A Cow and a Goat

Ek Gae aur Bakri — 'A Cow and a Goat' — is one of Iqbal's children's fables, set in a green meadow with clear streams and shade trees, where two animals fall into conversation. A goat, wandering by, greets a cow politely and asks, simply, how she is.

The poem belongs to the early children's section of Bang-e-Dara, the collection gathered and published together in 1924. Like the other animal poems around it, it follows the schoolroom tradition of the moral fable that Iqbal knew from the English readers of his day, and turns that familiar form into warm, easy Urdu verse for the young.

The poem is built as a contrast of two temperaments answering the same life. The cow takes the goat's small courtesy as an opening and pours out a long complaint. Human beings, she says, are cruel masters: when she gives less milk they scold her, when she grows thin they sell her off, they manage her with tricks and never repay her kindness; she raises their children on her own milk and gets only ill-treatment in return. It is a real grievance, and Iqbal does not mock it.

The goat's reply is the turn of the poem. She does not pretend the cow's complaints are false — she even admits the truth is bitter to hear. But she sets a different account beside it. Look at this meadow, she says, this cool air, this green grass, this shade. We are weak, voiceless creatures; safety like this is not something we could win for ourselves. It is human care that gives us this settled, fed, protected life, while the open forest is full of danger. If you weigh the comfort honestly, she says, you will not complain.

The moral is handled with genuine nuance, and that is what lifts the poem above a simple lecture. Iqbal does not say the cow's suffering is imaginary; he lets the goat concede it. The lesson is about proportion, not denial: a grievance can be true and still leave out half the picture. The cow, the poem tells us at the end, was shamed and regretted her complaint, because the goat's words had the ring of truth — gratitude is not the refusal to see what is wrong, but the discipline of also seeing what is good.

Ek Gae aur Bakri endures because the two voices in it are the two voices in every reader. The instinct to count only our injuries, and the harder wisdom that also counts our shelter, belong to no one faith or nation. Iqbal gave children a small drama in which the gentler, fuller way of seeing quietly wins — and adults can still feel the pull of both sides.