ungratefulness and
wrong direction. He quotes Rumi with approval in Payam i
Mashriq that:
Knows he who is good of luck and knower of secrets
That cleverness is from Satan and love from Adam.
Here “cleverness” stands for Reason (‘Aql in Iqbal’s, not
Sufistic, sense) and “love” for that state of mind which leads to
the knowledge of Truth (ma‘rifat). The precedence of Love
over Reason is Iqbal’s favourite theme. (Science, that is, ‘Ilm
or reason is total veiling. Love is total presence, he says.) In
Javid Nama lqbal advises his son to destroy Satan with the
sword of the Qur’an and that
Sons of men have set their hearts on Satanness
I saw naught but disorder in Satanness.
In the long Persian poem Pas Che Bayad Kard. . . he again
identifies unfettered Reason with Satan:
Reason under heart’s dominion is Godness,
When unfettered from the heart, it is Satanness.
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 103

In the same poem, he states that the mores of Western

science and culture are so corrupting that they could convert
Gabriel into Satan and that the Western culture has denigrated
knowledge (the act of knowing) through “city and desert.”
Thus Iqbal clearly negates reason and rationalism in matters of
faith. Indeed, he humbles his Satan before his God precisely
because Satan tries to rationalize.
Milton, on the other hand, shared the dilemma of the Christian
theologians who had been obliged, almost from the very
beginning of their history and particularly since the Renaissance,
to walk a very tight rope. As J.W. Burrow states in his stimulating
introduction to a modern edition of Darwin’s The Origin of
Species, there have been three great intellectual upheavals since
the beginning of the Christian era and each has threatened its
whole structure of accepted ideas. The second such, according to
Burrow, was “the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, which displaced the earth from the centre
of the universe and established models of inquiry in the study of
matter which presupposed regular sequences of cause and effect
and seemed to leave little or no room for the interposition of a
miracle working deity.” Newton had tried to show that the
Universe could be explained in mathematical terms, though in
spite of his best efforts, some of the more emotional or emotive
beliefs had to be sacrificed. But Newtonian astronomy left the
problems of good and evil and personal choice untouched, at least
by explication. It also could not really explain or give scientific
basis to such pronouncements as the famous observation of a 17th
Century Vice Chancellor of Cambridge that “man was created by
the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C. at 9 0’ clock in the
morning.” Burrow says that not many would necessarily have
been so specific as all that, but it is a fact that theological time was
taken quite seriously and “it has often been pointed out that when
the poet apostrophized Petra as rose red city half as old as time, he
meant it.”
It is obvious that when this kind of rigidity of belief is sought to
be injected into a poem with the claim that it can be made to hang
104 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

together under all circumstances, the structure is bound to show

leaks and cracks sooner or later because even if the poet’s masterful
design papers over the obvious inconsistencies, the inherent
anomalies will make themselves felt under scrutiny. That is why
two so very different critics as David Daiches and Northrop Frye
have reached almost identical conclusions. Daiches states with a
candour rather uncharacteristic of even nominally Christian critics
that Milton overlooked the fact that there could be no logical
answer to the question of evil existing in a world ruled by an
omniscient, omnipotent and yet benign Deity. Frye makes a more
dramatic comment by contrasting the gulf between the dramatic
and conceptual aspects of the poem and says that “the doctrinal
coherence” of the poem is seriously impaired because the
theological situation is the opposite of the dramatic situation. Even
Rajan admits that “God’s affirmation of man’s freedom is
sometimes too strenuous to be convincing because there are times
when the totalitarian nature of his deity, or to put it more bluntly,
the force of cosmic will, breaks through the containment of
Christian humanism which the poem is so earnestly seeking to
erect.” It is true, as Rajan points out in his foot note to this remark,
that Augustine also had substituted Will for Reason in his hierarchy
of values (and had, perhaps by implication, affirmed that Christian
humanism was not as humanistic as all that) but the fact remains
that in spite of Rajan’s claim to the contrary, Milton’s God,
whenever he opens his ambrosial mouth on the subject of free will
(Frye’s phrase) comes out as a rather heartless and certainly an
unconvincing tyrant:
...whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have: I make him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall
(Paradise Lost III, 96-99)
Note the slight element of doubt in “all he could have”. God
does not say “would have” purposely. Yet if Satan had been
just and right, he should have had all that he would. Also note
the rather weak pleading: it was sufficient for him to have
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 105

persevered in God’s faithfulness. He was not required to

perform any specific duties. Before elaborating the concept of
“freedom to fall”, I would like to quote further:
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have given sincere
Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,
Where only what they needs must do, appeared,
Not what they would?
(Paradise Lost III, 102-106)
This is obviously an attempt to rationalize the concept of
freedom by seeking support from the idea that all created
beings have also freedom to worship because if worship were
to be exacted, it were no worship at all. Alistair Fowler, co-
editor of the comprehensive Longman’s edition of Milton’s
poetical works, provides a useful commentary from Milton’s
“De Doctrina Christiana” that “if free will be not admitted,
whatever worship or love we render to God is entirely vain and
of no value; the acceptableness of duties done under a law of
necessity. . .is annihilated altogether. . .” This creates more
questions, but God is not mindful of them. The Qur’an
explicitly declares, “We did not create the Jinns and the
humans but for that they worship”, and sets aside all questions.
If the Jinns and humans do not fulfil the purpose for which they
were created, so much the worse for them. This may be bad
logic, but is good theology. Milton’s God flounders yet more:
They there as to the right belonged
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination over ruled
Their will, disposed by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I; if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fate, Which had
no less proved certain unforeknown.
(Paradise Lost III, 111-119)
106 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

The problem that if God foreknew, was he not also

responsible? is neatly solved by saying that since their fault
would have none the less occurred even if it was not
foreknown, God’s foreknowledge had no influence on the
occurrence. Fowler again provides useful commentary from
“De Doctrina Christiana” that Milton believed in a liberal
version of the doctrine of predestination but he carefully
defined predestination and foreknowledge in such a way as to
exclude necessity or determinism. He quotes Milton: “Future
events which God has foreseen, will happen certainly. . .
because the divine prescience cannot be deceived, but they will
not happen necessarily, because prescience can have no
influence on the object fore known, inasmuch as it is only an
intransitive action”. But this brings the questioner to a number
of recalcitrant issues. If the fault was “no less proved certain”
even if “unforeknown”, then was it not rather preordained?
And how does one distinguish between’s God’s knowledge and
God’s will? Are knowing and willing not the same so far as
God is concerned? Particularly when we see that God, even
though knowing that the “fault” would occur, did nothing to
prevent it? And how to reconcile God’s utterances here with
Paradise Regained I, 494-496 quoted earlier, that Satan does as
he “finds permission from above” and “can’st not more?”
Thus we again see Rational Christianity falling over and
over again into the webs spun by its own casuistry. Milton’s
greatness of course is that he faces the issues nevertheless.
Iqbal was saved the embarrassment by sticking to his beliefs
and by sticking to a tradition which demanded full acceptance
so that it could be understood. (“I believe, so that I may
understand” had also been the doctrine of Aquinas when faced
with the intellectual revolution created by the rediscovery of
Aristotle in the late Middle ages). I am not sure that Iqbal could
have come out with as much honour as Milton if he had to go
“behind the event” of the Fall as Milton did. Rajan rightly says
that Milton faced “peculiar difficulties in his account of the
Fall. It is not easy to differentiate dramatically freedom to fall
from a propensity to falling to point a vulnerability which falls
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 107

short of being a defect. The many poems and plays on the

subject bypass the problem by not going behind the psychology
of Adam and Eve.” Almost immediately after the lines quoted
by me above, Milton makes God say that there is hope for man,
though indeed the tone that he uses belies the image of Mercy
that he seems to be projecting:
...They themselves ordained their fall.
The first sort by their own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self depraved: man falls deceived
By the other first: man therefore shall find grace,
The other none: in mercy and justice both,
Through heaven and earth, so shall my glory excel,
But mercy first and last shall brightest shine.
(Paradise Lost III, 128-134)
Milton’s God does not speak of Grace (of which the
medieval Muslim Sufi had spoken, see above) but of mercy
and justice. Echoes of medieval monarchs seem to be very
near. The monarchical tone resounds yet more ominously later:
Hear all ye angels, progeny of light,
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,
Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My only son, and on this holy hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your head I him appoint;
Then, in the words of Christ:
Mighty Father, thou thy foes
Justly hath in derision,
(Paradise Lost, V, 735-736)
This much show of pomp and power brings God nearer to
human reckoning but makes him no more sympathetic, which
is what Milton wanted him to be. According to Rational
Theology, God’s “purposes were in some sense akin to the
purposes and feelings of man himself.” This urge towards
authropomorphism only made matters worse because it
108 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

necessitated a further urge to examine and question God

closely. Milton took the risk and he is the greater man and poet
for having done so. He failed, yet he did dot deserve the
wishful comments of Romantic interpreters that his Satan is an
imaginatively appealing and emotionally satisfying figure in
spite of himself and that Milton was “of the devil’s party”.
Perhaps the only critic who has realized this fully is W.J. Grace
in his “Ideas in Milton”. To quote just once: “But there is irony
in the fact that Milton cannot deal .with his subject of justifying
Providence without occasionally skirting such ‘wandering
mazes’* himself. Primitive religious art can assert, since it does
not attempt to bring reverenced mystery before the tribunal of
the human intellect, but sophisticated religious art runs into
danger when it asserts rather than asks questions. Milton took
the plunge of attempting to present a more coherent and
rationalized explanation of biblical events”.
Milton attempted but failed. Iqbal, as I have said, did not
attempt at all. Or rather, he shied off from attempting, as we
have seen in “Taskhir i Fitrat” (Conquest of Nature) where he
contents himself with creating an allegorical rhapsody. The two
short pieces where he does show an inclination to go “behind
the event” of the Fall are Miltonic in style but not in approach.
The dialogue between God and Satan (entitled Taqdeer or
“Fate”) which I have quoted in full, is the only And found no
end, in wandering mazes lost (P. L. II, 561).poem in which
Iqbal confronts Satan with God. In this poem Satan is not the
degenerate creature that C.S. Lewis would have us believe the
Miltonic Satan to be (“from Hero to General, to politician,
secret service agent and thence a thing that peers in at bed
room or bathroom windows and thence to a toad and finally to
a snake—such is the progress of Satan”) but he is clearly
shown as more cunning than intelligent, eager to score a point
yet not unwilling to ingratiate himself with God who gives him
short shrift. The much more famous and complex dialogue
(Gabriel & Satan) in Bal i Jibril apparently shows Gabriel—
and by implication God—on the defensive and has therefore
often been quoted as Iqbal’s glorification, or at least approval,
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 109

of Satan. Let us first have the poem in full:

Gabriel: Old Comrade, how goes the world of colour and
fragrance?
Satan: It is inner fire and music of joy and pain and scar
and searching and yearning.
Gabriel: Often we talk of thee in heaven. It is it not possible
that the torn hem of thy raiment ever be repaired?
Satan: Alas Gabriel, thou know’st not the secret: In
breaking, my stoup of wine intoxicated me! My passing
again into this estate is not possible now
How silent is this world without house and street!
For him whose despair is the secret of universe in fire
Is God’s word “Despair not” suitable or plain “Despair”?
Gabriel: By thy denial thou hast lost positions of eminence;
Say, what honour for angels remained in God’s eyes?
Satan: By my venturing is lust for growth in the handful of
dust
My machinations the warp and woof of wisdom’s raiment.
Thou watchest just from the shore the strife of good and
evil;
Who braves the stormy tempest, thou or I? Khizr and Ilyas
both are powerless, handless and legless
My storms rage from ocean to ocean, river to river, stream
to stream!
If ever thou find’st privacy, then thou must ask God
Whose blood in spilling gave colour to Adam’s tale?
I throb and sting into God’s heart like a thorn
Thou art only a perpetual O Lord! O Lord! O Lord!
No doubt on superficial reading the poem strikes us as a
powerful defence of Satan, and some would enthusiastically
state that a defence of Satan always implies an indictment of
God. These interpretations were particularly acceptable to such
Urdu critics as thought it fashionable to have read “Man and
Superman”, a few snatches of Nietzsche, some of Milton, and
then to have proceeded to spread this Western marmalade over
the oatmeal bread of Iqbal so that both his and their
110 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

respectability was assured. In point of fact, the poem is deeply

ironical and is anti-Satan to the extent that such a poem can be
“anti” anything. It is true that Gabriel is on the defensive—the
fact that he begins the overture to Satan and wistfully reminds
him that the lost comrade is still very much a comrade affirms
this. But Satan falls into the trap only too easily by indulging in
heroics. His description of the material world is couched in
terms which would– but for the soz o saz (inner fire and music
of joy)—be scarcely recognizable to Adam, who according to
Iqbal is the true inheritor of the earth. That is why the
confrontation is not between Satan and Adam (who is the Lord
of Creation), nor between Satan and God (before whom Satan
abjectly fawns in the Zarb i Kalim poem), but between the
arch-intellectual Satan and the innocent Gabriel. For the world
is search and scar and pain and yearning only to those who
have not fulfilled themselves. As Rumi said and Iqbal quoted
in his “Pir o murid” (The Sage and the Novice) printed
immediately before the poem under discussion in Bal i Jibril:
Wings take the falcon to the King;
Wings take the crow to the graveyard for carrion.
Doubtless Satan upheld the right to individual affirmation or
denial and this quality Iqbal has always admired. In his
allegorical interpretation of the Fall in “Taskhir i Fitrat”
(Conquest of Nature) and in a celebrated passage in The
Reconstruction he seems to have taken an almost Augustinian
view of Adam’s sin. But his Satan remains a plain and simple
theological Satan, an individualist as the Qur’an also affirms.
In breaking, his stoup of wine made him intoxicated, but him
only. He gained individual fulfilment. He unwittingly reveals
his nature by describing Heaven as a world devoid of house
and street. Because baseness of nature always hankers after the
hustle and bustle of material existence. Whether employed
gainfully or otherwise, the meaner natures find their natural
house and habit in market places. Iqbal is here alluding to a
saying of the Prophet that market places are Satan’s dwellings.
Thus Satan’s dig at the peace abounding in heaven is not
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 111

Iqbal’s criticism of its alleged lack of colour and variety but a

self-condemnation by Satan. Similarly, once when God has
affirmed that there is no salvation for Satan, what better than to
rationalize by saying that Adam and his strife and struggles
came to pass just because I was made to despair of God’s
mercy and thus my despair is the key that winds the clockwork
of the Universe? This claim, even if true, makes Satan only a
minor functionary in God’s scheme of things, gives him a
negative and passive role and generally approximates him to a
rather esoteric but perverse view of Yazid, that as the author of
the massacre at Karbala, he was only doing what God had
ordained him to do. As I have shown above, Christian
theologians also have occasionally held the view that Satan’s
evil was the ultimate cause of good. But this is no defence of
Satan.
Satan revels before Gabriel in his knowledge of sin and
tribulation. But he would be a complete being only if he knows
Good as well. This in spite of his bombast, he carefully refrains
from claiming. In the concluding canto of “Conquest of
Nature” Adam had pleaded before God in extenuation that
earth cannot be conquered unless we fall into its trap. Adam, in
order to survive and to enable his return to God, had to taste the
earth, but there was no such compulsive urgency for Satan.
This is why this claim that to have awakened man to self
consciousness, inspired human actions and having “supped full
of horrors” to be a fuller being than Gabriel, rings false. It is
true that in this poem (in sharp contrast to “Conquest of
Nature” where he strikes a theatrical and flashy pose) Satan is
invested with a dignity and stature which recall Coleridge’s
remarks on Milton’s Satan. Yet Macbeth had far more dignity
than either of the Satans, but no one believes that Shakespeare
intended to make, or in fact did make Macbeth an example to
be imitated or even admired. In fact both Milton and Iqbal
(Iqbal to the extent of this poem only and Milton generally)
conceived Satan not as a rag-tag and bobtail Satan with horns
of tinsel and buck teeth of bone. They conceived him fittingly
as a powerful personage. Except that Iqbal saw in him a subject
112 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

for irony more than terror and Milton treated him as God’s
adversary, perhaps too high an estate for Satan himself to
maintain for very long. Iqbal’s famous line in Payam i Mashriq
in the poem entitled “Paradise” (Bihisht) has often been quoted
to prove that Iqbal too treated Satan as God’s adversary,
Live not in a world so blind of taste
That it has God but no Satan
This in fact refers to the simple Islamic tradition that
fullness of being can be attained only when one knows both
good and evil. There is a famous incident of an early 20th
Century Sufi, Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanavi, that when a
disciple expressed to him his anxiety that he was subject to
numerous temptations, Thanavi pointed towards a wall and
said that it feels nothing and gains nothing. Thus Satan as
principle of Evil is necessary so that temptation may befall man
and he may overcome it.
Dr. Johnson was perhaps the first important critic to complain
that there was a want of human interest in Paradise Lost. That
this view was ill-founded most of us would agree now. Only,
what constitutes “human interest” in the poem could be debated.
To my mind the human interest of the poem is not that Milton
pitifully exposes himself as a diabolist and thus joins the ranks
of us frail humans not to be tested against reason. Otherwise, the
poem is a human document in every sense of the word. In his
preface to the Longmans edition, Fowler has successfully argued
against Waldock and Empson that Milton wrote an unchristian
poem in spite of himself. Fowler also asserts that the poem has
logical structure—that is, its logic coheres. I do not think this
can be shown to hold at all points but there is no doubt that
questions like whether Satan or God is hero of the poem are
meaningless. Milton may not have created a personal God as
Fowler claims, nor a personal Satan as Empson and others have
claimed, but he certainly created a Satan and a God who were
larger than life, which is more than can be said of most of us,
fettered as we are by our basically anthropomorphic conceptions
of God.
The Image of Satan in Iqbal and Milton 113

Iqbal made no attempt to create an epical Satan, or even an

Adam. It is therefore, unfair to isolate a few poems or lines for
comparison with Milton. As I have been at some pains to
explain, Satan does not loom so large in Iqbal’s theogony. But
for a handful of occasions, Iqbal conceives Satan in plain black
and white and does not give him true poetic stature. Under no
pressure to rationalize, Iqbal is not much preoccupied with the
Fall. Even his famous observation in the Reconstruction that
the Fall is “man’s transition from simple consciousness to the
first flash of self consciousness, a kind of waking from the
dream nature with a throb of causality in one’s own being”
leaves Satan entirely out of the reckoning and is borrowed from
St. Augustine without much critical examination. Cleanth
Brooks quotes from Augustine’s City of God and states that
“self consciousness” was the “knowledge conferred by the act
of plucking and eating the fated apple”. Iqbal makes use of this
argument to further his thesis of self-awareness but scarcely
looks at Satan whom he generally treats in a conventional
manner. His long Urdu poem in Armughan-e Hijaz (“Offering
to Hejaz”) entitled Iblis ki Majlis-e Shura (The Parliament of
Satan) contrasts rather poorly with the parliament of devils in
P. L. II, 1-505 mainly because Milton shows greater dramatic
sense, and Iqbal for all his high rhetoric, shows Satan only as a
general given to bombast and delusions of grandeur. Iqbal’s
Satan alternately raves and plots like a demagogic terrorist and
shows up bloodless against Milton’s “grand infernal peers” and
“their mighty paramount” (P.L. II, 507-508). Iqbal’s other
poems show that he had some talent for drama. That he held it
here in abeyance would perhaps indicate that to him the subject
was not big enough. At any rate, but for the two dialogues,
Iqbal’s Satan remains a shadowy or a flashy figure, depending
on what poem you happen to be reading. Milton’s Satan stands
everywhere supreme as a creature of the imagination.
 Part-II

REVIEW ARTICLES

IQBAL STUDIES
 A COMPLAINT AGAINST KHUSHWANT
SINGH’S “COMPLAINT AND ASWER”

I am afraid I am going to come down rather heavily on this

book. In order to soften the blow, let me first say what I like
about it. But the trouble is that there is not much that I like.
Anyway, here are the points that appeal to me. This is a
trilingual edition: the original Urdu has been reproduced by
photo offset from the centenary edition of Iqbal’s collected
Urdu translation, and a Devanagari transliteration. Thus each
page contains just one stanza; this makes for easy reading. The
Urdu calligraphy is good (no credit to the publisher); the
Devanagari type-face is pleasing (credit to the publisher); while
the English type-face is as good as that of any Oxford
publication (credit to the Indian printer). The production values
of the whole book are excellent. The translator greatly admires
Iqbal and the Urdu language, and he is not happy with the
extant (admittedly bad) translations of the two poems he has
chosen to translate. He has brought to bear on his task a
fervour, a vigour and a devotion which are truly commendable.
The translator has taken pains to track down the allusions to
Islamic history and learning with which the poems abound. He
has done some background reading on Iqbal, and provided
some useful factual information. He has got made a literal
translation, in that he has very often expanded the original
lines, endeavouring (but mostly failing) to make their sense
more clear.
But, has Khushwant Singh produced a good translation, or
even a good poem in English? Is he competent to do a
translation from Urdu? The answer to both these questions, I
118 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

am afraid, has to be a firm “No”. It would need a book of

almost the same length as the one under review to point out and
discuss the numerous blemishes that mark this book. Broadly
speaking, there are errors of fact, errors of Urdu language
comprehension, errors of Urdu poetry comprehension, and
errors of English. I will give just a few examples. I will not
divide my comments under the different headings that I have
mentioned above, but will do a random sampling, page by
page.
Singh says (p. 16): “The bulbul which in real life only emits
an unmusical chirp ...is made into a nightingale...in order to
endow it with a melodious voice..". The bulbul does not emit
an unmusical chirp, as Singh can easily verify by stepping out
into his garden; and a bulbul is not made into a nightingale;
there are no nightingales in Urdu poetry. We are told (p. 23)
that Iqbal had “an affair with ‘Atiya Zaidi, a young uninhibited
girl..”. It is most doubtful if Iqbal had “an affair” with Atiya
(whose surname,. incidentally, was Faizi, not Zaidi,), and her
lack of inhibition is a mere invention. On page 24, Iqbal’s
daughter’s name is given as Munawarah, instead of Munira. On
the same page, we are informed that “a few days before the
end” Iqbal wrote “a verse in Persian lamenting his own
departure". In fact, what Iqbal wrote was not a lament “on his
own departure”, but a dignified, melancholy poem which says
that there may or may not be another poet and seer like him to
finish what he had set out to do. Very loosely translated, the
four line poem is something like this:
The music which has gone away, it may return, or it may
not;
A breeze from Hijaz may blow, or it may not.
The days of this faqir are done;
Another knower of secrets may come, or he may not.
In his introduction to the “Shikwa”, Singh says (p. 25) that
it is one of Iqbal’s most controversial compositions: as
passionately lauded by its many admires as it has been
criticized by others". I do not know which of Iqbal’s students
A Complaint against Khushwant Singh’s “Complaint and Aswer” 119

have “passionately lauded” the “Shikwa” or even the “Jawab”.

Except for a very recent defence of the poems by the Pakistani
critic Salim Ahmad on rather chauvinistic grounds, I am not
aware of any notable critic of Iqbal “passionately” admiring the
poems. In fact, informed literary opinion has always held the
two poems in low esteem, and assigned them no place in
Iqbal’s development as a poet or a thinker. The poems evoked
warm response among the Muslims for non-literary reasons;
literary critics never thought much of them. So there has hardly
been any controversy about them. Singh further declares (p.
25) that the “Shikwa” “reveals a not-too-veiled contempt for
non-Muslims, particularly Hindus. “Shikwa” may be regarded
as the first manifesto of the two-nation theory..". If dead men
can turn in their graves, Iqbal must be writhing in his. Singh’s
conclusion that the poem expresses contempt for non-Muslims,
especially Hindus, is based on a misreading of certain lines
(more about which later). To see this poem, which is at best a
populist expression of Indian Muslims’ frustrations at having
been relegated to the background on the national scene, as the
two-nation theory in embryo, is to miss the point completely.
Both the poems are verbose, flabby-sentimental, simplistic, and
on the whole second rate, though occasionally brilliant. They
are not political, but historical and theological statements. They
are based on a populist interpretation of the history of Islam
which, quite naturally, soothed Indian Muslims, and also urged
them to action. But the action which the two poems urge is not
political, it is essentially religious and moral.
I have said that Singh’s translation shows errors of Urdu
language and Urdu poetry comprehension. By the former I
mean that he does not know accurately enough the meaning of
many words; by the latter I mean that he is not aware of many
concepts and conventions that govern most Urdu poetry of the
classical type, of which these two poems are generally bad
examples. Both of his failures are evident in the very first
stanza of the “Shikwa”. He translates kyun ziyan-kar banun as
“why must I forever lose". ziyan-kar means “one who acts for
one’s own or somebody else’s loss or harm”. Thus, the
120 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

protagonist here is blaming himself and not fate, as the

translation suggests. Then, Main bhi koi gul hun ki Khamosh
rahun is translated: “...am I as dumb as a flower? Must I
remain silent?” This shows misapprehension of the concept of
gul (the rose or any other flower) in Urdu poetry. The gul (the
beloved) remains unresponsive to the wailing of the bulbul (the
lover) not because it (the gul) is “dumb”, but because it is hard-
hearted. To render the unresponsiveness of the gul as
“dumbness” betrays not only ignorance but also bad taste.
Again, in the last line of this stanza, the Persian phrase Khakam
ba dahan has been translated as “dust fills my mouth".
Actually, this phrase is used as a kind of curse on oneself—an
expression of apology when one says something impertinent or
sacrilegious. It is subjunctive in mood and must always be
translated as “may there be dust/ash in my mouth”.
On page 30 (stanza three) we find maujud, azal and zat i
qadim (all of which are metaphysical mystical concepts)
translated as “primal from the beginning of time”. Maujud
means here “that which has real existence (as opposed to non-
existence". Zat i qadim means “the being which has existed
since eternity, therefore, since before Time, and will continue
to exist eternally". (Qadim is one of the properties of God.)
Azal means “eternity without beginning". By translating all this
as “primal from the beginning of time,” Singh implies that God
is sempiternal, and not eternal. This not only corrupts the
sense, but also violates all the concepts from which the sense
flows. In the fifth line of this stanza, the protagonist uses a
clever verbal device to mean something opposed to the
apparent sense. The line is ham ko jami ‘atikhatir ye parishani
thi. Here jami ‘atikhatir means “the heart’s satisfaction, a
satisfaction which results when the heart is not torn apart by
divers fears and anxieties;” parishani (which colloquially
means worry) actually means “being scattered". This is linked
with the preceding line where the protagonist says (Singh’s
translation): “If there were no breeze, how could the rose have
spread its scent?” In other words, this scatteredness–
wandering from land to land to spread God’s message– is seen
A Complaint against Khushwant Singh’s “Complaint and Aswer” 121

as the heart’s satisfaction. Singh botches up the whole

metaphor by translating the line as: “We your people were
dispersed, no solace could we find...”. (By the way, the actual
line has nothing for “Your people”, which Singh has
introduced, tautologically, to fill out the meter. Such
tautologies abound in the translation and give the impression
that the actual poems are weaker than they are. Translating
downward is a greater fault than translating upward.)
A similar failure of comprehension occurs in stanza thirteen
(p. 40) where safha i dahr (which here means “the face of the
world”) is translated as “the pages of history” and batil (which
means “Untruth” as a concept, as opposed to “Truth”) as “the
smear of falsehood". Thus, a line which says that the
protagonist and his people erased untruth from the face of the
world reads, “we blotted out the smear of falsehood from the
pages of history,” and implies that they re-wrote past history
and removed from the archives what they thought was false!
In stanza twenty-two (p. 48), Singh assumes that the word
pesha has its usual sense of “profession,” while actually here it
means “practice or habit". Similarly, butgari has been used
here to mean “idolatry” and not “idol-making”. Therefore,
butgari pesha kiya should be translated: “Did we adopt
idolatry?” The third line of this stanza has been corrupted
beyond recognition. The line means: “Did we give up love, or
the frenzy that it causes in the head?” Singh translates: “Did we
forsake love because of the anguish with which it is fought?”
(“Fought” may be a typographical error for “fraught,” but the
translation still does not at all say what the original says.)
In stanza twenty-three (p. 49) there are errors of
comprehension and translation, of greater or lesser magnitude,
in the first three of the six lines. In line one Singh
misunderstands ada (“style, manner”) to mean ada’igi (“way
of articulation or expression”), and gratuitously adds the
unpleasant, copy word “blandishments". A line which simply
means, O.K., we grant that love has no longer the same style”
(‘ishq ki khair wo pahli si ada bhi na sahi has been made
122 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

emotionally pulpy and semantically gross :

Our love may not be what it was, nor told with the same
blandishments;...
In the second line, Singh misinterprets taslim o riza. Taslim
means “surrendering, accepting”; riza means “endeavouring, or
even vying, to please". (The Urdu original itself is somewhat
faulty, but has been made faultier in translation,) Together they
would mean: “to surrender/accept willingly in an endeavour to
please”. Singh mistranslates:
We may not tread the same path of submission,
nor the same way give consent.
It would be impossible for a Muslim to think in terms of
“giving consent” to God’s will. Islam has no concept of man
consenting to the will of God. God does what he wills.
In the third line, the failure of comprehension is due to
Singh not appreciating a very slight syntactical complexity. He
reads muztarib dil as an independent phrase, making
(“restless”) a part of the subject, and translates:
Our hearts are troubled, their compass needles
from Mecca may have swerved,...
Actually muztarib is a part of the verbal phrase. Thus, the
prose-order of the line is: dil sifat i qibla-numa muztarib bhi na
sahi. And the line simply means: “our hearts are no doubt not
restless like the compass needle". The compass needles which
Singh sees as having swerved from Mecca are not there at all.
I don’t think I need to say more about the accuracy of the
translation. But since all my remarks so far have been confined
to the “Shikwa alone”, let us have a look at the “Jawab” as
well. Mistranslation in a ghazal is deplorable, but is not so
harmful to the poem as is mistranslation in a nazm. A ghazal is
a bunch of discrete ash‘ar (loosely, “couplets”) which are
almost never linked each to each in meaning; whereas in a
nazm, all the lines are more or less closely connected to each
other; thus, one mistranslation can mar the sense of a large
A Complaint against Khushwant Singh’s “Complaint and Aswer” 123

chunk of the poem, if not the entire poem. For example, in the
“Shikwa” itself, the fourth line of stanza twenty-seven (p. 54)
is: hind ke dair nashinon ko musalman karde (“These temple-
dwellers of India, make them Muslim".) Now dairnashin
literally means “those who sit in temples,” but here the phrase
refers to the Muslims themselves, and not the Hindus.
According to the protagonist, the Indian Muslims have lost the
quality of Islam, and he prays that God change their hearts and
make them true Muslims again. Singh translates: “Convert to
Islam India’s millions who still in temples dwell”. Thus the
poem is made to appear not as a plaint of the Muslims who feel
neglected and unloved by God, but as a prayer for conversion
of the “infidels”. Perhaps it is misinterpretations such as these
which have led Singh to conclude that these poems have the
two-nation theory in its embryonic stage. There is nothing in
the poems which could support such a view. In fact, the poems
could be seen as a warning to the Indian Muslims that they
have forfeited, and will continue to forfeit, God’s favours if
they do not mend their ways. They are told that they cannot
pretend to be God’s chosen people just because they claim to
be the followers of the Prophet; God’s bounty comes to those
who deserve it; “Muslim” or “infidel” in the traditional sense
has no meaning for God. What has meaning is true submission,
and the qualities of truth, justice, modesty, fortitude, ceaseless
strife and action, fear of God rather than the fear of death, in
fact all that distinguishes the perfect man from the imperfect
man. In the “Jawab”, God is made to declare unequivocally
(Singh’s translation, p. 66):
You are not the clay of which another Adam could be made.
If there were one deserving, we’d raise him to regal
splendour,
To those who seek, we would unveil a new world of wonder.
And again (Singh’s translation, p. 72):
From time eternal we the Creator made justice our
sovereign rule;
To infidels who behaved as Muslims we gave heaven’s gifts
124 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

as prize.
So the poems are not documents to division, political or
cultural. They are just second rate poems expressing the
frustration of the Indian Muslims around the first decade of this
century and exhorting them (to use a trite phrase, for the poems
are trite) to first deserve, then desire the favours of God.
Let me now revert to the dismal litany of mistranslations. I
will randomly pick some from the “Jawab”. The first line of
stanza four (p. 64) has the words Shokh (“impertinent”) and
barham (“angry”). Singh mistranslates Shokh as “proud” and
barham as “rails against". So a fairly crisp line, which says,
“So impertinent that he is angry at God too;” becomes: “He
even rails against Allah, he has become so proud; ..".
(Whatever little effect of the original this vapid line could have
reproduced, is lost by putting a semi-colon, instead of an
exclamation point, at its end.) The third line has ‘alim i kaif
(“the knower of sensations; the knower of abstract things”) and
Dana i rumuz i kam (“one who is wise about the finer points of
quantity; the knower of material or non-abstract things”). All
this is destroyed by the translation: “He knows about things,
their quantity and quality;..". The point is that man is being
described as having the knowledge of two different orders of
things, and not about two aspects of the same order of things.
Misunderstanding the meaning of shokh in stanza four (p.
64) has led Singh to another, more flagrant, mistranslation of
this word in stanza five (p. 65) where Shokh zaban (“sharp-
tongued”) becomes “cunning” and this quality of
“cunningness” is seen as being produced in the protagnonist’s
tongue by his “impassioned heart". The line, kis qadar Shokh
zaban hai dil i divana tera, simply says: “How sharp-tongued
is your frenzied heart!” Singh renders it meaningless by saying:
“What cunning your impassioned heart has lent your tongue!”
In stanza fourteen (p. 74), the idiom kuch tumhen paas
nahin (“you have no regard for..”.) has literally and ludicrously
been translated as “nothing with you is left". So the line which
A Complaint against Khushwant Singh’s “Complaint and Aswer” 125

simply says, “You have no regard for Muhammad’s message”,

becomes in Singh’s version: “Of Muhammad’s message
nothing with you is left". A similar misunderstanding of idiom
produces a similar mistranslation in stanza fifteen (p. 75). Here
the idiom ke dam se (“by virtue of”) is translated “by the breath
of,” creating an unintended comic effect. The comic vein
continues in the next stanza (p. 76) where sahib (“possessor”)
is taken to mean the British Sahib and translated as
“gentleman". The line is: ya‘ni vo sahib i ausaf i hijazi na rahe
(“...that is, those possessors of Hejazi qualities are no more".
There are no “noble gentleman” here. Yet Singh translates:
“The likes of noble Hejazi gentlemen are no longer there".
Two stanzas in the “Shikwa”, and two also in the “Jawab”,
end with Persian instead of Urdu lines. Let us look at one
example of what Singh has done with the Persian. Admittedly,
the lines in question are somewhat fuzzy in the original Persian
too, but the translation misses whatever little point they have.
In the “Jawab”, stanza eighteen (p. 78), Singh misunderstands
the Persian polysemic pronoun represented by the letter sin. In
the lines in question, it means, “it was his, i.e., it was his nature
or his lot". The lines are:
Khud gudazi name i kaifiyat i sahbayash blood
Khali az Khsh shudan surat i minayash bud
A rough and literal translation would be:
It was his to be melting in himself, like the state of moisture
in wine;
It was his to be empty of his own self, like the wine jar.
The first line is an indirect allusion to Ghalib where he says
that his wine is so strong as to melt the glass. Contrary to that,
Iqbal imagines the frothing of the wine to indicate that it is
melting (i.e., has a heart melted by the fire of love). By being
“empty of his own self’ Iqbal means “surrender of the self’ and
not unselfishness in the conventional sense. Singh translates :
His self-effacement was the essence as liquid contents are of
liquor
126 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

