Sare Jahan se accha

Sare Jahan se accha

The need of the hour is History, a sense of our past, our heritage and our culture. We need to look at our country through our own eyes. Satguru Sivananda Murty  Garu

Keeping the visionary’s words in mind,

Top of Form

Bottom of FormI would like to introduce you the song ‘sare jahan se accha’, which of course you know it as a patriotic song, its origin and a little about its author Jenab Mohammad Iqbal.

Iqbal was a lecturer at the Government College, Lahore. Probably on 16th August 1904 he was invited by a student Lala Har Dayal to preside over a function. Instead of delivering a speech, Iqbal sang Saare Jahan Se Achcha, the day on which it first came to light. The song, being called as tarana-e-hind, in addition to embodying yearning and attachment to the land of Hindustan, expressed "cultural memory" and had an elegiac quality. In 1905, the 27-year-old Iqbal viewed the future society of the subcontinent as both a pluralistic and composite Hindu-Muslim culture. Later that year he left for Europe for a three-year sojourn that was to transform him into an Islamic philosopher and a visionary of a future Islamic society.

As I remember it has 9 stanzas of which the 5^th one goes like this:

Ai āb-i rūd-i Gangā! Wuh din haiṉ yād tujh KO?
Utrā tire kināre jab kārwāṉ hamārā

O the flowing waters of the Ganges, do you remember that day
when our caravan first disembarked on your waterfront?

Try to recollect the day, whether we had, where we the followers of Sanatana dharma along with the Muslims disembarked our caravan on the banks of Ganga. One more thing is he uses in one stanza, with which you are conversant. ‘Hindi hai ham vatan hai hindusitan hamara’. ‘Hindi’ hear means people of Hindustan, like Gujarati for Gujarat, Bengali for Bengal, Bihari for Bihar etc. No ambiguity in this. The next one is ‘Hidusitaan hamara’. The word hamara denotes ‘Ours’. Is it the entire population of India put together or because it is written by Mr. Iqbal who is a Muslim by birth have we to take it as to be Muslims’?

As regards the word ‘Hind’ and ‘hindu’ please go through the passage here under.

The fact is that the BOTH the words "Hindu" and "India" have foreign origin. The word "Hindu" is neither a Sanskrit word nor is this word found in any of the native dialects and languages of India. It should be noted that "Hindu" is NOT a religious word at all. There is no reference of the word "hindu" in the Ancient Vedic Scriptures.

It is said that the Persians used to refer to Sindhu as the Indus River, as the pronounce ‘HA’. Indus is a major river which flows partly in India and partly in Pakistan. However, the Persians could not pronounce the letter "S" correctly in their native tongue and mispronounced it as "Ha" for “Sa”. Thus, for the ancient Persians, the word "Sindhu" became "Hindu." The ancient Persian Cuneiform inscriptions and the Zend Avesta refer to the word "Hindu" as a geographic name rather than a religious name. When the Persian King Darious 1 extended his empire up to the borders of the Indian subcontinent in 517 BC, some people of the Indian subcontinent became part of his empire and army. Thus for a very long time the ancient Persians referred to these people as "Hindus". The ancient Greeks and Armenians followed the same pronunciation, and thus, gradually the name stuck.

Here I tell one more thing. Sanskrit is indeed ‘Deva Bhasha’ which has segregated the alphabets in groups like Vowels, Consonants, the group spelt by throat, by teeth, by lips by nose etc. which we can never find in any languages of the world other than in India. More over our letters are called ‘Akshara. While the explicit meaning is ‘from A to KSHA’ the esoteric meaning is which will never be putrefied. While ‘Kshara’ is to ‘Perish’, ‘Akshara’ represents ‘Eternal’ ‘Perennial’ ‘Perpetual’. You think how great our great sages are.

Again coming back to the point, In 1910, Iqbal wrote another song for children, Tarana-e-Milli (Anthem of the Religious Community), which was composed in the same metre and rhyme scheme as Saare Jahan Se Achcha, but which renounced much of the sentiment of the earlier song. The sixth stanza of Saare Jahan Se Achcha (1904), which is often quoted as proof of Iqbal's secular outlook:

Maẕhab nahīṉ sikhātā āpas meṉ bair rakhnā

Hindī haiṉ ham, wat̤an hai Hindūstāṉ hamārā

Religion does not teach us to bear ill-will among ourselves

We are of Hind, our homeland is Hindustan.

Contrasted significantly with the first stanza of Tarana-e-Milli (1910) reads:

Cīn o-ʿArab hamārā, Hindūstāṉ hamārā

Muslim haiṉ ham, wat̤an hai sārā jahāṉ hamārā

Meaning,

 Central Asia and Arabia are ours, Hindoostan is ours

We are Muslims, the whole world is our homeland.

Iqbal's world view had now changed; it had become both global and Islamic. Instead of singing of Hindustan, "our homeland," the new song proclaimed that "our homeland is the whole world." Two decades later, in his presidential address to the Muslim League annual conference in Allahabad in 1930, he supported a separate nation-state in the Muslim majority areas of the sub-continent, an idea that inspired the creation of Pakistan.

Now I leave you the decision about the song and the patriotism