In Memory of My Late Mother

Walida Marhooma ki Yaad Mein — 'In Memory of My Late Mother' — was written after the death of Iqbal's mother, Imam Bibi, in 1914. It is one of the very few poems in which Iqbal sets aside the philosopher and the political voice and speaks simply as a grieving son. For that reason it has always held a special place among readers, who turn to it not for ideas but for the recognisable shape of their own sorrow.

The poem opens in the language of pure loss. Iqbal addresses his mother directly, and the imagery is domestic and intimate: the lamp of the house has gone out, the one whose prayers shielded him is no longer there. He admits something rare for him — that no learning, no eloquence, can undo this particular wound, and that the comfort a mother gives has no substitute anywhere in the world.

But the elegy does not stay in despair. Gradually it widens into Iqbal's deeper conviction about the soul. He reminds himself that the human spirit does not end with the body; that what was real in his mother — her love, her selflessness, her constant care — belonged to an order of things that death cannot reach. The grave covers the body; it cannot cover the truth of a life.

One of the poem's most quoted movements is its image of a mother's love as something that asks for nothing in return. Iqbal observes that her affection had no motive of self-interest in it; she gave without calculation, and that very purity is what makes the love a sign of something beyond the visible world.

The poem also turns, characteristically, toward consolation through action. Iqbal resolves that the best tribute to her is not endless mourning but a life lived well — that her prayers should be answered in what he becomes. Grief, in his hands, becomes a kind of responsibility.

Formally the elegy is written in a flowing, restrained style, free of the rhetorical fireworks of his public poems. Its power lies in its plainness; the lines move the way real grief moves, between the sting of memory and the search for meaning.

Walida Marhooma ki Yaad Mein endures because it is universal. Every reader who has lost a parent finds their own experience in it — the empty house, the unanswerable absence, and the slow, hard work of believing that love is not destroyed by death.