The Will of Sultan Tipu

Sultan Tipu ki Wasiyat is cast as the parting counsel, the wasiyat or will, of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore who died defending his capital against the British in 1799. Iqbal does not retell the siege. He gives us, instead, the wisdom such a man might leave behind: a few couplets of advice meant to outlast him.

The poem belongs to Zarb-e-Kalim, the collection Iqbal published in 1936, two years before his death. He subtitled that book a declaration of war against the present age, and the poems in it are short, blade-like and direct. Sultan Tipu ki Wasiyat is among the sharpest of them, and Tipu, who chose to fall fighting rather than live in submission, was for Iqbal a fitting voice for its message.

The poem is built as a string of self-contained couplets, each one an instruction. You are a traveller of longing, the first tells the listener, so do not accept the destination. The second couplet pushes harder: even if Laila herself rides beside you, do not accept the resting litter. The form mirrors the content; each couplet is its own small refusal of rest.

The argument is a single idea pressed from several angles. A stream that has grown into a strong, fast river, the poem says, should not accept the bank that is offered to it. The seeker should not be lost in the idol-house of the universe, captivated by the warmth of the gathering. Tipu reports that on the first morning of creation Gabriel told him a plain thing: a heart that is the slave of cold intellect is not worth accepting.

The hardest line for a modern reader is that last one, because it seems to set the heart against reason. But Iqbal is not against thought. He is against a particular reduction: the self that calculates, hedges and never commits, that lets intellect alone govern it and so never burns with conviction. The will closes by warning against duii, the love of division and half-measures; truth, it says, admits no partner, so do not accept a compromise stitched between truth and falsehood.

Sultan Tipu ki Wasiyat endures because its counsel reaches far past the man who supposedly speaks it. To refuse the comfortable stopping point, to keep moving while the journey is still alive in you, to act from conviction and not only from calculation: this is advice any person in any age can take to heart. Iqbal gave a defeated king the last word, and made it a charge to the living.