As a goblet empties out, emptying himself for others was his

pleasure.
The preceding four lines mention truthfulness, fearlessness,
justice, modesty, and bravery, in that order. It is obvious that
“self-effacement, etc". would not be natural in this context.
Stanzas thirty-three through thirty-five of the “Jawab” are
especially scarred in translation because Singh misunderstood
the link between them and stanza thirty-two. He translates the
last two lines of the latter (p. 92) as follows:
With the power of love raise the lowest to triumphant
heights
With the name of Muhammad turn the darkness to light.
I do not wish to comment on the tepidity of these lines; what
I want to point out is that the “flowers” and the “names” in the
next stanza (p. 93) refer to Muhammad, and not to God, as
Singh assumes. He translates, “If he were not the flower, no
bird song would you hear,” and so on, till the end. These
stanzas are in fact in praise of Muhammad, and refer to a
popular Muslim belief that God created the world only because
he wanted to create Muhammad. The translation by Singh
becomes not only meaningless, but also sacrilegious from the
literalist or fundamentalist point of view, because what the
poem says about Muhammad, the translation says about God.
(I may hasten to add that I am no literalist nor fundamentalist.)
The translation of the last stanza of the “Jawab” (p. 96)
leaves an impression totally different from the original. Where
the poet has “love is your sword” (‘ishq hai Shamshir teri),
Singh says, “...the sword of love in your land". Where the poet
says, “my homeless one, “Singh says, “servant of God;” where
the poet says, “your vicegerency is throughout the world,”
Singh would have us believe that he has said, “the leadership of
the world is at your command". Where the poet says, “that
which is not God,” Singh says, “all except God;” where the
poet says, “what you plan will become your destiny,” the
translation says, “your destiny is to grasp what you aspire".
A Complaint against Khushwant Singh’s “Complaint and Aswer” 127

Where the poem says, “what is this world? Even the Tablet and
Pen of fate are yours,” the translation informs us, “What is this
miserable world? To write the world’s history, pen and tablet
we offer you".
All this would be tolerable, if not acceptable, if Singh had
produced a reasonable English poem. He is fully aware of the
problems of translating from what he calls “oriental” verse in a
European language (p. 15). He also disclaims any pretence to
Urdu scholarship. Heavily handicapped as he was, his greatest
asset was his command of English, an asset for which he is
rightly admired. But it seems he remembers no English poetry
except the soggy verse of Edwin Arnold, whose pale shade
looms large over the translations. By translating into loose
hexameter couplets, Singh has let himself be bogged down by
elaborate, unnecessary padding for the sake of meter and
rhyme. By trying to imitate a language that had become dated
even in Victorian times, he has “writ no language". A piece of
English writing directed toward those who have little or no
Urdu and whose mother-tongue is English, should at least
make itself understood as English. Yet the translation is hardly
intelligible even to people like me. And this is not only because
of mutilation in translation, but also because of plain, bad
“poetic” English. Singh seems to have no idea of the language
being used in English poetry today. And by “the language of
English poetry today” I do not mean the highly wrought, boldly
creative and unorthodox language used by a poet like Ted
Hughes. I simply mean a language which refuses to accept
archaic, turgid, sentimental or coy expressions as the current
coinage of English poetry. Most of what Singh has produced is
simply not good English, either in terms of idioms or of
“poetic” language. Let me give some examples and try to say
what is wrong with them.
1. Inversion. While Urdu syntax does not suffer much by
inversion, and indeed seems to thrive on it, the English mode is
alien to inversion, and modern English poets have always
regarded it as a sign of poor poetic skill, if not of bad taste and
128 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

have used it only– if ever– for comic effects. Exigencies of

rhyme and meter have made Singh practice inversion on a large
scale. This not only creates a cutesy effect but also often makes
for unnecessary obscurity. At first reading, a line like “Filled
with the wine of faith, like goblets round we went.” (p. 39)
seems to mean that “round” is not an adverb, modifying
“went”, but an adjective, qualifying “goblets". Similarly a line
like “Neither rhyme nor reason has Your displeasure, what
does it mean? (p. 47) is liable to be misconstrued to mean that
“rhyme” and “reason,” and not “displeasure”, are the subject of
“has”. Again, in the following line: “His name is the tent pole
that the canopy of heaven sustains”. (p. 93) the immediate
impression is that the “tent-pole” is sustained by “the canopy of
heaven,” and not the other way round.
2. Bad English. One cannot believe that a stylist of
Khushwant Singh’s level would not be aware of the
grammatical holes in his translation; it must be the tyranny of
rhyme and meter which has made him compromise. But errors
which are not directly caused by these constraints—and many
are such errors—make one wonder what had got into him when
he translated:
Under the shades of glittering sabres Your creed we
proclaimed. (p. 33)
How does one justify “under” for “in” and “shades” for
“shade”?
Beneath the dragger’s (sic) point, we proclaimed Your
message true.
(p. 35)
“Beneath the dragger’s (presumably, dagger’s) point” is
meaningless, and also bad translation. One could easily say “at
dagger’s point”, or even possibly “under the point of a dagger".
To make matters worse, Singh says “the dagger". (What
dagger? one is tempted to ask.)
Heavy weighs the light of dawn, how loathe you are to rise?
(p. 69)
A Complaint against Khushwant Singh’s “Complaint and Aswer” 129

“Loathe” could be a typographical error for “loath”, but

“weighs” here needs a preposition and an object governed by
it. (For example: “weighs heavy on you”.)
Who love (sic) by selling tombs of their sires are you. (p. 70)
“Love” may again be a typographical error for “live”, but
the absence of the demonstrative “those” before “who” is
indefensible; so is the omission of the definite article before
“tombs". In the following line, the first “in” is unidiomatic as
well as unpleasantly repetitive. Replacing it with “from” would
remove both defects.
What is there to stop you in trading in gods made of stone?
(p. 70)
In the following line, “there be” hangs in the air; the
conditional clause” beginning “even if’ needs a subject to
conform with the impersonal pronoun “one”. So instead of
“One’s speech should be polite even if there be reason
to criticize” (p. 72) Singh should have written “One’s speech
should be polite even if one has reason to criticize.” (This
would have removed the heavily archaic “there be” in the
bargain.)
The following line has a nonsense phrase “set them wildly
free” which is tautological too.
The new civilization, removed all restraints and set them
wildly free;.... (p. 83)
In the following line, “dwells by” suggests that “He” lives
somewhere nearby, and not in the ocean. Moreover, “the
ocean’s swell” which is “tossed by the stormy seas” leaves the
reader wondering if “ocean’s swell” is different from, and
outside of, “stormy seas”. In addition, he wonders if it is
“swell” or the “ocean” which is “tossed”.
He dwells by the ocean’s swell that’s tossed by the stormy
seas. (p. 94)
The line is a gross mistranslation too.
130 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

3. Archaisms. Loosely interpreted, a word or phrase no

longer used by educated native speakers except for some
special effect is an archaism, even if the dictionary does not
designate it so. “Bread and butter” for “livelihood,” “kith and
kin” for “near relations,” “alas” as an expression of regret,
“missive” for “letter,” are some examples. Strictly speaking,
only words or phrases designated as archaic by good
dictionaries of current language are archaic. Also, different
disciplines have different idioms: a word may be archaic or
even obsolete in poetry or criticism, but current in law or
history. Singh’s translation uses archaisms of both types
(italicized in the examples below).
We are like the silent lute whose chords are
All of voice;... (p. 29)
Those who rose against you, against them we turned our
ire,... (p. 35)
Hejazis turned to Mecca, kissed the earth and ceased from
fray.... (p. 38) (“ceased from fray” is bad English too.)
Where is the affection you showed us in the days of yore?
(p. 43)
Alas! not one there was in the garden to hear his lament. (p.
56)
Strong was his sense of justice, no bias did hid (sic)
judgment blight. (p. 78)
Why tremble at the snorting of the chargers of your foes? (p.
90)
4. Tautology. (Note the bolded words or phrases.)
Do you know of anyone, Lord, who then took Your Name? I
ask. (p. 31)
Fake gods that men had made, who did break and shatter?
(p. 36)
My mind’s mirror is studded with many gems sparkling
bright; ... (p. 57)
Your tears tremble at the brim and are ready to flow. (p. 65)
Weeds and brambles will be swept out of the garden with a
broom; ... (p. 86)
A Complaint against Khushwant Singh’s “Complaint and Aswer” 131

(Also, the original has nothing to suggest “swept out,

“much less a broom.)
His name is the tent pole that the canopy Of heaven
sustains. (p. 93)
(In order to appreciate the tautology better, amend the line
as follows: His name is the tent-pole of heaven’s canopy.)
5. Mixed or inappropriate metaphors. It is hard to formulate
rules for metaphor making. In fact, one of the complaints that
some philosophers of language and some metaphysicians make
against metaphor is that there can be no manual for metaphor
making. Still, the fact that mixed metaphors and inappropriate
metaphors are generally bad has always been recognized. A
mixed metaphor means joining two metaphors which are
independently valid, but are derived from two different
premises. An inappropriate metaphor is one which seeks to
establish correspondence where there is none, or where the
figurative value established is ineffectual or too little. Here are
some examples from Singh’s translation.
My mind’s mirror is studded with many gems sparkling
bright; ... (p. 57)
Apart from being a gross mistranslation, the line suffers due
to the mixed metaphor of the mind’s mirror being studded with
jewels, for a jewel-studded mirror will have no reflective
power.
The aged vault of heaven heard. There is someone
somewhere, said he. (p. 62)
The “aged vault of heaven” is again a mistranslation, and
the mixed metaphor is that while “aged” is appropriate to a
vault, hearing is not. “The vault of heaven heard” could be
acceptable because the anthropomorphism of “aged” would not
be there to cause confusion.
Its breast is full of melodies that are still tempest-tossed. (p.
55)
The melodies are in the breast, not in the tempest. So if
anything is to be “tempest-tossed,” it should be the breast. A
132 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

curious mixing of metaphors, this. It is also a mistranslation.

Who made time-serving the measure of your
actions? (p. 74)
Time-serving is a style of conduct; it can be a symptom of
some weakness or fault, but not a “measure” of someone’s
actions.
Your thoughts are flames that dispel tomorrow’s shades and
make them bright. (p. 88)
Apart from being an enormous mistranslation, the line
suffers from the following defects: 1, if thoughts are flames
that dispel “shades”, they cannot make them bright, for the
shades are already dispelled; 2. there is only one tomorrow, so
it can have only one shade, not “shades”; 3. “shades” is
incorrect in this context, it should have been “shadows” or at
least “shade;” 4. “tomorrow’s shades” is yet another mixed
metaphor; 5. The tautology is obvious.
Strong was his sense of justice, no bias did hid (sic)
judgement blight. (p. 78)
“Blight is an inappropriate metaphor for the function of
“bias”.
A word about the Devanagari transliteration. Here again,
Khushwant Singh seems to have relied on slipshod advice. A
few examples of incorrect transliteration will suffice.
Jami‘at for jam‘iyat (p. 30); yurup for yurap, the Urdu
pronounciation of “Europe” (p. 33); sarkashi for sarkash-o (p.
61); ‘alam for ‘alim (p. 64); mursil for mursal (p. 68).
To conclude, this is not a book that I can recommend with a
clear conscience. Strong words, but Khushwant Singh is an
important and influential writer. The sins of the great are
always judged more severely than those of the small.
 IQBAL—A SELECTION OF THE URDU
VERSE: TEXT AND TRANSLATION.

Iqbal—A Selection of the Urdu Verse: Text and

Translation. Translated by D. J. Matthews. London: School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London; 1993. X,
289 pp. £ 12.

One Must Admire the industry and the literary

discrimination of D. J. Matthews, a scholar whom all of us
know and respect as co-editor of An Anthology of Classical
Urdu Love Lyrics: Text and Translations (London: 1972). The
expectations that were aroused in me on seeing his new book,
an advanced students’ handbook and anthology of Iqbal, were
high and pleasant, based on my previous views about
Matthews’s work. If I am now disappointed, these high
expectations are largely to blame. But then, such expectations
were not unreasonable. In the 1972 anthology, all the poems
were scanned accurately and their metres described correctly.
In the present book, I find a scansion that should have gone - -˘/
˘- -˘ /˘- -˘ /˘- - described as - -˘ - / - - ˘ ˘ / - - ˘ ˘ /- - (p. 149). Even
if we presume that the fourth syllable of the first foot (as
described by Matthews) is shown as long due to a
typographical error, there is nothing– not even our good
opinion of Matthews– that can make us believe that any foot in
an Urdu metre could end with two short syllables. The foot
division is not just wrong: it couldn’t have been made by
anyone who has knowledge of Urdu prosody.
On page 150 we find a scansion that should correctly be - - ˘
/ - ˘ - - / - - ˘ / - ˘ - - described as- - ˘ -/˘ - -/˘ - ˘ -/- -. The author
134 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

forgets that his configuration takes the metre away from

Muzari’ and makes it into a false Rajaz. The same error is
repeated on page 151. (In both cases, however, the metre is
correctly identified as Muzari’.) On page 152, a configuration
that should be - - ˘ /˘ - ˘ - / ˘ - - has been shown as- -˘ /˘ - ˘ -/- -.
The metre of poems 19 and 26 is Munsarih; both times it has
been identified as Rajaz (pp. 173 and 184). And so on.
At this point I hear the voice of my conscience suggesting
that I’m perhaps picking nits. Should I not examine the larger
issues? For example, what image of Iqbal does this book
convey? Does he come across as the great poet and great
thinker that we are informed (Introduction, p. 3) he was? What
are the issues, then, that his poetry addresses? With what ideas
does it engage? What are the literary strategies that he adopts?
Where does he stand in the Urdu poetic tradition? What new
ground, if any, did he break in Urdu poetry? These and many
such questions that should have merited David Matthews’s
attention are not even raised. All that we have are somewhat
hasty and certainly over-broad generalizations, like “The
Persian influence [on Iqbal] was so great that not infrequently
an Urdu verse may be rendered into Persian merely by
substituting the third person singular form of the verb ‘to be’
hai by ast, which conveniently scan in the same manner” (p.
vii). While one may disregard the fact that ast and hai do not
always scan the same way, one still wonders if such a narrow
situation obtains “not infrequently” even in the poetry of
Ghalib, which is more Persianized than that of Iqbal. One also
wonders whether Persian is not to Iqbal’s Urdu what Arabic
was to Hafiz’s Persian. Hafiz, as we well know, has a
predilection for inserting Arabic phrases, misra‘s, and even full
shi‘rs, into his Persian ghazals. Rumi does the same in his
Masnavi. So by throwing an occasional—and to be sure, not
major—bit of Persian into his Urdu, was Iqbal consciously
paying homage to the Persian language, or was he merely
acting out a role suggested by his great predecessors? Iqbal has
a lot of Arabic too, particularly Qur’anic references, in his
Persian, and also in his Urdu. The reason for this could be his
A Selection of the Urdu Verse 135

love of Islam and its Prophet, or his admiration of Arabic, or

his erudition, or all of these. Discussions of such non-central
matters should not, in my view, find place in brief, simplifying
introductions of the kind attempted here.
The reference to the alleged Persian influence on Iqbal has
been brought in, I suspect, merely in order to justify including
in this volume “a short appendix outlining the grammar of
Iqbal’s Persian” (p. vii). Before we go on to examine the worth
and value of the appendix in question, we might stop and ask
ourselves where the signpost “Iqbal’s Persian” is supposed to
lead us. Are we to understand that there are many kinds of
Persian, and Iqbal’s is one of them? Or does this mean that
Iqbal’s Persian was different from that of, say, Hafiz or
Ghalib? Or should we believe that Iqbal’s Persian was
“archaic” (or maybe “modern”) and had a different grammar?
Later on (p. 195) we are informed that “Iqbal’s Persian is not
the modern language of Iran, but reflects that of the classical
poets of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. [...]
Substantially, however, classical and modern Persian do not
differ greatly from each other. [...] Iqbal’s verse would
generally be perfectly comprehensible to the present day
Iranian.” If so, why insert an appendix outlining the grammar
of “Iqbal’s Persian”?
Now a brief look at the grammar itself. On page 196 we are
introduced to the izafat, the functions of which have been
limited to merely two: to indicate the possessive or the
adjectival. So what about the descriptive sense, like shahr i
dehli (the city of Delhi), or the inverted-descriptive, like abju
(ju i ab, stream of water), or the genetic like Bu ‘Ali i Sina (Bu
‘Ali, son of Sina), or the qualitative like ahl i dil (he/she/they
who have a heart), and so on? On page 197 we are told,
“Persian verbs have two stems: Present and Past ” (!). The
author goes on to say that khar is the present (!!) stem of the
verb kharidan (to buy) and that the infinitive is formed by
adding an to the past stem (!!!). At this point, I am rendered
speechless, for I have lost all the myriad Persian infinitives that
136 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

I’d always been taught to regard as masdar (occurring from the

beginning, that from which things start; hence, the original
forms) which are the source of other, finite forms.
Rather than losing myself in marginal issues, let me return
to the main questions. Does this book present any kind of
image of Iqbal as a great poet? One of the ways to attempt such
a presentation would have been to choose poems which the
critical opinion of the culture in which they were produced has
consistently regarded as great. Seen from this point of view, the
inclusion of long poems that are largely sentimental
(“Shikwa”), sententious (“Valida Marhuma ki Yad men”) or
more or less wish-fulfilling rather than visionary and history-
based (“Tula -e Islam”) seems to be misleading, or wasteful, or
both. For the very same space could have been used for
including much greater poems like “Zauq-o Shauq,” “Sham‘
aur Sha‘ir,” the grand qasida-like poem in imitation of Sana’i
(sama‘ sakta nahin pahna i fitrat men mera sauda), extracts
from “Mihrab Gul Afghan ke Afkar,” and many of the short,
dramatic poems like “Jibril o Iblis” that would be the pride and
glory of any poet.
It is hard to see why a selection like the present one—short
as it is—would choose to deal with poems of a local, passing
interest. I grant that even the weaker poems of Iqbal are often
better than the best of nearly all his contemporaries, but I truly
don’t see why Prof. Matthews should stuff the student’s gullet
with second-rate, stale stuff from a poet who is perfectly able
to supply some of the finest poetry produced in lndia in this
century.
These reservations notwithstanding, I am glad to affirm that
the translations of the poetry generally succeed in their
objective: each is “a parallel English translation, which has
been made as literal as possible, without, however, forcing the
English syntax” (p. 8). The book “is intended for those who
have a reading knowledge of Urdu and who would like to
become better acquainted with the works of Iqbal” (p. vii). I
would say that the translations generally do even better: they
A Selection of the Urdu Verse 137

read like good English texts in their own right. Here is a

sample from the poem “Khizr-e Rah” (p. 59, opening lines):
One night on the bank of the river I was lost in my vision.
In the recess of my heart I concealed a world of anxiety.
The night grew ever more silent; the wind was gentle; the
river flowed softly. My eyes wondered if this was a river or
a picture of water.
As a little baby sleeps in its cradle, somewhere, in the
depths, the wave was restless, drunk in dreams.
The birds in their nests were captives to the magic of the
night. The dim stars were prisoners of the spell of the
moonlight.
Then suddenly I see Khizr, the messenger who measures the
world, in whose old age the colour of youth is bright as the
dawn.
He is saying to me: ‘Oh seeker of the secrets of eternity, if
the eye of your heart is opened, the destiny of creation will
be unveiled.’
This reads very well, and the sense of the poem is more or
less preserved. But I still have my differences with it: some,
which relate to choosing a more or less literal word or phrase
from the English to represent the Urdu word or phrase, I’ll
disregard. For they fall in the area of legitimate choices: for
example, should jahan paima be “he who measures the world”
(Matthews, and quite correct and literal) or “he who travels the
world”? Instead, I want to point out what I consider serious
mistranslations in the above-quoted text.
In the first line, we have mahv i nazar, which means
“gazing” or “looking intently.” I would be very loath to render
it “lost in ... vision”. In verse 3, line 2, the Urdu text is mauj i
muztar. That is, there is an izafat connection between mauj and
muztar. Matthews doesn’t read the izafat, and translates, “The
wave was restless, drunk in dreams.” Actually, he should have
said, “The restless wave was [no longer restless but) lost in
sleep.” (By the way, I would here prefer “sleep” to Matthews’s
“dreams”). In verse 5, Matthews translates paik as
138 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

“messenger.” Here it could be much better translated as

“runner”.
The calligraphy of the Urdu text is pleasing, and has been
beautifully transported here from the Lahore edition of 1973.
However, that edition, venerable though it is, suffers from
some serious typographical and orthographic-stylistic errors.
Since Matthews’s target reader is the student who has some,
though not much, Urdu, I’d have been very happy to see the
text entirely debugged. Here are some examples.
Iqbal had an archaic way of writing mujh-ko (treating it as
one word) as mujko. Similarly, he wrote tujh-ko as tujko. This
is entirely incorrect, but he seems to have persisted with it in
all the editions of his poetry that were published under his
supervision. I see no reason for us to perpetuate this
anachronism. Or if out of respect to Iqbal we do so, we should
make this clear. In the present instance, the unexplained
occurrence of mujko or tujko (pp. 12—13 and passim) is sure to
cause misunderstanding about its correctness. Similarly, the
calligrapher of the source edition has an inordinate love for
using do-chashmi he, where current Urdu orthography
unequivocally prefers the ha i havvaz. Here again, if it wasn’t
possible for Matthews to effect corrections, he should have
stated the correct position in the notes. On page 98, verse 8,
line 1, the source edition makes a ludicrous error in printing gil
as gul. The error has been preserved by Matthews; even his
translation assumes that the true text is gull and he translates
accordingly, not realizing that gul doesn’t make very good
sense in the context. Furthermore, the entire second line of the
verse in which gil occurs, is missing from Matthews’s text,
making the verse incomprehensible anyway. On page 104, last
line, the source edition has tajdidah instead of tajdid The error
is preserved in Matthews.
Ghalib and Iqbal are the two Urdu poets whose names are
vaguely familiar to the modern Western reader. I fear that this
book will not do as much as we could wish toward deepening
that familiarity.
 Part-III

URDU LITERATURE

Literary Themes and History

 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN URDU
LITERATURE:
THE CONTRIBUTION OF DELHI

The story of early Urdu consists of a few small events and

some large gaps. It also presents the historian with many
puzzles whose existence, far less their solutions, had remained
unsuspected until quite recently. Although the language must
have existed by early eleventh century, it wasn’t known by the
name “Urdu” before late eighteenth century. Continuous
literary activity in the language is not traceable before the
fifteenth century. The birth of the language most probably took
place in the area around Delhi, which means chunks of
territories now in modern Rajasthan, Haryana, and the western
part of Uttar Pradesh. Regular literary production in the
language began, however, not in Delhi, but in far away Gujarat.
From Gujarat it spread to the true South and had many
centuries of powerful growth in Gujarat and the Deccan.
No influence of Delhi can be seen on the Urdu literature of
Gujarat and Deccan. The main reason for this is that Delhi did
not then have any Urdu literature of its own, to influence or be
influenced by others. Delhi had long remained a haven for
Persian and continued to be so until at least the first half of the
eighteenth century. Urdu literature in the mean time continued
to flourish elsewhere, and the language over the centuries
acquired a number of names: Hindvi/Hindi; Dihlavi; Gujri;
Dakani/Dakhani/Dakhini. “Hindustani” also seems to have
been used, but not very frequently. Rare instances of the name
142 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

being pronounced “Hindui” (from hindu=Indian) also are

known. “Rekhta” as another name for the language became
common in Delhi, along with “Hindi”, in the eighteenth
century. The language name “Urdu” appeared quite late in the
century, but over the next hundred years it outbid other names
for the language and is its only name today.
The first known literary writing in Urdu was the product of
Mas‘ud Sa‘d Salman’s erudite and prolific mind. Salman
(1046-1121), who lived in Lahore and was widely regarded as
the greatest Persian poet of the age, is reported to have put
together a divan in “Hindvi”—Urdu’s most popular early
name. Nothing of this collection survives, and the earliest
indication of its existence even comes a century after Salman,
in Muhammad ‘Aufi’s Lubab ul Albab, a biographical
dictionary of Persian poets compiled in Sindh around 1220.
Three quarters of a century later, Khusrau (1253-1325) wrote a
seminal Dibacha (Preface) to his divan called Ghurrat ul
Kamal (1294). In this Preface, Khusrau mentioned Salman’s
Hindvi divan, and said that he (Khusrau) had also produced, for
the delectation of his friends, “a few quires of verse in Hindvi”.
Unfortunately, almost nothing of Khusrau’s Hindvi verse
survives.
Thus there was nothing by way of Urdu literature in the two
centuries between Salman and Khusrau, and another century
had to pass after Khusrau before literary activity in Urdu can
be discerned. Owing to the vast geographical spread of the
language, and the flux of both time and its speech community,
Urdu quickly developed a number of registers: Gujri, “hard”,
or Sanskrit tatsam-and-Telugu influenced Dakani, “soft”, or
Sanskrit tadbhav-and-Braj influenced Aurangabadi
Dakani/Hindi, Dihlavi, Murshidabadi, Lakhnavi, and so on.
Yet in spite of the great longevity, range and sophistication of
the literature in Dakani, it or any other register could not
acquire pan-Indian authority and normativity.
The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature: the Contribution of Delhi 143

