Muhammad Iqbal’s rich legacy at stake

JAGAN Nath Azad, a scholar of rare distinction, must be turning in his grave. It was at the University of Jammu that he wrote eleven books on Muhammad Iqbal, including the authoritative five-volume biography, Roodad-e-Iqbal, and a translation of his magnum opus Javed Nama. Scholars described Azad, a professor at the university, as “Iqbal Academy incarnate”.

It is indeed tragic that a university which once hosted this finest post-Partition exponent of Iqbaliyat — the specialised field of research on the poetry and philosophy of Iqbal — should now seek to erase Sir Muhammad Iqbal from its curriculum.

At Azad’s request, the Iqbal Chair was established at the University of the Punjab in Pakistan during Gen Zia-ul-Haq’s reign. In contrast, the rich legacy of his research seems no longer relevant to the university that he had made his own. It is as if the institution is choosing to forget one of its finest sons to assert a new, narrower identity.

Iqbal, arguably one of the greatest poets of the subcontinent, traced his roots to the Kashmir valley, a fact he celebrated in his poetry and letters. He retained a deep emotional and cultural tether to Kashmir despite his ancestors — Kashmiri Pandits of the Sapru clan — having migrated a century earlier. What makes this erasure even worse is that Iqbal hailed from Sialkot, a city that was widely known as Jammu’s twin in the pre-Partition era. Though Sialkot was administratively part of Punjab, the two cities shared extraordinarily close cultural, economic and social ties for generations. Before Partition, a narrow-gauge railway linked them directly, ferrying traders, students and families in a matter of minutes. As old-timers would say, Sialkot was just “Dus kos door”!

This was no distant neighbourly bond — it was the intimacy of twin cities, bound by shared rhythms of daily life and a common cultural ethos that transcended administrative lines. Dogri and Punjabi influences blended seamlessly in language, folk traditions, cuisine and literary circles. Iqbal’s own formative years in this milieu infused his thought with the syncretic spirit of the region. This makes his removal from the syllabus not only an affront to Kashmir’s heritage but a deliberate severance from a city that was once an inseparable extension of Jammu’s own identity.

The irony deepens when one looks across the Pir Panjal. At the University of Kashmir, the central library — established in 1948 with the founding of the original University of Jammu and Kashmir — bears the name Allama Iqbal Library. It is a living monument to the shared intellectual heritage of the region.

Iqbal is not a peripheral name there; he is a major figure of study, his poetry and philosophy integral to courses in Urdu, Persian, philosophy and political science. Students in Kashmir engage with Bang-e-Dara, Bal-e-Jibril and Zarb-e-Kalim as part of their academic upbringing.

The contrast could not be starker. One campus honours the poet with a library that is the heartbeat of higher education; the other proposes to consign him to oblivion. This divergence is not accidental. It mirrors a deeper, more painful truth: the two halves of what was once a single university — and a single cultural universe — have grown worlds apart. This is something far more fundamental: an intellectual and emotional parting of ways. The practical split in 1969 has evolved into an institutional embodiment of separation, where once-overlapping academic traditions now diverge sharply.

The regions of Jammu and Kashmir have always been as different as chalk and cheese. But the distinctions have rarely been institutionalised in academia. These differences, long acknowledged, were once bridged by shared institutions and a common literary canon. Today, they are being etched deeper into the academic fabric. This institutionalisation of erasure is new and dangerous.

By looking to excise Iqbal, the University of Jammu is not merely pruning a syllabus; it is severing a thread that once connected the two regions through the unifying power of academics and progressive thought. Iqbal was never a narrow sectarian figure. His early poetry sang of Hindustan — “Sare Jahan Se Achha” — and his philosophical vision, though later focused on Islamic renaissance, remained rooted in the universalist traditions of Indian civilisation. To treat him as an untouchable because of his later association with the idea of Pakistan is to reduce a towering mind to a political label — an act unworthy of a university.

The fallout of this intellectual break goes beyond academia. In the post-Article 370 era, Jammu and Kashmir is grappling with the challenge of integrating two distinct regions while respecting their unique aspirations. Education was meant to be the bridge — nurturing critical thinking, preserving composite heritage and fostering mutual understanding among students who will shape J&K’s future. Instead, this move risks deepening the fault lines.

When one campus treats Iqbal as essential reading and the other as dispensable, when one library is named after him and the other proposes to delete his name, the message to students is unmistakable: the “other” side’s icons are not your icons. The shared past is optional. The cultural distance, already vast, is being made unbridgeable, ensuring that future generations grow up with even less common ground than at present.

Such steps are regressive precisely because they are polarising in a region that desperately needs healing. Universities are not battlegrounds for ideological purity tests; they are repositories of civilisation’s accumulated wisdom. Removing thinkers because their ideas do not fit a contemporary political narrative is the antithesis of academic freedom.

The University of Jammu must reconsider its move. It owes this to its own legacy, and to the thousands of students who deserve an education untainted by political expediency. Iqbal belongs to the subcontinent’s shared literary and philosophical heritage. He cannot be erased from Jammu’s university curriculum without erasing a part of Jammu’s own intellectual history — a history that once embraced Iqbal’s birthplace as its twin and Kashmir as its counterpart.

The two universities that once shared a roof and a library now stand as symbols of how far apart the regions have drifted. Let not one more act of erasure of intellectual and cultural heritage be allowed to widen that chasm. The poet who dreamed of a spiritual awakening for Asia — and who carried Kashmir in his blood while breathing the air of Jammu — deserves better. And so do the students of both Jammu as well as Kashmir.