The Idea of India

Sare Jahan Se Acha: The Idea of India in Early 20th Century Urdu Poetry

In the diverse iterations of Iqbal’s iconic ‘Sare jahan se achha’ in Urdu poetry, varied understandings of ‘Hindustan’ manifest – but none are narrowly chauvinist.

In the numerous iterations of Iqbal’s iconic ‘Sare jahan se achha‘ in Urdu poetry, varied understandings of ‘Hindustan’ manifest – but none are narrowly chauvinist.

Iqbal’s iconic ‘Sare jahan se achha’ is rife with geographical references, including to the formidable Himalayas. Representational image. Credit: Wikipedia

For many Indians, an enduring childhood memory is standing in an assembly line at school and singing Sare jahan se achha, Hindustan hamara.

But what was this idea of ‘Hindustan’, really, and did it always imply a sense of superiority to other nations?

The iconic nationalist poem, written by Muhammad Iqbal (1877 –1938), better known as “Allama” Iqbal, in 1904, at the age of 27, is rife with geographical references, from the Himalayas to the multiple rivers that flow across the country:

Parbat woh sabse uncha, hamsaya asman ka,

Woh santari hamara, woh pasban hamara.

(That highest mountain, the companion of the skies,

which is our sentry and our watchman)

Godi mein khelti hain, uski hazaron nadiyan

Gulshan hai jinke dam se rashk i jinan hamara

(In its lap play thousands of streams,

because of them, heavens envy our gardens)

Ae ab e rood e Ganga, woh din hain yad tujhko,

utra tere kinare jab karwan hamara

(Oh the water of Ganges! Do you remember those days,

when our caravan halted on your banks?)

Muhammad Iqbal. Credit: Wikipedia

The third couplet reminds us that numerous caravans have halted on the banks of Ganges through the ages and that the Indian nation is defined by these continuous migrations, not by ‘original’ inhabitants of any kind or an ‘original’ culture. What Indians share, according to Iqbal, is a common geography, not a common language, culture or religion. Hence, in the next couplet, Iqbal reminds us that:

mazhab nahi sikhata apas mein bair rakhna,

hindi hain hum, watan hai hindostan hamara.

(Religion does not teach us to hate each other,

We are Hindustanis, Hindustan is our homeland)

Iqbal wrote another poem, ‘Hindustani bachhon ka qaumi geet’ (‘The national song of Hindustani children’), before 1904, which refers to the same idea of India being constituted by continuous migration and diverse cultures:

Chishti ne jis zameen par paigham e haq sunaya,

Nanak ne jis chaman mein wahdat ka geet gaya

(The land where Chishti delivered the true message,

the land where Nanak sang the song of unity)

Tatariyon ne jisko apna watan banaya,

jis ne hijaziyon se dasht e arab chhudaya

(the land the Tartars made their home,

for which the Arabs forgot their desert)

Mera watan wohi hai, mera watan wohi hai

(that land is my homeland, that land is my homeland)

Akbar Allahabadi

Akbar Allahabadi (1846-1921) was already an established poet when Iqbal wrote his ode to Hindustan. With typical wit, of which he was a pioneer in Urdu poetry, he responded to Iqbal in the same metre and rhyme the latter had used in sare jahan se achha:

College mein ho chuka jab imtehan hamara,

seekha zaban ne kahna Hindustan hamara

(After we finished our exams in college,

we learnt to say ‘our Hindustan’)

Raqbe ko kam samajh kar Akbar ye bol utthe,

Hindustan kaisa, sara jahan hamara

(Akbar thought the area too small, so he exclaimed,

what is Hindustan, the whole world is ours)

Lekin ye sab ghalat hai, kahna yehi hai lazim

Jo kuchh hai sab khuda ka, wahm o guman hamara

(But all this is nonsense, one should say just this much,

everything belongs to God, only illusions and doubts are ours)

Akbar Allahabadi. Credit: Youtube

In a strikingly logical reply to Iqbal’s enthusiastic ode to the nation, Allahabadi points to the parochial nationalism induced by university education. He then moves from the idea of universal human ownership of the world to the even safer grounds of mysticism, reminding his readers that words like ‘hamara’ (‘ours’) are meaningless. The only thing that humans truly own is their doubts and illusions. While Akbar did take up the challenge of defining India, he used it to question British imperialism:

Ye bat ghalat hai ke mulk e islam hai hind

ye jhooth hai ke mulk e lakshman o ram hai hind

(it is wrong to say that Hind is a Muslim nation

it is wrong to say that Hind is Ram’s or Lakshman’s nation)

Hum sab hain mutee o khair-khwah e English

Europe ke liye bas ek godam hai hind

(All of us are servants and well-wishers of the English.