By the end of the seventeenth century, Urdu, or

Hindi/Hindvi/Dakani as it was then called, had become the
koine for the sub-continent. India’s greatest modern historian
Tara Chand says that over the centuries [before English
supervened], “Hindustani”, that is “Hindi” with an overlay of
Persian [=what is now called Urdu] was the lingua franca for
all polite speakers throughout India. The Dihlavi register had
by that time already burst its local linguistic boundaries and
had become established far into the South, in and around
Aurangabad, as that Aurangabadi register of Hindi/Dakani.
Now in the eighteenth century this powerful koine, as practiced
in Delhi, became the measure and the lodestar against which all
other registers were tested.
Ahad Ali Khan Yakta in his Dastur ul Fasahat (composed
in 1798, with emendations carried out until 1815), and
Insha’allah Khan Insha and Muhammad Hasan Qatil in their
Darya-e Latafat (composed 1807)affirm the supremacy and
normativity of Delhi’s Urdu. Although none of them came
from the South, they did come from different backgrounds and
places, and none of them was truly Delhi either. In the South,
Muhammad Baqar Agah (1745-1806) of Vellore, the greatest
writer of the time in the “hard’ dakani mode, also wrote in
“Rekhta”, confirming thus not only his virtuosity but also the
availability of “Rekhta” as a literary medium that far into the
South.
The acceptance of the Dihlavi register of Urdu as the
pristine, authentic tongue was due in no small measure to one
poet: Vali. Variously called Vali Gujrati/Vali Dakani/Vali
Aurangabadi, he was born around 1665/7, and died in 1708/9.
Vali’s language was mutually comprehensible with the Delhi
Hindi/Rekhta when he came to Delhi in 1700. There was very
little Hindi/Rekhta poetry in Delhi at that time. Much of
whatever there was, was in the rekhta genre. Rekhta was
originally a kind of macaronic verse where a Hindi/Hindvi
template was used for grafting Persian vocables onto it, or
144 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

there was Persian template with Hindi/Hindvi vocables grafted

onto it.
That Vali’s example must have shaken the polite society of
Delhi out of its Persian-induced hubris is not to be doubted.
The persianate Delhi must have been somewhat shocked to
realize that Aurangabadi Hindi/Dakani/Rekhta, in the hands of
a true poet, was flexible a means of literary production as
Persian itself. Whatever doubts remained, must have been
blown away 20 years later when Vali’s divan arrived in Delhi.
Shah Hatim (1699-1783), himself a major bilingual poet in
Persian and Hindi/Rekhta was an eyewitness to the frisson, the
thrill, the new fire of inspiration that swept through Delhi at
that time. As Hatim told Mushafi (1750-1824) later, poetry in
Vali’s style became the only game in town.
The success story of Dihlavi Urdu must have caused divers
kinds discomfort to several sorts of historians. If Delhi and its
Empire in the eighteenth century presented an unrelieved scene
of decay, corruption and disintegration, how come a new and
sophisticated linguistic-literary mode sprang out of such chaos?
And how could poor, battered, effete Delhi have had the
authority to enforce that mode throughout the vast stretches of
the sub-continent? Urdu/Hindi/Rekhta was never the court
language in the North. So even that deus ex machina could not
be implored to provide the solution. Such questions were
therefore not asked, and “mainline” historians preferred not to
make any observation on the literary-cultural vitality, power
and resilience of Delhi in the eighteenth century.
Urdu was not the court language at Lucknow. In fact none
of the regional courts that sprang up in the eighteenth century
in India had Urdu as the court language, or a language in which
official business could be transacted. Tipoo Sultan perhaps did
permit the Dakani/Karnataki mode of Hindi along with
Kannada, but his short reign ended in tragic defeat, and his
example was not followed elsewhere. Persian persisted well
The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature: the Contribution of Delhi 145

into the twentieth century as the official language at the court

of Nizamul Mulk at Hyderabad.
Of course, all courts, whether regional, or the one at Delhi,
began to employ Hindi/Rekhta poets from the eighteenth
century. This was by way of patronage, and providing
sustenance to a favoured subject, and had nothing to do with
treating Hindi/Rekhta as a language of the court. However
royal interest did help the growth of Hindi/Rekhta in the
Dihlavi register. Muhammad Shah (r. 1719-1748) was a
connoisseur of Hindi/Rekhta poetry, and Shah Alam II (r.
1759-1806) conducted informal conversations in Hindi/Rekhta.
He was also a Hindi/Rekhta poet and prose writer of some
distinction. All this naturally lent immense social prestige to
the language throughout the sub-continent.
As for those who like to put down– by way of praise or
blame– all Urdu as pale imitator of Persian, their dilemma was
equally horrible. Delhi liked to see itself as home to Persian,
and Khan-e Arzu, the greatest linguist and lexicographer of the
eighteenth century, declared in his major work Musmir (=Fruit
Bearing Tree, circa 1754) that the language of Delhi was
Persian, the same as that of the other great Iranian poets of the
past, and Delhi’s Persian was in fact better than that of other
extant Iranian cities for Delhi’s register was normative for the
entire country.
There is considerable force in Khan-e Arzu’s assertion,
because the elites of Delhi and many commoners or unlettered
people too, were then perfectly fluent in Persian, even literary
Persian. Khvaja Nasir Andalib (1696/7-1758/9) was a major
Sufi of Delhi. Khan-e Arzu describes him as “not having
acquired the knowledge of external disciplines” (tahsil-e ilm-e
zahir na karda). The saint also occasionally describes himself
as “unlettered” (ummi). Apparently he knew just enough to
write a bit, and nothing more. Yet he composed huge sufistic
texts in highly literary and learned Persian; the texts were taken
146 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

down to his dictation mostly by his even more famous son and
disciple, Khvaja Mir Dard (1720-85). Occasionally, when no
amanuensis was to hand, the saint himself did the writing.
Given this background, our Persianate historians held that
Urdu poetry in Delhi, if not everywhere else, was bound to be
just an appendage of Persian. Yet Delhi, great House of Persian
for at least seven centuries, had no tradition of Urdu
(=Hindi/Dihlavi/Rekhta) poetry. In other words, Persian alone
couldn’t provide the fillip that was needed to switch from
Persian to Hindi/Rekhta. The great flowering of
Hindi/Rekhta/Urdu in Delhi came to be only the Dakani
creative impinged upon the admittedly puissant forces that
were already in Delhi, like sun dried earth, waiting to be
quickened by the warm, welcome, but alien rain.
That Delhi did as much for Urdu literature as all Gujri and
Dakani put together, attests to the vast creative urge for Urdu
that lay dormant in Delhi, its ear to the ground, keen to descry
however dimly the coming of the catalyst which would open up
the ground forever. Urdu in Delhi at time was like, as Rumi
said in another context:
Deep into the bush– Tigers
Waiting for the command: Come!
“Official” historians find nothing but negative images in the
Delhi of the eighteenth century because such a view is on all
fours with the colonialist discourse, and let me say so, even
Marxist discourse. For did not Marx view the British rule in
India as a potent instrument of History which catapulted India
into the pre-Industrial society? The actual reality was rather
more complex. Certainly the eighteenth century did not view
itself as living on the edge of Apocalypse or Armageddon.
Instead, it saw itself as a continuation of the ages of Babur and
Akbar through Aurangzeb. Wars of succession, temporary
failure of the centre to hold, emergence of new alignments,
were nothing new to the Indo-Muslim political culture.
The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature: the Contribution of Delhi 147

Culturally and spiritually, the eighteenth century in India

was more vibrant than its predecessor. In the field of Urdu and
Persian literature, it was the inheritor and perfector of the
“Indian Style” of literary expression which had been fashioned
over the centuries alike by Hindu, Indian Muslim,. Iranian,
Tajik, Uzbek, and Pathan, and by a variegated host of Indian
poets like Kabir and Malik Muhammad Ja’isi who did not write
in Urdu or Persian. But for Delhi in the eighteenth century,
Urdu literature would have remained locked away in distant
places, like the obscure contents of the treasure chests of
provincial families.
With eighteenth century Delhi must also lie the credit for
introducing, or in fact creating, two new institutions in Urdu
literature: the musha‘ira, and the master (ustad) who gave
formal or informal instruction in the art of poetry and prose to
aspiring or practicing writers (shagirds).
The musha‘ira, as a formal gathering of poets at a well to do
person’s, or at another poet’s place, does not seem to occur
anywhere in the main Islamic lands in the medieval or
premodern times. Yet it must have existed in India from around
the sixteenth century. Such gatherings must have had an
audience, of both poets and non-poets from quite early on, if
not from the very beginning. The presence of a poet among the
audience would imply that he wasn’t regarded as senior enough
to recite his poetry at such an assembly. One of the reasons for
the musha‘ira to have originated in India may be the fact from
the sixteenth century, there was greater influx of Persian poets
in India than ever before. Persian poets from not only Iran, but
also from the Persianate Central Asia migrated, or travelled to
India for extended sojourns. Akbar actively promoted Persian
at court and in Government, and this must have given an extra
fillip to Persian poets from abroad to come to India in search of
employment or patronage. These poets, finding many of their
profession in the same city, or even at the same court away
from home, would have tended to gravitate toward each other
148 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

for comparing notes, for conversation, and recitation of their

new compositions.
The word musha‘ira is apparently not a proper Arabic
derivative from the root shin ‘ain ra. The word is also not
found in any authoritative Persian dictionary before the early
nineteenth century. Shamsul Lughat (composed 1804-5, printed
1891) and Ghias ul Lughat (composed 1826, numerous
printings in the nineteenth century) seem to be the earliest to
enter it. While according to the former, the word has an
agonistic sense in the context of public recitation of poetry, the
latter glosses it as “reciting poetry to one another”. The fact
that none of the authoritative Persian dictionaries of the
eighteenth and earlier centuries recognize it, would suggest that
poets of repute did not use this words in their works, regarding
it perhaps as spurious, or a neologism. Thus the institution
itself could not be very ancient. It was very much in place,
however, by early eighteenth century.
When Rekhta/Hindi poetry became popular in Delhi,
assemblies of poets of that language too began to take place
frequently. However, with characteristic snobbishness, the
word used for the Rekhta/Hindi poets’ assembly was
murakhita, an Indianistic (and grammatically illegal) derivative
from the Persian Rekhta. The “high” word musha‘ira was thus
reserved for the “high” poetry of Persian.
The murakhita, however, soon overtook the Persian-
language assemblies in popularity, if not exactly in prestige.
The earliest use of the word “musha‘ira” denoting an assembly
of Rekhta/Hindi poets is in the first divan of Mir (1722-1810),
compiled before 1752. We have accounts, or reports, of
musha‘iras/murakhitas by poets like Sa’adat Yar Khan Rangin
(1758-1834/5), Mushafi (1750-1824), and by poets and
biographists like Qudratullah Qasim (d. 1811). The
Rekhta/Hindi musha‘ira soon became a lively place, amenable
to agonistic confrontations and rivalries. It was not uncommon
The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature: the Contribution of Delhi 149

for a poet to be challenged in open assembly to scan a line, or

give “authoritative proof” of the correctness of a word or
phrase used by him. Qudratullah Qasim, in his tazkira called
Majmu’a-e Naghz (final draft composed around 1806/7) gives
us the story of Azim Dihlavi(d. 1806/7), a not very
accomplished poet, but much given to self-regard, being
challenged by Insha’allah Khan Insha (1756/7-1817) when the
former unwittingly mixed two metres in one poem. Tempers
ran high, and remained so for a long time. In his tazkira
Nikatush Shu‘ara (circa 1752), Mir tells us about the
musha‘iras at the residence of Khvaja Nasir Andalib, and how
the venerated Khvaja delegated to Mir himself the duty of
organizing as well as presiding over the musha‘iras.
There is little doubt that the musha‘ira helped improve the
standard of composition Rekhta/Hindi. From the point of view
of the sociology of literary production in a given milieu, an
even more important consequence of the spread of the
musha‘ira as a creative, competitive arena was, in Delhi and
elsewhere, a phenomenal increase in the number of poets, and
the love and praxis of poetry trickling down to the so called
lower classes. What F. Schlegel said about the democracy in
poetry in another context became quite true in the
Rekhta/Hindi poetry from early eighteenth century onward.
Qasim’s Majmu‘a-e Naghz lists 693 poets. Khub Chand Zaka's
(d. 1846) ‘Iyarush Shu‘ara (final draft finished around 1812/3,
begun 1798/9) has 949 poets. ‘Azamuddaula Sarvar’s ‘Umda-e
Muntakhaba (begun 1801, final draft may have been prepared
much later) gives us information about 996 poets. Not all the
poets listed by these authors are from Delhi. Since there is very
little Rekhta/Hindi poetry in the North and the East before the
eighteenth century, the proliferation of Rekhta/Hindi poets in
these territories in the eighteenth century must have owed a
great deal to the example of Delhi. Abul Hasan Amrullah
Ilahabadi wrote his tazkira called Masarrat Afza in 1779-80;
one of his stated purposes was to write about poets of the East
150 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

not mentioned in the tazkiras produced a few years earlier in

Delhi.
Among the professions of poets reported by Qasim are:
Husain Bakhsh Bakhshi, clothier (parcha farosh); Madhu
Singh Shigufta, ironsmith (ahan gar); Khvaja Hinga, gold lace
maker and braider (‘ilaqa band); Mir Sadiq Ali, elephant
keeper (fil ban); Shambhu Nath Aziz, money lender (mahajan);
Mir Latif Ali Latif, gemstones broker( dallal-e javahirat);
Mughal Ali Mughal, braider and merchant (‘ilaqa band va
saudagar); Badruddin Maftun, cloth merchant (bazzaz);
Yakrang, goldsmith (sunar);Muhammad Hashim Sha’iq,
tailor(khayyat); Muhammad Arif, darner(rafu gar); Pandit
Ganga Das Taskin, brahman (apparently a purohit); Inayatullah
aka Kallu, barber (hajjam); Ghulam Nasir, lancer and dresser
of wounds (jarrah); Mirza Raja Shankar Nath Haya, nobleman;
Maqsud, water carrier; and Shiv Singh Bejan, geomancer
(rammal). There is even a sweeper, called Qarin. Let it be
noted that some of the above poets are Hindu. Hindus, who had
been concentrating on Persian up until the middle of the
century, seem to have lost their heart to Rekhta/Hindi by the
time its musha‘iras became popular in Delhi. As the century
progresses, we encounter more and more Hindu names among
the Rekhta/Hindi poets. Soon they are joined by Christians,
mostly westerners, but also second generation Indians.
Women make their appearance quite early on the literary
scene. Contrary to common belief, not all of them came from
the “nautch girl” class, though that class did have its
representatives. The best and justly the most celebrated woman
poet of the century was indeed a dancing girl called Mah Laqa
Ba’i Chanda (1768-1820) in the South. A woman of great élan
and social prestige in Hyderabad, she had poets writing qasidas
in her praise. In Delhi, there was Gunna Begam (d. 1773).
Married to Ghaziuddin Khan, Prime Minister to Shah Alam II,
she was a poet of substantial elegance, and a person of great
beauty, ready wit, and a patron of poets. Then there was
The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature: the Contribution of Delhi 151

Yasman, housemaid to Insha’allah Khan Insha. Some of her

verses rival those of much better known poets.
Women poets attracted the attention of tazkira writers by
virtue of their considerable numbers, and the quality of their
poetry. Baharistan-e Naz, the first tazkira devoted to women
poets alone, was published in 1864-5 by Fasihuddin Ranj. It
contained accounts of 174 poets, some of whom wrote in
Persian. Durga Parshad Nadir published his Chaman-e Andaz
in 1877; its first edition contained 144 women poets, while in
the second (1884), the number went up to 196. In his Shamim-e
Sukhan (1872-3) Safa Badayuni took care to separate the
“professional” women from those who observed “purdah” and
were sharif by birth and circumstance.
We have seen how Persian was the main, and almost the
first language of all the elite and many of the middle classes in
Delhi up until the middle of the eighteenth century. However,
when Rekhta/Hindi began to tug at the hearts and minds of the
poets of Delhi, they turned to it with a zest and verve never
seen before or after in the history of Urdu letters. Yet, however
much the poetry in Rekhta/Hindi may owe to Persian, it was a
different language, and those who wanted to compose in it had
no real perspective to determine what was excellent and
acceptable as poetry in Rekhta/Hindi. They needed someone to
put them through their paces, to give them a surer footing in
what was essentially an alien idiom to them. This felt need
gave rise to the institution of ustad (master) to whom a shagird
(pupil) could submit his verse and also prose for “correction”,
and to whom he could defer in matters of idiom, usage, and
other finer aspects of the art of composition.
The origin of this system seems to have been unique to
Delhi, and to Rekhta/Hindi. Doubtless we hear of an occasional
Persian poet being a pupil of a major writer like Mirza Abdul
Qadir Bedil (1644-1720) or Sirajuddin Ali Khan-e Arzu (1689-
1756) in Delhi. Vali himself was a pupil of a Sufi and Persian
152 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

poet called Shah Gulshan (1662/3?-1727) and Vali himself is

reported to have had a couple of pupils of his own. But the
nature of the relationship is not clear in these cases. Vali
certainly was not a pupil of Shah Gulshan’s in Rekhta/Hindi
poetry. He may have learnt some other discipline from him.
Similarly, we know of Vali’s pupils from indirect sources
alone, and it is also possible that he acquired them on his return
from Delhi. As far as Persian is concerned, it seems that Bedil
and Arzu were consulted but informally, except where Arzu’s
expertise as linguist and master of literary as well as colloquial
Persian was made use of by other poets. Arzu certainly was the
ustad of some of the earliest Rekhta/Hindi poets in eighteenth
century Delhi.
In Urdu, the ustad-shagird institution very soon became a
commonplace of the literary environment. Protocols, unwritten
but fairly strong, were in place by about the middle of the
eighteenth century. For example, the ustad need not have been
much older than the shagird, but must have been someone with
a big reputation. One did not change ustads casually. Those
who changed ustads without a proper reason, or due to their
temperament not being suitable to the ustad, were not admired.
Often the new ustad would refuse to accept the pupil, unless
the matter had been run by the previous ustad and his
concurrence obtained. Payment to the ustad for services
rendered was not obligatory, but expected. Women also had
access to the ustad. Mah Laqa Ba’i Chanda’s ustad was Sher
Muhammad Khan Iman (d. 1806/7). Hayatunnisa Haya, a
daughter of Shah Alam II, was the shagird of Shah Nasir
(1760/61?-1838).
The ustad never solicited shagirds, and had full right not to
accept a given person as shagird, either due to lack of ability in
the prospective shagird, or lack of inclination on the part of the
ustad. Mir tells us in his autobiography of Raja Jugal Kishor, a
rich patron of poets who desired to appoint Mir his ustad. Not
finding the Raja’s poems “worthy of correction”, Mir turned
The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature: the Contribution of Delhi 153

him away, having “scrawled a line across most” of the Raja’s

verses. Mir was practically destitute at that time, and would not
have been more than thirty-five years of age. His refusal to
accept the Raja as shagird must have meant hardship and
maybe loss of future patronage from others as well. The fact
that Mir had no hesitation to turn down the Raja reflect light on
the value Mir placed on the ustad’s calling and also the station
of the poet: not everybody could become a poet, poetry was not
a class privilege. It was a matter of talent. There are
suggestions that sometimes the ustad composed virtually all the
poetry that went under the rich or powerful shagird’s name.
But no one has ever proved anything. Instances, however, of
the ustad giving away to, or “bestowing on” a shagird a whole
verse or ghazal are not unknown.
The ustad-shagird institution thrived and became
widespread in a short time because it answered a need, was an
easy means of showing favour to poets, and finally, because it
suited the nature of the oral society. The ustad passed on, by
word of mouth or by example, the nuances of the art of writing
to his shagird. No recourse to the written word was needed,
because the ustad’s authority subsumed, and perhaps even
surpassed the authority of the book. The “new” poetics that
developed and flourished in Rekhta/Hindi over the century and
a half between 1700 and 1850 remained unrecorded, for the
ustad’s oral transmission of all subtleties of theory and practice
was available when needed. This also suited the genius of the
society which was largely oral, and which respected immediate
authority and oral instruction as an important part of cultured
existence. This is also reflected in the fact that in due course,
one’s excellence as a poet became partly a function of whose
shagird he or his ustad was, and to a certain extent, the ustad’s
excellence and status too were judged in terms of the number
and excellence of his shagirds. Similarly, while the ustad might
authorize a shagird to recite his poems in musha‘iras without
“showing” them first to the ustad, many poets still preferred to
154 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

have, if feasible, the ustad look over their poems before they
recited them in the musha‘ira or put them in their collection.
No poet would, unless he was a “rebel”, take shagirds of his
own unless the ustad permitted him.
All this is reminiscent of the practice in musical gharanas,
and Sufi houses. The air was entirely secular, and Muslims
would cheerfully take a Hindu as ustad. The example of Sarb
Sukh Divana (1727/8?-1788/9), among whose shagirds were the
redoubtable Ja‘far Ali Hasrat, and Haidar Ali Hairan, is perhaps
the best known, though not as well known as one would like it to
be.
The “new light” of the post-1857 age extinguished the light
on many traditions, including the ustad-shagird tradition. One
of the many charges brought against it was that the ustad stifled
the originality of the shagird. The ustads remained in business
even after the new theory of poetry which called for “natural
poetry” and “poetry based on true emotions” seemed all set to
abolish the old order of excellence in literature. However, the
adherents to the old order were unable to answer the charge
that that the ustad destroyed the originality of the shagird. The
answer wasn’t actually far to seek, and the fact that the answer
was never made indicates the intellectual disarray and loss of
self-confidence which became the lot of our cultural
consciousness after the defeat of of the 1857 movement.
I. A. Richards taught in China during 1930-31 and thus had
an opportunity to learn at first hand the fundamentals of
Chinese literary culture. He was delightfully surprised to find
that the western concept of “originality” had no counterpart in
China where remaking an old thing in a new way was
considered the mark of true originality. Bertrand Russell had
made a similar discovery when he went to China a few years
earlier. Similarly, “realism” was never an issue with the
Chinese. While the Westerners asked about a work of art, “Is it
true?”, the Chinese simply asked, “Is it human?” Long before
Pankofsky, the Chinese had realized that “art” is just a set of
rules that tell us how “reality” should be represented. There is
no such thing as a reality “out there” which can be captured by
The Eighteenth Century in Urdu Literature: the Contribution of Delhi 155

the artist without any frills or strings. In a painting one doesn’t

represent reality so much as organize pictorial surfaces in given
ways.
Those of us who are familiar with the Sanskrit or Arabic
literary culture will immediately recognize that in regard to
“originality” and “realism” in literature, our own position is
very similar to the Chinese. A necessary concomitant to the
idea of originality is that of plagiarism. The great Arab literary
theorist Al Jurjani (d.1078) practically denied the existence of
plagiarism, saying that literary themes are the common
property of all. The Sanskrit as well as the Arab literary
traditions insisted on “meaning” and not “truth” as the object of
art. The Arabs had the same word ma‘ni, to denote “meaning”
and “literary theme”.
Of course, poets do influence each other, in big ways or
small. But since “originality” was not a value in our literary
tradition, it was never at risk at the hands of the ustad when he
dealt with his shagird. In fact, sometimes the ustad would write
in the manner of the shagird, if he found that the shagird’s
manner was more in keeping with the demand of the times. The
classic case is that of Mushafi (1750-1824) who during the
evening of his life readily adopted the manner of his shagird
Atash (1777-1847) who was very good at khiyal bandi, a mode
that had then become fashionable due to Shah Nasir and
Nasikh.
The ustads’ inability to meet the charges of the modern age
diminished the prestige and also the geographical spread of
their institution. The ustad-shagird nexus was, however, so
strongly suited to the genius of Urdu literary culture that it
never ceased to exist. It exists even today, though the
excellence of the ustad, as well as the authority that the
institution wielded in the culture are things of the past.
Delhi did some bad things too, and some bad things were
intepreted as good, and were added to Delhi’s crown by later
historians. In 1755-6, Shah Hatim wrote a Preface for his
Divan Zada, a selection of his poetry that he compiled
implying that whatever else he wrote in the past should not be
regarded as authentic. He strongly advocated the primacy of
156 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

the accepted colloquial idiom over the “bookish” idiom. This

was quite proper, but in that Preface, he also suggested that he
had given up the use of some words, which were not on the
tongues of elegant speakers of Delhi. The words that he singled
out were mostly of Sanskrit tatsam type, but had entered
Rekhta/Hindi perhaps through Braj. He also frowned upon
what he called “Bhakha”. His last suggestion was that poets
should use Arabic and Persian words according to their
“original” pronunciation.
It is not quite clear what motivated Hatim to say all this.
Perhaps he was desirous of distancing himself from Vali whose
attitude to language was practical and non-bookish. Be that as
it may, in his Divan Zada itself, which according to Hatim was
the epitome of his work purged of all “objectionable” usages,
Hatim used freely and frequently the very words and
constructions that he had held blameable in his Preface.
Unfortunately, later historians and grammarians of poetry
chose to ignore Hatim’s emphasis on the superiority of
educated, everyday speech over pedantic, overburdened
speech. They placed great value on the negative aspects of
Hatim’s formulations which were hailed as “reformist”. Hatim
was, on the basis of his negative and restrictive
pronouncements, honoured as having made the first attempt at
“purifying” the language.
All this was bad history and even worse linguistic theory,
but it gained enormous and very quick currency. Other
“reformers” of the language duly appeared or were invented,
especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. This
resulted in loss of flexibility in the language and established the
false power ratio of the grammarian (parole) laying down the
law for the poet (langue), though the natural equation works
the other way around. The situation became even direr because
the ustad-shagird system permitted the poet to assume the
grammarian’s role as well. For all its brilliant elegance, the
language of Urdu poetry in the nineteenth century doesn’t
always reflect the ground level linguistic reality.
 CONVENTIONS OF LOVE, LOVE OF
CONVENTIONS: URDU LOVE POETRY IN
THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Next to our own, the eighteenth century is the most exciting,

vibrant, and productive century in more than five hundred
years of literary production in Urdu. Perhaps the most
remarkable thing that happened in Urdu literature during that
time–traditionally represented by British historiography-
influenced writers as a period of decay and disintegration–was
the consolidation and discovery of a poetics, of a whole new
way of charting out a course for literary creativity in a
language that, in Delhi at least, was still a little tottery on its
legs in the field of literary production. Delhi, even in the
middle of the eighteenth century, boasted of Persian as the
zaban-e urdu-e mua‘alla-e shahjahanabad (the language of
the exalted city of Shajahanabad). It described Sanskrit as
hindi-e kitabi1(learned Hindi=Indian), and the city’s common,
spoken language, was known as plain Hindi or Hindvi. Very
little literature in Hindi/Hindvi was produced in Delhi during
the period 1600-1700– and hardly any during the four
preceding centuries– and the literary form of Hindi in which
this literature was produced was called Rekhta (mixed, poured,
cement-and-mortar, etc). The term Urdu as language name
came into use much later. Rekhta/Hindi remained the universal
name for the language until very nearly the end of the
eighteenth century.
158 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Rekhta may have begun independently, as a pidgin. It is

more likely that it began as a kind of macaronic verse in Hindi,
and gradually assumed a life of its own, so much that the
pidgin element was eliminated, giving room to a literary Hindi,
such as was already being written in the Deccan, particularly
Aurangabad, under the name of Dakani and/or Hindi.
However, Delhi, with its cosmopolitan cultural environment,
long continued to look upon Rekhta with a faint air of
disapproval, as something different from, and inferior to
Persian. There is a famous verse by Qa’im Chandpuri (1724-
94):
Qa’im, it was I who gave
To Rekhta the manner
Of the ghazal. For otherwise
It was just a feeble thing,
In the language of the Deccan.2
This tendency for the word ghazal to be taken to mean only
Persian ghazal, continued until quite late in Delhi. Thus we
have Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi (1750-1824), writing around
1820:
Mushafi, I compose Rekhta
Better than the ghazal. So why
Should now one be
A devotee
Of Khusrau and Sa‘di? 3
Delhi’s Rekhta/Hindi acquired a literary status and a
sophistication that was soon to equal, or even surpass, the best
achievements of the past three centuries in Gujarat and the
Deccan. This happened mainly due to Vali (1665/7-1708), an
Aurangabadi or Ahmedabadi by birth, who came to Delhi in
1700. At that time, he was a substantial poet in his own right,
regarding only the Persian poets–Iranian or Indo-Persian–as
worthy of his mettle. There is a story about Vali being advised
at that time by Shah Gulshan, a venerated Sufi and Persian poet
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 159

in Delhi to appropriate the rich store of themes and images in

Persian and thus introduce a new depth and space in his
Hindi/Dakani. There are reasons to disbelieve this story4. There
is however little doubt that Vali’s full Divan arrived in Delhi in
1720. According to Mushafi, Shah Hatim (1699-1783), who
was an eye witness to this event, told him that Vali’s poetry
took Delhi by storm, and became instantly popular with young
and old, rich and poor5.
It is this Divan which provided a jumpstart to Rekhta/Hindi
poetry in Delhi, not only by providing an active model, but also
by introducing new theoretical lines of thinking about the
nature of poetry, and about how to make poems. In short, Vali
seems to have provided both the model, and the theory that
went with it.
There is an interesting shi‘rs, again by Mushafi, in his third
Divan, compiled about 1794. He says:
Oh Mushafi, I have,
In this urdu of the Rekhta
Introduced a thousand new things
Of my own making.6
There is a certain piquancy in the phrase “Urdu of the
Rekhta”. (What does it mean: Urdu language as derived from
the Rekhta? or does “Urdu” here mean “royal court, camp,
camp-market”? “Royal court” seems the more likely meaning).
Yet what is most notable here is the bold assertion of invention,
the poet’s confidence and assurance in his own role as a
‘maker’, and not just ‘imitator’ of things in poetry. Judging
from the fact that this proudly soaring self-belief is of a poet
who wasn’t even born in Delhi, and was not a witness to the
momentous arrival, more than sixty years ago, of a new wave
of poetry in Delhi, it is easy to see that Rekhta/Hindi poetry in
the North came of age within a very short time, and the tree of
invention in Rekhta continued to give off new shoots for a long
time to come.
160 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

The major discovery in theory–we first hear about it in the

Deccan, in Ali Nama (1672), a long poem by Nusrati Bijapuri–
was in the concept of ma‘ni. Nusrati speaks of mazmun, and
ma‘ni, as two separate entities7. Classical Arab-Persian literary
theory spoke only of ma‘ni– a word now universally translated
as meaning– in the sense of the “content” of a poem, the
assumption being that a poem meant what it “contained”.
Nusrati, however, uses mazmun in the sense of theme, content,
the thing/object/idea, which the poem is about. The term ma‘ni
he uses to connote “meaning”, that is, the inner, deeper, or
wider signification of the poem. Vali too uses the two terms in
the senses described above8. After him, all Rekhta/Hindi poets
in Delhi constantly make use of the distinction for making
points about the nature of poetry.
Since the “theme/meaning” distinction doesn’t occur in
Arabic or Persian, it is strongly probable that Nusrati, a man of
great learning, picked it up directly from the Sanskrit, or from
Telugu and Kannada, languages which he would have known,
and whose poetics is almost entirely derived from Sanskrit. Or
he may have come across this idea in the Persian poets of the
“Indian style”, who themselves may have developed it through
their direct and indirect contacts with Sanskrit language and
literature from mid-sixteenth century on. These contacts, by the
way, remained very strong in the eighteenth century all over
the sub-continent, and their effects permeated Rekhta/Hindi
poetry as well.
Many advantages accrued to Rekhta/Hindi from this
discovery about the dual nature of meaning. For our purposes,
the most important seems to have been the change in the
ontological status of the lover and the beloved. Now, the lover
in the poem need not have been the poet himself, nor did the
beloved necessarily have to be a “real” or “real-like” person. In
the Deccan, Dakani/Hindi poets often spoke in the female
voice–poets like Hashimi Bijapuri (1635-1697/8) consistently
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 161

adopted the female persona in the ghazal. Others moved freely

from one persona to the other.
The recognition of the poem being splittable in “What is it
about?” and “What does it mean?” meant that the poet could
assume any persona–now it was not, for instance, Vali the
person, who was speaking in the poem, but there was a voice,
and Vali the poet was only the articulator of that voice. Again,
if the poem could mean something else, or more, or different,
from what it was about, the person or object or thing about
whom, or as a result of transactions with whom, the poem
came into existence, did not need to be fixed in any particular
gender, for then that would tend to limit the “meaning” aspect
of the poem.
The great nineteenth century Urdu poet Ghalib (1797-1869)
made this point nicely, more than two centuries later. Qadr
Bilgrami, a pupil of his, sent him a ghazal for correction. The
matla’ (opening verse) can be translated as follows:
You brought me into the world
And gave me the poison
Of mortality. What a pity!
You cheated, leaving me alone
In this maze.
Ghalib wrote back, “ Tell me, who is it you are addressing
here? Except for Fate and Destiny, none else, no boy, no
woman, can be imagined to be the addressee…. So I changed
the person of the verb to plural…now the utterance is directed
equally to the worldly beloveds, and Fate and Destiny.” 9
The contribution of Vali in the development of the new
ontology is that in his ghazals, the beloved is occasionally
female, often it/he is male, and in many cases, indeterminate.
The significance of this is that the notion–articulate or
inarticulate– of the protagonist or the speaker in the poem
assumes a critical importance. The protagonist-lover could now
162 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

be just a notion, an ideal lover, whose gender was not so

important as the ideas that could be expressed through his
medium. Similarly, the beloved became a notion, an ideal,
expressed and realised in the poem by whatever metaphorical
construct lent itself conveniently at the moment. Just as the
woman/man lover was not actually a woman or man, so the
woman/man/boy beloved was not actually a woman, man, or
boy.
Since the convention of having the “idea” of a lover or
beloved instead of an actual lover/beloved freed the poet-
protagonist-lover from the demands of “reality”, or “realism”,
love poetry in Urdu from the last quarter of the seventeenth
century onwards consists mostly–if not entirely–of “poems
about love”, and not “love poems” in the Western sense of the
term. This is true of almost all of Indian style Persian poetry
too–for obvious reasons–and even of a lot of other Persian
poetry of earlier times. But the distinction between poet–the
person who actually wrote the poem–and protagonist–the
person, or the voice, which articulated the poem– was nowhere
so seriously adduced and practiced as in the Indian style
Persian poetry, and in Urdu love poetry of the eighteenth
century.
The ghazal is often described by West-oriented Urdu critics
as a “lyric”, and the main quality of the ghazal, as “lyricism”.
Modern Urdu critics invented even a new term taghazzul
(ghazal-ness) to describe this quality. It comes as a surprise, if
not an incredible and unpleasant shock, to modern students to
be told that the term taghazzul does not occur in any work or
document extant to us from before 1857, the time when a great
discontinuity began in our literary culture through colonialist
interventions.
There are serious flaws in the proposition that a ghazal is a
lyric, and that a rose by any other name, etc. While there
doesn’t exist a single, hegemonic, seamless image of the lyric
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 163

in Western poetics, the lyric is generally understood there to be

a poem in which the poets expresses “personal” emotions and
“experiences”, and does not, in the nature of things, assume an
external audience for his poem. Both these assumptions are
false for the ghazal. We just saw how new developments in
Urdu poetics split the poet-poem-as-one notion, in which a
main line “lyric” poem would seem to be anchored. As for the
audience, since the ghazal was intended to be recited at
musha‘iras and public gatherings, and was in any case largely
disseminated by word of mouth, the whole proposition of the
ghazal as a “personal-private-no-audience-assumed” text
becomes ridiculous.
The idea that the ghazal is a poem, in which oral
performance plays a great part, has other important
consequences. One consequence is that a ghazal may perhaps
be expressive of “emotions”, in the ordinary sense of the terms.
But these are not necessarily the poet’s “personal” emotions
“recollected in tranquillity” (Wordsworth), or “the spontaneous
expression of the powerful feelings of the heart”
(Wordsworth)10, or the “lava of the imagination whose eruption
prevents an earthquake” (Byron)11. It was the “verbal
contraption” in the poem, to use Auden’s phrase, which
became the chief object of the poetic exercise. Poems needed
to make sense of the experience, or the idea, of love, and in
terms that made sense to the audience as a whole, and not a
specific individual, beloved, or friend.
Byron was nearer the mark when at another place he said
that the poet was “the most artificial” of the artists12. But the
ideas about the nature of poetry–all poetry–that won the day in
Urdu through the efforts of the great modernisers of the late
nineteenth century were those of the “lava of the imagination”
type, and echoed writers like Wordsworth and Hazlitt, who
insisted that a certain lack of “art”, and an overflow of
“passion” were the hall marks of poetry. Hazlitt, one might
recall, said that there was a natural and inalienable connection
164 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

between passion and music, and music and poetry. Then he

went on to say, “Mad people sang”13. Small wonder that
phrases like shirin divanagi (delectable madness) became the
stock in trade of our modern critics when they spoke of the
kind of ghazal that they admired.
The distinction between mazmun (theme, motif), and ma‘ni
led to the recognition of the fact that there was a universe of
discourse particular to the ghazal. Certain kinds of mazmuns
were admissible in this universe of discourse; others were not.
Thus while mazmuns were infinite in theory, each mazmun had
to have affinity with other mazmuns before it could be
considered a proper subject for poetry. Thus one major
convention–common, by the way, to Sanskrit, Indian style
Persian poetry, and Indian style Turkish poetry– was that
mazmuns, even words and images, already used, should be
reused, though in a new way, or with a new slant. “Personal” or
“personalised” narration was by no means barred, but was not
to be encouraged, and preferred only when it made sense in
more general terms.
One of the recurrent themes in the eighteenth century Urdu
ghazal is the poet’s self-denigration as a “writer of elegies”,
and not of poems proper. Here are some examples:
Nothing falls from the lips of Qudrat
But lamentation. He’s no poet
But an elegist for his own heart.
(Qudratullah Qudrat, 1713-91)14
It’s a whole age
Since Mazhar has been pouring
His lamentations into metre,
And yet in the beloved’s mind,
He doesn’t speak like a poet.
(Mirza Mazhar Jan-e Janan, 1699-
1781)15
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 165

The above verse is in Persian; Mazhar was a major sufi and

an important Persian and Urdu poet in Delhi, and is described
as having influenced a great many Urdu poets, especially in the
fist half of the century.
Don’t describe me as a poet, Oh Mir,
I collected numerous griefs and sorrows
And made up a Divan.
(Mir, 1722-1810, in the third Divan, compiled circa 178516).
I just don’t know
If my Divan is a book,
Or an elegy, or
Anything at all.
(Mushafi, in Divan I, circa 178517).

