About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text of Bang-e-Dara ("The Call of the Caravan Bell"), Allama Muhammad Iqbal's first collection of Urdu verse, published in Lahore in 1924, with a new English translation couplet by couplet. Nothing is left out: all three parts, with the ghazals of each part and the humorous poems (zarifana) at the end, 200 poems in all.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the poems listed under Bang-e-Dara (1924) on the author's page, downloaded in October 2026. The list was checked poem by poem against the contents of Bang-e-Dara on iqbal.com.pk, part by part: Part One (to 1905), 49 poems and 13 ghazals; Part Two (1905–1908), 24 poems and 7 ghazals; Part Three (from 1908), 70 poems, 8 ghazals and 29 humorous poems. For Shikwa, Jawab-e-Shikwa, Tulu-e-Islam and some other poems, the Urdu text already corrected for this site's Intikhab-e-Iqbal against the standard Bang-e-Dara text is used.

Layout: each poem has a numbered heading (1 to 200, in the order of the book); each block is one couplet, or one line where the poem has a single line (a refrain, a speaker's name, a section heading in Khizr-e-Rah, or the last half-line of a quoted verse). Vowel marks (zabar, pesh, shadda) are left out of the Urdu; the izafat zer is kept. Persian couplets that Iqbal quotes or writes are translated too, with "(Persian)" after them.

Copyright: Iqbal died in 1938, so Bang-e-Dara is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. The English translation is new. It is an AI translation made for urduintranslation.com and reviewed against the Urdu; it is not the work of any named translator.

Names and terms are kept as in the Urdu, with short explanations in brackets where a reader may need them: Khizr (the immortal guide of travellers), Laila and Majnun (Qais), Farhad and Shirin, Jamshed's cup, Sinai and Moses, Abraham and Azar, the saki (cup-bearer).

Introduction

Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), poet and philosopher of Sialkot and Lahore, wrote in both Urdu and Persian. Bang-e-Dara gathers the Urdu poems of twenty years, and Iqbal arranged it in three parts that follow his life.

Part One (to 1905) is the work of the young poet in Lahore: poems of nature such as "Himalaya", "The Mountain Cloud" and "The Firefly"; poems for children adapted from English models, such as "A Spider and a Fly" and "A Mother's Dream"; and patriotic songs, among them "Tarana-e-Hindi" ("Sare jahan se achchha Hindostan hamara") and "Naya Shiwala". Already there are signs of the thinker to come, in "The Candle", "A Picture of Pain" and the long reflective poems on love, death and the self.

Part Two (1905–1908) comes from Iqbal's years as a student in Cambridge, Heidelberg and Munich: short lyrics of love and nature written in Europe, poems such as "An Evening (on the banks of the Neckar)", "Solitude" and "Sicily", and the ghazal of March 1907 in which he foretells that "your civilisation will kill itself with its own dagger".

Part Three (from 1908) is the poetry of the mature Iqbal, who has turned from Indian nationalism to the idea of a single Muslim community and of the self (khudi) that must be strengthened. Here are the famous "Shikwa" (The Complaint) and "Jawab-e-Shikwa" (The Answer to the Complaint), "The Candle and the Poet", "In Memory of My Late Mother", "Khizr of the Way" and "Tulu-e-Islam" (The Rise of Islam), with poems on the Balkan and Tripoli wars and on the fall of the Caliphate. The book ends with a group of ghazals and the humorous poems, in the manner of Akbar Allahabadi, on Western schooling, councils and capital and labour.

The translation keeps the couplet as the unit and tries to give the meaning of each line plainly, with Iqbal's images and allusions, rather than imitating his metre and rhyme.