Ahmad Shah Durrani's diwan: the king's Pashto poems

At a glance

• Ahmad Shah Durrani (احمد شاه ابدالي), founder of the Durrani kingdom, also wrote Pashto poetry. Afghans call the collection his diwan and call him Ahmad Shah Baba. His reign is told in Ahmad Shah and the founding of the Durrani state and the poems are the subject here.

• Raverty translated twelve of the odes into English in 1862 and printed the Pashto of several in 1860. He called the collection scarce, even in eastern Afghanistan, and Sufi in tone. [1, 2]

• The Kabul edition of 1319 (1940), prepared by Abdul Hai Habibi for the Pashto Tolana, was put together from three manuscripts because the copies in circulation were full of copyists' errors. [3, 4]

• On his model, Habibi's edition first wrote him down as an imitator of Khushal Khan, then records later research showing he followed Rahman Baba. Ganda Singh calls the verse simple in language, traditional in construction and remarkable for its emotion. [3, 4]

The king who wrote odes

Raverty, who gave Ahmad Shah a notice of his own among the poets of the Selections, says that after the conquests of 1751 and 1752 the king passed four quiet years in which he "appears to have had time to devote himself to literature". [2] He held a majlis-i-ulama, an assembly of the learned, at stated times. The first part of the evening went to divinity and civil law, for Raverty says Ahmad Shah was himself a molawi, and the rest to conversation on science and poetry. [2] The odes, in Pashto "his own native tongue", were "tinged, as usual, with the mysticisms of the Sufis". Raverty adds that he also wrote several poems in Persian. [2]

Elphinstone's portrait, which Raverty copies out in full, says Ahmad Shah "was himself a divine and an author, and was always ambitious of the character of a saint". [2] Ganda Singh, writing in 1959, reads the poetry the same way from the other side: a man with "a fairly good taste in poetry", whose own verses "are simple in language and traditional in construction; and yet they are remarkable for their emotion". [4]

Manuscripts and printed editions

Raverty's preface of 1862 says that Afghan books "exist only in manuscript" and names Ahmad Shah's poems among those that were "rare, and seldom to be met with, even in Afghanistan". [2] He gave twelve odes in English in the Selections (pages 294 to 304), and had already printed several in Pashto in the Gulshan-i Roh (1860), in the section headed احمد شاه ابدالي. [1, 2] Each Pashto line there holds both halves of a couplet, the first half on the right, and the poet's name comes in the last line. [1]

Habibi, the Afghan scholar who prepared the 1940 Kabul edition, names the printed predecessors in his introduction: another book of Raverty's that quoted many of the poems as specimens, and the Rev. T. P. Hughes's Kalid-i Afghani, printed at Lahore in 1893, which chose a number of poems from the diwan. [3] He says the copies of the diwan in circulation had been spoiled by copyists, whose errors had ruined many verses, and that he therefore corrected the book against three manuscripts. [3] He describes them. One he found in Sindh, finely written with gold work but without the copyist's name or a date. A second belonged to the library of the Pashto Tolana in Kabul, also finely written, and full of mistakes by a scribe who did not know the language. The third was incomplete, lacking its opening, but dated Wednesday 6 Shawwal 1186 AH, which he calls the year of Ahmad Shah's death. He judges it the most correct, with many readings found in neither of the others. It belonged first to the Sadozai family of Kandahar and was then in the museum of the Kandahar municipality. [3] Ganda Singh records the same edition as the collection printed at Kabul in 1319 Afghani, 1940, titled Loy Ahmad Shah Baba. [4]

Habibi's book has two parts. The first is a long review of the king's standing as poet, scholar and writer, with the men of letters of his realm. The second is the diwan itself, in alphabetical order of the rhyme letters, with notes in the margins. [3]

What the odes are about

Most of the twelve that Raverty translated are love poems in the Sufi manner: the beloved's curls and mole, the nightingale and the rose, separation, the heart that will not be consoled. The first ode makes the lover Majnun and ends on the poet's own name:

Draw near, Ahmad Shah! learn thou love from Majnun! For he is famous, in the world, for his love of Layla. [2]

The ninth, which Raverty also printed in Pashto, is an address to the poet's heart, each couplet closing on the same words. Its opening runs:

نن ته بیا ولي ژړا کړي ځما دل، همیشه آه و غوغا کړي ځما دل

Nun ta byā wulē zhṛā kṛē ẓmā dil, hamēsha āh o ghoghā kṛē ẓmā dil.

Why weepest thou thus to-day again, O my heart? Thou sighest and complainest ever, O my heart! [1, 2]

In its last couplet the poet names himself and asks only to be employed "in beholding the dear one's face". [2]

Not all are about the beloved. The third, a satire on the fly, closes with the one line in Raverty's selection that mentions a sword: "Seize thou, O Ahmad Shah! the good sword of courage; And the Hindi temptations of the devil expel from thy breast!" The eleventh is a prayer of repentance: "I cry unto Thee, O God! for I am of my sins and wickedness ashamed". [2] The eighth ends by telling himself not to bend "under absence's load". [2] None of the twelve speaks of his campaigns or his crown.

Homeland and the throne of Delhi

The couplet most often quoted from the poems is not among Raverty's twelve. Habibi quotes it in his introduction, in a passage on Ahmad Shah's love of country. He calls the piece a sweet and eloquent badala in which the king's longing for his land shows. [3] Habibi's text reads:

د دهلي تخت هېروم چې رایاد کړم

ځما د ښکلي پښتونخوا د غرو سرونه

Da Dehlī takht hērawum chi rāyād kṛum, ẓmā da khkalī Pakhtūnkhwā da ghro sarūna.

I forget the throne of Delhi when I remember the summits of my beautiful Pashtunkhwa's mountains. [3]

Habibi sets beside it another couplet from the same piece, in which the poet says that however many lands of the world he may hold he will not forget "these beautiful gardens of yours". [3] Habibi writes that even when Ahmad Shah sat on the throne of the emperors of Delhi, among its palaces and gardens, he did not forget his country. [3] The English of both couplets here is the site's own.

The attribution questions

Raverty, Habibi and Ganda Singh do not question that the Pashto odes are his. The difficulties are the text and the Persian. Habibi's complaint is that copyists corrupted the diwan before it ever reached print. [3] Raverty says Ahmad Shah also wrote in Persian. [2] Habibi says he had a Persian diwan too, but that it is lost, and he gives the Persian couplets that are "ascribed" to him: two whose first line runs "Ma ba sulh-im u falak dar pay-i jang ast injā" (we are for peace, and the sky is bent on war here), taken from the Kabul magazine, volume 4, page 152, and one on a ruler who has left justice, which he says answers an opening couplet of his contemporary, the Persian poet Shaikh Ali Hazin, though Habibi thinks the king's couplet the weightier. [3] Ganda Singh adds that the Shah left no memoirs, and that of the dozen or so official letters ascribed to him in the Murasalat-i Ahmad Shah Durrani it cannot be said with certainty that he wrote them himself, since secretaries usually did. [4]

How later writers judged him

Raverty's judgement is the one already given: the odes are Sufi in tone. [2] Habibi's is more pointed. In a note at the end of his corrections he says the book's life of the king wrote him down as an imitator of Khushal Khan Khattak in poetic style, but that later research showed Ahmad Shah entered Rahman Baba's literary school and followed that famous poet's style. [3] Ganda Singh's view is quoted above; he also names two poets the king favoured at court, Waqif of Batala and Nizam-ud-Din Ishrat of Sialkot, who wrote a verse history of his reign. [4]