I am not really a poet, Oh Mushafi,

I am an elegy-reciter,
I recite the soz, and make
The lovers weep.
(Mushafi, Divan III, circa 179418).

In fact, we can see this convention in action even in the

nineteenth century. Here is Syed Muhammad Khan Rind
(1797-1857):
Those of a loverly temperament
Often weep while reading them;
Indeed, the poems of Rind
Are not poems, but elegies?19
Poetry thus was basically a quest for themes, and love was
just another theme, not an event in the poet’s real life; only that
in the ghazal, love was the most important theme. And the core
function of love was to soften the heart, to make it receptive to
more pain, which ultimately made the human heart a site for
the Divine Light to be reflected upon and into it. Pain, and
166 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

things that caused pain, had a positive value. The lover’s place
was to suffer; the beloved’s function was to inflict suffering.
This was a Sufistic formulation, but was regularly taken by the
ghazal poet to be true for the ghazal universe. Shaikh Ahmad
Sarhindi, a leading and extremely influential Indian sufi of
early seventeenth century, wrote that the lover should desire
that which is desired by the beloved. Since the lover suffered
pain and grief, it is obvious that that was what the beloved
desired for the lover. To ask for, or long for, comfort was
therefore un lover-like20.
All this was mazmun for Urdu love poetry in the eighteenth
century. The poet suffered pain also in search of mazmuns. Or
he wept for a mazmun that was lost, or couldn’t be realised, or
which was experienced for a moment, and then lost. One is
reminded here of Shelley’s characterising the creative process
as being “conscious of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with a place or person,
sometimes regarding our mind alone, and always arising
unforeseen and departing unbidden…”21 So the poet toiled to
get the lost visitations back, or mourned at their departure. Mir
said:

You have neither grief in your soul

For the mazmun,
Nor is your heart soft with pain.
So even if your face was pale like parchment,
What of it?
(Divan IV, circa 179422)
The lover-protagonist and the beloved-object both live in a
world of extremes: supreme beauty, supreme cruelty, supreme
devotion–all things are at their best, or worst, in this world. The
beloved-object is not a passive recipient of the lover-
protagonist’s tribute of love, or a helpless non-entity, unable to
alleviate the lover’s pain, or ameliorate his condition. The
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 167

beloved’s “cruelty” may be real, or a metaphor for his/her

indifference, or physical distance from the lover. But the
indifference of the beloved is an active stance, it makes a point.
The lover-protagonist would prefer death at the hands of the
beloved to his/her indifference. Or if one does find oneself to
be lucky enough to be killed by the beloved, there are degrees
of merit and distinction in death, too. The lover-protagonist is
the only true lover: all the rest are false, and given to havas
(lust), rather than shauq (desire), or ishq (love) There is a
famous Arabic saying: al ishqu narun yuhriqu ma siva al-
matlub. (Ishq is a fire that burns down everything but the object
of desire). The rival, the Other (ghair) doesn’t burn with that
fire; even if the beloved kills him, he earns no distinction:
There’s the difference of earth and sky
Between the death of the ghair
And my giving up the ghost:
Doubtless, she killed us both, but me
She killed with torture.
(Mir, Divan V, circa 1798-
180323).
Also, even if there are other true lovers–though not really
possible, such a state can at least be imagined– the lover-
protagonist of the ghazal deserves special treatment:

She ought to have maintained

My distinction at the moment
Of killing. What a pity, she
Trampled me into dust, roiling me
With others.
(Mir, Divan II, circa 1775-824)
She was heard telling someone
The other day: I’ll kill someone.
Well, there’s no one who so deserves
To die, but me.
168 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

(Muhammad Rafi Sauda, 1706? -178125)

It should be obvious that in such a scheme of things,
“success in love” is not a valid, or powerful, category of
thought. No doubt, eighteenth century Urdu ghazal contains
some extremely delightful erotic poetry, and these poets are
much more conscious of the body, and its pleasures, and the
transactions that give rise to, or lead to such pleasures, than
their nineteenth century successors. Yet success in terms of this
universe is unsuccess–the greatest success is therefore death.
This poetry is thus quite naturally more occupied with dying
than most love poetry that one is likely to encounter in other
cultures. It reverberates throughout with the terror, and the
ecstasy, of dying. Death, in spite of all its uncertainty and
unfamiliarity, is an achievement, a respite, a transition:
I hacked through life in every way,
Dying, and having to live again
Is doomsday.
(Shah Mubarak Abru, 1683/5-173326)
From being to non-being
The road is just a few breaths
It’s not much of a journey–
Passing from this world.
(Sauda27)
It thus follows that so long as Death doesn’t come to him,
the lover-protagonist seeks, or gets, suffering and ill luck,
disapproval of the “worldly”, loss of honour and station.
Madness and banishment, or imprisonment or general “ill
fame” are the functions of true love: the stronger the madness,
the farther the wandering, the blacker the ill fame, the truer and
deeper the love. All this is often expressed with the subtlest of
word plays, in the most vigorously metaphorical language, and
occasionally, with extremely vivid but generally non-carnal
realisations of the beloved’s body. Since the beloved-object is
the ideal in physical beauty too, his/her body can be evoked
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 169

freely, but because the idea of the beloved is not anchored into
any particular person or gender, the narration, though bold, is
rarely physical in the modern sense of the word.
Evocation, rather than description is the rule in the ghazal.
This is also true of all other characteristics, circumstances,
transactions, of the lover and the beloved. The only items
somewhat firmly anchored in quotidian, recognizable reality
are the “other” “Others”– friends, advisers, preachers, censors,
the devout, and the priestly–that is, all those who are in
principle not in favour of the lover throwing his life away, or
destroying his faith by following the course of love, rather than
that of the world, and of God as seen by the worldly and the
priestly. The lover rarely listens to them, and generally holds
them in contempt, regarding them as benighted, materialistic,
and mundane, having no understanding of the inner life. The
phrase ahl-e zahir (the people of the obvious and apparent)
sums it up all. The world of the ghazal is one world where the
Outsider is the Hero, where non-conformism is the creed, and
where prosperity is poverty.
In spite of its idealistic and unworldly air, the poetry of the
ghazal wears an air of delight, of enjoyment, in making up
poems through words, in making the language strain at its
limits, and yet remain ravan (flowing, felicitous, smooth in
reading aloud, easy to remember: all these things are denoted
by the term ravani ). All poets, in even conventionally “sad”
narration, employ word play to the best of their power. A
certain restraint in physicality, and a certain exuberance in
execution, mark much of the best Urdu love poetry from the
eighteenth century:
In the Time’s garden, Oh how well
My fortune sleeps. I am verdant
And prosperous like the green grass;
But it’s a sward that’s crushed
To sleep by the feet that walk
170 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Upon it.
(Khvaja Mir Dard, 1720-8528)
The verse turns on a play on sar sabz (verdant, thriving),
sabza (greenery), and khufta/khvabida (sleeping) whose
subtlety can’t really be conveyed in any translation or
explication. Most modern Urdu readers, brought up on false
notions of “naturalness” of expression, are taught to feel
disappointed and let down to see a “serious” poet like Dard
indulging in the “frivolity” of word play on such an occasion.
Yet the poets knew better. They knew that word play infuses
new life into old themes, expands the horizon of meaning, and
often makes for an ambiguity of tone which enriches the total
feel if the poem. Here is an almost exact contemporary, using
the same image, to a different effect:
Like the grass
That grows on the roadside,
I was trampled off
By the multitude
In a single sortie.
(Qa’im Chandpuri, 1724-9429)
It is a powerful verse, but lacks the additional energy of
meaning that Mir gives to the same theme by word play:
I was grass newly sprung on the roadside
I raised my head to be crushed down by feet.
(Divan I, circa 175430)
The word play revolves around nau rusta (newly liberated,
newly sprouted, newly sprung), sar uthana (to raise one’s head,
to rise in rebellion), and pamal hona (to be trampled
underfoot). It is obvious that Qa’im’s verse lacks these
dimensions which are afforded to the poem by word play.
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 171

As we can see, “sadness” of theme or “authenticity” of

emotion is not the point here. The poet and the audience both
know that it is in the nature of certain themes to be sad, and
they are not interested in how “sad” is “sad”. Their primary
concern is to renew, and refashion, and thus demonstrate and
realize the potential of the language. Intertextuality,
imagination, audience expectation, all play their part.
Obviously, eighteenth century poets did not have twentieth
century Indian readers in mind.
Let’s now examine how “erotic” is erotic in this kind of
poetry. Word play is important here too. But other devices like
all kinds of sensuous imagery, metaphor, and a sense for
dialogue and drama also come into play. An epistemological
convention almost always respected here more than most is
that things are expressible by their essence, or epitome. There
is an essential “itself-ness” in each thing, and it is this, rather
than specific points, which needs to be indicated by the poet.
Ghalib (1797-1869), though not of the period we are
discussing, put it best:
The rose, the poppy, the eglantine
Are all of a different colour.
In every style, every colour
One needs to affirm the spring.31
Thus the rose is the essence of all roses, and since the
beloved is the essence of all beloveds, so gul (rose) is often
employed to mean “beloved”. The central image of the rose
generates an almost infinite complexity of metaphors, but the
human body beats it all:
How can the rose have the clearness, the finish of your
body?
And then, there is the bride-like fragrance of good fortune,
Poured into it to the full.
(Shaikh Jur’at, 1748-180932)
172 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

This is based on Shah Hatim (1699-1781), and reading

Hatim’s verse, one can see how great a difference the
suggestive imagery has made in the case of Jur’at:
You whose body is like a rose,
How exciting are the waves
Of fragrance from your perspiration,
Roses are now perfumers, and
The breeze is ever so pleased. 33
(Shah Hatim)
Doubtless, Hatim is more earthy in talking of the
perspiration as a heady perfume, and his globalization of the
perspiration-as-fragrance is piquant, but the verse feels bookish
when put beside that of Jur’at.
Morning, she rolled her sleeves
Up to the elbows–
The nakedness of her body, entire,
Was drawn into the hands.
(Mushafi, Divan III, circa
179434).
How closely it clings
To her gold-like body,
There’s someone whose
Sulphur-coloured dress burns
My heart much with envy.
(Mir, Divan VI35, Circa
1809/10).
Mir and Mushafi both use the image of the clinging dress
over and over again, and always to great effect:
If you would always wear
Dresses of this design
I for one would never say,
“Please put off your dress.”
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 173

(Mushafi, Divan III, circa

179436).
My heart is torn to pieces
Envying her clinging dress
How tightly the dress
Hugs the body
(Mir, Divan VI, circa 1809/1037).
Consider the date: Mir was nearly eighty-eight when he put
together this last, sixth Divan. Also consider the word play: the
heart that tears, and the dress that clings. It should be clear that
the verse wouldn’t have had much to do with Mir’s “real life”
at that time. It is the play of imagination on a favourite theme,
the life of the mind, and the poet boldly writing and rewriting
on the palimpsest that enables such vivid and “naughty” poems
to be made.
The question that most bothers western readers (and,
unfortunately, now a number of native readers too) is that of
the beloved’s gender. The fact that in many ghazal shi‘rs, the
lover and beloved can be construed as male, or the beloved can
be construed to be a boy, was seen by the modernizing Urdu
critics of the late nineteenth century as an embarrassment, if
not an indictment of the whole ghazal culture. It never seems to
have bothered anyone else before. Many reasons are offered by
the modern critics for this “lapse of taste” committed by the
eighteenth century Urdu poets: an almost universal vogue of
various kinds of same-sex love–from homoeroticism to open
pederasty; segregation of women in the society; influence of
Iran; “corrupt” practices prevalent in religious and Sufi
institutions; general decline of “moral” values, encouraging
every kind of dissolute life; and so on38.
No one, of course, seems to have asked the “accused” if
they had any explanation or defence. All of us were in the
greatest hurry to apply the moral standards of Victorian-
Colonial India to a culture that was nowhere near being
174 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

colonised at that time. In fact, during a great part of the

eighteenth century, the boot was on the other leg: it was the
English who were trying to adopt what they thought was the
Indian life style. Throughout the eighteenth, and through much
of the nineteenth century, Indians looked down upon the
English as essentially uncivilized. A white complexion was not
yet a thing of universal praise and desire.
One who, in preference
To those of a dark-complexion,
Hankers after the white ones–
Connoisseurs of beauty
Regard him as heart-dead.39
(Shah Mubarak Abru, 1683/5-1733).
Let me go hunt the Dark-
Coloured Beauty. Why die
At the hands of the light-weight
White ones? 40
(Muhammad Shakir Naji, 1690? 1744).
The point that I want to make here is that by late nineteenth-
century standards, fairness of complexion may have been the
greatest of merits in a person, but poets of the eighteenth
century should not be blamed for holding a different opinion.
Similarly, questions about the beloved’s gender didn’t bother
the poets of that time because they weren’t practicing
“realism”, or writing autobiographical poems. The beloved
was, first and foremost, an idea, and that idea could be
represented in one of many ways. The beloved’s
anthropomorphic character was often left vague, especially by
poets inclined toward Sufism. The general literary feeling was,
anyway, in favour of ambiguity and richness of interpretive
potential.
Once the beloved was no longer anchored in any given
entity, it became possible to play all kinds of possibilities.
Man, woman, boy, God himself, all, or none of them, but a
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 175

general sense of “belovedness”, became possible. The “you” of

the ghazal assumed a life of its own. There is no question but
some of the poems are clearly homoerotic or even pederastic.
Also, there is no question but in many of such poems it is very
hard to determine the tone– ironic, or self-mocking, or just
conventional, or maybe all of this rolled into one. Similarly, the
shi‘rs in which the gender, or the identity of the beloved is so
vague as to encompass both “profane” and “sacred” love,
would perhaps outnumber all other kinds of shi‘rs in the
eighteenth century ghazal put together.
What is really important here is not the question of who? Or
why? And how bad or how good a light it reflects on the poets.
Literature is a system in its own right, it needs to be understood
and judged, first and foremost, in its own terms. Is the system
coherent? Do all its parts make sense separately, or
collectively? These questions are more valuable than those of
“moral soundness” or “political correctness” in regard to the
literary output of a culture.
The matter of real importance thus is to understand the
poetics which enabled poems to be written where the poet
could be heterosexual, sufistic, homoerotic, or pederastic at the
same time, and where the beloved could have characteristics of
both man and woman in the same poem, often in the same
shi‘rs. This is how this came about.
The liberation of the beloved from the constraints of gender
identity enabled the poet to use all possibilities as it suited him.
For example, let the beloved be a boy. Now the convention is
that the beloved is always assumed to be youthful in age and
appearance. Since intensification is a common device in this
poetry, the age of the beloved became gradually so reduced
that he could be imagined, without any sense of incongruity, as
little more than a baby. Little children everywhere love to ride
a short staff, or the cane-reed, pretending to be expert
176 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

horsemen. In Urdu, the word for such children is nai savar

(cane-reed rider). Now this is Mir:
Well, love is a terrible thing indeed
Even Mir, much given to lamenting
Ran on and on, like a petty servant
Yesterday, alongside the cane-reed riders 41
(Divan III circa 1785).

There is a bit of word play here, but it’s not a great shi‘rs.
Still, the great thing about it is that Mir carries off the image of
a grown up person running hot like a footman behind a reed-
riding child. Even in English translation the poem doesn’t
sound risible. In Urdu, it sounds entirely appropriate. Here is a
shi‘rs by Mushafi:
Wearing my heart on my sleeve,
I was always there, around him
Even in the days when he played
Marbles with the urchins of the street.42
(Divan I, circa 1785).
The Mushafi shi‘rs does not have the ravani that Mir’s has,
but the point, I think, is clearly made by the two examples: the
poet-protagonist-lover is not a paedophile. It is the convention–
the ecriture– to use a fashionable word, that’s doing the writing
here. And by the same token, if the beloved is assumed to be a
grown up man, he is conventionally seen as a boy, or
adolescent, on whose face the down has not appeared, or is just
appearing. All these are again full of possibilities for mazmun-
making. It is quite common, for instance, to say that the
appearance of the down on the face has made the beloved more
beautiful, hence crueler, less truthful, and more prone to break
promises. The word most used for “down” in such cases is
khat, which also means writing, and therefore, a written
agreement or letter. Mir Tahir Vahid, a noted Iranian poet of
the Indian style, makes the point beautifully:
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 177

How can Vahid claim his heart

Back from you now?
The day he gave it to you,
There was no khat between us.43
(Mir Tahir Vahid, d.
1708).
In the following verse, Naji (1690?-1744) implies that the
bearded face of the beloved is more devastating that that a
clean one. Unfortunately, my translation loses the delightful
word play. Anyway, here is it, for whatever it is worth:
For how long the practice
Of tyranny, dearest?
Cut your hair short,
Shave off your beard. 44
Taking advantage of the fact that the beloved’s hair is
occasionally described as the rays of the sun, and the sun’s rays
are supposed to kiss the dewdrops on the rose, Naji says:
If you desire union with
The sun, keep your eyes wet
With tears, like the dew.45
The two eighteenth century poets who are most given to
mazmuns of boy love, homosexuality, homoeroticism, so forth,
are Shaikh Mubarak Abru (1683/5-1733) and Muhammad
Shakir Naji (1690?-1744). It is not clear that their interest in
these themes was based on actual propensity, and if so, how far
did this propensity enter their real life. Abru never married, and
if the following verse of from him is taken as a true statement
of personal preference, he looked down upon heterosexuality
as improper and unloverly:
One who passes by a boy
And loves women
Is no lover. He is
A man of lust. 46
178 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

We know that there were many women in Mushafi’s life,

yet he claims–again, if the poem is accepted as true personal
evidence–a certain proclivity for bisexuality:
Though the catamite gives pleasure
Of a sort, I didn’t find
The true pleasure of love
But in women.
(Divan IV, circa 1796 47).

In any case, such verses, whether true testaments or false,

would not have shocked their audiences in the eighteenth
century. Indian society has never looked upon homosexuality
with the horror and anxiety that have characterised western
responses to it since the early modern period. K. J. Dover tells
us that among the Greeks, homosexual transactions were
intercultural, and anal penetration was not permitted, at least in
theory. If some of the Indian eighteenth century accounts are to
be believed, while there were any number of professional boy
beloveds in Delhi at that time, even touching and kissing were
considered improper, and were to be discouraged strongly.
The story is told, for instance, of a poet called Aftab Rai
Rusva’s love for a boy. Rusva came from a well to do family,
and was gainfully employed when he fell in love with the boy.
He gave up his job, began to wander naked in the streets of
Delhi, mad and uncaring. Once he found his beloved holding
court, surrounded by friends and admirers. Apparently there
had been no physical contact between Rusva and the boy until
then. Finding him in open company, Rusva was overwhelmed
by passion, and boldly kissed his beloved. This lapse from
decorum so enraged the boy that he fatally stabbed Rusva who
refused medical aid and all other succour. He recited the
following verse (apparently his own) as he died:
Though my master may not
Sew up the wound in my heart,
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 179

What of it if I die,
Let my master live.48
Abru has left us a long poem in the masnavi form, addressed
to a young male who wants to set up as a beloved. Detailed
instructions about toilette, make up, hairstyle, deportment, and
speech, are given. He is also advised to retire as soon as his
beauty starts declining, though not immediately after the down
appears, or even after the whiskers grow stiff, necessitating
their removal: for the down also is “the secret of beauty, and
goodness”. It is God’s “artistry on the face”. Coquettish
behaviour is okay, but things should never be allowed to
become physical:
Be sure that among your lovers
There’s none that is vulgar,
Lustful, unchaste, filthy hearted
You already have beauty, now
Look for sophistication,
A bad-living person is
No beloved at all. 49
Choudhri Muhammad Naim has an excellent analysis of the
poem, and the issues involved in it. The interested reader is
referred to it.50 My limited concern here is to show that
however much rooted in the social mores of the eighteenth
century, boy-love, and man-love, as depicted in this poetry, are,
for us, not “social” but literary issues. These themes, and their
treatment in the extant form, became possible due to literary
reasons. And in any case, since poetry then was not expected to
reflect social reality (as if there could be one seamless,
omniwhere social reality which poetry could catch hold of), but
deal with mazmuns, the issues of the beloved’s gender, age,
profession, social status, never arose, and we would be doing
serious injustice to this poetry if we raised such issues now.
Mir described one of the qualities of his poetry of which he
was particularly proud as ada bandi.51 This term, vague in
180 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

itself, is hard to translate. It means something like “depiction

and narration of the beloved’s coquetry, dress and manners,
speech and body language”. Mir, no doubt, excels here, as he
does in many things. But he does much more. The depths and
intensities of experience, coupled with the fullest possible
vocalisation of the mysterious power of love that Mir is able to
achieve is not seen elsewhere in this century, or in any century,
for that matter. In Mir’s poetry, the dimensions of both loss and
gain are infinite, and yet the poems are strictly earthy, not
abstract or cerebral. A great deal of Urdu love poetry can be
interpreted as sufistic, but Mir retains the everyday, human
dimension even while suggesting things best seen on a cosmic
scale.
The thing that immediately strikes the reader’s mind from
the eighteenth century–as compared to the nineteenth–is the
human relationship aspect, the ada bandi, the rare meetings
and closenesses, the all too frequent partings and the
distressing distances between lover and beloved that the
eighteenth century poetry highlights for us. Mir was thus quite
correct in giving ada bandi such importance in his scheme of
things.
It is largely because of ada bandi that the beloved in the
eighteenth century ghazal is not the passive, hiding-behind-the
purdah, slightly tubercular, recoiling from the slightest physical
contact, shrinking-violet type of little girl much touted by
modern critics as the optimal beloved in the ghazal. This image
gained currency through modern “classicist” poets like Hasrat
Mohani (1875-1951), and attempts continue to be made to fit
all ghazal to this image, but even a brief look at the ghazal of
this period will demonstrate the falseness of this image. Here is
Hatim:
Our bodies and souls were one
There were no cracks
But both our hearts longed
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 181

Just for a word or two.

I still remember that heart enticing
Hint of yours, making up
A little pan from a filbert
Leaf, and flinging it toward me.
At that time, right then
My heart was in your firm grasp
When you let your hand
Touch with mine.
(Shah Hatim, composed 1736-37 52).
Scooting over a little bit, bit by bit
You came to sit right next to me
What skittishness, effrontery,
Self-assurance!
(Shah Hatim, composed 1743 53).
The beloved here is a conscious participant, and since the
gender is not specific in any of the four shi‘rss I quoted above,
the lover-protagonist here need not necessarily be male, just
because the poet is male. In fact, even in the general scheme of
things, though the lover/beloved became essentially genderless,
the lover-protagonist inherited some of the qualities from the
original, female protagonist in the ghazal. That is, many
qualities which are generally identified in Indian society with
women–steadfastness against the (male) beloved’s fickleness,
being given to copious weeping, growing thin, and wasting
away, being patient, and self-surrendering–came more and
more to be the mark of the lover-protagonist in the eighteenth
century ghazal. I discussed the “female” aspects of the lover-
protagonist’s personality in a paper.54 One might recall here
that Muhammad Hasan Askari, Urdu’s greatest modern critic,
identified Mir’s greatest strength and poetic quality as his
ability to fully and unconditionally surrender his lover’s self to
the beloved, and even to the world and its people.55
182 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

We’ll now look briefly at one point relating to the

epistemology of metaphor, and close this necessarily brief
discussion of a wide and difficult subject. Non-native readers,
and now most of the native ones even, are shocked and even
revolted by the image of the beloved and the lover as presented
in the ghazal. The beloved seems mindlessly given to
bloodshed, kills countless people at one stroke, lets rivers of
blood flow in the streets, cuts the lover up into pieces, is
deliberately and sadistically cruel, so forth. The lover is
apparently the most wretched of persons, partly or wholly mad,
revelling in being denigrated, often grovelling in the dust or
mud in the beloved’s street, and so on. These things are true,
except that they are seen in the ghazal universe as positive, not
negative characteristics, and the reason for their being where
they are is again literary, not the social or mental
backwardness of our poets.
Metaphors are also to be understood in their “literal” sense,
before they can start making sense as metaphor. Abdul Qahir
Jurjani held that in some cases, rejection or deferment of the
literal sense would lead to losing all the sense contained in the
metaphor. He quotes the line Shamsun tuzalliluni
minashshamsi (A sun gives me shade from the sun) and says
that although the sun is a metaphor for the beautiful slave who
opened an umbrella over the head of his master to protect him
from the sun, the line has no meaning unless it is read as if
there were no metaphor at all.56
Schleirmacher made a similar point about the literality of
metaphor eight centuries later when he said, “Words used in
the figurative sense retain their proper and specific meaning,
and achieve their effect only through an association of ideas on
which the writer depends”.57
One implication of the “literalness” of metaphor was on the
epistemological level: metaphors do not represent facts; they
are facts. Thus a metaphor could be treated as a fact, and
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 183

another metaphor drawn from it. From that metaphor again,

another one could be derived, and so on. Shibli No‘mani
(1857-1914), the great modern Indian-Persian scholar and
critic, was the first to point this out.58 Instead of the frightening
“infinite regress” of meaning that one finds in Derrida, here
was an exhilaratingly infinite progress of metaphor, and each
metaphor was a fact in its own right. Consider the following:
The lover obviously loves the beloved more than he loves
his own self. This leads to the metaphor/idiom: kisi par
marna=to die on someone. Or, there is the metaphor/idiom:
kisi par jan dena=to give up one’s life for someone. This leads
to the proposition: The beloved can cause death. This is
followed by the proposition: The beloved can kill. This is
followed by: The beloved is a killer. Now a new line of
metaphorical reasoning takes over: The beloved kills–with a
look. Her eyes therefore are daggers, or swords, or a weapon of
killing. Now swords etc. need to be sharpened; so the kohl
applied to the eyes is a sharpener. But why should only the eye
be the sword/dagger, etc.? The beloved’s coquetry also can kill.
So another set of metaphors comes into existence. Then since
the beloved has a number of lovers, and all lovers, by
definition, get killed, so the beloved can kill a whole host of
people in one glance=blow. Then, killing with a dagger or a
similar weapon causes blood to flow. Hence the beloved’s
street is a place where one smells blood, like Cassandra,
anticipatively, or actually. If a number of people get killed at
the same time, rivers of blood flow in the city, and the beloved
can be seen riding his/her/its charger in triumph.
Then, the beloved doesn’t necessarily kill; she may inflict a
wound or two, and stop at that. The lover now can react in any
number of ways, given the “fact” that the wounds are real
wounds. For example: The lover writhes in pain, ecstatically,
hoping to “enjoy” the moment for as long as possible; the lover
may complain, to the effect that the beloved was casual, and
not in earnest; or worse still, she was deliberately casual and
184 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

intentionally delivered only a glancing blow, so as to deprive

(because she is perverse by definition) the lover of the pleasure
and honour of dying. The lover may plead for the killing blow,
or feel angry and disappointed at being reprieved.
A casual blow, or refusal on the beloved’s part to kill the
lover, may also involve a value-judgement: the lover is poor
material, not fit to kill. This may again be due to one of many
reasons: the lover is qualitatively inferior; he is not a good
enough lover, or distinguished enough as a person, to deserve
killing at the hands of the beloved. Or, it may be that the lover
has grown “pale, and spectre thin”, has wasted away, and is
therefore not worth the trouble of killing. Or maybe the
beloved, or her sword–yes, even the sword, because the shine
and sharpness of a sword is described as its ab=water–may
perspire, out of shame at having to kill such a wretch who is
more than half-dead himself.
And if there are wounds, then there are doctors, surgeons,
expert or inexpert sewers up of the open wound. The lover
should, by definition, refuse any kind of aid, medical or
spiritual. This gives rise to another set of metaphors. Or the
lover’s wound may have been sutured, but the sly lover knows
his job. He has fingernails to pick at the stitches, or reopen the
wound.
The wounds may be self-inflicted, in a fit of frenzy, for
instance, but not with a view to suicide. Or the wounds may
have been inflicted by the street arabs, who harass and torture
the mad lover and pelt him with stones. The lover actually
desires this, because loss of dignity, honour, and station, being
insulted by the meanest, and treated with contumely even by
street urchins, ensures the death, or least the suppression, of his
own Self, and thus makes himself more suitable for “dying” in
the beloved. Negating his own being, he affirms the being of
the beloved, who alone is sufficient as life, and as life-taker-
giver. So the lover actually desires and welcomes the rocks
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 185

thrown at him by naughty children. In a shi‘rs of Mir’s, the

protagonist-lover heaps rocks and stones in his street so as to
make it easy for the street arabs to throw them at him. A
seventeenth century Persian poet of the Indian style put it most
piquantly, summing up a whole culture of love, and madness,
and self-effacement, in these two lines:
The madman goes his way,
And the children go theirs;
Say, friends, does this city of yours
Have no rocks or stones? 59
(Syed Husain Khalis, d. 1710).
All this, and much more, could become possible for the
simple reason that in the poetics of Indian style Persian poetry,
and all classical Urdu poetry, the metaphor of dying is treated
as a fact from which another metaphor can be generated, and
the resultant metaphor, in turn, treated as fact , generates other
metaphors. What sounds bizarre, or distasteful, to minds
untrained in this poetics, falls quite naturally into place as
proper and desirable–in fact unique in all poetry since early
modern times–once it is seen as a rhetorical system which
permits metaphors to be made both paradigmatically and
syntagmatically.
Western poetics has generally treated metaphor as a
paradigmatic device, which is true as far as it goes. But the
picture changes drastically once metaphor and fact are treated as
interchangeable, as in the Urdu and Indian-Persian poetics. Now
metaphors can be generated syntagmatically as well. Thus: if p
is the same as q, then the characteristics of q also apply to p. The
lover is a captive (of the beloved, or of love). Birds also are
made captive, so the lover is a bird. A captive bird is kept in a
cage, so the lover is in a cage. In order to be made captive, the
bird has to be captured; the person who captures a bird is a
hunter=saiyad. So the protagonist-lover-bird was made captive
by a hunter. But the bird-protagonist is the lover too. And the
186 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

person who captured the lover is the beloved, who thus equals
saiyad, and so on.
Syntagmatic thinking makes for an infinity of metaphors,
because the metaphors generated by it do not depend on
similitude between two apparently dissimilar objects (which,
Aristotle said, was the soul of metaphor), but on association.
Western philosophers have long held that there are no rules for
metaphor making. This is quite true, so long as metaphors are
seen as hinging upon similitude. Once that barrier is broken, a
simple rule emerges: metaphors can be made by the power of
association, so long as each metaphor is taken as the fact itself,
and not the substitute for that fact. A delightful example of this
procedure is that the eyes of the beloved are often described in
this poetry as bimar=ailing, indisposed. Apparently there
could be nothing more dissimilar to the beloved’s eyes than
ailment, or indisposition. Syntagmatism makes this possible,
thus: ankh uthna/uthana is for the eyes to be raised. Those who
are ailing cannot rise. The beloved keeps his/her eyes lowered,
out of modesty. So the eyes cannot rise, so they are indisposed.
Thus, the more indisposed or ailing the beloved’s eye, the
better it is, for it affirms both her status, and chastity, as
beloved.
Going back to the status of the beloved as the rightful taker
of lives, it is natural that there are no suicides in the eighteenth
century ghazal, or any classical ghazal, for that matter. There
are countless deaths and woundings, burials and half burials,
but no one ever kills himself. For that would deprive the lover
of the merit of being killed by the beloved, and worse still, by
killing himself, the lover would presume to occupy the space
that can be occupied only by the beloved. There is scarcely any
talk of suicide in this world, and Mir, who has a few delightful
verses on this theme, makes it do more work than its nature,
and the nature of the ghazal universe, would seem to imply:
The following is from Divan II, put together around 1775-78:
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 187

Don’t leave sword or axe

Anywhere near Mir,
Lest he waste himself. 60
The idea here is not so much to emphasise the act of Mir’s
killing himself, as his character: Mir is no wilting lily, or an
adolescent in the throes of calf love. The other point is that by
killing himself, he would be wasting himself; he is too valuable
to be wasted. The ambiguity of the verb used to indicate the act
of suicide permits two meanings. The other shi‘rs:
I said to her: I am
Out of my patience, entirely;
What should I do,
Kill myself? She said,
“Oh yes, man, must
Do something.” 61
(Shikar Nama II, circa 1790).
The ironical dimensions of this verse can only find a match
in the miraculous economy of the diction. The two-line shi‘rs
in the original though in a metre of normal length, that is, a
metre that requires four feet to a line and not three, contains
eighteen words, of which fully eight have only one syllable. Of
the rest, nine are disyllabic; there is only one trisyllabic word.
Those who read Urdu would know that Urdu favours di-
syllabic and trisyllabic words. Words of four syllables too are
quite common. A verse having a heavy preponderance of uni-
syllabic and disyllabic words, and packing so much meaning in
it, is a rarity, even in Mir.
The final impression that a major eighteenth century poet’s
ghazal leaves on us is not that its protagonist (and some of us
erroneously tend to identify protagonist with poet) is a person
much given to wine and love, but who is essentially a helpless
slave to social power or sexual desire, battered and defeated.
Instead, we are left with the feeling that we have been in close
touch with a vigorous, complex intellect, a mind capable of
188 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

self-mockery and introspection, a body and spirit that have

suffered and enjoyed, and are still prepared to suffer and enjoy,
a soul that is no stranger to the mystic dimensions of existence,
an outsider and nonconformist who cannot be patronised. An
invitation to pity is nowhere to be found in his vocabulary.

