Larger-than-life poet of Urdu and Persian

ALLAMA Mohamed Iqbal, one of the Indian subcontinent's most versatile and controversial figures of the 20th century, defies easy categorisation. The myriad ironies and contradictions that defined colonial India seem to have converged in the life and works of Iqbal to the extent that the exact opposite of anything ever said of him could equally be true.

A celebrated Urdu and Persian poet who spoke several languages including German and Arabic, he was steeped in the knowledge systems of the East and the West. A political activist who fathered the idea of Pakistan, Iqbal cut a larger-than-life presence as a political philosopher in the sub-continent's turbulent history of the period.

In Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician, Singapore-based author Zafar Anjum provides a lucid narrative of the maverick's multi-layered life in this 320-page book published by Random House India. But it is done without trying to explain away the many contradictions in Iqbal's life and works or defend the serious intellectual flaws in his political philosophy - which later proved costly for the subcontinent.