#UpendranathBrahmachari

Upendranath Brahmachari · 1873–1946

In the books · 1 chapter

Who this is

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.

“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.”

— The Great Indians, Ch. 200

The big idea, in the book's words:

“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.”

— The Great Indians, Ch. 200