*****

Select Bibliography

Abrams, M.H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic

Theory and the Tradition, London & New York, OUP., 1977
[1953]
Abru, Shaikh Mubarak, Divan-e Abru, Ed., Muhammad
Hasan, New Delhi, Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu, 1990
Abu Deeb, Kamal, Al-Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery,
Warminster, Aris & Phillips, 1979
Abul Hasan Amrullah Ilahabadi, Tazkira-e Masarrat Afza
[1780-1], Ed., Syed Shah Muhammad Isma’il, Patana, Khuda
Bakhsh Oriental Library, 1998
Arzu, Sirajuddin Ali Khan-e, Navadirul Alfaz, Ed., Dr
Syed Abdullah, Karachi, Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1992
[1951], [1746-52]
Askari, Muhammad Hasan,Takhliqi Amal aur Uslub,
Karachi, Nafis Academy, 1989
Askari, Muhammad Hasan, Waqt ki Ragini, Lahore,
Maktaba-e Mehrab, 1979
Cowl, R.P. Ed., The Theory of Poetry in England, London,
Macmillan, 1914
Davidson, Donald, “What Metaphors Mean” in Sheldon
Sacks, Ed., On Metaphor¸Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1979
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 189

Digby, Simon, Sufis and Soldiers in Aurangzeb’s Deccan,

New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman, “Expression of the Indo-Muslim
Mind in the Urdu Ghazal”, in Muhammad Umar Memon, Ed.,
Studies in Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction, Madison,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1979. A slightly enlarged
version of the paper is in Faruqi, The Secret Mirror: Essays on
Urdu Poetry, Delhi, Progressive Book Service, 1981
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman, Shi‘rs-e Shor Angez, Vol. III,
New Delhi, Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu, 1993; all four
vols. rept. 1998
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman, Urdu ka Ibtida’i Zamana,
Karachi, Aaj ki Kitaben, 1999
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman, Early Urdu Literary Culture
and History, New Delhi, OUP, forthcoming
Ghalib, Mirza Asadullah Khan, Khutut-e Ghalib, Ed.,
Maulvi Mahesh Parshad/ Malik Ram, Aligarh, Anjuman
Taraqqi-e Urdu, (Hind), 1962
Hasrat Mohani, Maulana, Ed. Intikhab-e Sukhan, Vol. I,
Lucknow, U.P. Urdu Academy. The selection from Hatim is
particularly valuable. (Rept. of the original 1929[?] edn.)
Hatim, Shah Zahuruddin, Intikhab-e Hatim, Ed., Abdul
Haq, New Delhi, Delhi Urdu Academy, 1991
Jan-e Janan, Mirza Mazhar, Divan, Kanpur, Matba’-e
Mustafa’i, 1855 [Circa 1740]
Jan-e Janan, Mirza Mazhar, Kharita-e Javahir, Kanpur,
Matba’-e Mustafa’i, 1855 [Circa 1740]
Jur’at, Shaikh Yahya Man (Qalandar Bakhsh), Kulliyat-e
Jur’at, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi, Aligarh, Litho Colour Printers,
1971
Jurjani, Abdul Qahir, Asrarul Balaghat, Ed., H. Ritter,
Istanbul, 1954
Mir, Muhammad Taqi, Kulliyat, Lucknow, Naval Kishor
Press, 1868
Mir, Muhammad Taqi, Kulliyat-e Mir, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e
Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968
190 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Mir, Muhammad Taqi, Nikatush Shuara, Ed. Mahmud

Ilahi, Delhi, Idara-e Tasnif, 1972 [1752]
Mushafi, Shaikh Ghulam Hamadani, Kulliyat-e Mushafi,
Vol. I, 1968; Vol.II, 1969; Vol. III, 1971; Vol. IV, 1974; Vol.
V, 1983. All edited by Nurul Hasan Naqvi, and published by
the Majlis Taraqqi-e Adab, Lahore
Mushafi, Shaikh Ghulam Hamadani, Kulliyat, Divans VI
and VII, Ed. Hafiz Abbasi, Delhi, Majlis-e Isha’at-e Adab,
1975
Mushafi, Shaikh Ghulam Hamadani, Divan-e Mushafi (the
Eighth Divan), Ed., Abid Raza Bedar, Patna, Khuda Bakhsh
Oriental Library, 1995
Mushafi, Shaikh Ghulam Hamadani, Tazkira-e Hindi,
[1794-5], Ed., Maulvi Abdul Haq, Aurangabad, Anjuman
Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1933
Naim, Choudhri Muhammad, “The Theme of Homosexual
(Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modern Urdu poetry”, in Muhammad
Umar Memon, Ed., Studies in Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction,
Madison, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1979
Naji, Muhammad Shakir, Divan-e Shakir Naji, Ed., Fazlul
Haq, Delhi, Majlis-e Sub’h-e Adab, 1968
Nusrati Bijapuri, Ali Nama [1672], Ed., Abdul Majid
Siddiqi, Hyderabad, Salar Jung Dakani Publications
Committee, 1959
Qa’im Chandpuri, Shaikh Qiyamuddin, Kulliyat-e Qa’im,
Vol. I, Ed., Iqtida Hasan, Lahore, Majlis Taraqi-e Adab, 1965
Qamaruzzaman, Maulana, Ed. and Trs., Aqval-e Salaf,
Vol. III, Allahabad, Maktaba-e Aziziya, 1991
Qasim, Qudratullah, Majmu’a-e Naghz, Ed., Mahmud
Sherani, New Delhi, Government of India, Bureau for the
Promotion of Urdu, 1973 [1805-1806]
Pritchett, Frances W., Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and
its Critics, Bekeley, University of California Press, 1994
Sauda, Mirza Muhammad Rafi, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed.,
Abdul Bari Asi, Lucknow, Naval Kishor Press, 1933
Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 191

Shelley, P.B. “A Defence of Poetry” [1821], in Edmund D.

Jones, Ed., English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century),
London, OUP, 1919 [1916]
Shibli No‘mani, Shi‘rsul Ajam, Vol. V, Azamgarh,
Matba-e Ma’arif, 1957 [1918]
Todorov, Zvetan, Symbolism and Interpretation, Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 1986
Wordsworth, William, “Poetry and Poetic Diction” being
the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2nd Edn., 1800, in Edmund
D.Jones, Ed., English Critical Essays, (Nineteenth Century),
London, OUP, 1919 [1916]
Yusuf Taqi, Ed., Murshidabad ke Char Klasiki Shu’ara,
Calcutta, by the Author, 1989

Notes & References

1 Sirajuddin Ali Khan-e Arzu, Navadirul Alfaz, Ed., Dr Syed Abdullah,

Karachi, Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1992 [1951], [1746-52] p. 6 and passim.
2 Qiyamuddin Qa’im Chandpuri, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Iqtida Hasan, Lahore,

Majlis Taraqqi-e Adab, 1965, p 215.

3 Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi, Divan-e Mushafi, (the eighth divan), Ed., Abid

Riza Bedar, Patna, Khuda Bakhsh Library, 1995, p 52.

4 The first person to purvey this tale seems to be Mir in his tazkira, Nikatush

Shu’ara [1752]. See Mahmud Ilahi, Ed., Nikatush Shu’ara , Delhi, Idara-e Tasnif,
1972, p. 91. I have discussed this whole question in some detail in my Early
Urdu Literary Culture and History, forthcoming from New Delhi, OUP.
5 Mushafi, Tazkira-e Hindi, Ed., Maulvi Abdul Haq, Aurangabad, Anjuman

Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1933, p. 80.

6 Mushafi, Kulliyat, Vol. III, Ed. Hafiz Abbasi, Delhi, Majlis-e Isha’at-e Adab,

1975, p. 79
7 Mulla Nusrati Bijapuri, Ali Nama, Ed.,Abdul Majid Siddiqi, Hyderabad, Salar

Jang Dakani Publications Committee, 1969, pp. 9, 27, 425, 426. [ circa1672]
8 Vali Dakani, Kulliyat, Ed. Nurul Hasan Hashmi, Lahore, Al Vaqar

Publications, 1996, p. 177.

192 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

9 Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Khutut-e Ghalib, Ed., Maulvi Mahesh

Parshad/ Malik Ram, Aligarh, Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, (Hind), 1962, p. 262
10 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” in Edmund D. Jones, Ed.,

English Critical Essays of the Nineteenth Century, London, Oxford University Press,
1919, p. 26.
11 Quoted in M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, London, OUP, 1977, p. 49
12 Quoted in M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, London, OUP, 1977, p. 49
13 Quoted in M.H.Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 51.
14 Qudratullah Qudrat, in Yusuf Taqi, Ed., Murshidabad ke Char Klasiki Shu’ara,

Calcutta, Osmania Book Depot, 1989, p. 20.

15 Mirza Mazhar Jan-e Janan, Divan-e Farsi, Kanpur, Matba’-e Mustafa’i, 1855,

P. 60. [circa 1740]

16 Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi,

Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p. 511.

17 Mushafi, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed. Nurul Hasan Naqvi, Lahore, Majlis Taraqqi-e

Adab, 1968, p 544.

18 Mushafi, Kulliyat, Vol. II, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi, Lahore, Majlis Taraqqi-e

Adab, 1971, p. 228.

19 Navab Syed Muhammad Khan Rind, Divan, Lucknow, Naval Kishor Press,

1931, p. 277.[after 1832]

20 Quoted in Aqval-e Salaf, Translated and edited from numerous Arabic and

Persian Sources by Maulana Qamaruzzaman, in four volumes, Vol.III ,

Allahabad, 1991 p. 134.
21 P.B. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry” in Edmund D. Jones, Ed., English

Critical Essays of the Nineteenth Century, London, OUP, 1919, p. 157.

22 Mir, Kulliyati, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p.

649.
23 Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p.

699.
24 Mir, kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p. 472.
25 Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Abdul Bari Asi,
Lucknow, Naval Kishor Press, 1933, p. 98.
26 Shah Mubarak Abru, Divan, Ed., Muhammad Hasan, New Delhi,

Government of India, Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu, 1990, p. 270.

27 Sauda, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Abdul Bari Asi, Lucknow, Naval Kishore Press,

1933, p. 2.
28 Syed Khvaja Mir Dard, Divan, Lahore, Khayyam Publishers, 1991, p. 72.
29 Qa’im, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Iqtida Hasan, Lahore, Majlis Taraqqi-e Adab,

1965, p. 263.
30 Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p.

196.
31 Ghalib, Divan-e Urdu, Ed., Imtiaz Ali Khan Arshi, New Delhi, Anjuman

Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1982, p. 284.

Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions 193

32 Qalandar Bakhsh (Yahaya Man) Jur’at, Kulliyat, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi,
Aligarh, Litho Colour Printers, 1971, p. 450.
33 Shah Zahuruddin Hatim, Intikhab-e Hatim, Ed., Abdul Haq, New Delhi,

Delhi Urdu Academy, 1991, p. 79.

34 Mushafi, Kulliyat, Vol. III, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi, Lahore, Majlis
Taraqqi-e Adab, 1971, p. 231.
35 Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p.

797.
36Mushafi, Kulliyat, Vol. III, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi, Lahore, Majlis Taraqqi-

e Adab, 1971, p. 155.

37 Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p.

820.
38 See for instance, Altaf Husain Hali, Muqaddama-e She‘r o Sha‘iri, Allahabad,

Ram Narain Lal, 1953, pp. 133-140. [1893]. Also see Frances W. Pritchett,
Nets of Awareness, Urdu Poetry and its Critics, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1994, pp. 169-183.
39 Shah Mubarak Abru, Divan, Ed., Muhammad Hasan, New Delhi,

Government of India, Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu, 1990, p. 230.

40 Mujammad Shakir Naji, Divan, Ed. Fazlul Haq, Delhi, Idara-e Subh-e

Adab, 1968, p.147.

41 Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1967, p.

598.
42 Mushafi, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi, Lahore, Majlis Taraqqi-e

Adab, 1968, p.276.

43 Mirza Mazhar Jan-e Janan, Kharita-e Javahir, Anthology of Persian Verse,
Kanpur, Matba’-e Mustafa’i, 1855, p. 155 [Circa 1740].
44 Mujammad Shakir Naji, Divan, Ed. Fazlul Haq, Delhi, Idara-e Subh-e Adab,

1968, p. 192.
45 Mujammad Shakir Naji, Divan, Ed. Fazlul Haq, Delhi, Idara-e Subh-e Adab,

1968, p. 209.
46 Shah Mubarak Abru, Divan, Ed., Muhammad Hasan, New Delhi,

Government of India, Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu, 1990, p. 283.

47 Mushafi, Kulliyat, Vol. IV, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi, Lahore, Majlis Taraqqi-e

Adab, 1974, p. 56.

48 At least two versions of the incident have come down. For the story of

Rusva’s death at the hands of the boy beloved, see Abul Hasan Amrullah
Ilahabadi, Tazkira-e Masarrat Afza, Ed., Syed Shah Muhammad Isma’il, Patna,
Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library, 1998, p. 56.[1780-81]. Qudratullah Qasim, in
his Majmu‘a-e Naghz, Ed. Mahmud She’rani, New Delhi, Government of India,
Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu, 1973, [1805-6]pp. 268-9, quotes the she’r,
but not the circumstances of Rusva’s death. He however adds a new
dimension by saying that according to Rusva’s desire, his body was bathed in
wine in preparation for his last rites. Yet the body didn’t at all smell of wine
194 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

after being so bathed. A very similar incident of the lover’s killing, by the boy-
beloved of a disciple of Baba Shah Musafir, the well known Aurangabadi sufi
of the eighteenth century, is narrated in an account of the Shaikh, translated by
Simon Digby. See Simon Digby, Sufis and Soldiers in Aurangzeb’s Deccan, New
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 80-81..
49 Shah Mubarak Abru, Divan, Ed., Muhammad Hasan, New Delhi,

Government of India, Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu, 199o, pp.304, 305.
50 Choudhri Muhammad Naim, “The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic)

Love in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry” in Muhammad Umar Memon, Ed., Studies

in Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction, Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin
Press, 1979 pp. 120-142.
51 Mir, Nikatush Shu’ara, Ed., Mahmud Ilahi, Delhi, Idara-e Tasnif, 1972, p.

163. [1752]
52 Hatim, in Hasrat Mohani, Ed., Intikhab-e Sukhan, Vol. I, U.P. Urdu

Academy, Lucknow facsimile edn., p. 51.

53 Hatim, in Hasrat Mohani, Ed., Intikhab-e Sukhan, Vol. I, U.P. Urdu

Academy, Lucknow facsimile edn., p. 50.

54 “The Expression of the Indo-Muslim Mind in the Urdu Ghazal” in The Secret

Mirror: Essays on Urdu Poetry, Delhi, Progressive Book Service, 1981.

55 Muhammad Hasan Askari, “Mir ji” in Waqt ki Ragini, Lahore, Maktaba-e

Mehrab, 1979, pp. 206-209, and “Ghalib ki Infiradiyat” in Takhliqi Amal aur
Uslub, Karachi, Nafis Academy, 1989, pp. 128-130.
56 Abdul Qahir Jurjani, Asrarul Balaghat, Ed. Hellmut Ritter, Istanbul, at the

Government Press, 1954, p. 21. Also see Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjani’s Theory
of Poetic Imagery, Warminster, Aris & Phillips, 1979, pp. 77-80.
57Quoted in Zvetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation, Trs. Catherine Porter,

Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986, pp. 161-162. Many modern

philosophers of language too hold similar views about the “literality” of
metaphors. Paul Ricoeur develops Schleirmacher’s ideas in the direction of
psychology. See “What Metaphors Mean” by Donald Davidson, and “The
Metaphorical Process” by Paul Ricoeur in Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor,
University of Chicago Press, 1979, pp. 29-45 and pp 141-157. It must be noted
that Jurjani’s position is more firmly grounded in semantics and is
demonstrated easier than the positions taken by the western philosophers cited
above.
58 Shibli No’mani, She’r ul Ajam, Vol. V, Azamgarh, Matba’-e Ma’arif, 1957, p.

76. [1918].
59 Mirza Mazhar Jan-e Janan, Kharita-e Javahir, Anthology of Persian Verse, Kanpur,

Matba’-e Mutafa’i , 1855, p. 105. [Circa 1740]

60 Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p.

434.
61 Mir, Kulliyat, Lucknow, Naval Kishor Press, 1868, p. 1031.
 THE POET IN THE POEM OR,
VEILING THE UTTERANCE

Choudhri Muhammad Naim spent very nearly two decades

perfecting his translation of Zikr-e Mir, Mir’s autobiography.
Written in difficult, somewhat idiosyncratic, and occasionally
quite obscure Persian, it has fascinated scholars and students of
Mir ever since it was discovered in the late 1920 and printed in
1928.1 Yet, apart from the fact that its author is perhaps the
greatest Urdu poet ever, it signally fails to do what
autobiographies are supposed to do: it tells us practically
nothing about Mir as a person, or even as a poet. What Mir
claimed to have done in Zikr-e Mir is as follows (in Naim’s
excellent translation): 2
Now says this humble man, whose takhallus is Mir, that being
unemployed these days and confined to my solitary corner, I
wrote down my story [ahval-i khud], containing the events of my
life [halat], the incidents of my times[savanih-i rozgar] and some
[other related] anecdotes [hikayat] and tales[naqlha].
Naim tells us in his Introduction that in Zikr-i Mir: 3
The account of Mir’s own life is scattered and quite summary in
nature. He does not give us the kind of personal details we expect
in an autobiography. He does not tell us what year he was born in,
or got married in, or how many children he had and when; he is
silent about his peers and his interaction with them in literary
gatherings; he doesn’t even mention any of his writings.
So what was the purpose of the exercise, or experiment in
autobiography that Mir undertook apparently in all
seriousness? Judging from what little we know of Mir, the
196 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

autobiography seems to present a picture– if at all it can be

called a picture– of Mir which is not on all fours with his real
personality. To quote Naim once again:
Contrary to the image created by Muhammad Husain Azad
in Ab-e Hayat, the most influential of all histories of Urdu
poetry,4 and his own frequent remarks in Zikr-i Mir, Mir was
not always a dour recluse. In fact, on the evidence of many of
his topical poems, he could be said to have been a man of
appetites. He could feel strongly for his friends and lovers and
openly find pleasure in their company, just as he could launch
scurrilous attacks against those who would enrage him for any
reason. The poems he wrote about his patron Asafuddaulah’s
hunting expeditions– they are thematically unique in Urdu
poetry– display a keen appreciation of natural beauty. He also
appears to have been quite fond of animals– at various times,
he kept cats, dogs, and goats as pets, and wrote delightful
poems about them.5
Thus Zikr-i Mir seems to conceal much more than it reveals,
and what it does reveal about its author is either
inconsequential or not quite in conformity with the image of
Mir that has reached us through sources other than this so
called autobiography. One might almost say that Mir composed
Zikr-i Mir to dissemble, rather than reveal. It is true that no
auto biographer reveals everything, but one can expect a
responsible auto biographer to reveal something, and to ensure
that whatever he does reveal is not false. A good example is the
autobiography of Bertrand Russell. It merely hints at or
suppresses almost all the unsavoury aspects of the author’s life
and character; it edits the truth to present the author in the best
possible light.6 Yet what it does present is substantial and true
information about its author.
Mir’s autobiography reads in part like a hagiography of his
father and grandfather’s spiritual merits, and in part like notes
of contemporary events hurriedly jotted down in a private
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 197

journal. A lot of the material has no date, and a good bit of it

doesn’t observe any chronological sequence. Small wonder,
then, that while Urdu critics have assiduously mined Mir’s
poetry to glean details about his life and circumstances, they
have rarely alluded to, or made use of Zikr-i Mir to support
their assertions about Mir’s personality and what they regard as
the “true details” of his life. And even in poetry, only that
much has been used which supports the critic’s pet notions.
Whatever doesn’t make it to the horizon of the critic’s
attention. For instance, the popular myth is that Mir was an
intensely unhappy person, especially in love. So, a successful
love affair of mature years as described in the apparently
autobiographical Mu‘amilat-e Ishq (Episodes of Love) has
been passed over in silence, and the unhappy love story, Khvab
o Khiyal-e Mir (Mir’s Dreams and Imaginings), also apparently
autobiographical, has been savoured by our critics “as much as
their lips and teeth could permit” (in Ghalib’s phrase, though in
another context). Russell and Islam cheerfully satisfy the
demands of inclusiveness by flying in the face of the poem’s
evidence and asserting that the “woman in the case” in both
Mu‘amilat-e Ishq and Khvab o Khiyal-e Mir is the same, and
that the Khvab o Khiyal is actually a sequel to the Mu‘amilat.7
Much of our Mir criticism shows a somewhat amusing,
somewhat annoying conjuncture of two myths. The first myth
is that poetry, especially ghazal, is necessarily the expression
of the poet’s personal feelings and the events and
circumstances narrated in it are, in not entirely factual, based
certainly on facts. Myth number two is that since Mir’s poetry
reveals him to be a sad, embittered man so his life and
personality also were sad and embittered. Another way of
stating this myth is to say that since Mir’s life was all sad and
embittered, so his poetry is full of sadness and bitterness. Let
me elaborate this a little.
Poetry is the expression of personality: versions of this view
have been held sacred in our criticism ever since we realized
198 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

that there is a business of criticism and some people are

specially equipped to transact it. The late Professor Nurul
Hasan Hashmi, a respected teacher of C. M. Naim’s, used to
observe quite casually and frequently that “poetry was a dakhili
thing”, dakhili here being taken to mean anything from
“heartfelt”, “authentic in some autobiographical sense”, to
“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, this last, of
course, being a statement made by Wordsworth,8 and made
popular among us by undergraduate-school teachers of
literature.
One inevitable, and perhaps initially unanticipated result, of
this stress on the dakhili nature of poetry was that much of the
Masnavi, almost all Qasida, and all Ghazal that wasn’t based
on Sufistic themes or “sacred love” was considered to be out of
the pale of sachchi sha’iri (true poetry). The term “true poetry”
could be interpreted as (1) texts that truly deserved to be called
“poetry’’, and (2) texts that stated “true” things. When
influential literary personages like Rashid Ahmad Siddiqi
declared that the Ghazal was the abru (honour and good name)
of Urdu poetry, they clearly intended this to apply to the
“authentic”, “undefiled” Ghazal, the Ghazal that expressed the
poet’s “true and natural feelings” and was based on “reality”).
The principle that poetry is, or should be, the expression of
the poet’s “personality” was a natural derivative of the
assumption that poetry expressed the poet’s “true feelings”.
This principle was also stated in the following form: Poetry is,
or should be, based on “reality”, or “truth”, or “true facts”. It
was again only a small percentage of extant Urdu Ghazal that
could make the grade according to this formulation. The main
demand was that in the ghazal one should narrate or depict
only those events and states that one had experienced in
person. Thus the Ghazal was seen as something like
autobiography.
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 199

Andalib Shadani, in a series of famous and very influential

articles published from October, 1937 to November, 1940,
declared that all good Ghazal was based on the poet’s real life
experience. Judging from this standpoint, he found the
productions of all contemporary ghazal writers to be “false”, or
poetry of “inferior grade”. Their ghazals were not based,
according to Shadani, on what he believed should be the true
events of love, events that had occurred in the poets’ real life,
and in fact many of the events described in modern ghazals,
like the “death” of the “poet”, couldn’t have happened at all,
because the poet obviously had to be alive to compose the
poem.9 According to Shadani, the essential requirement for the
Ghazal was “intensity of feeling and true emotions”. He
declared further: 10
Only those should be considered truly qualified to compose
ghazals or narrate the story of love who, in addition to being
possessed of poetic powers, give word to their own emotions,
write about has really transpired in their life, and write only what
they have personally felt.
Shadani held the curious theory that while the “artificial”
themes and tropes that abound in Urdu ghazal were purely
imitative of Persian and therefore “unnatural”, it was quite all
right for the Persian Ghazal to have them, because “in the early
times, such ideas and themes came into Persian poetry because
of the poets’ circumstances, and their environment.”11 For
example, the Iranians were excessively given to drinking, so
it’s all right for Persian poetry to be full of images and themes
related to wine and song. But in Urdu, the addiction to drink
has been a rare occurrence among our poets from the earliest to
the modern times. It is therefore impermissible for Urdu poets
to wax eloquent on themes of drinking and inebriation.12
Firaq Gorakhpuri had urged that modern Urdu ghazal
should not be blamed for being full of themes of sadness and
pain, for the air of sadness, lament, and anguish of the heart
that one encountered in English poems like The Shropshire
200 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Lad, The Waste Land, and Hardy’s Wessex Poems, was much
more intense than anything found in Urdu. Shadani took the
trouble to translate some passages from these works (he
chooses “Death by Water” from The Waste Land) to “prove”
that:
Whatever has been said in these poems is entirely natural
[English word used in the original]. Some of this poetry is a
dirge on love’s martyrs, some of it a lament on the untimely
death of friends, some of it is an involuntary sigh on the death
by drowning of someone whose heart’s desire remained
unfulfilled…13
In any other literary environment such statements would
arouse derisive laughter, but in Urdu they became the guiding
light for later critics like Nurul Hasan Hashmi and Abul Lais
Siddiqi who found the poetry of the so-called “Lucknow
School” wanting in dakhiliyat, devoid of the narration of real
circumstances, much given to kharijiyat (that is, depiction of
external things like the beloved’s dress, her toilette, her speech
and mode of conduct in a somewhat explicit, faintly erotic
manner), and therefore inferior. This also established the
principle that poetry that concerns itself with the beloved’s
physical attributes, even if only in a mildly erotic way, and
perhaps based on the poet’s own experience and observation, is
inauthentic, “effeminate” and not of the first order.14
By the time our understanding of “good” and “bad” poetry
(or at least ghazal poetry) became firmly established within the
discourse of “truth” and “personality”, we discovered yet
another nugget of “truth” about the nature of poetry. Critics
who were led to believe that “individuality” of voice and
therefore “originality” of style was a positive value, found
Buffon’s maxim “Le style c’est l’homme meme” much
congenial to the theory that poetry was the expression of the
poet’s personality. The English translation of this dictum,
“Style is the man”, was understood to mean that personality
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 201

colours, or even creates a writer’s style. This was conveniently

added on to pseudo psychological critical speculations like:
Byron would not have been Byron but for his game leg. John
Middleton Murry’s nebulous semi-metaphysical notions about
style also came in handy and his name was often invoked in
discussions of this subject. Though his observation that style
was “organic—not the clothes a man wears, but the flesh and
bone of his body”15 was not actually quoted very often, it
informed our critics’ assumptions about how the writer’s
personality revealed itself through his style.
Given the paucity of facts or even clues about the manner of
life and feeling of early Urdu poets, there was no better way to
determine the contours of a poet’s personality than
extrapolating inferential facts from his poems, or from
whatever “sources” presented themselves. The conclusions
were then patched on to poet’s status as a literary person. For
example, it could be argued that if Mir was seen in Zikr-i Mir
as telling a lot of lies, we could infer that such a person could
not be a good poet, for he would have lied about his affairs of
the heart as well, and since poetry, in order to be good, must be
based on truth, Mir’s love poetry cannot be regarded as good
poetry. While we didn’t go quite that far in regard to Mir,
Ghalib’s detractors often found in the “questionable” aspects of
his character a suitable stick to beat him with: a person given
to drinking, gambling, sycophancy, jealousy, etc., could not be
a good poet.
The Urdu Modernists avoided the pitfalls of “personality”,
but insisted that poetry was izhar-e zat (expression of the inner
being). This formulation was used as a counterpoint to what
was later described as “committed” literature, but was actually
the literature of the Party-line. The Modernists said that the
poet should write whatever he really feels or thinks. He should
not be fettered by outside pressures or persuasions. A true poet
describes the truth as he sees it. He narrates truths, conveys to
his reader his personal vision; he deals in truths that he
202 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

discovers for himself. In other words, the poet does not purvey
communal or communitarian truths; he gives to the world only
what his inner being says is the truth.
There is no doubt that this principle works very well for the
“new” poetry, that is, the poetry written and promoted by the
Modernists and their immediate inspirations: Miraji, Rashed,
Akhtarul Iman. And it continues to work for the Urdu poetry
being written even today. But as a tool for understanding the
“classical” or pre-modern Urdu poetry, it is useless. It must go
to the great credit of the Urdu Modernists that they didn’t try to
read and judge classical Urdu poetry in terms of the
“expression of the poet’s inner being”. They however did say
that there was no unbridgeable difference between the old
poetry and the new, for both were, after all, true poetry. Thus
they paved the way for the notion that poetry in not necessarily,
and not always, the expression of the “inner being”.

