| The soul’s candle is quenched in the lamp of India: | |
| Indians are strangers to India’s fair repute, | 2600 |
| its manikins not intimate with their self’s secrets, | |
| their plectrum plucks but rarely at their strings. | |
| They fasten their eyes upon the past, | |
| their hearts would glow from an extinguished fire. | |
| Because of them I am bound hand and foot, | 2605 |
| they are the reason for my unavailing laments; | |
| they have estranged themselves from their selfhood, | |
| they have made a prison of ancient customs. | |
| Humanity is pained by their existence: | |
| the new age is outraged by their ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’. | 2610 |
| Have done with the poverty that bestows nakedness; | |
| blessed is the poverty which bestows true power. | |
| Beware of constraint and of the habit of patience; | |
| constraint is poison to both constrainer and constrained— | |
| the latter becomes habituated to patience, | 2615 |
| the former becomes habituated to constraint; | |
| for both the pleasure of oppression increases | |
| and I can only repeat, Ah, would that my people knew! | |
| When shall India’s night give place to day? | |
| Jaafar is dead, but his spirit is living still; | 2620 |
| as soon as it escapes from the chains of one body | |
| at once it makes its nest in another flesh. | |
| Now it makes concord with the church, | |
| anon it turns entreating to the templars; | |
| its creed, its cult are nothing but commerce, | 2625 |
| an Antar got up in the robes of Haidar. | |
| As the world changes in scent and colour, | |
| even so its customs and usages change; | |
| In former times it bowed before other gods, | |
| in our days its idol is the fatherland. | 2630 |
| Outwardly it is anguished for the Faith, | |
| inwardly it wears the thread like the templars. | |
| Jaafar, in whatever body, murders the nation; | |
| this ‘good old Moslem’ murders the nation. | |
| He is always smiling, and is friends with none; | 2635 |
| let a snake smile, it is still a snake. | |
| His treachery divided the people’s unity; | |
| his nation is demeaned by the fact of his being. | |
| Whenever a nation is devastated | |
| the root of its ruin is a Sadiq or a Jaafar. | 2640 |
| God save me from the spirit of Jaafar, | |
| save me from the Jaafars of the present time! |