Abdul Qadir Khan Khattak: poet, soldier and translator, son of Khushal

At a glance

• Abd-ul-Qadir Khan Khattak (عبدالقادر خان خټک) was a son of Khushal Khan Khattak and a younger brother of Ashraf Khan Hijri. Raverty gives his birth as 1063 AH (1652) and calls him "the most eloquent writer and poet of all Khushhal's sons". [2]

• He was a soldier as well as a poet. Raverty says he led the assault on a Mughal fort at Kottah and was wounded in the war of Bangash. [2]

• He wrote a diwan of Pashto odes steeped in Sufi mysticism, put Jami's Yusuf and Zulaikha and Sa'di's Gulistan and Bostan into Pashto, and wrote a version of the love tale of Adam and Durkhanai. [2, 3]

• Raverty says he tried hard to win the chiefship of the Khattaks, and that Afzal Khan, Ashraf's son, had him put to death with ten of his brothers and a number of their sons in one day at the village of Zaman Garrai. Raverty gives no year. [2]

The poet among Khushal's sons

Khushal Khan Khattak had, by Raverty's count, fifty-seven sons, and Raverty adds that the father had little reason to be partial to them, "on account of their very unnatural conduct, and unfaithfulness towards himself". [2] Of the sons who wrote, Raverty names Ashraf, Sadr Khan, Sikandar Khan and Gohar Khan besides Abd-ul-Qadir. [3] Of Abd-ul-Qadir he says the opposite of what he says of the family: he appears to have been a favourite, and to have shared considerably in his father's affection. [2]

Raverty puts his birth in 1063 AH, which he converts to 1652. [2] Raverty is the only source for the date. Ashraf, the eldest, was born in 1634 by Raverty's reckoning, so Abd-ul-Qadir was about eighteen years his junior. [2, 4] Raverty spells the name Æabd-ul-Kadir, and the poet writes it عبدالقادر in the last line of each ode. [1, 2]

Sword and pen

Raverty says he was "as good at the sword as at the pen". He writes that at the battle with the Mughal troops at Kottah, in the neighbourhood of the Peshawar district, the victory of the confederate Afghans "was chiefly owing to the skill displayed by the poet on that occasion", and that Abd-ul-Qadir led the assault on the fort, which fell after three hours of severe fighting. [2] Afterwards he "distinguished himself, in like manner, in the war of Bangas'h", where he was wounded, and the successes of that war "were celebrated in his name". [2] Raverty does not date either action and does not say who commanded the Mughal side.

The struggle for the chiefship

Raverty tells the family quarrel in the notice of Ashraf and again here. When Khushal gave up the chiefship, the sons struggled to supplant each other, and Abd-ul-Qadir "did not hold back. He tried very hard to gain the chieftainship, but fortune was unpropitious". [2] Ashraf, as eldest son, "had certainly the best right", and father and tribe chose him. [2] When Ashraf was betrayed to the Mughals and sent to the Deccan, Bahram "the Malignant" took the chiefship; later Ashraf's son Afzal Khan became chief. [2] For Ashraf's side of this and the dates that Raverty and Caroe give differently, see Ashraf Khan Hijri.

Raverty says that to obey his nephew "appears to have been extremely difficult and bitter" for Abd-ul-Qadir, who wanted the authority himself. All the brothers still living took his side, but the tribe was unanimous for Afzal, in whom the hereditary right lay. [2] Raverty's account of the end is a single sentence: Afzal "saw no other practicable solution of the difficulty, according to the custom of those days, than to get rid of all rivals", and Abd-ul-Qadir, with ten of his brothers and a number of their sons, was put to death at Zaman Garraey in one day and buried in one grave. [2] He adds that they thus escaped "the sorrows and troubles of chieftainship". [2]

The notice gives no year for the killing. The same Afzal Khan was a historian, the author of the Tarikh-i Murassa on which Raverty drew for the life of Khushal, and his son was the poet Kazim Khan Shaida, whose article reads Kazim's fear of a kindly brother against this killing. The wider setting is in Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier.

What he wrote

Raverty lists his chief works as then known. [2] There was a diwan, or collection of odes. There was a translation of Jami's Yusuf and Zulaikha from Persian, which Raverty says the translator rendered "into the most difficult style of Eastern poetry" and which is "considered the most perfect of its kind in the Afghan language". There was the love tale of Adam and Durkhanai, on which, Raverty says, three or four other authors had written in verse and prose, and there were translations of Sa'di's Gulistan and Bostan. [2] The contents list of Raverty's Gulshan-i Roh (1860) names the translation of the Gulistan "Gul-dasta'h, of Abd-ul-Kadir Khan", and lists the Yusuf and Zulaikha "by Abd-ul-Kadir Khan, Khattak" and his poems among the poetical works. [1]

In the introduction to his Pashto grammar (third edition, 1867) Raverty puts it more briefly: Abd-ul-Qadir "wielded his sword as bravely as his pen", wrote a diwan and the tale of Adam and Durkhanai, and translated Jami's poem and the Gulistan and Bostan, and also wrote a small work entitled Mukhammas, or "Enigmas and Rebuses". [3] The grammar quotes lines from that Mukhammas to illustrate Pashto verb forms, among them: "Oh thou ignorant heart of mine! take example from the dead! For they that used to amass wealth, went from this world, and left it behind. To-day is conjunction: to-morrow is separation." [3]