Hind is but a godown for Europe)

Akbar did not hide his contempt for the advocates of religious nationalism and reduced their new-found identity to a byproduct of European economic machinations. As important protagonists of Urdu poetry in North India, these verses by Iqbal and Akbar indicate the diverse reactions to the new idea of India which was being floated in the last decades of nineteenth century.

In 1908, Iqbal returned to Punjab after a three-year stay in Europe. This led to a reconfiguration of his ideas on the nation and religion, and his poetry borrows increasingly from the repository of Islamic symbolism. This transformation is evident in ‘Tarana e Milli‘, written in 1909:

Cheen o arab hamara, Hindustan hamara

Muslim hain hum watan se, sara jahan hamara

(Central Asia/China is ours, Arabia is ours, Hindustan is ours,

We are Muslims by nation, the whole world is ours)

Dunya ke butkadon mein woh pehla ghar khuda ka

hum uske pasban hain, woh pasban hamara

(Among the idolhouses of the world,

this is the first abode of God,

This is our sentry, and we are its watchmen)

How striking is the change in Iqbal’s ideas about the nation! From the Himalayas as the sentry of a geographical nation, we jump to a nation of faith being guarded by that ‘first idol-less house of God’. It is also striking that Iqbal ends the first sher with the same words that Akbar uses: ‘sara jahan hamara’. However, what is common to both those phases is an obsession with geography. In ‘Tarana e Milli’, he refers to markers of a shared Islamic geography, such as Andalusia in Spain and the river Tigris. Later in Iqbal’s life and career, many of his couplets refer to the territorial idea of the nation as a dangerous political concept, as reflected in the poem ‘Wataniyat‘:

Is daur mein mai aur hai, jam aur hain, jam aur

saqi ne bina ki ravish e lutf o sitam aur

(In this age, the wine is new, the cup is new and the emperor is new,

The cup-bearer has invented new ways of reward and punishment)

tahzeeb ke azar ne tarashwaye sanam aur

muslim ne bhi tameer kiya apna haram aur

(The idol-maker of this age has created new idols,

even the Muslims have declared a new sacred direction]

in taza khudaon mein bada sabse watan hai

jo pairahan iska hai wo mazhab ka kafan hai

(of all these recent deities, the nation is the greatest,

and the cloth that makes its clothes is the shroud of religion)

Iqbal saw territorial nationalism as something that divided humanity and co-religionists, something that ought to be destroyed, and through this poem he urged Muslims to bury the false idol of nationalism.

This most acclaimed poet of the Urdu language, who imagined an India at one point, gave up his vision eventually, making way first for an imagined Muslim nation and then a complete rejection of territorial identity altogether. Akbar, on the other hand, was in complete disagreement with Iqbal from the start, reminding us that colonialism had an important role to play in the formation of Indian identities. It would be a worthwhile exercise to analyse the idea of India as Urdu poetry expressed it during the colonial era, and compare it with similar or parallel expressions in other vernacular literatures.

Sahir Ludhianvi

Finally, we come to the progressive Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi (1921-1980) and his take on this string of poems on the idea of India. In a 1958 movie Phir Subah Hogi, he gives us a new version of ‘Hindustan hamara’:

Cheen o Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara,

rahne ko ghar nahi hai, sara jahan hamara

(China is ours, Arabia is ours, India is ours,

we don’t have a place to live, the whole world is ours)

jebein hain apni khali, kyon deta warna gali,

wo santari hamara, wo pasban hamara

(Our pockets are empty, otherwise why would

our sentry and our watchmen scold us)

jitni bhi buildingein theen, sethon ne bant lee hain

footpath Bambai ke hain aashyan hamara

(All the buildings have been divided among the rich,

the footpath of Bombay are our homes)

Sahir Ludhianvi. Credit: Wikipedia

Although the first couplet is attributed to Majeed Lahori by the online repository Rekhta.org, the rest of the poem has been written by Sahir for the movie. In this poem, the message is strongly socialist: since the majority does not own any land, there is no question of ownership of this or that piece of land, and the whole world belongs to the downtrodden. Sahir also turns the watchman metaphor upside down: the abusive watchman who exploits the poor is far from Iqbal’s watchful and caring sentry. This third version adds to the set of diverse reactions of the Urdu poets to the idea of India, which ranges from Iqbal’s emphasis on global migration patterns, to Akbar’s and Sahir’s attention to the nuanced meaning of ownership and the economic conditions of colonial and post-colonial India.

