In The Prolegomena to the Poetic
Arts (Muqaddima-i-Shaer-o-Shaeri), published in 1892,
the Indian sage Maulana Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914)
observed that the poetic imagination usually diminished
with a society’s advancement in natural sciences,
and hence these two spheres of intellectual activity were
in conflict with each other.
This seems to be one of the yardsticks
by which Iqbal measured the progress of contemporary Western
literature, about which he is reported to have said, “Looking
at the Western literature [while in Europe], I found it
quite uplifting but there, science was poised against
humanities and infusing pessimism into it. The Western
literary situation was no better than the Oriental in
my eyes by the time I returned [from Europe] in 1908.”
The judgments of Hali and Iqbal were
not unfounded. The scientific trends of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries had influenced European
writers. While such influence could not curtail the optimism
of Goethe, others like the French novelist Stendhal were
less fortunate. Ideals got banished from literature as
the writers attempted to confine the human circumstances
to whatever could be tested and proved in the light of
the existing scientific knowledge.
If “science fiction”
was conceived by the French novelist Jules Verne (1828-1905)
as a stronghold of romanticism against the onslaught of
pessimism in the late nineteenth century, even that new
genre was soon taken over by skeptics like the British
writer H. G. Wells (1866-1946).
One of the benchmark for gauging
the conflict between science and healthy imagination was
to see how extraterrestrial life was treated in the literature
of an age. The possibility of life on other heavenly bodies
was not a new idea (it could be traced back to some of
the world religions – including Hinduism, Judaism
and Islam – as well as ancient Greece and the Middle
East), but it became more popular after the propositions
of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
led to the discovery that the earth might not be the centre
of the universe. In the earlier days of scientific advancement,
the fantasies were usually of the happy sort: “If
Jupiter has... inhabitants... they must be larger and
more beautiful than the inhabitants of the Earth, in proportion
to the [characteristics] of the two spheres,” the
Czech astronomer Anton Maria Schyrleus of Rheita (1604–1660)
suggested.
This optimism had vanished by the
time Wells wrote The War of the Worlds (1898),
in which Martians were depicted as ruthless invaders destroying
human life with superior technology. In The First
Men in the Moon (1901), the inhabitants of the Moon
were presented as termite-like “Selenites”
with savage instincts.
While creating his perfect world
of Mars, Iqbal took diversion from these dominant trends
of his times (and he must have been familiar with many
of the works mentioned here, especially the writings of
Wells). Iqbal’s Martians are spiritually more evolved
than human beings and yet so compatible with human life
that can be interpreted as metaphorical representation
of the inevitable future of humanity itself.
Like the Selenites of Wells, they
are also threatened by an intruder from the earth, the
false prophetess. Hence the suggestion of an inter-terrestrial
conflict is there, just as in the popular science fiction
of the time, but the overall picture is far from dark
and there is no trace of the cynicism prevailing in the
genre in those days.
Arguably, the cultural exchange that
occurs between the human beings and Martians in Javid
Nama is of a much higher quality, and rationally
more wholesome, than in any other masterpiece about extraterrestrial
life.
Special
thanks to Iqbal Academy Pakistan
