Afzal Khan Khattak: Khattak chief and author of the Tarikh-i Murassa

At a glance

• Afzal Khan Khattak (افضل خان خټک) was a chief of the Khattaks, the son of Ashraf Khan Hijri and the grandson of Khushal Khan Khattak. [2, 3]

• He wrote the Tarikh-i Murassa (تاریخ مرصع), a Pashto history. Plowden renders the title "The Be-jewelled Chronicle", Raverty "the Gold and Gem Studded History", and Mikhail Pelevin "The Ornamented History". [1, 3, 5, 9]

• Raverty, who owned what he thought the only copy, says it ran to upwards of 1,600 pages in small folio. [3]

• Pelevin gives his life as 1665/66 to 1740/41 in his 2019 book; in another 2019 article he says "circa 1740". [9, 11]

• Raverty, Plowden, Caroe and later Pakistani historians all drew on the book, and Elphinstone had credited it to Khushal by mistake. [3–6, 8, 12, 13]

Khushal's grandson

Afzal was the son of Khushal's eldest son Ashraf. Khushal names him in a poem in which he reviews his life. In Plowden's English, the old chief says Ashraf "my scatter'd house together brought" when he went to prison, and, a few lines on:

I now five grandsons have, ('mongst them) Afzal (son) of Ashraf Khan: God grant him long to live! of him great hopes I entertain. [5]

That is the poem's own text in Plowden's 1875 translation, which gives no Pashto for the lines. The poem names no age for the boy. [5]

Raverty says Ashraf's brother Bahram betrayed him to the Mughals, in 1681 by one of Raverty's dates and 1683 by another, and Aurangzeb sent him to Bijapur. Afzal, then seventeen, took up arms in his father's cause, and Khushal installed him as chief, but Raverty says the youth could not yet cope with Bahram, who had Mughal support. [2] The old man, to stop the clansmen shedding each other's blood, let Bahram hold the chiefship and told Afzal to wait and not lengthen his father's captivity by opposing the Mughals for the present. Afzal withdrew with his family into Afridi country. [2]

Bahram's line and the chiefship

Every account of this quarrel in the sources comes from Khushal, from Ashraf's descendants or from writers who used them, and Afzal wrote as Ashraf's son. No writing by Bahram or by his line appears in any of them.

Khushal's own verse is the harshest. In Biddulph's English a poem to Bahram begins "Thou hast never learnt the Chieftain's art, Bahram". It says "Thy elder brother hast thou imprisoned, thou holdest his sway" and that Bahram aimed at the chiefship "by means of gold". It ends with the prayer "May thy name be erased from amongst my sons". [7] Raverty's introduction to his Grammar says Bahram several times tried to seize his father's person to confine him and sometimes tried to take his life, "in order to get the chieftainship into his own hands". [3]

Olaf Caroe does not take it from the family alone. He writes that not all of Khushal's tribe, "not even all his own family", rebelled with him, and that a younger son, Bahram, "consistently took the Mughal part, fought against his father, and even sought to secure his capture and surrender to the imperial authorities". [8] Sultan-i-Rome (2014), a Pakistani historian, makes the quarrel a cause of the war. He writes that Khushal was pushed to arms when his son Bahram "became his rival for the chieftainship and thus his tribe also divided". He adds that the Kabul governor Mahabat Khan conspired with Khushal's sons, which divided the Khattaks between those fighting for the Mughals and those against. [12] So the sources agree that Bahram stood with the Mughals and against his father. None of them gives Bahram's own reasons.

How Afzal came to the chiefship is told two ways. Raverty's notice of Khushal's son Abd-ul-Kadir says that after Bahram seized the chiefship "subsequently, Afzal Khan, the son of Ashraf, became chief of the clan", the tribe being "unanimous in favour of Ashraf's son Afzal, in whom was the hereditary right". [2] In his Grammar Raverty says Afzal succeeded his grandfather "on the death of his father in the Dakhan". [3] Neither passage gives a year. Caroe has Afzal at Attock with the prince Shah Alam when news of Aurangzeb's death arrived in 1707, left in charge of the family's old duty, the highway to Peshawar. [8]

Raverty adds the cost. Abd-ul-Kadir, Afzal's uncle and a poet, wanted the chiefship himself, and Raverty says Afzal "saw no other practicable solution of the difficulty, according to the custom of those days, than to get rid of all rivals". Abd-ul-Kadir, ten of his brothers and a number of their sons were put to death in one day at Zaman Garraey and buried in one grave. [2] Raverty does not say where he took the account from. For what it did to the next generation see Kazim Khan Shaida, Afzal's son. [2]

What the Tarikh-i Murassa contains

In 1867 Raverty wrote that the only known copy was before him, that it ran to upwards of 1,600 pages in small folio, and that the author was Afzal Khan, "who ... succeeded his grandfather, Khushhal". [3] The Pashto contents of his Gulshan-i Roh (1860) list it first among the prose works, as تاریخ مرصع د محمد افضل خان ختک (in Raverty's spelling), "the Tarikh-i Murassa of Muhammad Afzal Khan Khattak". [1] He says an extract from it is printed in that book. [4]

