A Child's Prayer

Lab Pe Aati Hai Dua — 'A Child's Prayer', sometimes titled Bachche Ki Dua — is the gentlest famous poem Iqbal ever wrote, and perhaps the most universally heard. Written around 1902, it is recited at morning school assemblies across the subcontinent, learned by heart by children who often meet Iqbal here first, long before they read anything else of his.

The poem is written in the voice of a child speaking to God. There is no philosophy in it of the difficult kind, no argument, no falcon — only a string of simple, luminous wishes. The child asks to be useful, to be good, to be a source of light, to help the poor and the weak, and to be kept from wrong.

Its central image is the candle. The child prays that his life take the form of a candle — a thing that exists by giving itself away, that drives back darkness simply by burning. It is, in miniature, the same idea Iqbal would later build his whole philosophy around: a self is fulfilled not by being hoarded but by being spent on something larger. Here it arrives in a form a seven-year-old can hold.

Structurally the poem is a sequence of short, paired lines, each a single clear request, easy to chant in unison. That musical simplicity is the reason it became an anthem of childhood rather than a poem on a page. Generations have sung it together, and the act of singing it together is part of what it means.

It is worth noticing how faith-neutral the prayer's actual content is. The child asks to love learning, to serve the helpless, to beautify his country, to walk the straight path and avoid evil. These are aspirations any parent, of any belief, would wish for a child — which is why the poem has crossed every border Iqbal's later work is argued over.

Lab Pe Aati Hai Dua endures because it is the first Iqbal most people ever know, and because it asks for the right things. Before Khudi, before the falcon, before the great complaints and answers, there is this: a child asking to grow into someone who gives light. Everything else Iqbal wrote is, in a sense, that same wish grown up.