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It was during his
Cambridge days and his German influences that he came under the
spell of two powerful, but opposed, ideologies —
Socialist-egalitarian and Nietzschean. Never a Marxian, Iqbal,
nonetheless, absorbed, unconsciously perhaps, its deeply
humanistic world-view. No wonder, on his return to India in
1908, he repudiated the more orthodox and strangulating aspects
of the Shariat, and considered the welfare of the Indian
Muslims in relation to their participation in the Indian freedom
movement. He, thus, became an eloquent champion of nationalism
and an anti-British, anti-imperialist patriot. He exhorted the
Muslim masses to shed their isolationism which both the British
rulers and the misleading mullahs had helped create to
further their own interests. And he advocated strongly the need
to create a sentiment for Hindu-Muslim unity.
It was this period
of Iqbal’s poetry which produced the poems on Guru Nanak as a
supreme master with his message of toheed or Oneness of
God and the brotherhood of mankind. He also thought well of
other Hindu liberals and intellects. His patriotic verses belong
to this phase, and one recalls with nostalgia his celebrated
lines which rendered loosely read thus: Our country is
supreme in the world/we’ re but nightingales in that garden of
flowers. Also memorable are his inspired verses on the
toiling Indian peasantry under the yoke of feudal masters. His
clarion call to them to rise and claim their rightful due is
best found in such lines as these: That piece of field which
denies the peasant his own bread/Go, put each ear of its
wheat-stalk to torch and flame! Few Marxian poets could have
asked for more while exhorting the peasantry to adopt
revolutionary means.
However, even as
he advocated passionately a philosophy of righteous action, he
remained acutely aware of the plight of Islam in India. In India
it had not followed the path of modernity like in Turkey under
Kamal Uttaturk. And he laments over its fate, though it takes a
queer form. In the poems called Shikva or ‘the
complaint’ and in its sequel, Jawab-e-Shikva, Iqbal had
began to see the pristine Islam as a call for piety. His ‘complaint’
against God was that He had placed Muslims in a disadvantageous
position and robbed them of their rightful place. We can see the
churnings of a soul in torment, and Iqbal’s seeking to connect
with his Arab heritage. During the post-1920 period, he
gradually drifted away from his radical-nationalist vision, and
turned to Islam as his only saviour, far above all the
philosophies that had fallen into the basin of his mind in his
formative years. And perplexingly enough, there are few firm
formulations regarding the Koranic code of legal rights and
observances.
Now, he began to
produce poems on the kinetics of khudi or the self. The
Nietzschean concept of the sovereignty of the self surfaced
increasingly in his poetry, though he sought to subsume it under
the Islamic framework of thought. Perhaps his Kashmiri Brahmin
origins now erupted in his consciousness to add fuel to his
burgeoning pan-Islamic sentiment.
Literary theorists
have identified two distinct modes of progression in the passage
of nearly all great poets, these being the Shakespearian-Keatsian-Yeatsian,
and the Shelleyan-Swinburnian. In other words, a journey from
"feathers to lion" (Keats’s phrase), or from
escapist romance to meeting the assaults of reality, emerge as
the two routes of growth. The utopian visions of love and
society get eroded through the abrasive processes of struggle if
the Shakespearian mode is at work. Where does Iqbal fit into
this double frame?
I believe Iqbal’s
progress was from vision to vision, the earlier rooted in
radicalism of the western imprint, and the latter in Koranic
epiphanies. The Nietzschean — Islamic idealism had elements of
regression, and his politics now came to mean, more and more, a
crusade for an Islamic homeland within the boundaries of India
itself. In the late twenties when he had participated in the
First Round Table Conference in London, his political
commitments had crystallised quite clearly. He never lived to
see Pakistan and the world’s worst communal carnage and the
greatest mass-migration tragedy in human history. Nor did he
ever imagine that his ideological vision would, one day, create
a monstrous culture of hatred, and unleash jehadi
terrorism in Kashmir, his ancestral home. How he would have
reacted to see "the Valley of Paradise" turned into a
vale of tears, agony and unending suffering is a matter of
speculation. I presume, he would have realised the misery of
pursuing a communal dream that negated the essence of his being
and becoming. But then, who knows?
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GHALIB
and Iqbal are considered two of the greatest poets in the Urdu
language, and my aim is to show how in their idiom and vision the
two remain divided, Ghalib moving more in the orbit of personal
contingencies and circumstances, and Iqbal in that of wider,
ideological considerations. And while Ghalib’s politics, if any,
are subsumed in his aesthetic, Iqbal’s stand cut in sharp
contrast. Again, while Ghalib’s faith was seldom a driving force
in his ghazals with their Donne-like complexity and involuted
poetics, Iqbal’s Islamic vision, in the end, alone vindicated his
unexpected development. Whether it was a progression or a regression
depends upon how one sees the controversy.