Mikhail Pelevin of St Petersburg State University divides it. The original part is "The Khattaks' Chronicle", which Khushal and then Afzal wrote over several decades. It survives as a mass of different texts: Khattak lineages and genealogical traditions, historical records, memoirs, diaries, letters, declarations and many verses. Pelevin calls it both a primary source on the Peshawar valley and an early anthology of Pashto narrative prose, and says Afzal added it as a supplement to a wider historical compilation. [9–11] The Pashto journal Pashto describes the whole as the first large Pashto work of history, covering the Pashtuns, the Khattaks and the Mughals, and as a work in which Afzal quotes Persian poets from Abu Said Abul Khair and Nizami to Saadi, Hafiz, Amir Khusrau and Jami. [14]

Plowden's translation of selections (1875) shows the shape of the Khattak half. It opens with the Karlanri and Ghoria Khel Afghans leaving Kandahar for Kabul and Peshawar, where the text cites Akhund Darweza's Tazkirat al-Abrar. [5] Another chapter gives the Khattak pedigree from Khushal's own notebook, in twenty generations ending "Afzal Khan, the son of Ashraf Khan, the son of Khush-hal Khan". [5] Others tell the Khattak migration from Shwal, Malik Ako at Khwara, the tract the Khattaks held about 1710, and their feuds with the Bangash, Lohani, Waziri, Awan, Afridi and Yusufzai neighbours, ending with the death of Khushal's father Shahbaz Khan in 1640. [5] Raverty adds that Afzal quotes the Tabakat-i-Akbari and "renders literally from Persian into Push'to" the account of Babur at Bajaur. [4]

The book also speaks in the first person. Raverty's Grammar prints a sentence in which Afzal speaks of himself: "I then sent for the Khattak force, and the Muhmandis and Aoria Khels ... Came to my assistance". [3] The same book quotes Afzal on his grandfather's last stand against Mukarram, Bahram's son. Khushal came down from his hiding place with his drawn sword and called out, in Raverty's English, "Whoever are men amongst you, come to the sword, if you dare". Veneration for the old man was so strong that "no one would make any attempt to lay hands on him". [2] The scene is in Raverty's notice of Khushal and, again, as an example sentence in his Grammar. [2, 3]

Other books by Afzal

Raverty's Grammar lists a second work, a Pashto translation of the fables of Pilpay. Afzal began it, as he says in his preface, in his fifty-third year, from Abul Fazl's abridgment of the Anwar-i Suhaili. He first called it Iyar-i Danish and then, at a second revision, Hilm Khana-i Danish or Kalila wa Dimna. [3] The Pashto contents of the Gulshan-i Roh give it as کلیله و دمنه یا علم خانهٔ دانش د محمد افضل خان ختک. [1] Raverty adds that Afzal made other translations from Arabic and Persian, among them a life of Muhammad, and left four sons, one of them the poet Kazim Khan Shaida. [3]

None of the sources read quotes a poem by Afzal. Raverty's selections give poems by his father Ashraf, his uncle Abd-ul-Kadir and his son Kazim. [2] The Pashto contents of the Gulshan-i Roh list the diwans of Ashraf and Kazim but none of Afzal. [1]

How later writers used the book

Elphinstone's Account of the Kingdom of Caubul says Khushal, on his release, "published a vast number of poems, and a history of the Afghauns, from the Babylonish captivity to his own time". [6] Raverty answers that this is wrong and that the history in question is Afzal's. [3]

Raverty then used it constantly. His Grammar takes example sentences for its rules "from the best writers", and at least nine of them are Afzal's. [3] In his Notes on Afghanistan (1888) he cites "Muhammad Afzal Khan, the Khatak chief, grandson of the famous Khush-hal Khan" for Pakhli, which Afzal says was without a faujdar from the year Raverty prints as 1118 AH up to 1123 AH (1711 to 1712), so the book records events into 1712. [4] He also corrects others who had used it. Bellew, he says, "appears to have quite misunderstood the passage" on Babur at Bajaur, and the book gives "no details whatever" of the Sheikh Patur battle that Bellew and Plowden placed near Nowshera. [4]

Plowden's 1875 translation of extracts was made for officers sitting the Pashto examination. He collated them with a manuscript and recorded places where the printed text had added words that were not in the manuscript. [5] Caroe used "the writings of Afzal" to show that in the last ten years of Aurangzeb's reign no part of what are now Kohat and Bannu districts was under effective Mughal rule. [8]

The book is now an edited text. Dost Muhammad Khan Kamil Momand edited it, and Pelevin cites his Peshawar edition of 1974. [9] Later Pakistani articles cite a 2006 reprint from University Book Agency. [12, 13] An article in Pashto (2020) compares two printed editions by the rules of textual criticism. [14] Sultan-i-Rome cites it for Khushal's imprisonment and his later wars. [12] Yaqubi, Khattak and Rabbi (2023) use it for Akor Khan's meeting with Akbar, and add that its account of his refusing a rank "needs proper analysis". [13] Dawn (2020) repeats from it that the Kabul governor Amir Khan told Aurangzeb a ban on tax collection would be useless unless Khushal were "tackled with an iron hand". [15]

Pelevin has used it in two further ways. One article reads it with Khushal's writings as advice literature, "mirrors for princes" from the Khattak chiefs. [9] Another draws demographic figures from the Khattaks' Chronicle, such as birth dynamics, infant mortality and epidemics. [10]