- Lived:
- 1877–1938 · born and died in the Punjab that is now Pakistan — Sialkot to Lahore, by way of Cambridge and Munich
- Field:
- poetry and philosophy — the third summit of the Urdu ghazal after Mīr and Ghālib, the supreme Persian-Urdu philosophical poet of the twentieth century, and a modernist Muslim thinker
- The Big Idea:
- The same man wrote Sāre Jahāṅ se Achchhā — the song Indian schoolchildren still sing, that calls Hindustan better than all the world — and, twenty-six years later, the presidential address that first gave the idea of a Muslim state in India a political shape. This chapter does not resolve that contradiction. It is about it.
- In their words:
- “Mazhab nahīṅ sikhātā āpas meṅ bair rakhnā” — “religion does not teach us to bear enmity among ourselves” (Tarana-e-Hindi, 1904)
- If you remember one thing:
- Pakistan calls him its national poet and the thinker of its idea; India sings his verses at school assemblies every morning. Both countries are right about him, and neither is wrong — which is exactly why he belongs in this book, held open, unresolved.