Ashraf Khan Hijri: Khattak chief and poet of exile at Bijapur

At a glance

• Ashraf Khan Khattak (اشرف خان خټک) was the eldest son of Khushal Khan Khattak. Raverty gives his birth as 1044 AH (1634) and puts his death in 1105 AH (1693) in his sixtieth year; a 2025 article by Mikhail Pelevin gives 1694. [2, 5]

• He became chief of the Khattaks when his father stepped down. Raverty dates that to 1681, and Caroe has Khushal giving up the chiefship in 1674. [2, 4]

• In Raverty's account his brother Bahram betrayed him to the Mughals. Raverty puts the betrayal in 1681 in one notice and in 1683 in another, and Caroe says 1683. [2, 4]

• Aurangzeb sent him to Bijapur in the Deccan, where he lived out the rest of his life. [2]

• In exile he wrote a diwan of Pashto poems under the pen-name Hijri (هجري), "of separation". Raverty translates it "the Severed" or "the Exiled". [1, 2]

• His son Afzal Khan wrote a long history of the Afghans, the Tarikh-i Murassa. [2]

The eldest of Khushal's sons

Khushal Khan Khattak was the chief and poet of the Khattaks. He had, Raverty says, fifty-seven sons and several daughters, and of them "four or five" seemed to Raverty worthy of their father's affection. [2] Ashraf was the eldest. Raverty gives his birth as 1044 AH, or 1634, and his age at death as sixty, which agrees. [2]

Khushal's own verse says more about Ashraf than any chronicle does. In Biddulph's English version of a long poem on his arrest and imprisonment, Khushal tells how he sent word to his tribe and to Ashraf Khan not to take up arms, because the Khattaks were the Emperor's old and faithful servants and the fighting would kill Pathans. [3] He says he wrote all a father's advice in a book for Ashraf. [3] He also reproaches him. Of all the tribe's leaders, he says, Ashraf Khan and Bahram were among those whose counsel failed, and he gave Ashraf the signal to draw his sword and Ashraf did nothing. [3] Biddulph's version has the line "Alas! O Ashraf Khan, no such resolution was thine". [3]

In another place the father speaks differently. In a poem that lists his family, Khushal says Ashraf Khan "is my son, who collected my scattered household", for when he was led away a prisoner his family was dispersed, and he adds that he has twenty-four other sons "but the greatest of all is he". [3] In the poem on his arrest he says "I in Hind, a prisoner, and Ashraf Khan in Cabul", and that a man named Jagram, whom he calls a Hindu, bore Ashraf away to Kabul. [3] The translation does not say why Ashraf was at Kabul or in whose custody.

Chief of the Khattaks

Two writers date Ashraf's chiefship differently. Olaf Caroe, telling the Mughal war of the 1670s, says Khushal and Aimal Khan of the Afridis took the Mughal fort at Nowshera in 1674, and that Khushal also gave up the chiefship to his eldest son Ashraf, "regarding himself henceforth as a rebel and outlaw". [4] For the Afridi side of that war see Aimal Khan and Darya Khan.

Raverty tells it in two notices that do not agree on the year. In his notice of Khushal he writes that when the war died away, the death of Aimal Khan and Darya Khan and the buying-off of the lesser clans left the old chief "disgusted", and he resigned the chiefship to Ashraf and gave himself to books. [2] In his notice of Ashraf he dates the resignation to 1093 AH, which is 1681. [2] The two accounts therefore differ by seven years, and no source settles it. Caroe's date belongs to the war itself; Raverty's falls after the war had ended.

Raverty says Ashraf tried for some time to govern the clan and also to do his duty to the Mughal government by helping the officers at Peshawar. [2] He was thwarted by his brother Bahram. Khushal called Bahram "the Degenerate" and "the Malignant", and Raverty says he was always regarded with aversion by his father. [2] Bahram gathered a considerable party, and the brothers fought several times. On one occasion Bahram was taken prisoner and played on Ashraf's pity until he was set free. Khushal, who knew his son, was angry with Ashraf for letting him go. [2]

The wider setting is in Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier: the Khattaks held the road from Attock to Peshawar as Mughal vassals, and a chief of the Khattaks had to answer both to his tribe and to the governor. [2]

Betrayed to Aurangzeb

Raverty says Bahram, once free, went back to his intrigues and at last betrayed Ashraf into the hands of the Mughals. In the notice of Khushal this is dated 1093 AH (1681). [2] In the notice of Ashraf he gives 1095 AH (1683), and Caroe also writes 1683. [2, 4] The two Raverty dates sit in the same book, a hundred pages apart, and the later one agrees with Caroe.

