Poet unknown · kept here, honestly labelled
jo pale hain zulmat mein kya sahar ko pehchane
tirgi ke shaidai raushni se darte hain

Those raised in darkness — how would they ever know the dawn? It is the lovers of the dark who are afraid of the light.

Romanहिन्दीPoet unknown
जो पले हैं ज़ुल्मत में क्या सहर को पहचाने
तीरगी के शैदाई रौशनी से डरते हैं

The verse in Devanagari — it carries the authenticity of the original, and every Hindi reader can read it.

The Interpretation

Two lines that turn a fear into a diagnosis. The first asks, almost gently, how anyone reared entirely in darkness could even recognise a sunrise. The second sharpens it into an accusation: the people who resist the light are not its strangers but devotees of the dark — they fear the dawn precisely because they have made a home in the night. It reads at once as politics, as faith, and as the plain psychology of anyone who would rather not see.

For You, Today

When someone fights the light — a hard truth, a clearer view — notice that the resistance is rarely ignorance alone. People defend the dark they have grown comfortable in. You cannot dawn on someone who has decided to fear the morning.

A girah couplet — one of the borrowed verses woven into Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawwali of Iqbal Safipuri's 'dil pe zakhm khate hain'. It travels online, and in Google's answers, as Firaq Gorakhpuri's — but it does not appear in Rekhta's exhaustive Firaq corpus, or on any authoritative archive, under his name, so we will not attribute it to him. It is, fittingly, a live specimen of the very disease this shelf treats: a sung interpolation acquiring a famous false author. If a reliable source ever confirms the poet, we will move it and credit them gladly.
Themes:Faith & DoubtSociety
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More from Poet unknown
Humility
Mita de apni hasti ko agar kuchh martaba chahe
Solitude
is ki panah le kabhi us ki panah le
Defiance
jalwe tujhe dikhaenge bas intezar kar
All couplets by Poet unknown

The heart of this site stays with Iqbal: explore his couplets → Or browse the whole Other Voices shelf →