A Mountain and a Squirrel

Ek Pahad aur Gilahri — 'A Mountain and a Squirrel' — is a short children's fable in which Iqbal stages an argument between the biggest thing in a landscape and one of the smallest. A mountain looks down on a squirrel and tells it, cruelly, that if it had any shame it would go drown itself in water for being so insignificant.

The poem sits in the early children's section of Bang-e-Dara, the collection published together in 1924. Iqbal is again adapting a known source: the exchange follows Ralph Waldo Emerson's well-known little poem 'Fable', in which a mountain and a squirrel have exactly this quarrel. Iqbal takes Emerson's idea and reworks it into Urdu verse for children, and the borrowing is part of the poem's story rather than a defect in it.

The poem is built as a two-part debate. The mountain speaks first, and at length, all of it boasting: see how vast I am, see how the earth lies low before my grandeur, what is your little existence next to mine. Iqbal gives the mountain every word a proud creature would use, so that the squirrel's reply lands against a full statement of arrogance.

The squirrel's answer is the heart of the poem, and it is composed rather than angry. It does not deny that the mountain is large. It simply refuses the idea that large means worthy and small means worthless. If I am not big like you, the squirrel says, what does it matter — and you, for your part, can never do what I can do. You cannot climb a tree. You cannot crack a nut. Each of us has what the other lacks.

From that the poem reaches its moral, and Iqbal makes it explicit because the audience is young: every single thing is made by the power of God; that one is large and another small is simply His wisdom at work; nothing in creation is useless, and in the whole workshop of nature nothing is bad. The nuance is that the squirrel is not made superior to the mountain in turn — the poem refuses to flip the ranking. It abolishes the ranking. Bigness and smallness are not better and worse; they are only different gifts.

Ek Pahad aur Gilahri endures because the squirrel's reply is something every reader can carry. The temptation to measure worth by size, by loudness, by visible scale runs through every society and every age. Iqbal's small animal, answering a mountain with quiet self-respect, gives children and adults of any background the same durable line of defence: I am not you, and I do not need to be.