The Secrets of the Self

A STUDY OF IQBAL’S POEM ASRAR-I KHUDI

BY P. K. VENKATA RAO, M.A.

There are poets who weave their songs from, the sorrows of mankind. These songs, whether pervaded by the gentle wistfulness so characteristic of Arnold or raising the soul-searching cry of anguish of Job, are not without their attraction. When a heart-struck old man in Shakespeare cries out, for instance,

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport;

or when a younger poet, Keats, calls our attention to

The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

it seems to us, for the time being, that the last word has been said on the sad lot of humanity on earth.

But that is but a passing phase. Every great poet outlives this fit of pessimism, and emerges from his Slough of Despond to obtain a vision of the Celestial City. By the power of thought and fancy, by the gift of inspiration that makes him a poet, he works out a more hopeful ideal that pleases by its beauty while it convinces by its truth. Iqbal is one such great poet, and he has achieved this effect in Asrar-I Khudi. He too, it is clear, was for a while plunged in despondency. But in this poem we see how he rose gloriously out of it by the power of a lofty ideal. The poem, therefore, takes its place among those very few works of art which serve to fortify our souls against the encroachments of gloom, pessimism, and, particularly, of the despairing, defeatist outlook. I shall endeavour to trace the evolution of its thought.

I

There is in each one of us a vital centre of experience. We shall call it the divinely-forged Self. Asrar-I Khudi is a powerful plea for the boundless development, we shall say the apotheosis, of this spiritual personality in us. It enjoins on us the duty of shaking ourselves free of all weakness, and rising from a slumber of the soul to a full consciousness of its God-given strength:

When the Self awoke to consciousness,
It revealed the universe of Thought.*

Such unfettered development of our spiritual consciousness, the poet points, out, is the very basis of existence. It is life; and the absence of it, death. A drop of water, by such development of its Self, is exalted into a pearl of no price; and so does a piece of coke become a diamond. So also,

When the mountain loses its Self, it turns into sands
And complains that the sea surges over it;
But the wave, so long as it remains a wave in the sea’s bosom,
Makes itself a rider on the sea’s .

The Self-development advocated by the poet is not the same as self-aggrandisement. He certainly desires that the soul should so expand as to include in its orbit of influence all things from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven; but the expansion is effected by the cultivation of the loftiest ideals, by a love that is co-eval with the universe. It is an all-pervading expansiveness, an unbounded spiritual energy, such as we associate with God and His mighty Prophets. The poet’s contention is that if the soul of man be a spark of Divinity, the Great Creator did not intend that this spark should be snuffed out of existence by fear or other weakness, or that it should be like a little glow-worm, just glistening fitfully and drifting in a dark world, but that it should develop into a flame that becomes the source of heat and light, of energy and illumination.

II

One essential aid to such Self-development, the poet says, is the forming of desires. On the face of it, it seems to us that this doctrine of the cultivation of desires runs directly counter to the other more familiar one that says that we should overcome desire. But closer scrutiny reveals the truth that what is demanded by all great teachers is the suppression of low, sensual desires in favour of the highest spiritual longings and ideals. Desire, or the intellecutal side of it, curiosity, is the basis of all science.

What is the secret of the novelties of science?
A desire which broke through by its own strength
And burst forth from the heart and took shape.

Lest there should still be any doubt respecting the contribution of desires to the growth of the Self, Iqbal concludes this part of his poem with two very illuminating couplets:

Rise, O thou who art strange to Life’s mystery,
Rise intoxicated with the wine of an ideal!
We live by forming ideals,
We glow by the sunbeams of desire!

III

If "the luminous point whose name is the Self" is the life-spark beneath our dust,-

By LOVE it is made more lasting,
More living, more burning, more glowing.

The poet’s exposition of Love as the expanding and fortifying force of the Self is the best part of the poem. We know something of the expansion of the Hitler Self; and it comes, therefore, as a great relief to be told that the expansion of the real divine Self in us is something altogether different. "Love," says Iqbal, is not born of water and air and earth." It is love of God that he has in mind, and he points out that "Love of God at last becomes wholly God." What he is driving at is the transformation of a world of sorrows and fears and low passions into a heaven where divine love as radiated from the Self governs all. As the embodiment of such pure, all-pervasive love, Iqbal cites that great servant of God, the Prophet Mohammed. He illustrates beautifully, by means of an episode from the life of the Prophet, the protective power of Love and our helplessness when the Self is not exalted and fortified by it:

The daughter of the chieftain of Tai was taken prisoner in battle
And brought into that exalted presence;
Her feet in chains, unveiled,
And her neck bowed with shame.
When the Prophet saw that the poor girl had no veil,
He covered her face with his own veil.
We are more naked than that lady of Tai,
We are unveiled before the nations of the world.

The poet glances also at a noble internationalism engendered by the Self that has been expanded by the power of Love. The poetical imagery by which the idea is enforced is both simple and sublime:

We who know not the bonds of country
Resemble sight, which is one though it be the light of two eyes.
We belong to the Hijaz and China and Persia,
Yet we are the dew of one smiling dawn.

A rose, he reminds us, has many petals, but has but one perfume.

IV

The thoughts contained in the poem are such as may be truly described as "commercing with the skies"; they have an uplifting quality. And many are the delicate flowers of rhetoric with which the poem is interspersed. I shall just conclude with a short quotation from another highly spiritual poet, Shelley. I do not suggest that Shelley’s outlook on life is the same as Iqbal’s. What does suggest itself to me is that the central doctrine of Iqbal’s great poem, the expansion or development of the Self by the power of Love, is very well set forth in these four lines of the English poet, taken from Adonais:

Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit’s light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference.

The mighty Love-exalted Self of Iqbal has indeed "clasped the pendulous earth," even in a literal sense. But one might well hope that from there it will not fail to, dart its spirit’s light beyond all worlds, until its spacious might satiate the void circumference."

* The English translation is by Reynolds A. Nicholson in the edition published by Macmillan & Co.