The debates about the concept of Indianness and the Indian nation among these Urdu poets is far removed from the imagined nation of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has gained immense popularity in recent times and which postulates an inherent and timeless ‘Indian’ culture and civilisation.

Sharjeel Imam is a graduate from Computer Science, IIT Bombay and is currently doing his MPhil in Modern History from JNU. His research topic is “Partition and Pogroms in Bihar in 1946”. Besides his academic and professional involvements, he is interested in Urdu poetry and literature.

Review: Incarnations Is an Ambitious yet Intimate View of the Plurality that is India

Those who claim that India is the product of just one religion and culture would do well to read Sunil Khilnani’s eclectic selection of fifty lives who show that India has always absorbed myriad influences, says Sidharth Bhatia.

Those who claim that India is the product of just one religion and culture would do well to read Sunil Khilnani’s eclectic selection of fifty lives who show that India has always absorbed myriad influences, says Sidharth Bhatia.

Incarnations: India in 50 Lives. Credit: BBC.

Jawaharlal Nehru dominated Sunil Khilnani’s best-known book, The Idea of India, a title that has since then become a catchphrase of sorts. The building blocks of Nehruvian nationalism guided India for decades after independence and to some extent still do, notwithstanding the persistent endeavours of the current dispensation to demolish them.

It is therefore ironical that Nehru does not find a place in the pantheon of the 50 names that Khilnani profiles in his latest work, Incarnations: India in 50 Lives. These are, according to Khilnani, the people whose thoughts and deeds have shaped the creation of what we call India.

Fully anticipating that the obvious question – where’s Nehru? – will be asked by readers, Khilnani addresses it obliquely in his introduction: “I’ve chosen to leave out some familiar names, to allow space to bring in a few others who should be more widely known – a choice with which I think one of the figures I have excluded, Nehru, would have agreed.”

Khilnani quotes him early on in the introduction, “Jawaharlal Nehru famously described this past as a palimpsest, where each successively dominant culture, religion or group left its traces, never quite effacing what came before it.” The resonance of these words at a time when all efforts are being made to demolish his legacy and introduce a Hindutva-led nationalism cannot be overstated. Given the current climate, it will not be surprising if Nehru’s absence in a book by Sunil Khilnani is pointed out as some warped admission of the first prime minister’s growing irrelevance in modern India.

Credit: Penguin Books

Any such list is bound to raise questions and not a few controversies: why so few women, or why no one from the North-east, for example. Including Mohammed Ali Jinnah is fully understandable; after all, he changed the very geography and destiny of the sub-continent, but surely Manto makes it because of a modish interest in him over the last few years. Similarly, one would have argued for Lata Mangeshkar instead of M S Subbulakshmi (if indeed there was just one place vacant for the ‘female singer’ category). There was equally a strong case to bring in Clive of India, perhaps a politically incorrect choice but a historically more significant one. And why Charan Singh, of all people?

Yet, this should not detract from what is a very thoughtful and readable book that is ambitious in scale, but with intimate touches that Khilnani brings to each profile. The fifty names Khilnani has selected cover a span of 2500 years could broadly be divided into three categories: the philosophers, the rulers and the innovators. All of them are path-breakers in one way or the other, or what marketers would call “disruptors”. The eclectic and somewhat eccentric result is full of pleasant surprises – where else can one find Kabir with Raj Kapoor, Annie Besant with Ramanujan and Shivaji with Satyajit Ray?

Happily, Khilnani also profiles those who are significant but do not have widespread public recognition – the African slave Malik Ambar, Nainsukh the miniaturist and the tribal leader Birsa Munda, who is particularly relevant in the current context as adivasis fight for their land in the face of rapid industrialisation.

In this book, which began as a radio series for BBC4, Khilnani the historian leaves his classroom behind and ventures to the far flung corners of India, from Mumbai’s slums to impoverished villages outside Varanasi and then on to Amir Khusro’s tomb in Delhi, absorbing local ‘colour’ in a relatable way to establish his bigger arguments. From the very first profile, of the Buddha, to the last one, of Dhirubhai Ambani, Khilnani is on the road, talking to ordinary citizens and to experts in order to to draw portraits of his subjects, some of them very well known, others completely forgotten and still others plucked from obscurity.

