Punjab

by Rajmohan Gandhi

One man who seemed unwilling to be caught up in the excitement over Turkey, though he helped stimulate it, was Punjab’s celebrated poet, Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938). Born in Sialkot in a tailor’s family of Kashmiri Brahmin origin (a forefather had converted to Islam), Iqbal studied in Lahore’s prestigious Government College, where he was influenced by Thomas Arnold, a British scholar of Islam who had earlier taught at MAO. While in his twenties Iqbal wrote powerful Indian nationalist poetry, lauding, in Saare Jahaan Se Achha, the country of Hindustan, and rebuking, in Naya Shiwala, both the Brahmin and the Mullah for spreading strife. The latter poem called upon Hindus and Muslims to raise a new temple of unity in India. But three years he spent in Europe and England, from 1905 to 1908, changed Iqbal’s thinking.