His descendants, Raverty reports, said he wrote about sixty works, but apart from "a small volume on enigmas, charades, and verses of mysterious meaning", even the names of the rest were by then unknown. [2] Bernhard Dorn's Chrestomathy of the Pushtu or Afghan Language (1847) printed several chapters of a Pashto version of Jami's Yusuf and Suleikha, copied from a manuscript then owned by a Mr Bland; the contents list there does not name the translator. [5] Raverty's Gulshan-i Roh printed a portion of the poem and the first part of the Gulistan in Pashto. [2]

The odes

Raverty calls the odes "deeply imbued with Sufi mysticism" and says the Afghans thought very highly of them and that his language is "extremely polished". [2] In his Selections he gives eighteen odes in English, and the Pashto of the odes is in the Gulshan-i Roh, where the heading over them is the poet's name and "Khattak". [1, 2] They are ghazals: each line is one couplet, and the poet puts his own name, here Abd-ul-Qadir, in the last. The images are those of the form, the cupbearer, the nightingale and the rose, the beloved's curls and eyes, and Raverty sets beside them lines on greed, power and death.

The fourth ode opens by weighing every kind of rule against the beloved. It begins with the very thing the author wanted in life. The verses are in Pashto as Raverty printed them, with his English translation. The transliteration is the site's and gives the right-hand half of the line first, as the print does.

که خاني که ملکي که سلطاني دَ، که ئي ګوري بیهوده سرګرداني دَ

Ka khānī ka malkī ka sultānī da, ka ē gorī bēhūda sargardānī da.

Whether it be chieftainship, or lordliness, or a monarch's sway; If thou perceivest, they are all fruitless trouble and anxiety. [1, 2]

The next line of the same ode puts the beloved above life and death: without the beautiful ones, "both life and death, are one and the same thing; for the sake of the dear ones, alone, is existence of any usefulness". [2] The tenth ode is a sermon on contentment. Its sixth line gives man his measure:

د سړي ښایست په علم و په حکمت دي، د چارپایو څربیدل دي په علف

Da saṛī khkhāyist pa ʿilm w pa hikmat dē, da chārpāyo tsṛbēdal dē pa ʿalaf.

A man's superiority, in wisdom and knowledge consisteth; The beast's, in grazing; and on hay, and on grass, growing fat. [1, 2]

The same ode closes on the poet's own name and a verse of the Qur'an:

تل له خدای ترس کوه عبدالقادره، حق خایف ته دي ویلي لَا تَخَفْ

Tal la Khudāy tras kawa Abd-ul-Qādira, haq khāyif ta dē wēlī lā takhaf.

O Abd-ul-Kadir! have the fear of God ever before thee; for unto them that fear, He hath said, "Fear thou not!" [1, 2]

Raverty's footnote gives the passage: "And God said unto him, 'O Moses! draw near and fear not, for thou art safe.'" [2]

Not every ode is a sermon. In others the lover is mocked for his looks, the beloved's curls and nose-jewel are described, and Raverty prints a spring ode whose lines each end in "flowers": flowers on the house-tops, in the lanes, in the hair, the turban and the bosom, and "the spring passeth away, and every moment the flowers fade and decay". [2] A line in another ode reads: "I will leave the walls of the cloister, and go out unto the tavern; for therein is to be found safety from this, and the next world's ills." [2] One couplet refers to a year: "May God never send unto us the Ghowis year again!" Raverty explains in a footnote that the letters of Ghows add up, by the abjad system, to 1097 AH (1685), a year in which "a terrible plague is said to have raged throughout Afghanistan and the adjacent countries". [2]

On making Pashto sweeter than Persian

The sixteenth ode ends on a claim about his language. He had put Persian classics into Pashto, and the last couplet of the ode turns that work into a claim.

تا خوږه کړه تر فارسي عبدالقادره، که پخوا وه ترخه ژبه د پښتو

Tā khwaṛa kṛa tar Fārsī, Abd-ul-Qādira, ka pakhwā wa tarkha zhaba da Pakhto.

Thou hast rendered it sweeter than Persian, O Abd-ul-Kadir! although the Pus'hto language was so bitter before. [1, 2]

Ashraf's poem, quoted in his article, claims that no other Pashto poet will match him in the art. Abd-ul-Qadir's claim is different: he is the translator who made the language sweet. In his grammar Raverty calls the literary talent of Khushal's family "surprizing" and lists the works of five of the sons. [3]

Where he stands

Raverty names Abd-ul-Qadir the most eloquent poet of the sons. The weight rests on Raverty. No other writer is quoted here ranking him. Raverty is also the source for the sword, the failed claim to the chiefship and the killing at Zaman Garrai; the Pashto text of the odes is his as well. The dates of his death and of the actions at Kottah and in the Bangash war are not recorded in any of those pages. No modern study of his diwan or his translations is cited here.