Adam Khan and Durkhanai: the Pashto love tale of Swat

At a glance

• Adam Khan and Durkhanai is a Pashto love tale set in the villages of Bazdara in Swat. Adam Khan, the son of a tribal chief, plays the rubab and sings tappas. Durkhanai, the daughter of Malik Taus Khan, is betrothed to another man. [2]

• It ends in the death of both lovers. One researcher says they are buried in the same grave, and the storytellers behind a recent English translation say two bodies were found in Durkhanai's grave. [2, 4]

• The earliest known verse telling is credited to Sadr Khan Khattak, a son of Khushal Khan Khattak: couplets of eight syllables, dated 1118 AH, first printed by the Pashto Academy at Peshawar in 1959. [3]

• Writers disagree on the author. One credits Abdul Qadir Khan Khattak, another son of Khushal, with a version dated 1100 AH, and Raverty wrote in 1867 that two of Khushal's sons each composed a poem on the tale. [1, 4]

• A Pashto film of the tale was released in 1971. [7]

The story as translators tell it

No two tellings agree on every name, and the tale has been told in verse and prose for at least three centuries. The spine is the same in each. A young man hears of a girl he has never seen, and she hears of him. They meet once, at a wedding. Her family has promised her to someone else. The lovers die of the separation.

In the English translation that Muhammad Sheeraz published in Pakistaniaat in 2018, working mainly from the Urdu text of Shafi Aqeel, Adam Khan is the only son of the chief Hassan Khan and the most handsome man of Upper Bazdarra. His passion is the rubab. He declines his parents' wish to marry him, because he is waiting for an imagined beloved whom his songs call. [2]

One day he overhears an old woman from Lower Bazdarra praising the daughter of her village's chief, Taus Khan. Her name is Durkhani. Adam Khan asks whether she has a mole on her left cheek and a scar on her forehead, and the old woman says yes: this is the face he has seen in his dreams. Then she tells him that Durkhani is engaged to Payo. [2]

The old woman carries news both ways. Durkhani, who has not left her house since childhood, comes to a wedding in Adam Khan's village, and he is asked to play. Each sees the other and no one else. After the guests leave, Adam Khan wastes away, and two friends, Mehru and Balu, bring him to her on a moonless night. [2]

Durkhani is married to another man and falls ill in her husband's house, and no healer can find the cause. She is sent back to her parents. Adam Khan's father, advised by his friend Mirmai, rides with armed men to Taus Khan's house and takes her by force. Taus Khan buys Mirmai's loyalty, and Mirmai returns her to her father. Adam Khan and his two friends then dress as beggars and sit at a shrine outside her village. The old woman brings Adam Khan to Taus Khan's house, where Durkhani knows him by his eyes. Taus Khan lifts his sword, the old woman talks him out of it, and Adam Khan is sent away. His father tries to marry him to a girl named Gulnaar, and he will not look at her. He dies. Durkhani hears of it in a dream and then in the old woman's words, calls his name and dies. [2]

The translation closes with what "storytellers say": there were two bodies in Durkhani's grave, a shrine to them stands in Swat, and two trees grew from the grave with their branches entwined, so that anyone who makes a rubab from their wood becomes the best of musicians. [2]

Names and details change from teller to teller

The Express Tribune's account of Changez Jan's novella, which Jan built from several versions, has a different cast. Adam Khan hears of Durkhanai from a visitor named Gulo Jan. Her suitor is Payo Khan, son of Malik Gul Khan. The wedding is that of her friend Baskai in Lower Bazdara, and the friend who helps Adam Khan is Mirwais. Adam Khan, his father and Durkhanai seek sanctuary with Malik Mir Mai, whom Payo Khan bribes to give her up. Adam Khan then goes mad, joins the yogis and dies, and Durkhanai dies when the news reaches her. [8] In the Pakistaniaat translation the man who is bribed to give her up is Mirmai, Hassan Khan's friend, and Adam Khan's helpers are Mehru and Balu. [2]

