ab mujhe dhoke se maara hi nahin jaa sakta
“There is no one in my army except myself — and so now I cannot be killed by treachery.”
अब मुझे धोके से मारा ही नहीं जा सकता
The verse in Devanagari — it carries the authenticity of the original, and every Hindi reader can read it.
A magnificent inversion of what an army is for. The usual danger to a commander is betrayal from within; the speaker has removed it by reducing his ranks to one. He is his own entire force, which makes him unbetrayable — there is no traitor to turn, no inside to be sold from. Solitude is rewritten as the one impregnable position.
Some of your safety comes precisely from owing your loyalty to no faction. If you are your own whole army, no one inside it can sell you out — a hard kind of freedom, but a real one.
The heart of this site stays with Iqbal: explore his couplets → Or browse the whole Other Voices shelf →