Old Edifices Majeed is particularly good on the dialectic of khudi and bekhudi—selfhood and selflessness—in Iqbal's poetry Alok Rai

The poetry of Iqbal, sensitively analysed by Javed Majeed, is a deeply influential creative response to this moment of abject helplessness in the face of a dominant Western civilisation. The process of enforced cultural accommodation had profound consequences. In the first generation of post-1857 Urdu intellectuals, it translated into elegiac melancholy, a futile nostalgia inseparable from the sour taste of defeat. With Azad and Hali and their servile admiration of things English, it tips over into a kind of self-loathing. However, instead of the familiar chronicle of colonial monstrosity, Majeed redefines the postcolonial "problem" as one of inventing the aesthetic forms through which one may appropriate and accommodate one’s own experience, rather than remaining trapped in borrowed Western valuations. The post-colonial seeks to tell a story in which one is not merely an "extra", a victim, but is, instead, a protagonist, a doer, a maker of history.

MOHAMMED IQBAL: ISLAM, AESTHETICS AND POSTCOLONIALISM by Javed Majeed Routledge Pages: 190; Rs 295

Iqbal’s achievement cannot be addressed in a review—or even in a narrowly focused work such as this book. But Majeed is particularly good on the dialectic of khudi and bekhudi—selfhood and selflessness—in Iqbal’s poetry. One khudi couplet is well-known:

Khudi ko kar buland itna ki har taqdeer se pahle
Khuda bande se hi poochhe, bataa teri razaa kya hai

(So heighten your selfhood that, before inscribing your destiny,
Khuda himself shall ask the follower, what is it that you desire)