A lyrical legacy that must go on

Ramnik Mohan

A FEW months ago a song caught on — Ae watan, watan mere aabaad rahe tu/ Mai jahaan rahoon, jahaan mein yaad rahe tu.... A friend had sent an audio download of the song from the film Raazi. I heard the melody, sung in a way that compulsively holds you. I was spellbound. It had a resonance all its own, like that immortal, short classic Mohammed Rafi had sung for Haqeeqat — Mai ye sochkar us ke dar se utha thaa — even though the mood and tempo were altogether different.

But what struck me was the very beginning of the song, a couplet from Bachche ki Duaa by Allama Iqbal, the poet respected in both India and Pakistan — Lub pe aati hai duaa bun ke tamanna meri/ Zindagi sham’a ki soorat ho khudaaya meri. I had heard my elders — now in their eighties and nineties — say that it was the prayer children sang in the morning assembly in schools in the days before the Partition. 

On an impulse, I shared the song with three friends, all my juniors in years, though not necessarily so in wisdom, born and brought up at different places. Along with the song I sent Iqbal’s poem (a sonnet containing seven couplets), pointing out that the first two lines of the film song have been taken from the ‘Duaa’. 

To my pleasant surprise, I got almost identical responses from all. One said in Doda in Jammu and Kashmir, this was the prayer school children sang, till some years ago, for sure; the second recalled that it was sung in a school in Delhi from where she had passed out around a decade back, adding that it was still sung in another school she had been teaching in till recently. And the third, in Rohtak, had had students prepare it for a programme. 

Quite possibly, Iqbal’s prayer is still sung in many more schools across India. 

What Gulzar has done with Iqbal’s couplet is, indeed, his USP — using a couplet from a renowned poet to begin with and building a whole composition around it. Recall ‘Dil dhoondtaa hai phir wahi fursat ke raat din’; Ghalib’s couplet as the beginning for the composition in Mausam? Iqbal’s prayer has just one couplet that talks of watan and the wish to be its zeenat, to be the one to adorn it. A gem of a song. 

Literature recognises no boundaries, transcending both distance and time. Cherished legacies are to be taken forward, indeed.