stepping out into his garden; and a bulbul is not made into a nightingale; there are no nightingales in Urdu poetry. We are told (p. 23) that Iqbal had "an affair with Atiya Zaidi, a young uninhibited girl. ..." It is most doubtful if Iqbal had "an affair" with Atiya (whose surname, incidentally, was Faizi, not Zaidi), and her lack of inhibition is a mere invention. On page 24, Iqbal*s daughter's name is given as Munawarah, instead of Munira. On the same page, we are informed that "a few days before the end" Iqbal wrote "a verse in Persian lamenting his own departure." In fact, what Iqbal wrote was not a lament "on his own departure," but a dignified, melancholy poem which says that there may or may not be another poet and seer like him to finish what he had set out to do. Very loosely translated, the four-line poem is something like this: The music which has gone away, it may return, or it may not? A breeze from Hijaz may blow, or it may not. The days of this faqir are done; Another knower of secrets may come, or he may not. In his introduction to the shikwa, Singh says (p. 25) that it is one of Iqbal's "most controversial compositions: as passionately lauded by its many admirers as it has been criticized by others." I do not know which of Iqbal*s students have "passionately lauded" the shikwa or even the Jawab, Except for a very recent defence of the poems by the Pakistani critic Saleem Ahmad on rather chauvinistic grounds, I am not aware of any notable critic of Iqbal "passionately" admiring the poems. In fact, informed literary opinion has always held the two poems in low esteem, and assigned them no place in Iqbal*s development as a poet or a thinker. The poems evoked warm response among the Muslims for non-literary reasons; literary critics never thought much of them. So there has hardly been any controversy about them. Singh further declares (p. 25) that the shikwa "reveals a not-too-veiled contempt for non-Muslims, particularly Hindus, shikwa may be regarded as the first manifesto of the two-nation theory. ..." If dead men can turn in their graves, Iqbal must be writhing in his. Singh's conclusion that the poem expresses contempt for non-Muslims, especially Hindus, is based on misreading certain lines (more about which later). To see this poem, which is at best a populistic expression of Indian Muslims' frustrations at having been relegated to the background on the national scene, as the two-nation theory in embryo, is to miss the point completely. Both the poems are verbose, flabby-sentimental, simplistic, and on the whole second-rate, though occasionally brilliant. They are not political, but historical and theological statements. They are based on a populist interpretation of the history of Islam which, quite naturally, soothed Indian Muslims, and also urged them to action. But the action which the two poems urge, is not political, it is essentially religious and moral. I have said that Singh's translation shows errors of Urdu language and Urdu poetry comprehension. By the former I mean that he does not know accurately enough the meaning of many words; by the latter I mean that he is not aware of many concepts and conventions that govern most Urdu poetry of the classical type, of which these two poems are--generally bad— 112