The principle that remains on the whole even now dominant

in our main line criticism is that poetry, and especially ghazal
poetry, in some way mirrors the poet’s life and personality.
This implies two things: (1) We can derive some truths about a
poet’s life from his poems, and (2) We can legitimately derive
some conclusions about a his poetry from the facts of a poet’s
life and personality.
Different Urdu critics used these principles within limits set
apparently unconsciously by themselves. Also, if some critics
stressed the personality of a poet as a foundation on which to
erect opinions about his poetry, others used the poetry in order
to make generalizations about his personality. For instance,
Muhammad Husain Azad depicted Nasikh as a somewhat
aristocratic and arrogant person of good culinary appetites who
was also fond of “worldly” or “unpoetic” pastimes like
physical exercise and wrestling. Against this portrait of Nasikh,
Azad posited, perhaps unconsciously, the figure of Atash as a
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 203

person of no desires, unworldly to the point of being naïve,

self-respecting though not self-regarding, devoid of hypocrisy,
and austere like a Sufi. Our critics were not slow in concluding
that given these personal traits, Nasikh produced a poetry that
was the epitome of Lucknow-ness: a poetry replete with
kharijiyat and empty of dakhiliyat, while Atash’s poetry was
something else–steeped in the “Delhi” style, a model of
dakhiliyat, and devoid of the preoccupation with the beloved’s
body and raiment, so characteristic of Lucknow-ness.16 That
both were actually poets of the same type, and in fact
sometimes the poetry of one is practically indistinguishable
from the other’s, was a fact that doesn’t seem to have occurred
to any of our critics.
The contradictions and errors bred by the approach: poetry
reflects biography, or biography is mirrored in the poetry, can
further be seen in our treatment of Nazir Akbarabadi and Amir
Mina’i. Seeing in Nazir’s poetry an apparent abundance of
religious and social multi valence, a proclivity for free, or at
least liberal thought, and a lack of stress on religious ritualism,
we made no delay in concluding that Nazir displayed these
properties of character in his everyday, “non-poetic” life too.
Basing ourselves on the poems, we declared Nazir to be an
avami sha‘ir (poet of the people). We ignored Nazir’s ghazals
because the ghazals could support no such conclusion. As for
Nazir’s putative liberal and multivalent religiosity, no one
seems to have noticed that Nazir, who lavishly praises Hindu
and Sikh religious figures, doesn’t have a word for the
shaykhain (the first two Caliphs of Islam).
The exemplary personal piety of Amir Mina’i rubs
uncomfortable shoulders with his numerous erotic shi‘rs, some
of which he liked so much that he put them in a selection of his
poetry which he himself compiled.17 If poetry is expression of
personality, should it not be inferred that Amir Mina’i was a
man of worldly delights, and a free-living lover of erotic
pleasures? Major details of the life of Amir Mina’i are well
204 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

known, and speculation of the kind that was freely yielded to in

Nazir’s case wasn’t possible here. So our critics maintained a
discreet silence. With all the self-assurance of one who needn’t
see very far, Rashid Ahmad Siddiqi pronounced it impossible
for a “bad” person to be a “good” poet.
For obvious reasons, Mir has had more than his share of
theory-flaunting, poetry-twisting critics. For example, Andalib
Shadani was quite persuaded that since Mir has a number of
shi‘rs with homoerotic, or homosexual, or plain boy-love
themes, he was an amrad parast, a term that means all the
above modes of homosexual eroticism.18 Contrariwise, some of
Mir’s famous shi‘rs which sounded conventionally “sad”, or
had themes of unsuccessful or unrequited love led the critic to
decide that Mir did nothing in his life but weep and utter sad
sighs. His clearly humorous or light-hearted shi‘rs were
dismissed as “lowly”, or “vulgar”, or somehow darkened by
the murk and gloom of personal loss and tragedy. In the
Preface to his extremely popular Intikhab-e Kalam-e Mir, Ma’
Muqaddama, jis men Mir ke Halat aur Kalam ki Khususiyat
par Bahs ki ga’i Hai (Mir’s Selected Poetry, with a Preface,
which Discusses Mir’s Circumstances and the Characteristics
of his Poetry), Maulvi Abdul Haq had this to say about Mir and
his humorous shi‘rs:
Light-heartedness and gaiety were not allotted in Mir
Sahib’s portion; he was the very embodiment of despair and
[emotional] deprivation. This is the state of his poetry too. Or
rather, his poetry is a true image of his disposition and life-
story, and probably this is the reason why it is not devoid of
genuineness and reality….
Man’s temperament has two aspects: pleasure and delight,
or then affliction and grief. Mir Sahib’s shi‘rs, whether based
on love or on wisdom, all reflect grief and affliction, failure
and despair. This was the cast of his temperament. He might
have been in any circumstance, may have been overpowered by
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 205

any state, whenever he uttered something from the heart, it

would be saturated in despair and failure. The taste of jesting,
or fun, is just not there in his poetry…. His Works do have
some humorous shi‘rs, but they are either of such vulgarity that
they smack of bad taste, or then they have that very unfulfilled
longing and despair which stuck with him through his living
days.19
Majnun Gorakhpuri detected some sort of “revolutionary”,
or at least a moral and didactic agenda in Mir’s poetry, but still
he designated Mir “the poet of sorrow”, and said something
curious to support his contention:
Mir is the poet of sorrow. Mir’s age was the age of sorrow.
And Mir, had he not been the poet of sorrow, would have
committed treason against his age, and would not have been
such a great poet for us either. Posterity has regarded only
those poets as great who were the true children of their age,
and fully representative of it.20
All this would be risible, if the matter was not deadly
serious, for criticism such as this has governed our appreciation
of Mir for the last seventy or seventy-five years. Going back to
Maulvi Abdul Haq’s judgement on Mir’s humour, let me recall
here that Maulvi Abdul Haq has quoted just one shi‘r of
Mir’s21 to “prove” that even the comic verses of Mir are
charged with sorrow and despair:
Mir too was mad, but while passing by,
In a jesting way
He would rattle the chains
Of us, the shackled ones.22
So what does Majnun Gorakhpuri do to account for Mir’s
humorous shi‘rs? He says:
Let it be remembered that Mir’s humour was not of the
shallow and cheap kind. His humour had very deep layers of
gravity and meaningfulness.
206 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

This remark is intended by Majnun Gorakhpuri as a

comment on the very shi‘r about the “jesting Mir” that Maulvi
Abdul Haq quoted to “prove” that Mir’s humour was overlaid
with tones of sorrow and despair.
It is interesting and symptomatic that these two senior
critics who are often praised for establishing the place of Mir in
the modern canon, are entirely unable to come to grips with
Mir’s humour and his pleasantries. Both quote the same shi‘r to
prove two different points. According to Abdul Haq, Mir’s
lighter verses are both vulgar and plebeian, or are actually
darkened by the shadow of his sorrows and frustrations.
Majnun Gorakhpuri, on the contrary, judges Mir’s humour as
having “serious” purposes underneath.
It must be concluded, however reluctantly, that neither of
these critics seems actually to have read Mir carefully. Then
they have deliberately distorted the personal and literary
picture of Mir to suit their own favourite theories. Both are
quite convinced that Mir is a poet of sorrow and pain. Majnun
Gorakhpuri attributes this to Mir’s age. For it was his age, and
his personal circumstances, which had turned Mir’s life, and
therefore his poetry, into a “perpetual hanging on the gallows”.
His poetry, especially his ghazals prove that “Mir’s voice
expresses the whole pain and anguish of his times in an
extremely sophisticated and dignified manner.”23 Against this
is Maulvi Abdul Haq’s formulation to the effect that Mir’s
temperament itself was extremely susceptible to the experience
of pain. According to Majnun Gorakhpuri, Mir’s poetry reflects
his life; according to Abdul Haq Mir’s life reflects his poetry.
That is, Abdul Haq diagnoses Mir’s temperament to have made
his life unhappy, and since his life was unhappy, his poetry was
unhappy too. Majnun Gorakhpuri goes the other way round:
Mir’s age was an age of sorrow, so Mir’s life was sorrowful,
hence his poetry was sorrowful too. Thus according to Abdul
Haq, Mir was essentially an uncouth type who lapsed into
indecorous drollery the moment he slipped out of his tenebrous
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 207

moods. According to Majnun Gorakhpuri, Mir’s was a life of

unrelieved gloom and even his humour veiled serious meanings
and grave purposes.
The poetry of humor or banter doesn’t translate well, if at
all. Yet it seems worth while here to invoke Mir’s own
evidence and present some of his light hearted shi‘rs to show
what actually he was doing when he wrote in that mode:
I now depart the idol-house, oh Mir,
We’ll meet here again, God willing.
Friendship with the boys now darkens my destiny;
My father used to warn me
Often, against this very day.
If I was so minded
I’d fill my arms with you
and lift you up in a trice:
Weighty you may be, but you are
just a flower before me.
Pious Sheikh, your asinine nature
Is known the world over;
You do your hops and skips everywhere,
in refined assemblies, or arid places.

I visited Mecca, Medina, Karbala,

I sauntered around and came back
Just the way I was.
On the Day Of Judgement
By way of punishment for having written poems,
They flung against my head
My own book of poems.24
It should be obvious even from these random selections that
in range, mood, and verbal subtlety, these shi‘rs present a
degree of variety and sophistication which the reductionist
mindset of our critics was unequipped to handle. The three
208 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

senior critics whose work I have briefly discussed above, I

hope without oversimplifying their positions, considered their
assumptions about Mir’s poetry more reliable than the poetry
itself. The assumption that they shared was that poetry is the
expression of personality. The only difference was that for
Shadani and Abdul Haq, personality meant disposition and
temperament, and for Majnun Gorakhpuri it was the sum total
of the poet’s personal history and the social and political
circumstances prevalent in his time.
I need not emphasize here that questions like “personal
expression”, or “poetry as self-revelation” never arose in
classical Urdu poetics, or in Sanskrit poetics, nor yet in the
Persio-Arab poetics. Nor were issues like “authenticity”, “true
expression of real emotions” ever raised in any of the literary
traditions that Urdu is heir to. None of the contemporary or
near contemporary accounts of Mir, for instance, say a word
about his so-called hardships, disappointments and sorrows, or
that his poetry is an expression of his bitter personality and the
sadness of his life trickles through everywhere in his poetry.
The censures of critics like Shadani and the extenuations
offered by critics like Firaq Gorakhpuri were both conceived in
terms of what they thought was the literary idiom of the
western world.
The important thing from the point of view of the sociology
and politics of Urdu literary criticism is not the truth or validity
of the literary theory offered by Shadani and others. The
important thing is that in its essentials, the theory was believed
by our critics to be Western in origin, and also (or perhaps
therefore) universally true. The fact of the matter, as every
student of Western literary thought knows, is that poetry as
expression of personality is not a universally recognized notion
in the West. On the contrary, up until the advent of
Romanticism in England, it had long been recognized in the
West that literary texts, especially poems breed other literary
texts, and that no literary artefact can be understood outside the
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 209

rules and conventions of the genre in which it was written.

When a new genre came into existence, every effort was made
to present it as not essentially different from the pre-existing
literary artefacts of a similar nature.
A good example of this can be seen in the romances (we
would now call them “novels”) of Madeleine de Scudery, and
the prefaces that her brother Georges wrote for them as their
putative author. In the Preface to Ibrahim (1641) Georges
wrote: 25
The works of the spirit are too significant to be left to chance; and
I would be rather accused of having failed consciously, than of
having succeeded without knowing what I was about….Every art
has certain rules which by infallible means lead to the ends
proposed;…I have concluded that in drawing up a plan for this
work I must consult the Greeks…, and to try by imitating them to
arrive at the same end….It would be as stupid as arrogant not to
wish to imitate them.
This was not just a casual appeal to the Ancients to justify
what would have been at that time a novelty. We see Fielding
adopting the same strategy in his Preface to Joseph Andrews
(1742). He wishes his text to be read as a “comic romance”,
and finds justification for it in the practice of the Ancients.
Having declared that “poetry may be tragic or comic”, and that
it “may be likewise either in verse or prose”, he designates his
“comic romance” as a “comic epic poem in prose”:
Now, a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose;
differing from comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its
action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a
much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a great variety
of characters.26
Similarly, in regard to making extensive and even blatant
use of the texts of one’s literary forebears, it is interesting to
see Fielding say in Tom Jones (1749): 27
210 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

The ancients may be considered as a rich common, where every

poor person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a
free right to fatten his muse. Or, to place it in clearer light, we
moderns are to the ancients what the poor are to the rich….
In like manner are the ancients, such as Homer, Virgil, Horace,
Cicero, and the rest, to be esteemed among us writers as so many
wealthy squires, from whom we, the poor of Parnassus, claim an
immemorial custom of taking whatever we can come at.
Fielding’s tone is facetious, but in essence his point is well
supported by past theory and practice. I cite Madelaine de
Scudery and Fielding to illustrate the point that in the literature
of pre-industrial Europe, even new genres were sought to be
understood in terms of old genres, and that literary artefacts
were not seen there as creations in the void. A very vague and
generalized maxim to the effect that poetry expresses the
personality of the poet may be extracted from the writings of
some of the English Romantics. But it would be a brave critic
indeed who would believe that a “lyric” poem like Shelley’s A
Lament (1821) expressed not only his real feelings, but also
that those feelings were permanent, and that the second
(concluding) stanza was true and accurate for Shelley’s later
life too:28
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—Oh, never more.
Had Abdul Haq and other Urdu critics had their way,
Shelley, on the strength of A Lament would have been held out
as a poet of unmitigated sadness and frustration at least after
1821. Critics (see Firaq Gorakhpuri and Andalib Shadani
above) who could believe Death by Water to be a personal
poem of loss could believe anything.
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 211

A genuine question arises here: After all, the poet does put
something in his poem, even if it is mere words. So does his
utterance, or his words, give us no clue about his personality?
In order to attempt any coherent answer to this question,
we’ll first have to decide what we mean by “personality”.
Caroline Spurgeon, in her Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it
Tells us (1935) had, by offering not unfanciful interpretations
of Shakespeare’s image-clusters, even tried to determine
Shakespeare’s likes and dislikes, his habits, his personal
experiences, and similar (minor?) details of his personality. But
if “personality” is the sum total of a person’s genetic
inheritance, education, domestic and cultural environment,
then it is a moot point if poetry does express it all, and if it
does, whether it can be descried by the reader in distant times
and climes.
Then there is another question: Even if we do succeed in
determining some or even all feature’s of the pre-modern Urdu
poet’s personality, what insights would that information give
us that could be relevant to an understanding or appreciation of
his poetry? Or let’s go the other way round: Let’s study the
shi‘rs in which the poet seems to be speaking of himself. What
information would we get about his character and personality
from such shi‘rs, and how reliable would that information be,
never mind its usefulness as a tool for critical assessment of the
poetry?
Even a less than close reading of a pre-modern Urdu ghazal
poet would make one thing instantly clear: he is not a reliable
informant about himself, if at all the word “informant” would
apply here. Mushafi (1750-1824) and Mir are notable among
our poets for their sensuous and erotic imagery. Both also say
things that can be taken as information about their sexual
interests. Here are some shi‘rs from Mushafi:
Master Mushafi, you didn’t miss out on a single lad;
Obviously you are quite a maestro
212 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

At your calling.
Well, Mushafi, I am not much of a lover of boys–
But I do have intercourse, more or less
With women kind.
Even if she ever came to hand
I shouldn’t be guilty of the wicked deed;
Please oh pure and perfect Lord, Grant me this prayer.
I grant that beardless brats
Do give pleasure in a way, yet one finds
The pleasure of love in females alone.29
It is obvious that these shi‘rs are useless as material for a
personality profile of Mushafi. In fact, it is easy to see, were
one familiar with the principle of mazmun afirini (theme
creation, that is, finding new themes for poems) that more than
anything else, these shi‘rs are exercises in theme creation. Mir
sometimes affords even more telling examples. Here is one:
How could a plain human being
Keep company with such a one?
Impudent, thieving, restless, shallow, rakish, profligate.30
This shi‘r occurs in Mir’s fifth Divan, completed perhaps
not earlier than 1798 and not later than 1803. Even if the earlier
date is taken as more probable, Mir was seventy-five years of
age at that time. And if this shi‘r is based on Mir’s real
circumstances, we should be bound to conclude that Mir was
possessed of a personality that inclined toward what he himself
describes as the very dregs of society. And if poetry expresses
personality, one may wonder if a poet with such a personality
could really have composed those noble shi‘rs that are the
glory of our literature.
Here again, the principle of mazmun afirini provides a more
reliable key for opening up such texts to us. First and foremost,
the pre-modern Urdu poet was engaged upon the business of
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 213

finding new themes, or giving new slants to old themes. Mir

said:
Your soul free from torment for the mazmun, your heart
devoid of pain,
What avails? Even if your visage is paper pale, What
avails?31
Here the poet’s office has been equated with that of the
lover or the Sufi, whose heart is tender and full of pain: one
should have a heart full of pain, or a soul afflicted with
torment, searching for new mazmuns, or torment for mazmuns
not coming at all, or those that came but disappeared before
they could be captured in words. One’s true station in life is to
have a concern in the heart for mazmuns, or pain in the heart
caused by love. One must have either one or the other, or one’s
life is profitless. Creation of themes, and not self-revelation, is
the proper business of the poet.
The following shi‘r occurs in Mir’s first Divan, completed
before 1752:
I used Rekhta as a veil
over my true utterance;
And now it has been fated
to stay as my art.32
This could be just another mazmun. But experience has
taught me to regard poetics related utterances of pre-modern
Urdu poets as genuine statements in literary theory. This is
particularly true of the poets who wrote roughly during the
century and a half from around 1700 to around 1850 when
Urdu’s “new” poetics was being developed and refined. I have
given an inadequate translation; the keywords here are sukhan,
parda, and fan, translated by me as “utterance”, “veil", and
“art” respectively. The following other meanings of these
words are pertinent here:
sukhan: conversation, speech, poetry, words, discourse
214 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

parda: screen, curtain, pretext, covering

fan: artifice, craft, accomplishment, cunning
The word rekhta too has more sides than one: the language
called Rekhta,
the poetry written in that language, the ghazal written in the
language called Rekhta, or Hindi. The basic theory is clear: the
accomplishment of poetry conceals, throws a veil over the real
utterance, or speech, or poetry, which remains unheard and un
revealed. Poetry veils the true utterance, and dissembling is the
true art of the poet. Should this then be taken to mean a
confession that one can never express one’s true thoughts?
Again, my experience of pre-modern Urdu poetry tells me not
to do so. The problem of the failure of language is a modern
phenomenon; the pre-modern poet was supremely confident in
his power to find words for any theme. Mir possessed all
sukhan, all words, what he didn’t have (according to this shi‘r)
was the desire, or the will, to unveil his words.
So what words could those words be? They could be
anything, a declaration of love before the beloved, a mystical,
gnomic vision, a proclamation of war upon a world that valued
form over meaning, the ritual over the spiritual, illusion over
reality. The fact that he doesn’t tell us what his real utterance
was, or could be, is entirely appropriate: the utterance remains
veiled.
So are we fated forever to remain ignorant of the poet’s true
purpose? My answer is, yes. And it is not such an intolerable
state of affairs so long as we can manage to divine all, or at
least some, of the poem’s true purposes. Trying to discern the
poet’s true purpose will almost certainly lead us to nothing
more than a handful of trivialities. In Mir’s third Divan there is
a stunning shi‘r:
The world is the chessboard, Heaven the Player,
You and I the pieces. Like a true tyro
Heaven’s only interest is in taking the pieces.33
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 215

The cold passion of the tone, the laconic satire, and the
telling observation about novice chess players create a dramatic
space where distant reverberations sound from a ruba‘i
attributed to Khayyam, and from King Lear, (though the latter
should owe entirely to reader/listener for their existence) and
where a somewhat conventional theme is transformed into a
cosmic dance of death. Added to this is the underlying irony:
the sky is conventionally described in Urdu poetry as
incredibly old. (That’s why it appears “bent’’, or it is “bent”
because it is so old). So there is a new dimension of irony in
describing a traditionally ancient being as an abecedarian chess
player. What made the shi‘r even more memorable to me was
another image drawn from the realm of chess, in the following
shi‘r from the fourth Divan of Mir: 34
How I wish you had
At least a chess board and pieces around—
Mir is an artful chess-playing companion,
Not a burden upon the heart.
Putting aside the felicity with which Mir made use of two
double-rhyming phrases (bar hai khatir, yar-e shatir) in a
single line, the easy flow of the shi‘r, the tongue in cheek
humility of the tone, and the polysemy of yar-e shatir,35 I was
immediately struck with the chess imagery, and coupled with
the previously quoted shi‘r from Divan III, it led me to
conclude that Mir must have been interested in chess. This
happy inference was shattered when some time later I came
across the following sentence in chapter II of Sa‘di’s Gulistan
(1258): In the people’s service I should be an artful chess
playing companion (yar-e shatir), not a burden upon the heart
(bar-e khatir).36
I ruefully concluded that the only knowledge about the
personality of Mir that I could extract from the two shi‘rs was
that Mir may or may not have been interested in chess, but he
knew Gulistan better than I did.

Note: All translations from Urdu and Persian have been made by
me, unless specified otherwise.
216 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Notes and References

1 Zikr-e Mir, Ed., Maulvi Abdul Haq, Aurangabad, Anjuman Urdu Press, 1928.
2 Zikr-i Mir, The Autobiography of the Eighteenth Century Mughal Poet: Mir
Muhammad Taqi Mir, Translated, annotated and with an introduction by
C.M.Naim, New Delhi, OUP, 1999, p. 26.
3 Zikr-i Mir, p. 11.
4 For an English translation of Azad’s account of Mir’s life, personality, and

poetry, see Ab-e Hayat, translated by Frances Pritchett in association with

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, New Delhi , OUP, 2001, pp.185-203.
5 Zikr-i Mir, pp. 4-5. Talking of Mir’s appreciation of nature, it might be worth

while to mention here that Mir never saw a body of water larger than a small
though wide and tumultuous river in North Avadh, variously called the Sarju,
or the Ghaghra. Yet he has written some most hauntingly resonant and richly
textured poetry about the ocean or turbulent river waters.
6 Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols., London, George

Allen & Unwin, 1967, 1968, 1969. He doesn’t even hint at the circumstances
of his divorce with Dora, his second wife, and the endless bickerings and
bitterness, and his own obduracy over the divorce settlement. Or consider,
for example, Russell’s laconic remark about his divorce with his third wife
Patricia (“Peter”) Spence. Russell says, “When, in 1949, my wife decided that
she wanted no more of me, our marriage came to an end”(Vol. 3, p. 16 ). For
fuller information one has had to wait for Monk’s Bertrand Russell, The Ghost of
Madness, 1914-1970, (Free Press, 2000). But there is no denying the fact that
while Russell gives little information about the divorces, whatever he does give
is true.
7 Ralph Russell, and Khurshidul Islam, Three Mughal Poets, Cambridge, Mass.,

Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 96-97.

8 William Wordsworth, “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads, Second Edition,

1800”, in Edmund D. Jones, Ed., English Critical Essays of the Nineteenth Century,
London, OUP, 1919, p. 26. Earlier in this Preface, Wordsworth said, “The
poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions” (p.21). Doubtless, in his
long essay Wordsworth had hedged his bets in several subtle ways, but the
glitter of his grand propositions so dazzled our theory makers that they didn’t
stop to read the fine print.
9 It is curious that practically none of our early twentieth-century critics could

see their way to making the elementary distinction between the “poet/author”,
and the “protagonist” or “speaker” or “narrator” in a she’r. The initiator of the
literalism which effected this conflation was the great Altaf Husain Hali in his
famous Muqaddama-e shi‘r o Sha‘iri (1893). Such conflation is entirely repugnant
to the principle of mazmun afirini. Failure to distinguish the protagonist from
the poet/author also resulted in the failure to differentiate between
The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance 217

metaphorical (or “false”) statements and non-metaphorical (or “true’’)

statements. Shibli No‘mani, despite his disapproval of what he thought was
“excessive metaphoricity” in the Indian Persian poetry of the Mughal period,
astutely noted that in this poetry metaphor was treated as true in the literal
sense, and was then made the basis of more metaphor making. See Shibli
No’mani, Shi‘rul ‘Ajam, Vol. III, Azamgarh, Ma‘arif Press, 1956, p. 20, “They
treated the literal [=idiomatic, accepted] meaning of the word as real, and
made it the foundation of their mazmun”. Also see Shi‘rul ‘Ajam, Vol. V,
Azamgarh, Ma‘arif Press, 1957, p. 76, where he discusses the extension of the
beloved-as-murderer metaphor in Persian poetry. Shadani doesn’t mention
Shibli at all, but quotes Hali in extenso, or paraphrases him freely.
10 Andalib Shadani, Daur-e Hazir aur Urdu Ghazalgo’i, Delhi, Parvez Book

Depot, 1945(?), pp. 14, 12-13.

11 Shadani, p. 28.
12 Shadani, pp. 39-40.
13 Shadani, pp.61-65.
14 Nurul Hasan Hashmi, Dihli ka Dabistan-e Sha’iri; Abul Lais Siddiqi, Lakhna’u

ka Dabistan-e Sha‘iri; Hashmi’s book first came out in the 1950’s, Siddiqi’s in
the sixties. Both have remained popular. These works bring to their logical
conclusion the ideas about “natural” and “authentic” poetry introduced by
Hali (1893), then Abdus Salam Nadvi (1926), and Andalib Shadani. For a
good discussion of what these people meant by “Delhi-ness” and “Lucknow-
ness” in the context of Urdu poetry, see Carla Petievich, Assembly of Rivals:
Delhi, Lucknow and the Urdu Ghazal, New Delhi, Manohar, 1992, pp. 13-25.
15 Quoted in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton, N. J.,

Princeton University Press, 1993, p.1225.

16 For character sketches of Nasikh and Atash by Muhammad Husain Azad,

see Frances Pritchett and the present writer’s translation of Ab-e Hayat, pp.
279-84 (Nasikh), and 311-12, 17 (Atash).
17 Here are two of my favourites, from the first 15 pages:

I’ll now bring back your picture

Before you, and
I’ll clasp it to my breast,
I’ll kiss it.
Arm under the head, last night
She went to sleep with me.
It was so comfy, my arm
Went to sleep.
See Gauhar-e Intikhab, by Amir Mina’i, Rampur, Ra’isul Matabi’, 1873, pp. 10,
15.
18 “Mir Sahib Ka Ek Khas Rang”, by Andalib Shadani, in his Tahqiq ki Raushni

Men, Lahore, Ghulam Ali and Sons, 1963; originally published in the Saqi,
Delhi, October, 1940. Shadani’s and Russell’s conclusions on Mir’s love poetry
218 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

have been well and searchingly examined by Frances W. Pritchett in her

“Convention in Classical Urdu Ghazal: The Case of Mir”, in The Journal of
South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, 3,1, (Fall 1979), pp. 60-77.
19 Maulvi Abdul Haq, Intikhab…, Delhi, Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu (Hind),

1945 [1929], pp. 16, 31.

20 Majnun Gorakhpuri, “Mir aur Ham”, in M. Habib Khan, Ed., Afkar-e Mir,

Delhi, Abdul Haq Academy, 1996 [1967], p. 196. Majnun Gorakhpuri’s essay
was first published in the 1940’s.
21 Maulvi Abdul Haq, Intikhab, p. 32.
22 Mir, Kulliyat, Vol. I, Ed., Zill-e Abbas Abbasi, Delhi, Ilmi Majlis, 1968, p.

616. The she’r occurs in the Fourth Divan, composed before 1794, though
after 1785.
23 Majnun Gorakhpuri, “Mir aur Ham”, in M. Habib Khan, p. 191.
24 Mir, Kulliyat, Ed., Abbasi, pp. 138 (Divan I), 145 (Divan I), 237 (Divan I),

584 (Divan III), 620 (Divan IV), 623 (Divan IV).

25 Georges de Scudery, “The Preface to Ibrahim (selections)”, in Allan H. Gilbert,

Ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, Detroit, Wayne University Press, 1964,
[1940], pp. 580-81.
26 Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews & His Friend Mr

Abraham Adams, Penguin Edition, 1954, pp. 17-18.

27 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, New York, Washington

Square Press, Inc., 1966, p. 501.

