“Aey sarzameen-e-Pak zarrey terey hein aaj sitaron sey tabnak. Roshan hey kehkashan sey kahin aaj teri khak.”
O land of Pakistan, each particle of yours is being illuminated by stars. Even your dust has been brightened like a rainbow.”
It seems the current national anthem (penned by Hafeez Jullundhri) wasnt the original one. Funny this is the first time i am hearing about it - considering how we were made to study (compulsory) 'Pakistan studies' in school, where wranglings over the national anthem was a subject given some importance. An intriguing editorial and article in the Daily Times explains more..
Given the recent controversy in India regarding Mr Jinnah’s secular credentials, amid a similar debate in Pakistan as the centre-right and liberal camps lock horns, the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, may have done all of us much good by reporting on what eminent Indian poet Jagan Nath Azad had to say a year prior to his death. According to the late Mr Azad, who was based in Lahore in 1947, he was asked by Mr Jinnah to write the national anthem for the new state of Pakistan. This is how Mr Azad described it: “On the morning of August 9, 1947, there was a message from Pakistan’s first governor-general, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It was through a friend working in Radio Lahore who called me to his office. He told me ‘Quaid-e-Azam wants you to write a national anthem for Pakistan.’ I told them it would be difficult to pen it in five days and my friend pleaded that as the request had come from the tallest leader of Pakistan, I should consider his request. On much persistence, I agreed.”
Why would Mr Jinnah get an Urdu-speaking Hindu poet to write the national anthem? Mr Azad’s response to that question was that “I believe Jinnah Sahib wanted to sow the roots of secularism in a Pakistan where intolerance had no place.”
We find it interesting that this fact has so far remained little known, indeed almost unknown. Why should that be? Could it be that there has been a conscious effort to bury it? The other interesting part of this story is that after Mr Jinnah’s death, at some point, the anthem written by Mr Azad and used for over a year was dropped and Hafeez Jallundhry, himself an eminent poet, was tasked to write Pakistan’s national anthem. What need was there to do that and who ordered that the anthem be changed? None of this is recorded in our history textbooks, which is understandable because these textbooks have been written with the express purpose of distorting facts or, as Prof KK Aziz wrote, to “murder history”. During General Zia ul Haq’s time the state even took the ‘Two-Nation’ theory back to the time when Mohammad Bin Qasim landed in Sindh on a military expedition. But while the praetorian state may have its reasons for bludgeoning facts for political reasons, we would strongly urge the independent historians of Pakistan to look into what Mr Azad revealed before his death and bring it out of obscurity because it lends weight to Mr Jinnah’s secular credentials. This shouldn’t be too difficult especially if the anthem written by Mr Azad was actually used for more than a year. It certainly seems to us that the League which later decided to trash the legacy of Mr Jinnah’s August 11 speech must have done away with the anthem written by Mr Azad for the same reason
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_20-6-2005_pg3_1
‘Jagan Nath Azad wrote Pakistan’s first anthem’
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: “Aey sarzameen-e-Pak zarrey terey hein aaj sitaron sey tabnak. Roshan hey kehkashan sey kahin aaj teri khak.”(O land of Pakistan, each particle of yours is being illuminated by stars. Even your dust has been brightened like a rainbow.”)
These are lines from Pakistan’s first national anthem — written by Jagan Nath Azad, well-known Indian writer and intellectual, acceding to the wishes of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, The Hindu newspaper reported.
Days before his death last year, Azad recalled, in an interview, the circumstances under which he was asked by Jinnah to write Pakistan’s national anthem: “In August 1947, when mayhem had struck the whole subcontinent, I was in Lahore working in a literary newspaper.
All my relatives had left for India and for me to think of leaving Lahore was painful. My Muslim friends requested me to stay. On August 9, 1947, there was a message from Jinnah Sahib through one of my friends at Radio Pakistan Lahore. He told me ‘Quaid-e-Azam wants you to write a national anthem for Pakistan.’”
Why him? “The answer to this question,” Azad said in the interview, “has to be understood by recalling the inaugural speech of Jinnah Sahib as Pakistan’s governor general. He said: `You will find that in the course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.’
I asked my friends why Jinnah Sahib wanted me to write the anthem. They confided in me that ‘the Quaid wanted the anthem to be written by an Urdu-knowing Hindu.’ Through this, I believe Jinnah Sahib wanted to sow the roots of secularism in a Pakistan.”
The national anthem written by Azad was sent to Jinnah, who approved it in a few hours. It was sung for the first time on Pakistan Radio, Karachi.
The situation in Punjab was becoming worse. Azad’s friends told him in September 1947 that it would be better for him to migrate to India. The song written by Azad served as Pakistan’s national anthem for one and a half years. After Jinnah’s death, Hafiz Jallundhari wrote the national anthem.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_19-6-2005_pg7_31