Genre Patriotic song | ||
Published 16 August 1904 (1904-08-16) | ||
Sare Jahan se Accha Hindustan hamara (Urdu: سارے جہاں سے اچھا; Hindustani: सारे जहाँ से अच्छा; Sāre Jahāṉ se Acchā), formally known as Tarānah-e-Hind or Tarānah-i-Hindi (Urdu: ترانۂ ہندی; Hindustani: तराना-इ-हिन्द; Anthem of the People of India), is an Urdu language patriotic song written by Muhammad Iqbal. It is often rendered during patriotic occasions in India and is used as a marching song at a number of national events including the Indian Armed Forces Beating the Retreat ceremony. The song is also played by the bands of the Indian Armed Forces accompanied by music composed by Ravi Shankar.
Contents
- Composition
- Popularity in India and in popular culture
- English Translation
- Iqbals transformation and Tarana e Milli
- References
Written for children in the ghazal style of Urdu poetry by Iqbal, the poem was published in the weekly journal Ittehad on 16 August 1904. Recited by Iqbal the following year at Government College, Lahore, then in British India, it quickly became an anthem of opposition to the British rule in India. The song, an ode to Hindustan—the land comprising present-day India and Pakistan, it was later published in 1924 in the Urdu book Bang-i-Dara.
Composition
Iqbal was a lecturer at the Government College, Lahore at that time, and 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 song, 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.
Popularity in India and in popular culture
English Translation
Better than the entire world, is our Hindustan,
We are its nightingales, and it (is) our garden abode
If we are in an alien place, the heart remains in the homeland,
Know us to be only there where our heart is.
That tallest mountain, that shade-sharer of the sky,
It (is) our sentry, it (is) our watchman
In its lap where frolic thousands of rivers,
Whose vitality makes our garden the envy of Paradise.
O the flowing waters of the Ganges, do you remember that day
When our caravan first disembarked on your waterfront?
Religion does not teach us to bear animosity among ourselves
We are of Hind, our homeland is Hindustan.
In a world in which ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome have all vanished without trace
Our own attributes (name and sign) live on today.
There is something about our existence for it doesn't get wiped
Even though, for centuries, the time-cycle of the world has been our enemy.
Iqbal! We have no confidant in this world
What does any one know of our hidden pain?
Iqbal's transformation and Tarana-e-Milli
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:
contrasted significantly with the first stanza of Tarana-e-Milli (1910) reads:
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.