Lahore and Government College

Iqbal arrived in Lahore in 1895 and enrolled at Government College, then the finest institution in the province. The city was the cultural heart of Punjab, alive with poetry recitals, debating societies and newspapers, and Iqbal stepped into it as a gifted provincial young man with verses already in his pocket.

He took his bachelor's degree and then a master's in philosophy, and it was philosophy that opened the next door. At Government College he came under the influence of Sir Thomas Arnold, an English scholar of Islam and a teacher of rare generosity. Arnold treated Iqbal less as a pupil than as a younger colleague, introduced him to modern European thought, and — crucially — urged him to study in Europe.

Lahore in these years also made Iqbal a public poet. He began appearing at the mushairas, the poetry gatherings where verse was recited and judged aloud, and audiences quickly learned to listen for him. His early Urdu poems — patriotic, descriptive, often tender — were widely circulated, and by his late twenties he was a name that literary Lahore knew.

It was in this period that Iqbal wrote some of his most beloved early work. In 1904 came Tarana-e-Hindi — Saare Jahan Se Achha — a song to India as a shared garden that is still sung across the subcontinent. He wrote Naya Shawala, 'The New Temple,' addressed warmly to a Hindu friend, and Himala, a hymn to the Himalayas as the guardian of all of Hindustan. This was a poet in love with a composite civilisation.

He also began earning a living, lecturing in philosophy and English at Government College and at Oriental College. The work suited him: it kept him among books and ideas, and it gave him the standing and the means to think about what came next.

But Iqbal was restless. Arnold's encouragement had planted something, and the wider intellectual world beyond Lahore was calling. In 1905, in his late twenties, he set sail for England. The composite-India poet of Saare Jahan Se Achha was about to meet Europe.