Many of those whom he has written about are pressed into service to provide a considered view about the contemporary state of the nation. Here’s Khilnani on Panini, the fourth century Sanskrit grammarian: “Today, you can hear Sanskrit intoned in temple and family rituals and practiced in classrooms, but it’s no longer a language inquiry or debate. Governments can proclaim ‘Sanskrit weeks’ and millions of students are made to endure Sanskrit classes each year in Indian schools, but most learn absolutely nothing. In 2014, some ministers in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government, revivalist in their hopes, even took their Cabinet oaths in the language. But it’s all a bit of a sham.”

In his gem of a piece on M Visvesvaraya, engineer and planner, Khilnani writes: “A good deal of the economic revitalisation plan Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised in return for the mandate he won in the 2014 national elections parallels what Visvesvaraya advocated: development of large-scale industries, greater power to the states, decentralised administration, efficiency as a primary value of governance and harsh responses to corruption. Modi also shares Visvesvaraya’s lack of patience for social questions. The weaknesses of human development indices do not perturb him greatly, and his government has cut funding for schemes to improve them.”

Visvesvaraya, as Khilnani shows, also pushed the Brahmanical agenda. On the other hand, Jotiba Phule, one of the many social reformists Maharashtra has produced, had a distinctly democratic and anti-Brahmanical agenda. Khilnani is ready to challenge prevailing orthodoxies about many of his subjects – did Aryabhata really invent the zero? – and look past the myth-making: “But the historical record shows no particular gift for military strategy or leading troops; instead, he possessed courage, moral myopia, and a capacity for outlandish reinvention that rivalled his nemesis Gandhi’s whenever faced with an impediment to the goal of independence,” he writes about Subhas Chandra Bose.

Khilnani’s take on Vivekananda, though, may surprise considered liberal opinion which has long held that the preacher promoted a hyper-masculine brand of Hinduism. Khilnani acknowledges that, but concludes, somewhat ambivalently: “…his writings make clear that he also wanted humans to overcome narrow identities, respect each other and expand their circles of identification. Or at least I think that’s what he wanted. One can never be quite sure with the elusive, charismatic Vivekananda. But I rather suspect that many contemporary Indians have mistaken one of their most interesting universalist thinkers for a simplistic nationalist.”

At a time of contested views on not just nationalism but also what it means to be an Indian, such arguments could provide a convenient handle to those who are aggressively pursuing a majoritarian agenda, though that may not ever be Khilnani’s objective. Which, happily, takes us to Kabir, who, in Khilnani’s telling, emerges as a kind of cool dude who took great pleasure in mocking the conventions of this time. Of the many translations of Kabir’s dohas available, Khilnani uses, playfully, one supposes, a recent attempt by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, which can only be described as hipsterish:

Kabir and disciple. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

‘Me shogun.’
‘Me bigwig.’
‘Me the chief’s son.
I make the rules here.’

It’s a load of crap.
Laughing, skipping,
Tumbling, they’re all
Headed for Deathville.

In the blink
Of an eye, says Kabir.
The king will be
Separated from his kingdom.

But get past this and one is treated to the story of a man who is still relevant 600 years after he died, not least because much of what he saw around him – the oppression of the weak, the injustices of the caste system – is still prevalent.

“Today in India, dissenting views are often exiled – forced out of the public sphere by state interference and by religious and social groups within civil society,” writes Khilnani. “Books and documentary films are frequently banned. Publishers are intimidated into censoring their authors. …So now perhaps it’s as important as ever to reject revert incarnations of Kabir and recognise the edgier social critic and sceptic – the one whose verses are rightly woven into the long, rich, often-endangered tradition of dissent in Indian life.”

Those who claim that India is the product of just one religion and culture, and demand that fealty to it must be loudly proclaimed to establish one’s patriotic credentials, would do well to read this book. It will show that India is, and has always been, a land that has adopted and absorbed myriad influences and in turn has been shaped by them. Here, in these pages, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, Tribals, Africans, Britons and even Parsis, all mingle to create the wonder that is India.

Incarnations: India in 50 Lives
Allen Lane/Penguin, 630 pages, Rs. 999

(This review first appeared in Biblio.)