28 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poems, Edited with an Introduction and Notes

by Edmund Blunden, London and Glasgow, Collins, 1965. There are also
other, somewhat different versions of the poem. I give the one that is
considered most acceptable.
29 Shaikh Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi, Kulliyat, Ed., Nurul Hasan Naqvi,

Lahore, Majlis Taraqqi-e Adab, Divan I, 1968, pp. 515, 225, Divan III, 1971, p.
65, Divan IV, 1974, p. 56.
30 Mir, Kulliyat, Ed., Abbasi, p. 726.
31 Mir, Kulliyat, Ed., Abbasi, p. 649, Divan IV.
32 Mir, Kulliyat, Ed., Abbasi, p. 132.
33 Mir, Kulliyat, Ed., Abbasi, p. 604.
34 Mir, Kulliyat, Ed., Abbasi, p. 680.
35 This phrase has at least the following meanings: a friend or companion

who is (1) an expert chess-player, (2) extremely clever and artful, (3) swift in
speed (as a messenger or runner, or one who walks with the master’s mount),
(4) deceitful, (5) roguish and unreliable, (6) wanton. The Arabic root shin, toe,
ra, also means “to go away from, to withdraw from.”
36 Sa‘di Shirazi, Gulistan, Kanpur, Matba‘-e Majidi, 1909, p. 68.
 THE POWER POLITICS OF CULTURE:
AKBAR ILAHABADI AND THE CHANGING
ORDER OF THINGS

Most of us are familiar with the main circumstances of

Akbar Ilahabadi’s life. So I’ll recapitulate them here but
briefly. Born Syed Akbar Husain in 1846 at village Bara in the
trans-Jamna area of Allahabad district, young Akbar received
his early education from Syed Tafazzul Husain, his father.
They came from a family of Sayyids that had long settled in
that part of the country. Conservative, middle class, and proud,
they had preserved their traditions of classical learning, but
were not in the most prosperous of circumstances. Akbar
Husain was obliged in 1863 to find clerical employment with
the builders who had contracted to bridge the Jamna not far
from his native village. In the mean time, he acquired a good
knowledge of English at home and sat the Lower Courts’
Advocates’ examination in 1867. He cleared that examination
without difficulty and in 1869 he was appointed Nai’b
Tahsildar, a comparatively low grade Revenue Dept
appointment under the British. He soon quit that job to sit the
High Court Advocates’ examination. He passed that
examination too without difficulty and enrolled as a lawyer at
the High Court of Allahabad. In 1880 he was appointed Munsif
(a medium grade Judge). He progressed steadily to become a
Sessions Judge in 1894, then acting District Judge at Banaras.
In 1898 the British made him Khan Bahadur. It was a highly
regarded title, considered just below that of a Knight of the
Empire. He took retirement in 1903, and settled to a life of
poetry and semi-reclusive comfort, though beset by poor
220 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

eyesight, in a vast house built by him near the Kotwali in

Allahabad.
Toward the end of his life he was much attracted by Gandhi
and his movement for political independence and Hindu-
Muslim unity. He wrote a long series of poems called Gandhi
Nama (Gandhi’s Book) to embody his ideas on these matters.
He died in 1921, at the peak of his reputation as a powerful,
socially and politically engaged voice on the Indian literary
scene.
1.
Akbar has had a bad press over the past five decades or so.
He had immense prestige and a commanding reputation during
his lifetime. A list of his friends and admirers reads like an
Indian Who’s Who of the decades between 1880 and 1920.
Despite Akbar’s bitter opposition to his ideas and agenda, Sir
Syed Ahmad Khan liked and respected him so much as to have
had him transferred to Aligarh so as to be better able to enjoy
his company. Iqbal once wrote about a shi‘r of Akbar’s that it
encapsulated the central idea of Hegel’s philosophy,
“compressing Hegel’s ocean into a drop.”1 Madan Mohan
Malaviya had him write poems on Hindu-Muslim unity.2
Akbar’s poetry remained popular, or perhaps gained even
more admirers and adherents over the score or so years
following his death. His Kulliyat (Collected Works) was
brought out in three volumes by his son after Akbar’s death.
The first volume had run into eleven printings by 1936. The
second saw seven printings by 1931, and the third was printed
five times by 1940. Yet things are very different today. The
Gandhi Nama (1919-1921) was printed only once, in 1948, and
has long been out of print. A modern edition of the Kulliyat
exists, but it is by no means an authoritative or scholarly
edition. The National Council for the Promotion of Urdu
proposes to bring out a comprehensive, though not critical and
scholarly edition now. Akbar’s fame as our greatest satirical
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 221

poet remains un dented, but his readership has declined and he

has been almost uniformly criticised by Urdu critics for what is
seen as his opposition to Progress, Science, and the Modern
Way of living and thinking.
There are at least two more reasons– one literary and the
other non-literary– for Akbar’s rough treatment, I almost said
ill treatment, at the hands of our critics. The literary reason is
the lowly place that comic and satirical verse occupied in the
literary canon in the eyes of Urdu critics. Doubtless, Urdu has
an immensely rich tradition of such verse, but Urdu critics of
the early part of the twentieth century were brought up to
believe in Matthew Arnold’s dictum of “high seriousness”
being the ineluctable quality of poetry. I well remember my
chagrin and the feeling of being let down when as a young
student of English literature nearly half a century ago I read
Arnold’s pronouncement that Dryden and Pope were the
classics of English prose, not of English poetry. Even if my
teachers didn’t entirely endorse this opinion, they
unhesitatingly held Dryden to be a poet of the second rank.
This, coupled with the strictures of Muhammad Husain Azad
about the satirical and scurrilous poetry of eighteenth century
Urdu poets, especially Sauda (1706-1781) as offensive to good
taste3, was enough to make Urdu critics suspicious of all satiric
and comic verse. Even Akbar’s passionate engagement with
political and social questions in his poetry wasn’t enough to
redeem his position. It would be a rare Urdu critic today who
would put Akbar among the first ten Urdu poets.
The other reason has to do with the obvious cleavage
between Akbar’s life and political opinions. In his poetry he
presents himself as an implacable enemy of all things British.
Yet he himself was a fairly senior member of the British
official establishment and was apparently quite proud of the
high regard in which Thomas Burn, one time Chief Secretary
to the Government of U.P. held him4. He even wrote an
adulatory qasida on the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria
222 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

(1887) at the request of “Mr. Howell, Judge”5. He sent his son

Ishrat Husain to England for higher education and on his return
suffered him to enter the civil service under the Government of
U.P. as Deputy Collector. All this sits ill with the fiery scorn
and burning rage that he pours over the British and the West
and their admirers.
It is possible that Akbar was aware of the contradiction.
Perhaps this sense of duality makes his denunciatory voice so
much more vehement, his disavowal of Western and British
mores and systems so much more passionate. Certainly, he
knew that no one could really swim against the current, but the
tragedy according to him was that those who swam with the
current were drowned. The Indian, in trying to fashion himself
like a modern [British] creature, gave up his past, his
traditions, his belief systems, but could not really become the
modern Western individual that Macaulay had expected him to
become. The following verse is poignant in its tragic bitterness:
6

They became votaries of the Time

And made their style as that of the West.
In their ardent desire for a second birth
They committed suicide.
The Urdu original has a powerful ambiguity owing to a
peculiarity of our grammar which permits sentence
construction without an overt subject. So the original can be
read as having any or all four of the subjects: I, You, They,
We. In a longer poem he expresses the same dilemma with a
sense of personal defeat and loss, though the protagonist of this
poem too could well subsume the whole Muslim community: 7
Akbar, if I stick to the old ways
Sayyid tells me plain: This hue
Is now sleazy. And if I adopt
The new style, my own people raise
A Babel of hoots and shouts.
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 223

Moderation? It doesn’t exist

Here or there. All have stretched their legs
Beyond all limits. One side insists
One mustn’t touch even a lemonade
Bottle; the other side keen
To summon the Saki, “Hey! A stoup of wine!”
One side regards as unclean
The whole book of management,
Skill, and sound policy. For the other,
The bag of English mail is God’s own word.
Majnun’s soul suffers from double trial:
Laila’s company and separation both
Are catastrophic.
Hostile critics (and nearly all of Akbar’s modern critics are
hostile) ignore poems such as these, and stress only those
which according to them show him up as a blind, unreasoning
hater of the New Light, or deliberately perverse in his
backwardness and love for a past that was generally unsavoury,
and in any case dead or dying. And these are the views not of
those alone who might have regarded the British rule as a
blessing, or a stage in the march of historical forces, but also of
those who were out of sympathy with the Raj.
The sub text, and sometimes the explicit strain in most
modern criticism of Akbar is that he may have been a good
poet of satire and may have been extremely popular in his day,
but the values, ideas and ideals that Akbar upheld as valuable
suffered a decisive defeat in his lifetime itself. Thus when the
values that provide the prop of belief and conviction to his
poetry are gone, his poetry must inevitably make room for
others. Akbar’s negative agenda and therefore his poetry,
critics say, can have no strength or validity in the modern age.
The logical flaw in this reasoning is that the defeat or rout of
the group, party, or ideas targeted by a satirist necessarily
makes the satire invalid or obsolete. No satirical text from
224 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Aristophanes through the Arab polemical and poems and

individual lampoons to the poems and prose of Swift and Jafar
Zatalli would be intelligible or alive today if the satire died
with its subject. Another point to be noted here is that Akbar’s
attitude toward the issues of his day, and especially towards
issues of “progress” was not so unilinear and uncomplicated as
his critics would like us to believe. He is very complex poet
and he cannot be read like the morning newspaper. In addition,
all of Akbar’s fears and dire predictions were not just the
fancies of a diehard conservative.
Akbar was in fact one of the few to realize at that time in
our history that Syed Ahmad Khan’s reformist schemes had
much in common with Macaulay’s agenda. The “Indian
Renaissance” was really a powerful current of shallow
modernization. The Anglo Oriental College at Aligarh had very
little “Anglo” and even less “Oriental” about it. For all his
learning and good intentions, Syed Ahmad Khan wasn’t
equipped to create a unified system of scientific inquiry and
religious faith. How different was closeness to the British from
being subserviently tied to the coat-tails of the British is a
question that may have occurred to many, but aside from
Akbar there is no one in our cultural history of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who articulated this
question so relentlessly and pointed up to fact that it was mere
wishful thinking to believe that the two were substantively
different.
Soon after he became a judge of the High Court at
Allahabad, Syed Mahmood, the son of Syed Ahmad Khan,
finding that Indian judges of High Court were allowed pay and
privileges inferior to those of the British judges, submitted a
memorandum to Government, demanding that for the purpose
of pay, perquisites, and conditions of service, he should be
treated on par with British judges. He based his claim not on
the principle of equity and fair play, but on the fact that he was
to all intents and purposes, an Englishman by virtue of his long
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 225

sojourn in England, his English education, and his complete

absorption of the English language, culture and customs8.
Akbar, who was himself in the Judicial Service of U.P. at that
time, would have known or heard of this and would have felt
his worst fears realized in the conduct and the mindset of Syed
Mahmood. He would also have known or heard of the later
intransigencies of Syed Mahmood, and the arrogant hostility to
him of his Chief Justice, John Edge. Syed Mahmood was
ultimately obliged to leave his judgeship. All this would have
amply vindicated Akbar in his own eyes. No wonder that his
short poem on the death of Syed Mahmood in 1903 is briefly
elegiac and has a bitter triumphalism:
Neither Theodore Beck remains now
Nor does Sir Syed; a sigh arises
From the hearts of friends. There was
Some consolation so long as Mahmood
Was there. Today he too departed this world
For paradise. Admonition, weeping, said:
To your senses! Oh you who are greedy
For pomp and power and splendour,
Obliterated is the stamp of Ahmad and Mahmood
“There’s no God but God” is all
That remains.9
Akbar’s contradictions thus were of his age. Moreover,
there is no doubt that toward the end of his life he was groping
toward a resolution of his inner paradoxes. He was, in the
idiom of the age, a “government servant” and then a “pensioner
judge” for most of his life, and didn’t find it in himself to
express himself openly in support of Gandhi and the freedom
movement, though he never ceased to attack the British and
their government and their cooperationists in no uncertain
terms. A poet, after all, is not expected to wield a stick or lead
a suicide brigade. Many years before Gandhi Nama he wrote
in two separate verses: 10
226 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Were Akbar not the Government’s concubine,

You would find him too among Gandhi’s gopis.
For him Akbar uses the word madkhulah, which means
exactly what I say in translation: a kept woman. For Gandhi’s
followers, he uses the word gopi which means one of the
myriad legendary female lovers of Sri Krishna, and suggests
the extraordinary, almost superhuman charisma that Gandhi
possessed. There are other meanings too, but I’ll only one here:
Akbar sees Gandhi as the principle of fecundity and creative
liberation, and India as the female principle, to be fecundated
by Gandhi. Now the other shi‘r: 11
Little Buddhu too is with
The Honourable Mr Gandhi; though he is
But a pinch of dust on the road
He is the storm’s companion.12
“Little Buddhu” (Buddhu Mian) is one of Akbar’s favourite
metaphors for the Indian Muslim. Maulana Muhammad Ali is
reported to have been slightly miffed at this shi‘r, suspecting
that “Buddhu Mian” here stood for him, and that Akbar was
making gentle fun of him. Akbar is reported to have disabused
Muhammad Ali of this notion. There is a shi‘r in Gandhi Nama
which suggests that here “Buddhu Mian” was none other than
Akbar himself: 13
The word “Buddhu” was actually
A matter of prudence,
What I actually meant it to mean
Is hidden in my heart.
Akbar didn’t let Gandhi Nama see the light of the day. He is
reported by Maulvi Qamaruddin Ahmad to have candidly
admitted that he didn’t have the fortitude to oppose the
Government, and that he was concerned about his son getting
into trouble because of his nationalistic poetry. Nor did he have
the physical health and strength to stand the hardships of the
jail.14 Yet in the poem he lets himself go, putting the following
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 227

shi‘r as its epigraph, declaring Firdausi’s great epic Shah Nama

(The Book of Kings) to be obsolete and abrogated:
The revolution is here:
It’s a new world, a new tumult,
The Book of Kings is done
It’s the age of The Book of Gandhi now.15
Akbar was strongly conscious of the immense fascination
that the culture of the politically victorious has for the
politically vanquished. As numerous examples in
contemporary life and letters amply demonstrated, the
vanquished people could be made to unconsciously strive for
identification with the ruling elite by the insertion of popular
and powerful icons of alien culture into their day to day life.
The pulls and counter-pulls exerted themselves as much, if not
more, through culture as through politics. Akbar’s great insight
was his early identification of the colonizer’s culture with his
politics, his administration, and his regulations. That’s why he
replied through his poetry, traditionally the greatest cultural
weapon that one could command in the Indo-Muslim society.
That’s why he equates his Gandhi Nama, a series of short or
very short and politically overt poems with Shah Nama, a
literary masterpiece of an entirely different kind.
It’s fashionable today for us to talk of cultural and economic
colonization of the third world by the capitalist-imperialist
West in a post-colonial scenario. For all its trendiness, this
notion of the cultural hegemony of the West represents hard
realities on the ground level in countries like India. Akbar was
perhaps the first to appreciate the political power of cultural
icons:
Though Europe has great
Capability to do war,
Greater still is her power
To do business. They cannot everywhere
Install a gun, but the soap
228 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Made by Pears is everywhere.16

Improved means of communication go side by side with
improved ways of doing business, and new ways of loving and
living: 17
Nowhere now the hands
Of frenzied love tear at the collar
Separating thread from thread;
Now it’s Majnun’s hands, and the Pioneer,
And news despatched by wire.
Shirin has contracted to supply milk
At the commisariat; and Farhad
Is building a railroad through the mountain.
***
Lovers of peris are now
Enchanted by the Ms,
Frenzy once made them rip their clothes
They’re now sewing blazers.18
***
I took her to bed, and then
Took my leave, saying:
“Thank you.”19
3.
The mode of British rule in India was often described by
the British civil servants themselves as the rule of law, and
benevolent, though despotic. One of the chief methods of
despotism, however benevolent, is pronounced propensity for
over-regulation. Akbar regarded the constricting effect of the
British over-regulation as cultural invasion inasmuch as it
forced the people to change their lifestyles. He often uses the
English word “License”as a metaphor for the over-regulation:
Eyes
Watching every step,
License
Demanded at every turn,
Oh Akbar, I finally gave up strolling
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 229

In the park.20
***
Just the license is enough
To give you honour on the road,
Just have a license on you,
Put away the sword.21
***
Don’t ask:“Are you Piru, or
Are you Harbans?” Whatever
This slave is, he is
Without license.22
In Akbar’s changing world there is not just the sense of loss
at things which are gone. The vanquished and subjugated
Indian, becoming a part of the colonial administrative system,
tries to out-Herod Herod, and shows himself up as even more
oppressive than the British benevolent despot:
When buttons were stitched onto the waist-wrap
And western pants grew out of the dhoti,
A corporal and six was posted at every tree,
And a law sprouted in every field.23
Where Akbar’s poetry has seemed most annoying to modern
critics is his apparent rejection of even such obviously useful
and progressive things as running water supplied to homes
through pipes, the printing press, the newspaper, and the
railway train. A casual reading would indeed leave us puzzled,
or sad, at Akbar’s refusal to permit, far less welcome, even
such essentials of modern life and enlightened living. But
Akbar was not in fact protesting against the signs of progress:
he was protesting against the signs of enslavement and the
destruction of Indian cultural values and lifestyles that such
enslavement guaranteed above the putative guarantee of
progress and improvement in the quality of life. He also saw
water tax and muck and stagnating puddles and pollution
accompanying piped water. He saw the disappearance of water
230 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

and wells, and river water as a sequel of the establishment of

water works in the cities:
The plague, and the fever, the bug and the mosquito
All are nurtured in the muck
That surrounds the municipal tap;
The flow from the municipal tap
Is something, cleanliness is
Something else again.24
***
Tears are such great things:
They do good to the heart’s tillage,
Water tax is now proposed
To be levied on the weeping eye.25
***
Is it the flow and surge
Of civilization or the deluge?
What need there is for the tap
When there’s a well in the house? 26
The symbolism of the domestic well whose water is native,
pure, and controlled, against the municipal tap that supplies
water to homes and street corners need not be laboured. What
is more important to my mind is the cultural import that the
change portended for Akbar. Those of us who are familiar, and
I expect everybody is, with our folk songs about Krishna and
Krishna’s gopis at the well or river bank, and with songs of
drawing and conveying home the water from wells and rivers
in general will easily appreciate the feeling of cultural loss, the
sense of desecration and denigration of community values and
lifestyle that commercially controlled and supplied water
would have produced in the mind of anyone sensitive to those
values.
The well was not just a well, the river not just a river in the
Indian mind. For one thing, well water and river water was
free. Even in the village where caste segregation was common,
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 231

those who were entitled to draw water from a well did so

without payment, without let or hindrance. Then, both quality
and quantity of the water were within reasonable power of the
drawer: it wasn’t like the impersonal, unknown source from
which the tap water came, and on which there was no control
of the consumer in terms of quantity and flow. Lastly but
perhaps most importantly, there was the religious, social and
cultural value of the well and the river as a locus for emotional
and spiritual commerce.
How important the well was in even large cities like Delhi is
well reflected in Ghalib’s letters. In a letter of 1860/1861
addressed to Mir Mehdi Majruh, Ghalib wrote: 27
Qari’s well has dried up. All the wells at Lal Diggi have suddenly
become entirely brackish. So one could somehow drink the
brackish water, but those wells now yield only hot water.
Yesterday I rode out into the city to inquire into the state of the
wells....In brief, the city has become a wilderness. And now, if the
wells disappear and fresh water becomes rare like a pearl, this
city will turn into the wilderness of Karbala.
Such was the state of Delhi after the destruction of buildings
and monuments carried out by the British after they reoccupied
Delhi in September 1857, and the demolitions effected by them
in 1859-1861 in the name of modernization and progress. Tap
water couldn’t replace all the wells, and wasn’t tax free like
well water anyway. The drying out or the disappearance of
wells was not just inconvenience, it was the prelude to a new
kind of dependency, a new kind of life where water could not
be drawn at will, but had to be awaited; the taps must flow for
the water to reach the people. It was no longer a natural
resource, but a man made artefact.
Rivers were even stronger sources of cultural strength and
continuity in India. Water from different rivers was believed to
have different properties and was valued in terms of both
sactity and salubriousness. It was not unknown for people to
hand carry on their travels the water from the Ganga, or any
232 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

other river that they favoured. Even a hard headed Sultan like
Muhammad Tughlaq (r. 1325-1351) had his favourite river
water carried to him every day a thousand miles away to the
Deccan.28 Akbar invariably drank Ganga water, and it was
carried to him every day regardless of distance when he was far
from the river itself. Abul Fazl tells us about waters from other
rivers used in Akbar’s kitchen and other establishments.29
Nearer our time and place, here is Ghalib, eloquently
praising the water of the river near Rampur:30
How can I have the tongue to thank God for the water? There is
a river, called Kosi. Holy is the Lord! Kosi’s water is so sweet
that anyone who drank it could imagine it was a lightly
sweetened drink: clean, light, easy on the system, digestive,
quick to be absorbed in the body.
***
The water, Holy is the Lord! There is a river just three hundred
steps from the city. It’s called Kosi. Doubtless some
underground current from the stream of the Elixir of Life is a
tributary of it. Well, even if such is the case, the Elixir only
extends life, it could never be so sweet.
It is the loss of these protocols and being deprived of these
waters and their cultural reverberations that Akbar lamented:31
Obliged to drink water from the tap
And to read texts set in type,
Suffering from the flux
And conjunctivitis; Help!
Oh Good King Edward, help!
The supreme irony of the appeal to King Edward VII is too
good to need comment. The protest against typesetting the
reading material is not just because the small type faces were
small and harder to read than books calligraphed by expert
calligraphers. The matter had to do more with mass production
and quality control. In the pre-print age, one often
commissioned books to be copied by a calligrapher, and one
generally supervised the job personally. On account of the one
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 233

time nature of the work, the calligrapher could ensure

uniformity of style, ink, and general lay out of the work that he
was producing. More important, the copier or the
commissioner made sure, at least in theory, of an error free
.copy. With the advent of the printing press and mass
production, errors became extremely numerous, for the quality
control ensured by the author/commissioner’s personal
supervision was no longer there. The author/commissioner of
the printed work had no real control over it, but was still held
liable for the numerous errors that printed texts now routinely
contained.
Ghalib, who tried to maintain a measure of quality control
during the printing of some of his works. His letters on that
subject reflect his concern, and his anguish over the printer’s
excesses:
Let the ink be bright black, and uniform throughout”, Ghalib
pleads to Har Gopal Tafta who was supervising the printing of
Dastanbu.32 Now this is about an edition of his Urdu Divan. I saw
each and every proof. The calligrapher/proof maker was someone
different from the middleman who used to bring the proofs to me.
Now I find that all the errors are just as they were. That is, the
proof corrector didn’t incorporate the corrections at all.33
In a letter to Junun Barelvi Ghalib laments that people
blame him for typos, and “do not envisage the possibility of
error in printed texts. The poor author is indicted for the
calligrapher/proof reader’s mistakes.”34
Thus in his mock-protest against the typeset text, Akbar is
actually protesting against the culture of mass production
which lowers aesthetic standards, makes coldly impersonal
what once was a work of art and mindlessly permits errors to
proliferate. It is for these reasons that Akbar dislikes
photographs and the phonograph: they separate the subject
from his/her attribute. Printed photographs are worse, for they
are copies of a copy:
234 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Now what occasion could there be

For me to boast of my album?
Your photograph has now become
All too cheap: Even the painter cannot
Have a sight of you. From just a photo
Are now your pictures made.35
***
Why wonder if my friends
Are parted from me; in the age
Of the phonograph, the voice
Is parted from the throat.36
A similar tension, or perhaps even worse, prevails with the
telephone, for not only is it impersonal, but in permitting
avoidance of eye contact, it makes refusal easy:
Now how could one hope
For the eye of compassion, when
The telephone is the only
Means of conversation?37
Akbar saw the newspaper too as a weapon of cultural
invasion. He equated British business with British information.
Worse still, by virtue of it being a vehicle for the promotion of
commerce through advertisement and aggressive salesmanship,
the newspaper was also a medium of disinformation. It was
culturally deleterious in other ways too: it had immense even if
false prestige and made Indians eager to be seen in print on its
pages:
Real goods are those that are made in Europe,
Real matter is that which is printed in the Pioneer.38
***
Okay, so give me nothing from your purse,
But please do print my name in the paper;
Whomever you look for, you find them
Settled at the door of the Pioneer:
For God’s sake, Sir, do print me on some page!
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 235

The true state is not hidden

From the eyes of the world;
Print in the paper whatever you please.39
***
I have now no desire for Paradise and its Lote tree
Nor do I long for the heavenly spring of Kausar,
I lust only for publication
In the Pioneer.40
***
Give me too a couple of pages from the paper
But not the one that contains medicine ads.41
This last one is particularly interesting. With characteristic
astuteness Akbar notes that the newspaper, in printing
advertisements, in fact deviates from its true function. Early
newspapers in England were nothing more than accounts of
parliamentary debates. It was only in the nineteenth century, in
the shadow of the industrial revolution and because of the vast
blue collar readership that the revolution spawned, that
newspapers began to contain “sensational” news stories and
reports of crimes, criminal trials, and similar juicy stuff.
Advertisements came still later, when the industrial revolution
led to the assembly line and mass production and glut. Thus the
newspaper, from being a politically educative text, became a
player in big business and aggressive salesmanship.
It seems that the feeling that the newspaper was not the
proper place or medium for advertisements was shared by a
number of Indians in the nineteenth century. Ratan Nath
Sarshar’s Fasana-e Azad (1880) is a serio-comic story of the
picaresque type in four volumes. It is not a text notable for
being in sympathy with what the author apparently saw as the
effete Indo-Muslim culture of the nineteenth century. We find
a friend of Azad, the main character, disapproving the
appearance of a “Situations Vacant” in a newspaper and Azad
explaining to him the uses of the newspaper:
236 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Bahar: May God grant you success. But say listen, is this not a
newspaper? If so, what occasion could there be in it for
complications like vacancies, emoluments, applications? A
newspaper should contain accounts of battles and wars, or
discussion and disputation on matters scientific
and political and not such kinds of complications and fuss.
Azad: Then my dear Sir, you never did read a newspaper.
Revered Master, a newspaper is an admixture of fragrances. It is
the young people’s tutor, affectionate adviser to the youth,
touchstone of the experience of old men, chief member of the
government, friend to the businessman, loyal companion to the
manufacturer, advocate of the people, ambassador of the public
at large, adviser to policy makers, a column full of banter about
the affairs of the country, another column full of disputation on
social matters, brilliant poems on some page, notices and
advertisements on another. English newspapers have things of
myriad varieties and native papers imitate them.42
Needless to say, here Azad is the modern man: he revels in
the salesmanship, the jack-of-all-tradeness, and the lack of
privacy (note the bit about tutoring and advising the young and
the very young), that marks the newspaper. It is for him a
replacement for education and a desirable engine of mind
control. Moreover, those are precisely the reasons for Akbar’s
disapproval of the newspaper.
The newspaper for Akbar is essentially a materialistic
device. (note the “this worldliness” of the typical newspaper’s
contents listed by Azad’s friend above). Its main purpose is not
education, but furtherance of business, and administrative and
business interests of the colonizer. An even stronger
embodiment of the cultural /political/economic idea was the
railway engine, and the goods train:
Oh Akbar, those who place
Their faith and trust in the
Goods train, what fear
Could they have of an overload of sin? 43
***
The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 237

Notes & References

1 Iqbal’s letter to Akbar Ilahabadi, dated Decmber 17, 1914, in Kulliyat-i

Makatib-e Iqbal, Vol. I, Ed., Muzaffar Husain Barani, New Delhi, Delhi Urdu
Academy, 1991, p. 320.
2 Akbar Ilahabadi, Kulliyat, Vol. III, p.154.

3. “[C]losing the eyes of modesty and opening the mouth of shamelessness he

[Sauda] said such wild things that even Satan would ask for a truce.”
Muhammad Husain Azad, Ab-e Hayat¸Trs. Frances Pritchett in association
with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, New Delhi, OUP, 2001, p.153.
4 Akbar , Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 157.
5 Akbar, Kulliyat, Vol. I, pp. 207-08.
6 Akbar, Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 30.
7 Akbar, Kulliyat, Vol. I, pp. 161-62.
8 See David Lelyveld, “Macaulay’s Curse: Sir Syed and Syed Mahmood” in

A.A.Ansari, Ed., Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, A Centenary Tribute, Delhi, Adam
Publications, 2001.
9 Akbar, Kulliyat, Vol. I, p. 185.
10 Akbar, Kulliyat,
11 Akbar, Kulliyat. Also see Gandhi Nama, Allahabad, Kitabistan, 1948, p. ye.
12 Akbar, Kulliyat. Also see Gandhi Nama, Allahabad, Kitabistan, 1948, p. ye.
13 Akbar, Gandhi Nama, p. ye, p. 45.
14 Akbar, Gandhi Nama, p. vao.
15 Akbar, Gandhi Nama, p. 1.
16 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 63.
17 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 68.
18 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 15.
19 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 54, “Thank you” in English in the original.
20 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 94.
21 Kulliyat, Vol. I, p. 255.
22 Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 84.
23 Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 19.
24 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p.12.
25 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 85.
26 Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 13.
27 Khaliq Anjum, Ed., Ghalib ke Khutut, Vol. II, New Delhi, The Ghalib

Institute, 1985, p. 524.

28 See
238 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

29 Abul Fazl. I am obliged to Professor N. R. Farooqi, of the University of

Allahabad, for the information about Muhammad Tughlaq, and the citation
from Abul Fazl.
30 Letter dated February 1860, to Hakim Ghulafm Najaf Khan, and letter dated

February 1860, to Mir Mehdi Majruh, in Khaliq Anjum, Ed., Ghalib ke Khutut,
Vol. II, pp. 630, 517.
31 Kulliyat, Vol. I, p. 239.
32 Letter dated September 7, 1858, in Ghalib ke Khutut, Vol. I, 1984, p. 292.
33 Letter dated August 8, 1861, to Mir Mehdi Majruh, in Ghalib ke Khutut, Vol.

II, Ed. Khaliq Anjum, 1985, p. 521.

34 Letter dated May 8, 1864, in Ghalib ke Khutut, Vol. IV, Ed., Khaliq Anjum,

1993, p. 1511.
35 Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 20.
36 Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 10.
37 Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 17.
38 Kulliyat, Vol. II, p. 62.
39 Kulliyat, Vol. I, p. 254.
40 Kulliyat, Vol. I, p. 226.
41 Kulliyat, Vol.
42 Ratan Nath Sarshar, Fasana-e Azad, Vol. I, New Delhi, National Council for

the Promotion of Urdu, 1986, p. 163, [1880].

43 Kulliyat, Vol. III, p. 8.
 Appendix

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嶔 ìäĨ婨Ĩ嶔 ìäĨęþĨᠢĨ㲞 Ĩ㷨Ĩú ä㌪ äĨṎ
Ǘǔ
䆨Ĩ喆 Ĩ⚑ äエ Ĩ㣰⡜Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ巼 ìĨ抁Ĩ嶔 ìä ⫎ Ĩ媎 Ĩ⏢ Ĩ೧ Ĩ‫׮ٶ‬ǎ Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩㆇ Ĩ抁Ĩ嶔 ìä
ᣞ Ĩ㥃Ĩĕ äĒĨ㷨Ĩ徰 䆨þĨ⚑ þĨ嵗 Ĩ嶔 ìä ĕ ຩ嗚Ĩ偗 ĨþĨෂ ᔇĨ㗇 ìĨ嵗 Ĩ嶔 ìä
䯕 Ĩ 㞺 㘄Ĩ þĨ 䯕 Ĩ ょ Ĩ ě ਯ äîĨė 䶭 Ĩü ᱑Ĩ⣜ äĨå ä㍙ Ĩ婨䁐ĨþìĨó 㓲
ğĤĠğĤğò Ûú þäĨᵸ Û‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

剚Ĩ婨Ĩ㭜 ĨîþäĨ㿪Ĩ㱾Ĩ㪹 Ĩ徉ìĨ㨱 嬸 Ĩ⻎ 亾 Ĩ岫 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ弥㲢 ìĨęäîĨ㷩 Ĩęäþ

剚Ĩ婨Ĩ൸ Ĩ⸞ ĨĐ ‫܉‬Ĩ剐 Ĩ啵 Ĩ㊂ ‫܉‬Ĩ妉 î 廫㞑Ĩ㲢 îĨ೧ Ĩ嬸 Ĩ䍙 㥃ĨᠢĨ㥃Ĩě ⋖ Ĩ妉 î
剚Ĩ婨Ĩጡ Ĩě ᇆ Ĩᥢ 㲢 ìĨü ß㟥Ĩ【 很 䆨Ĩė 㶠 䆨ĨᠢĨ㺸 Ĩ䰍 Ĩď 㽽 ĨṎ Ĩ᭘ äĨⵗ
ğò ĨÛú þäĨᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

啵 Ĩ䰍 äþĨ嬸 㨱Ĩ䰍 äþĨ㲗 Ĩ嵗 ĨṎĨù 㘄䪫೥ Ĩ婨 ᡁ ĨᎹ㨱Ĩû㥃Ĩⵗ Ĩ嵉 Ĩᥖ ‫܉‬Ĩ峭 Ĩᥖ ‫܉‬ĨĚî屩

啵 Ĩ䰍 äþĨ嬸 亾 Ĩᣪ Ĩė ൞⠩Ĩⴣ Ĩ୧ Ĩࡸ Ĩä✪ 㥋 äĨě äĨė 峤Ĩ㲃 Ĩ抁ᠢĨ啵 Ĩ弥㱾Ĩ嵗 ‹ĨṎ Ĩ㲠
ğħħĨò ĨÛú þäĨᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

ęß 嵗 Ĩ奂 Ĩ⸞ Ĩå ⓧ äĨú ì ⵗ Ĩ⨭ Ĩ婨Ĩ䅍 ĨęîĨ঳ ĨęþĨ婨

 240 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

ęäîĨ㷨Ĩ⟁ Ĩé ßĨ೧ Ĩ嬸 Ĩė媑 äĨ䬉 ᣗ Ĩ ᔫ Ĩ ⸞ Ĩ ì九 Ĩ ç äí

ę᱑ĨþĨ㥵 ⿡ĨþĨü ⹢Ĩü 悲 ═ Ĩě ä áßĨ啵 Ĩñ 峤Ĩ㲁 Ĩç ㌘ Ĩ䬉ୢ
䡠 äĨ 䆨äĨ 䪬äĨ 䆨Ĩ 䅏 Ĩ ęî ì九 Ĩ þĨ ♀ äĨ 壸 Ĩ 䅏 Ĩ 䴱
ğĦģĨò ĨÛú þäĨᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

Ꮉ峤Ĩ 婨Ĩ 㽻 äĨ 㥋 äĨ 匵 î䁐Ĩ Þ䪬⠩人

啵 Ĩė ᎚ 䁐Ĩ㷨Ĩ常 垆㻠Ĩᥢ ຩĨĐ ßĨ೧ Ĩ㱾Ĩð ä
(١٨٥ ‫ ص‬،‫)ﺑﺰم اﮐﺒﺮ‬
嵉 Ĩᡀ ⡜Ĩ㺸 Ĩ常 垆㻠Ĩç □ Ĩ೧ Ĩė 咍 Ĩ帴 ࢌ
嵉 Ĩᡀ ⡜Ĩ㺸 Ĩ常 垆ßĨ剐 Ĩ嵉 ĨęäîĨĕ ⛪Ĩ䁐
(٦٤ ‫ ص‬،‫)ﺑﺰم اﮐﺒﺮ‬
ç ‫܉‬Ĩ㷨Ĩ偗 Ĩĕ äĨ㚔 Ĩᡁ Ĩ䛢 Ĩ㥃Ĩ帴 ࢌ
ç ‫܉‬Ĩ㷨Ĩヾ äĨ嵗 ĨṎĨ嵗 Ĩė婩Ĩě 亾 Ĩ啵 Ĩú ì
(٤٥ ‫  ص‬،‫ﯽ ﻧﺎﻣﻪ‬＄‫)ﮔﺎﻧﺪ‬

