The Question of Iqbal's Romanticisim

Revisiting G.R. Malik's Contribution

Abstract

Iqbal, the literary genius has immense power to speak to an age marred by various crises that fundamentally spring from haunting nihilism. Iqbal the mystic, the poet and the sage has world wide audience. Iqbal formulated a mystical philosophy that addresses certain concerns of the nihilistic age in an idiom that is not too alien to its ears, diagnosed decadence in the Western civilization and suggested turn East much before it became a rallying cry appropriated by counterculture poets, some influential writers and philosophers. Iqbal championed passion, vitality, individuality, freedom, faith in relationships and love in a milieu that still longs for retrieving them in a dehumanizing, deindividualizing homogenizing mass culture and the world safe for Capitalism where everything has been getting commoditised. Iqbal “appropriated” tradition for facing modernity and all its alienating and nihilistic undertones. The Romantics were fellow travellers in the path and many of Iqbal’s doctrines and views crisscrossed with them. Prof. G. R. Malik’s work is an attempt to make sense of this crisscrossing and that accounts for his choice of certain common themes rather than individual poets for comparative study in his work. The problem of heterogeneity in the Romantic camp is also there and is taken due note of Prof. G. R. Malik. He has deep and first hand acquaintance with and careful and dexterous handling of primary sources of Iqbal, especially literary and religious aspects of his thought and lucid style. He has opened up new vistas in approaching both Iqbal and the English Romantics. He has done substantial study which documents the relationship to Western literature without overlooking the points of difference between Iqbal and the English Romantics.