The final years

Iqbal's last years were shadowed by illness. From around 1934 his health declined; a throat ailment gradually took his voice, a cruel affliction for a poet whose verse had been made to be recited aloud. He continued to write, but the body that carried the mind was failing.

There were personal sorrows alongside the physical ones. His second wife, Sardar Begum, the mother of his son Javid and his daughter Munira, had died in 1935, and her loss weighed on him heavily in his final years. He was often unwell, often confined to his home in Lahore, and dependent on the care of family and friends.

And yet the mind did not slow. Zarb-e-Kalim appeared in 1936, and he kept composing. At his death he left an unfinished collection, later published as Armughan-e-Hijaz, 'The Gift of the Hijaz,' containing some of his final Persian and Urdu verse. He was working, in effect, to the end.

His thoughts in these years turned often to Javid, his young son, and to the next generation. Much of the late poetry carries the tone of a father and a teacher addressing those who would come after — passing on the falcon's creed of motion, courage and self-belief to people he knew he would not see grown.

Iqbal died on 21 April 1938 at his home in Lahore, in the early morning, at the age of sixty. He was buried beside the great Badshahi Mosque, where his tomb still stands. The whole subcontinent registered the loss; even those who had argued with him knew that a major mind had gone.

One date matters above all for reading him honestly. Iqbal died in 1938 — nine years before the Partition of 1947 and the creation of the state so often associated with his name. He never saw it. What later movements and later history made of his words is not simply identical to what he was, and any honest account of his legacy has to begin from that fact.