嵗 Ĩ 吶 峍 Ĩ 媜Ĩ 媜ìĨ 媙 Ĩ 徉ßĨ å 夋 ä

嵗 Ĩ吶 嗚Ĩ常 垆㻠Ĩîþì Ĩå äĨ↕ Ĩ峤Ĩ吶 嗚Ĩę⹢
(١ ‫ ص‬،‫ﯽ ﻧﺎﻣﻪ‬＄‫)ﮔﺎﻧﺪ‬

弥峤Ĩ常 ࢓Ĩç 㣡Ĩ㷨Ĩḟ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ䁐Ĩ啵 ĨĐ î 技

弥峤Ĩ常 ࢓Ĩç îᑅ Ĩ⸞ Ĩð äĨ嵗 Ĩėþ㘆Ĩ䮵
ᵤ Ĩ寄ĨĐ ᠢĨęþĨ ⬋ Ĩ䟣Ĩ 媎 Ĩ勴
ᵤ Ĩ寄ĨĐ Ⳣ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㥃Ĩð ᎟ Ĩ剐 Ĩ 慮 ì
ĤġĨò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
 The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 241

ė㲂 Ĩå äĨė 律 㽻 ĨîᎹĨėḸ Ĩ⣜ ìĨė㲂 Ĩå ä

㷨ĨîᎹĨ嵗 Ĩ⛭ ĨîþäĨė䶭 Ĩ⣜ ìĨîþäĨ嫁 ຩ

㥃ĨĘìþìĨᬻ Ĩ啵 Ĩ志 Ĩ㮧 Ĩ嬸 Ĩ承 〛 Ĩ䬊Ĩ䰍
㷨Ĩ î㲊 Ĩ å äĨ ì孆㘄Ĩ 䠂 Ĩ 嬸 ä୑Ĩ 憗 î

ĤĦĨò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

㥃Ĩė侬 Ĩä峤Ĩäì Ⳣ Ĩ㱾Ĩė⼶ ㌑Ĩ㺸 Ĩė 技࿀

嵉 Ĩ嵗 îĨⴣ Ĩď 㱾Ĩå äĨ吶 ᱑Ĩᣬ Ĩᥢ ēᅟĨṎ
ğģĨÛò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

㥋 äĨ ě äĨ ❢ îĨ ⸞ Ĩ ü ää峤Ĩ 啵
㨱Ĩ 㲙 Ĩ 技ᣧ Ĩ ीĨ 㺸 Ĩ ラ þ
ģĢĨÛò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
ǔ
ƹŋ
㉘ ĨƘ ƹƟǎĨĕ äĨᄰĨē吴 Ĩ寄Ĩė ä妛 Ĩ她 ßĨ⊠ ĨᄰĨû㻠Ĩ寄
徉ìĨē⏢ Ĩᩦ ĨᠢĨ嬸 Ĩ啵 Ĩ㥋 äĨě äĨ✭ßĨ啵 Ĩĕ îຩĨð ä
ħĢĨÛò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
ǔ
ƹŋ
䬈 Ĩ㺸 Ĩç ㍛ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㜢㥃Ĩ峭 ĨƘ ƹƟǎĨ啵 Ĩęäî
怖 ìĨ 峣 îĨ î ä᝝ Ĩ 䭓 Ĩ 䰍 Ĩ 抋 Ĩ ࢕
ĠģģĨÛò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

嵗 Ĩଫ Ĩ寄Ĩ徉Ĩ嵗 Ĩþጎ ĨᠢĨ㲁 峤Ĩ㷩 Ĩ⌨ ᄯ

ǔ
ƹŋ
嵗 ĨƘ ƹƟǎĨਯĨ䉺 ⓥĨ୳ Ĩ峤Ĩ㨗 ĨṎĨęଦ
ĦĢĨÛò ĨÛûⳢ ᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
 242 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

㻠äĨü ໖ Ĩ⸞ Ĩᣲ帴 ìĨ᱓ Ĩ䠂 Ĩ䟷 Ĩ᱓ Ĩ‫ ފ‬Ĩ啵 Ĩᠵ

㻠äĨü 婧㞑Ĩĕ äĨ啵 Ĩ㶦 Ĩ寄 Ĩං Ĩęᄳ Ĩĕ äĨᄰĨጏ Ĩ寄
ğħĨÛò ĨÛûⳢᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

⸞ Ĩ㸤 Ĩäጌ Ĩ抁Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㨗 Ĩ⡞ Ĩ䷫ Ĩ㳩 ĨþĨᏮ ĨþĨü 㑴ㇰ

ƸŰƴ
ø ㈲ Ĩ愡 äĨ弥ダ ĨĚî⡜ĨîþäĨø ㈲ Ĩ愡 äĨ媛äþîĨ㷨Ĩƾǐǐ
ğĠĨÛò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

嵗 Ĩ⑼ Ĩ悇 äĨ⽁ äĨᅌ Ĩ壓 Ĩ㱾Ĩú ìĨ㪃

嵗 Ĩ恙ᑦ Ĩ㷨Ĩᮜ ĨᦵäþĨᄰĨė 徉㽻 ĨÞę恔ì
ĦģĨÛò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

嵗 Ĩė㖵㊓ Ĩ㥃Ĩð äĨ徉㷨Ĩ徊 ᠬ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㝊 Ĩé 吴 Ĩ抁

㸳 Ĩ姾 Ĩ㥃Ĩ媛ຩĨᇆ ĨᠢĨ啵 Ĩ䂺 Ĩ嵗 ĨìṎ吴 Ĩė ä㱫
ğġĨò ĨÛûⳢᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

Ĩû㽻 ĨÛዛ Ĩ媛ຩĨ峭 ĨĚî㲢 Ĩ⠴ ĨĜ䅍 Ĩ峤 ĨĚî㲢 ĨûìĨ愡 äĨ承 㱫 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ䅎 ĒĨú 䆨ĨĜ䅏 Ĩ峤 Ĩଦ Ĩė ä㱫 Ĩ㥃ĨĚî㞑
Ĩ峤 Ĩäん Ĩ⿫ Ĩ乷 Ĩ㠘 ĨĜĜĜᡁ Ĩ䅏 Ĩ嬸 㨱Ĩ㖺 徉îìĨú ⓥĨ㥃Ĩė á㱫 Ĩ㨱 Ĩ峤 ĨîäⳢ Ĩ啵 Ĩė Ⳣ ࿀Ĝ嵗 Ĩ奁 Ĩ媛ຩ
Ĝ㻠Ĩ很 ᱑Ĩ峤 Ĩਯ㨱Ĩě äん Ĩäん Ĩ抁ĨᠢĨÛ䅏 Ĩ峤 Ĩå 徉嗚Ĩ寄 䁐Ĩ媛ຩĨîþäĨ嵗 îĨᥢ ᱑Ĩ承 㱫 ĨṎ Ĩå äĨĜᡁ 䅏
ģĠĢĨÛğħģĦÛûþìĨÛ⟪ ĨÛğĦĤğĨÛê þ䶊 Ĩû૾
Ĩ⨑ Ĩ㥃Ĩ徉㌑îĨ⸞ Ĩ嬸 峤Ĩଦ Ĩ幥 ຩĨ㞺 þĨð äĜ䟺 ĨĖ ßĨ啵 Ĩė 婧㥃þìĨ㷨 Ĩĕ ⋏Ĩä峤Ĩ㄰ ㍚ Ĩäēᣔ Ĩ㲁 Ĩ徉䰮㘄
 ‫ آب و‬㷨 Ĩⓦ で ĨĜ很 ᱑Ĩ㲂 Ĩ㷩 ĨĜᡁ Ĩ䞻 Ĩ㨱 Ĩ峤 Ĩᰂ䱱 Ĩ⸞ Ĩú ⠯ Ĩð äĨ⻸ Ĩęî㱾亽Ĩ嬸 Ĩ啵 ĨĜä峤Ĩü 夂
Ĩ᱑Ĩ弥 䆨Ĩ啵 Ĩୢ㞑Ĩ㞺 þĨ࢑ĨĖ ßĨᠢĨᥢ 峤Ĩ承 㱫 Ĩê ㈲ Ĩ㷨 Ĩ঎ ⡜ĨÞ婨䰮ï Ĩ㞺 þĨð äĨ㽻 ä嵗 Ĩ媛ä◷ ĨᄰĨ婨äì
Ĩ恡 ï Ĩ䬈 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ‫܉‬㓲 ĨÛ嵉 Ĩ啵 Ĩ弃 䆨Ĩú Ⳣ Ĩä亾 äĨîþäĨ㈃ Ĩė ä◷ Ĩ㲁 Ĩ慮 ìĨ啅 ᔊĨ啵 Ĩė þ⿫ ĨĜᣗ Ĩ⫌
 The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 243

ĨþĨ哶 äĨ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ抋 Ĩ⸞ Ĩð äĨìä亾 ĨĜ嵉 Ĩę㐗 Ĩご 䁐Ĩě 䀱 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ⿫ Ĩ⩱ äþĨ㺸 Ĩ嬸 î ä㽺 Ĩü ìĨ㺸

(٣/١٣٢ ،‫۔ )ﺑﺰم اﮐﺒﺮ‬䅎 峤Ĩ Ěìî‫ٶ‬ВǏĨ⸞ ĨìîìĨ㲡 ìĨ㺸 Ĩě ⨭ þìĨ愡 äĨ婨Û䆎 Ĩė 峤 婨Ĩ愴 Ĩ徊 㓲
Ė ßĨ嵗 Ĩ䟺 Ĩ啵 Ĩ䂺 Ĩ媎 Ĩ㵆 Ĩ弥㱾Ĩ幥 ຩ
承 㨱Ĩ 㷩 Ĩ î㕽Ĩ ä峤Ĩ îþㆈ Ĩ 䀇 ஸĨ å ä
ĢĠĨò ĨÛûⳢ Ĩᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

嵗 Ĩ 媛ä◷ Ĩ ᄰĨ 婨äìĨ þĨ å ß

ğġĞĨò ĨÛûⳢ Ĩᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

Ĩě 㨱Ĩü 㿫Ĩ䆨äþĨ᎘ Ĩ㲁 Ĩ媛ຩĨ咵 ĨីäĨ䡠 äĨü ⡪ ĨÛⴣ 㱾Ĩ嵗 Ĩ徉îìĨ愡 äĨĜėþ㨱ĨäìäĨ⸞ Ĩ各 Ĩ㨵 Ĩ⽇ Ĩ㥃Ĩ媛ຩ
ĨĜí䩞 äĨ惍 ⨭ ĨÛㆵ 孆Ûäî ä䁐 Û⢁ Ûø で ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ‫ ⻑ ܫ‬Ĩቲ Ĩ抁Ĩ㲁
ĤġĞĨÛğħĦģÛûþìĨÛ⟪ ĨÛğĦĤĞĨĚîþ㘄ĨġĨÛė⛪Ĩ囥 Ĩû㔢 Ĩ◿ Ĩû૾
Ĩå ßĨÞⅸ Ĩ⹳ Ĩ๵ Ĝ嵗 Ĩû嗚Ĩ㥃Ĩð äĨⴣ 㱾ĨîþäĨ嵗 Ĩ徉îìĨ愡 äĨ࿀Ĩû㟣 ĨⳢ Ĩ᥉ Ĩ⸞ Ĩ⿫ Ĝ䡠 äĨü ⡪ Ĩ媛ຩ
ĨីäĨ䮵 Ĩ嵗 ĨᎹ嵢࢓Ĩ㐸 Ĩç ⚒ Ĩå ßĨ弥 ஸĨᠢĨ嵗 Ĩ೧ Ĩė 技Ĩ㽻 äĨ⠴ ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ勀 Ĩ啵 Ĩð äĨç Ⳣ Ĩ弥 㱾Ĩ㷨 Ĩç ⚒
ĨĜ㻠Ĩ峤 Ĩė 㲂 Ĩ承 〛
ģğĥĨÛğħĦģĨÛûþìĨÛ⟪ ÛğĦĤĞĨĚîþ㘄ĨÛê þ䶊 Ĩû૾
㥃Ĩ 幥 ຩĨ 嵗 Ĩ ä࿁Ĩ ፳ Ĩ 媛ຩ
嵗 Ĩ 弥ßĨ 奣 ßĨ 嵗 Ĩ ∁ Ĩ ዜ
㥃Ĩ 幥 ᥴĨ 嵗 Ĩ ä࿁Ĩ 巽 ࿁Ĩ ø ═
嵗 Ĩ 弥孆ìĨ 㷨Ĩ ĒîþĨ 恕äĨ ę⹢
ĠġħĨò ĨÛú þäᵸ Û‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

Ĝ䰍 ࢌĨ婨Ĩ妉 îĨᚪ Ĩ✭ ßĨîþäĨ峤 Ĩę❔ îĨîþäĨęⴤ ĨîþäĨäîíĨ峭 ⴤ Ĩ㷨 Ĩኸ 㥃

ĠħĠĨÛğħĦĢÛú þäĨÛ⟪ ĨÛğĦģĦĨÛ⥀ Ĩ寷 ĨÛᙔ Ĩû૾
 244 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Ĩõ䚵äĨęþĨĜĜĜᡁ ĨîþäĨęþĨᡁ ĨᎹ㨱Ĩ徉䆨Ĩð ຩĨě 哶 Ĩኸ 㥃ĨṎ Ĩ⩠ 䴌 Ûᡁ ĨîþäĨî妊Ĩኸ 㥃ĨĜė 峤Ĩ孆îĨ慧 ìĨኸ 㥃寄
Ĝ很 ૾Ĩ婨Ĩ嬸 Ĩî妊Ĩኸ 㥃Ĩ惠 Ĩ嵉 Ĩė ᠢĨ㺸 Ĩė ṎĨ㔯
ğħĦģÛģĠğÛûþìĨÛ⟪ ÛğĦĤğĨ㾀 äĨĦÛê þ䶊 Ĩû૾
Ĝ嵗 ĨᎹ峤Ĩí⠩䰮Ĩęî‹Ĩ๵ Ĩ偫 Ĩ啵 ĨûᳩĨ
㺸Ĩ恛 婧Ĩ
ኸ 㥃Ĩ
Ĝ㳉 îĨ
媎 Ĩ
庠᱑Ĩ
ú ┞ äĨ
㥃Ĩ
㔳 Ĩ
啵Ĩ㑵傕 Ĩ
垿
ğħħġĨÛûî ⋑ ĨÛ⟪ ĨÛğĦĤĢĨÛ咈 ĨÛĚ憺࢑Ĩü Ḹ Ĩû૾Ħ
Ʒ
之 Ĩ㷩 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㥃Ĩï 嗚Ĩ࿀ĨũnjŐǎưäĨᄭ äĨ㱾Ĩ屨
㥃ĨĐ Ĩßᩝ㜌ĨᠢĨå äĨ嵗 Ĩ䅏 Ĩ峤Ĩė äïî äĨ╌ Ĩ๵
媎 Ĩ啵 Ĩ▛ Ĩ೧ Ĩ㺸 Ĩî偵 Ĩ⿅ îìĨ㺸 ĨĐ ß
㥃ĨĐ ßĨᩝ㜌Ĩ⸞ Ĩ峭 Ĩᩝ㜌Ĩ嵗 ĨᎹ᱑Ĩ䬊Ĩ࢕
ĠĞò ÛûⳢᵸ Û‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
ä᳥ Ĩï 仅 ìĨě 亾 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ䶱 Ĩ䅍 Ĩ峤Ĩ㍆ Ĩ㷩
ä᳥ Ĩï äþßĨ 弥峤Ĩ⸞ Ĩ㿩 Ĩ 啵 Ĩ婧㜌Ĩîþì
ĠĞĨò ÛûⳢᵸ Û‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

㣰‫܉‬Ĩ 峭 îĨ ė㲂 Ĩ ç þ亾 Ĩ ⅳ Ĩ 哴 ä
ä峤Ĩü ᯉ Ĩø エ Ĩ᱓ Ĩ㥃Ĩėᠢ‫܉‬Ĩ 惣 îí
ĠĞĨò ÛûⳢᵸ Û‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
啵 Ĩ Đ î 技Ĩ ṎĨ ୟ Ĩ 嵗 Ĩ ęþĨ ⑼
⌗ Ĩ 啵 Ĩ 嫁 ຩĨ ṎĨ 嵗 Ĩ ęþĨ ç ‫܉‬
ĤĠĨÛò Ûûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
怖 ìĨĐ ⋳ Ĩä亾 Ĩû嗚ĨᠢĨ啵 Ĩî⛫ ä 怖 ìĨĐ ßĨ䶵 Ĩ婨Ĩ㨗 Ĩ⸞ Ĩę㽻 Ĩᄣ ä
怖 ìĨĐ ⋳ Ĩ㲝 Ĩ೧ Ĩ䶵 Ĩä✪ Ĩ୳ ᥴĒĨ嵗 Ĩ啵 Ĩ㘇 ßĨ嫁 ຩĨęþĨᴍ Ĩ慮 ì
怖 ìĨĐ ⋳ ĨęþĨ嵕 ‹ĨṎĨ啵 Ĩî⛫ ä 媎 Ĩ⌕ Ĩヹ äĨ䉺 ⓥĨ⸞ Ĩė Ṑ Ĩⅳ
Ġģģò ĨÛú þäᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
 The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 245

㥃Ĩð äĨ⋧ Ĩ䅏 Ĩ峤Ĩ㫣 Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ啵 Ĩ➂ Ĩ㺸 Ĩ䂺

嵗 Ĩ ⋳ äĨ ú ⓥĨ 㥃Ĩ î ิĨ 嵗 Ĩ 䞾 Ĩ 嫁 ຩ
ĤĦĨò ĨÛú þäᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

啵 Ĩ塴 Ĩå äĨ嵗 Ĩᰂ㱾Ĩé 吴 Ĩ婨Ĩ啵 Ĩ⨭ Ĩ婨Ĩå äĨ嵗 Ĩ൝㊓ Ĩě ä峤

啵 Ĩ嫁 ຩĨ徃 ᱑Ĩ⋿ Ĩ೧ Ĩ屨 Ĩ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ抋 Ĩ࢕ ĨᠢĨ嵗 Ĩ㽻 äĨð 峤
ĠĠĤĨò ĨÛú þäᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

弥㱾Ĩ ù îþĨ 㥃Ĩ î⛫ äĨ 怖 ìĨ ೧ Ĩ 䶵
峤Ĩ婨Ĩî⺛ äĨ㥃Ĩė áäþìĨ啵 Ĩᳮ ĨęþĨ剐
(١٥٣ ،‫اﻧﺘﺨﺎب‬Û弥äþ㟣 

Ĩ抁ĨĜ嵉 Ĩ䰍 äþĨ找 ìĨ䞁 Ĩ࿀Ĩ㜧 ⻑ äĨ㷨 ĨĨç ⱳ Ĩĕ ຩĨü ‫܉‬ï Ĩⓦ で Ĩĕ 䆨Ĩ㜺 þ࿀Ĩé ßìäïß
ĨÛæ㣡Ĩ䆨þĨú ⚉䆨ü ᱑Ĩ和 Ĝ嵉 Ĩî倵 äĨþĨî徉ìĨî値 Û婨䰮ï Ĩě 愤 ĨÛ婨慿Ĩ䡴㌑ĨîþäĨð 冼 Ĩě ࢓Ĩîä䁐î࢔
Ĩ愡 äĨ㷨 Ĩ嬸 峤Ĩî値 Ĩ㺸 Ĩⓦ で Ĩ㜺 þ࿀Ĝ嵗 Ĩù ä亽Ĩå ä✭Ĩ㦌 ĨÛ峤Ĩě 垈೥ Ĩ㦏 Ĩ㟮 Ĩ㷨 Ĩä✪ Ĩ೦
Ý嵉 Ĩî値 Ĩęì徉ï Ĩ⸞ Ĩė ⛪Ĩ媛ìĨ㷩 ĨĜ䭓 Ĩ㟮 ĨᠢĨ峤 ĨⰮ Ĩ೧ Ĩû嗚Ĩᚪ Ĩé ßĨ很 峤Ĩě ࢓Ĩᠠ äĨ屨 ĨĜ㲛 Ĩ峭
ğģĨò ĨÛú þäĨᵸ ĨÛ‫)ﻓﺴﺎﻧﻪء آزاد‬

ĨîþäĨÛęä៑ ĨîþäĨę㑷 Ĩě ⟙ Ĩ啵 Ĩð äĨĜ嵗 Ĩî⛫ äĨᠢĨ抁ĨÛⴔ ĨᠢĨⳝ Ĩ䮵 ĨĜě 㨱Ĩå 咍 㥃Ĩä✪ î୥
Ĩ徉Ĩ嵕 ‹Ĩú 㞑ĨþĨ㤌 Ĩ䬶 ᄯĨîþäĨ㐍 ĨÛú ä᳥ ĨþĨḟ Ĩ徉ĨÛú ⓥĨ㥃Ĩ୤î䷼Ĩ啵 Ĩð äĨÝäỮ Ĩ㸳 Ĩ㥃Ĩ⣜ ä⠩îì
Ĩ㥃Ĩė 㱾䒳Ĝ嵗 Ĩ㑵 䶬 Ĩ㎘ ĨᠢĨî⛫ äĨÛ⻎ 亾 ĨþĨጎ Ĝ媎 Ĩ峭 Ĩ嵢࿁Ĩî⛫ äĨ嬸 ĨĐ ßĨ㞦 ĨᠢìäïßÝú ḇ Ĩ抁
ĨÛ⣜ þìĨ㥃Ĩîᑅ ĨÛ⭗ Ĩ㺕 îĨ㯴 îÛ᭛㩲 Ĩ㷨Ĩ๵ ᑋ Ĩ㺸 Ĩė帴ࢎĨÛ⼪ Ĩゅ 嗚Ĩ㥃Ĩė婧äṎĨÛ䮡 Ꮉä
Ĩ㲝 ĨÛē⋳ Ĩ⏿ Ĩ力 Ĩ啵 Ĩ䡴㥃Ĩ㩴 ĨĜ倭 Ĩ㥃Ĩė þ࢑人ĨÛ⪠ Ĩ㥃Ĩû嗚äĨîᷙ ĨÛ㹭 þĨ㥃Ĩ徉㌑îĨÛî㓈Ĩî徉Ĩ㥃Ĩė 㑴ㄔ
Ĩê ㈲ Ĩê ㈲ Ĩ啵 Ĩė þî⛫ äĨĚ 恙妛 äĜî⺛ äĨîþäĨᦷ 婧Ĩ㲝 ĨÛîäࢌßĨî⻪ äĨ㲝 ĨĜîäᚾ Ĩ啵 Ĩî吴 äĨ⾁ Ⳣ
(١٦٣ ‫ ص‬،‫ اول‬،‫)ﻓﺴﺎﻧﻪء آزاد‬Ĝ嵉 Ĩ
ᥢ 㨱Ĩ
ᐕĨ㥃Ĩ
ü äĨ
೧Ĩî ⛫ äĨ
悇 ìĨ
î þäĨ
Û嵉 Ĩ
ᣲ峤Ĩ
é îìĨ
ᥖ ‫܉‬Ĩ
㷨
 246 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

Ĩ啵 Ĩ࿄ ßĨᇆ ĨĜ嵗 ĨìṎ吴 Ĩî⛫ äĨîþäĨ㯓 ĨîþäĨ埖 㱾ĨĜ嵗 Ĩî⹢⨭ ĨþĨ乥 Ĩ啵 Ĩ⥢ ࿀Ĩì⠩ĨÞęì‫܉‬Ĩ愡 äĨ愡 ä
Ĝ嵗 Ĩç îþㆈ Ĩ㷩 Ĩ㷨 Ĩ嬸 㨱Ĩęî‹Ĩ弥 ஸĨÛ嬸 嵢࢓Ĩ䷿
(١٢٦ ‫ ص‬،‫)رﻗﻌﺎت اﮐﺒﺮ‬

㥋 äĨě äĨḽ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ⡜þహ ĨᄰĨĚē㻠Ĩú 䰮

㥃ĨĚî‫܉‬Ĩė ä㽻 Ĩ㷨Ĩė峤䀇 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ㕔 Ĩ㷩 Ĩ㱾Ĩü ä
ĦĨò ÛûⳢᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

⾰ ìĨå äĨ嵗 ĨîþìĨ抁Ĩ㥃Ĩ㌤ ㇰĨþĨ弥᠘

૽ ṎĨęþĨ婨ĨᄰĨäん Ĩ废ㇰĨęþĨ婨ĨᄰĨėþጏ
徃 ຩĨ嵉 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ憗 îĨęþĨ徃 ⡜Ĩᣬ ĨṎĨ㺸 ĨḤ
囸 äĨᵤ Ĩ 㷨Ĩ Ě 㣀 Ĩ⬘ Ĩᵤ Ĩ 㷨Ĩ 勀 ä
ģĤĨò Ûûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

嵗 Ĩ 䅏 Ĩ 弥㱾Ĩ ⸞ Ĩ ęäîĨ ð äĨ ೧ ä

㷨Ĩ ຩĨ 壸 Ĩ ⠮ ⿡Ĩ 嵗 Ĩ 忋 ìĨ 㲠
Ě屙ìĨᔥ Ĩ╬ Ĩ哶 
⸞ Ĩ ø ㈲ Ĩ ð äĨ 嵗 Ĩ 䅏 Ĩ 囸 äĨ ೧ ä
㷨Ĩ ä峤Ĩ 慶 îᎹĨ 嵗 Ĩ 忋 ìĨ 㲠
ĠģğĨò Ûú þäᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

ç ‫܉‬Ĩ 㷨Ĩ ⿘ þîĨ 媙 Ĩ 【 Ĩ 嵉 Ĩ 媎 Ĩⱑ

怖 ìĨĐ ஸĨå ĨäĨ啵 Ĩü 㥃Ĩ㺸 Ĩü äĨ㷨Ĩ囸 ä
ĠģĢĨò Ûú þäᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬
 The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things 247

⑼ Ĩ 㷩 Ĩ 嵗 Ĩ 戆 ìĨ 㺸 Ĩ 囸 äĨ 䆎 ß
⑼ Ĩ 㷩 Ĩ 嵗 Ĩ ู Ĩ 䆎 ßĨ 㺸 Ĩ ൅
ĠĢġĨò Ûú þäᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

ě î௎ Ĩ嵉 Ĩ㺸 Ĩð äĨîþäĨ嵗 Ĩ࿬ Ĩ㥃Ĩð ä

嵗 Ĩ䬊Ĩ㲡 îĨᄰĨ囸 äĨ㱾Ĩ悭 äĨ嬸 ĨĐ î技

ğĞĢĨò ĨÛûⳢ ᵸ Û‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

❢ îĨ 㱾Ĩ ė 嫸 Ĩ 㷩 Ĩ 嬸 Ĩ ė 倰
⸞ Ĩ ᎙ Ĩ 㷨Ĩ 囸 äĨ 䅍 Ĩ ēäĨ ᔊ㥖
ĢĤĨò Ûûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

嵗 Ĩ憗 îĨᚪ ĨėṐ Ĩ㱾Ĩ屨 Ĩ媎 Ĩ᲌ ⓥĨ㷨Ĩ❿

ħĦĨò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

Ĝ嵉 Ĩú 冯 ĨęþĨ啵 Ĩü 䨢 Ĩî‫܉‬îìĨ㲁 ĨᎹ㨱Ĩ媎 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ⡠ Ĩð äĨî㟣 Ĩ㷨Ĩⓦ で Ĩú 㞔äĨ啵

㥃Ĩę妊Ĩ㷨Ĩú ìĨ峭 Ĩᄭ äĨᠢĨ啵 Ĩė 峤Ĩ䆪 ㇰ
ǔ
㥃ĨęäþĨ㷨Ĩė ‫͓ٵ‬ǎ═ Ĩ㱾Ĩ䶱 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ媎 ĨäìⳢ
(١١٦-١١٥ ،‫)رﻗﻌﺎت‬
Ĩ࿀ Ĩė ㈟ Ĩù ⿡ Ĩ㥃Ĩė ᠢ䒰 Ĩė ⡜î Ĩü 夂 ĨîþäĨç ㍛ Ĩ᭛ ὞ Ĝ嵉 Ĩ嵗 ĨîĨ慤 ìĨĐ ßĨ妉 î Ĩ㥃Ĩ嬸 䰮ï
Ĩě ᧕ Ĩ幼 ⡜Ⳣ Ĩ⸞ Ĩᷩ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ峭 î Ĩ峤 Ĩ㷨 Ĩė ᠢ‫܉‬Ĩü äĨ⻙ 㱾Ĩ䮵 Ĩ㥃Ĩ㣰 ᔊĨ力 Ĩ嵗 Ĩû嗚ĨĜ嵗 Ĩ䆪 㓈
Ĝ很 ᱑Ĩ峤 Ĩě ᧕
(١١٩ ،‫)رﻗﻌﺎت‬
 248 How to Read Iqbal? – Essays on Iqbal, Urdu Poetry & Literary Theory

ĨĜ㻠Ĩ徇 ຩĨ⻸ Ĩ抁Ĩ啵 ĨûþìĨ▗ Ĝ嵉 Ĩå 夋 äĨî㻠ì徉ĨÛ嵉 Ĩ媎 Ĩ䬈 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ㱼 þîĨå 夋 äĨ塺 Ĩ抁

å 夋 äĨ î㻠Ĩ ì 徉Ĩ 䪫Ĩ ⯞ Ĩ 㱾Ĩ 㥋 äĨ 塵
弥峤Ĩ弥ßĨ嵗 Ĩ媎 Ĩᨎ Ĩ嵗 Ĩû儕 Ĩ⸞ äĨ抁
(٣٧-٣٦ ،‫)رﻗﻌﺎت‬

啵 Ĩ ė峤Ĩ ä✪ Ĩ 嬸 Ĩ î厎 Ĩ 㲂
啵 Ĩ ė峤Ĩ 嗚ï ୢĨ 䰍 ୢĨ ü þî äĒ
⣜ þìĨĕ äĨě 亾 Ĩ䠂 Ĩ 㲗 Ĩ㺸 Ĩ岸
⣜ þäĨ 屮 Ĩ îচ Ĩ 㨵 Ĩ 寄Ĩ 㚧
ğĢğğĢĞĨò Ĩò ĨÛûⳢᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬

î 徉Ĩ䱰 㞑ĨþĨ䰮ĨþĨ൝㊓ ĨþĨᠢ

⣜ þäĨ屮 Ĩîচ Ĩ㨵 Ĩ寄Ĩ㚧
(٧٢٧ ،‫ﻮان‬５‫د‬Û㙘 ⓥ)
ĨĐ î技Ĩ尪 äĨ࿀Ĩü ច Ĩú 危 Ĩð äĨᠢĨ嵗 Ĩä峤Ĩäጌ Ĩ⸞ Ĩîଦ Ĩü 垏 äĨ㲁 Ĩ嵗 Ĩ⣜ îìĨĚîᣫ Ĩ抁Ĩ㷨 Ĩü þî äĒĨ㽻 ä
ĨĜė 峤ĨᎹ㨱Ĩð 㘓 äĨ࿀Ĩð äĨĜ媎 Ĩ恜 äĨ剐 ĨĜᡁ Ĩ嵕 ‹Ĩ嗚峤Ĩ剙 ⓥĨ㥃ĨⰭ ䷼Ĩ㐓 äĨ⸞ Ĩ୧ Ĩ㺸 Ĩ媦 垏 äĨ㱾
嵉 Ĩ îଦ Ĩ 㹄 Ĩ 抁 䰐 äĨ 徉
很 峤Ĩ 婨Ĩ 和 ìßĨ ೧ Ĩ ࿀Ĩ ᚎî ä
(١٦٥ ،‫)ﺑﺰم اﮐﺒﺮ‬

䆎 Ĩ慮 ìĨė á㻠äᳫ äĨä哶 Ĩ⸞ Ĩ嶔 ìäĨ䆎 Ĩþî㽺 ĨṎ

嵗 Ĩĕ î‫܉‬Ĩäî䁐Ĩ啵 Ĩॳ Ĩ嵗 Ĩ伶 Ĩ愡 äĨ⽌
ğĢĦò ĨÛûþìᵸ ĨÛ‫ﺎت‬６‫)ﮐﻠ‬