A third telling, posted on the folklore site Folkloristan in 2023 without naming its source, ends differently. Here Payu Khan falls in love with Durkhanai from her reputation and marries her, and she stays unhappy. She meets Adam Khan twice in the hujra where she took lessons, and after the second meeting the two flee. Payu Khan pursues them, and one of Adam's companions dies in the fight. Adam Khan wanders until a group of monks take him in and lead him to Payu Khan's house, where Durkhanai sees him and grows calm. His father, Hasan Khan, tries to marry him to a woman named Gulnaz, who leaves the village when she understands his love. Payu Khan, worn down by his wife's sadness, takes another wife and, seeing that he caused the tragedy, buries the lovers side by side in his garden. Workers who dig them up later find them in each other's arms, rebury them apart, and centuries later, finding them embraced again, leave them together. [5] The same page sets the tale in Swat in the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar. [5]

Even the name changes. Raverty, printing the Pashto prose telling in 1867, spells it Durkhana'i and in one sentence Durkhan. [1] The translators and journalists write Durkhani, Durkhanai or Durkhanay.

Bazdara, Swat

Muhammad Sheeraz, citing Muhammad Nawaz Tair's study of the tale (Pashto Academy, 1981), says most of the romance takes place in Bazdarra Payan and Bazdarra Bala in Swat, and that it ends at Misri Banda on the River Kabul. His own translation does not go there: its lovers die in Swat and the shrine stands in Swat. [2] Suliman Sayad, a lecturer in Pashto at Laghman University, notes a disagreement about where the lovers lived, and writes that both were from Swat. [3]

Sadr Khan's poem, as Sayad quotes it in English, opens with the Yusufzai in Swat, from the Khwakhozai to the Akozai, living up in the mountains where the air is mild and the girls are handsome. [3] Raverty's prose passage makes Taus Khan "a chief of the Yusufzis". [1] For the valley itself see Swat valley.

Adam Khan, the rubab and the tappa

The rubab is the reason the lovers meet. Dawn's report on the rubab player Gulab Khel Afridi in 2013 says the instrument "occupies a prominent place" in the tale, "where Durkhani is captivated by the spell-binding skill of rabab playing of Adam Khan at his hujra". Afridi told the paper that in a Pashto folk tale Durkhanai loved Adam Khan because he played well: one day he played at a friend's wedding, she heard the sound and climbed her house wall to see him. "May be true or untrue," Afridi said, "but this thing also contributed a lot to its mass popularity among Pakhtuns." [6] For the instrument itself see the rubab and Pashtun music.

Adam Khan sings as well as plays. In the Pakistaniaat translation the words of his tappas blend with the rubab, and when his love is hopeless he sings war epics for the first time. [2] The translator's note on the form says a tappa is one of the oldest genres of Pashto poetry, in two unequal lines. [2] That is the verse the site describes in the landay.

Sadr Khan's poem

Sayad dates the poem to 1118 AH, which is 1706 to 1707 in the Gregorian calendar, and says Sadr Khan Khattak wrote it as couplets of eight syllables. Sayad's abstract counts 2,587 couplets and his text says 2,687. [3] Sayad says Sadr Khan took the work on after his father Khushal Khan wished to versify the tale but died before he could, and that Sadr Khan began it eighteen years after Khushal's death. [3] Sayad quotes Sadr Khan as saying that he heard the story from a Yusufzai named Tati, and from tellers, and that tellers add and drop things as they pass it on. [3]

The Pashto Academy of Peshawar University printed the poem first in 1959, again in 1981 and a third time in 1989, with an introduction and a study of the tale by Muhammad Nawaz Tair; Sayad says the poem fills 155 pages in that edition. [3]

