Indian Nationalism

Rabindranath Tagore photographed at Hamsptead in 1912, by Sir William Rothenstein (1872-1945), with whom Iqbal also corresponded later See also Chapter 15, 'Brahmin' in The Republic of Rumi: a Novel of Reality

Ganges and Himalaya in the parable in Secrets and Mysteries may be interpreted variously as (a) the individual and the society; (b) a society and the humanity; and (c) the Hindu community and the Indian Muslim community. The mountain’s rejoinder that the Ganges has made an offering of its existence to the ocean rings with the contemporary perception among Indian Muslims that the Hindu elite was bending over backwards for currying favors with the British colonialists and had even accepted the Machiavellian concept of territorial nationhood from the West.

“Do not run after the florist in order to spread your perfume” also has some historical connotations since the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), although gifted with natural lyricism, had gone out of the way to popularize his poems among the British literary elite through translation. In 1913 (two years before the publication of Iqbal’s poem), Tagore was awarded Nobel Prize in literature for poems which generalized the Indian masses as weak and placid (contrary to the ground realities of the day, it could be argued).

Hence the parable is not rooted in any skepticism about Hinduism or Vedanta (which receive due attention in Javid Nama) and it would help to remember that the first friend with whom Iqbal excitedly shared this section immediately after writing it in early 1915 was the Hindu ex-Prime Minister of Hyderabad Deccan, Maharajah Kishan Prashad.

As someone who had penned the most popular lyric about Indian patriotism, Iqbal was expected by Hindu readers to address them too and he did that in the present section. His criticism was directed specifically against certain tendencies of the “modern” Hindu, about which he had noted five years earlier in his private notebook, Stray Reflections, in 1910:

“It is extremely interesting to watch the birth and growth of a new ideal among a people. O! the enthusiasm it inspires and the force with which it attracts all the energies of a people to one common centre. The modern Hindu is quite a phenomenon. To me his behaviour is more of a psychological than a political study. It seems that the ideal of political freedom which is an absolutely new experience to him has seized his entire soul, turning the various streams of his energy from their wonted channels and bringing them to pour forth their whole force into this new channel of activity. When he has passed through this experience he will realise his loss. He will be transformed into an absolutely new people – new in the sense that he will no longer find himself dominated by the ethical ideals of his ancestors whose sublime fancies have been a source of perpetual consolation to many a distressed mind. Nations are mothers of ideals; but ideals, in course of time, become pregnant and give birth to new nations.”