Sare Jahan se Accha
Urdu poem
"Sare Jahan se Accha" (Urdu: سارے جہاں سے اچھا; Sāre Jahāṉ se Acchā), formally known as "Tarānah-e-Hindi" (Urdu: ترانۂ ہندی, "Anthem of the People of Hindustan"), is an Urdu language patriotic song for children written by poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal in the ghazal style of Urdu poetry. The poem was published in the weekly journal Ittehad on 16 August 1904. Publicly recited by Iqbal the following year at Government College, Lahore, British India (now in Pakistan) it quickly became an anthem of opposition to the British Raj. The song, an ode to Hindustan—the land comprising present-day Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, was later published in 1924 in the Urdu book Bang-i-Dara.
By 1910, Iqbal's worldview had changed to become global and Islamic. In a new song for children, "Tarana-e-Milli," written in the same metre, he changed the homeland from "Hindustan" to the "whole world." In 1930, in his presidential address to the Muslim League annual conference in Allahabad, he supported a separate nation-state in the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent, an idea that inspired the creation of Pakistan.
Saare Jahan se Accha has remained popular, but only in India. An abridged version is sung and played there as a patriotic song and as a marching song of the Indian Armed Forces. The most popular musical composition is that of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar.
Text of poem
English translation
Better than the entire world, is our Hindustan,
We are its nightingales, and it (is) our garden abode.
The public source identifies “Sare Jahan se Accha” as urdu poem. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sare, Jahan and Accha.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3241743. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1924, 1910 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sare Jahan se Accha” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.