Abdul Qadir, Sadr Khan and the prose versions

Raverty, a British officer who wrote on Pashto in 1867, names two of Khushal's sons as authors of the tale. Of Abdul Qadir Khan he writes that he composed "the love tale of Adam and Durkhana'i, so celebrated throughout the Afghan country". Of Sadr Khan he writes that he composed "a poem on the popular love tale of Adam and Durkhana'i". [1] Raverty names a prose version too, by Fakhr-ud-Din Sahibzada, written "about a hundred years ago" from 1867. He also objects to Professor Dorn, who in his Chrestomathy had made Khushal Khan himself the author of the tale, and calls that conclusion "entirely incorrect". [1] Shazia Umbreen, of Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, credits Abdul Qadir Khan Khattak with the tale and dates it to 1100 AH (1688 to 1689). [4] Sayad and Umbreen therefore give two different poets and two different years. Only Raverty says that both sons wrote on the tale. The article on Abdul Qadir Khan Khattak gives his life.

Pakistaniaat lists the later versions. A prose telling by Masood is the first in prose, dated 1130 AH (1717 to 1718). A poem by Sayyid Abu Ali Shah of the nineteenth century is the one with the larger popular audience, the translator writes. A second prose telling is by Moulvie Ahmad of Tangi, whose first edition, arranged by a Christian missionary named Hues, appeared in 1872. Khalid Khattak published a second edition in 1991, and the translator writes that its colloquial language makes it more popular than the earlier prose. [2] Sayad adds Akbar Shah Peshawari, whose telling was published in Delhi in 1883, and Fida Mutahar and Hamesh Khalil among others, citing Zarin Anzor's study of Sadr Khan. [3] Urdu translations include those by Sahibzada Hamidullah Pashinwi, Farigh Bukhari and Raza Hamdani, and in 2008 Shafi Aqeel's. [2]

The Express Tribune's 2025 profile of Jan's novella says the tale was "first recorded in heroic couplets in the 17th century", without naming a poet or a year. [8]

A page of the prose, in Pashto

Raverty used a Pashto prose text of the tale for the example sentences in his grammar. He does not say whose. Its first sentence, on page 52, reads in his Pashto and English: [1]

یو سردار د یوسفزیو په دولت کښې لکه طهمورث و، په اسم طاووس خان نوماندی و، د دې یوه لور وه درخان نوماندی، او د حسن سیال ئې نه و

Yo sardār da Yusufzo pa dawlat kshe lake Tahmuras wo, pa ism Taus Khan numandey wo; da de yawa lor wa Durkhan numandey, aw da husn siyāl ye na wo.

"There was a chief of the Yūsufzīs, a Ṭahmūras in wealth, who was ycleped Tā'ous Khān. There was also a daughter of this chieftain, named Durkhān, and there was no equal to her in beauty."

Other sentences in the grammar come from the same story. In one Durkhanai asks her father, "All those of my own age learn to read; pray give directions that I also may learn to read." [1] In another she tells Narma'i to bring her news from every jirga that meets. [1] Changez Jan's novella also makes her a reader, of the Quran and of Akhund Darweza's Makhzan (Akhund Darweza), according to the Tribune. [8] Raverty gives no more of the reading than the request.

On screen and on stage

The film of Adam Khan aw Durkhanai followed Yousuf Khan Sherbano. The Express Tribune, in a 2013 piece on the assistant cameraman of that film, says the same team made it, that filming ended in 1970 and that it opened in 1971. It earned money, though not the acclaim of the first film. [7] The Pakistaniaat note says it starred Badar Munir and Yasmin, and that Arbab Abdul Wakeel wrote a stage play of the tale, with a printed script published in 2011. [2] A Dawn survey of Pashto cinema lists it among the productions of the years 1970 to 1990. [9] For the film industry see Pashto cinema and drama, and for the other famous tale of the same years, Yusuf Khan and Sherbano.

In February 2026, at a Peshawar gathering to honour the director Aziz Tabassum, two performers, Faisal Khayal (the son of Ustad Khial Mohammad) and Mashal Khan, gave a short staged performance of the tale. [10]