Raverty's account of what followed is short. Aurangzeb was by then in the Deccan, where the affairs of the south had called him and where he stayed for several years. The Khattak chief was taken along as a state prisoner, and was later sent to the fortress of Bijapur, "situated in what is, at present, termed the Southern Mahratta country". [2] Raverty says he "continued to languish in exile for the remainder of his life". [2] Caroe says the same in fewer words: sent in 1683 as a state prisoner to Bijapur, where he died after ten years in exile, "bewailing his fate in a number of odes". [4]

Bahram took the chiefship with Mughal support. Afzal Khan, Ashraf's seventeen-year-old son, was set up in his place by his grandfather, who was still regarded by most of the Khattaks as their rightful chief, but he could not yet face Bahram. Khushal, to stop the clansmen shedding each other's blood, let Bahram hold the chiefship and told Afzal to wait and not prolong his father's captivity by opposing the Mughals. Afzal withdrew with his family into Afridi country. [2]

Hijri, the separated

Raverty says Ashraf wrote verse in his spare time before he became chief, urged on by his father's example and by his brothers Abd-ul-Qadir and Sadr Khan. In exile he wrote "a great number of poems" and gathered them himself as a diwan, an alphabetical collection. [2] He took the pen-name Hijri (هجري), which Raverty renders "The Severed" or "Exiled". [2] The Pashto word is Arabic: hijr is separation. A poet's pen-name in a ghazal appears in the last couplet, and Hijri's is printed in that place in Raverty's Gulshan-i Roh. [1] Raverty adds that "many of his poems, written in the most pathetic style, plainly tell where, and under what circumstances, they were composed". [2]

Raverty also records where the diwan was in 1862. The copy that Ashraf himself had arranged and written at Bijapur, he says, was still held by his descendants, and he knew of no other copy. [2] The Afghans, he says, thought Ashraf a good poet but regarded his poems, "without reason apparently", as difficult and abstruse. [2] A later edition of the diwan, by H. Khalil, appeared at Peshawar in 1958 according to the footnotes of Pelevin's 2025 article, which also notes that Ashraf signed some verses "Khattak" and "Rohi", Roh being an early modern name for the Pashtun country. [5] Raverty's selection prints seventeen poems, and his Pashto text of them is in the Gulshan-i Roh. [1, 2]

The verses below are in Raverty's English from Selections (1862); the Pashto is as he printed it in Gulshan-i Roh (1860). The transliteration is the site's, using Peshawari kh for ښ. Each Pashto line holds both halves of the couplet, the right-hand half first.

The first poem of the diwan, as Raverty prints it, ends with the couplet in which the poet names the place that held him:

بیجاپور هجري په خوب لیدلي نه وه، آخر پیښ شي هغه کار چه یې قضا کا

Bijāpūr Hijrī pa khob lēdalī na wa, ākhir pēkh shī hagha kār che ē qazā kā.

The Severed had never beheld Bijapur, even in his dreams; but, at last, that presenteth itself, which his destiny decreed! [1, 2]

Raverty's note to the line says only that Bijapur was "the name of the fortress in which he was confined". [2] A later ode is about leaving home. Attak is the fort on the Indus, and the poet looks back at it as he leaves:

ما هله ماتم د ځان وه کړ په وینو، چه اتک ته مي شا کړه په ژړا شوم

Mā hala mātam da dzān wa kṛ pa wēno, che Atak ta me shā kṛa pa zhṛā shwam.

At that time, for my life, in tears of blood I mourned, when, turning my back upon Attak, I weeping began. [1, 2]

The same poem goes on with the Deccan. Raverty's English has the prisoner say that he crossed "to the other bank of Narbada's swift stream", that "there is no magician in the Dakhan that can charm me", and that he is "a prisoner become, in a dragon's cavern profound". [2] Another poem ends on the cause of the separation, which Raverty glosses in a note as the poet's captivity in India:

یاره ته به هجري پرې نه ښوي په روغه، په ستم سره بیل جور د بادشاه کړو

Yāra, ta ba Hijrī prē na khwī pa roghā, pa sitam sara bēl jawr da bādshāh kṛo.

Living, O friend! The Separated would not have left thee; but 't is the king's tyranny that hath, by force, parted us! [1, 2]

Not every poem is about the Deccan. Several are moral poems on the faithlessness of the world: the world is "a faithless bride, that destroyeth her husband", and its friends are flies around a sweetmeat-seller's shop. [2] In poem IV, the poet says, "Khattak that I am, with exile I am never content", and puts the blame on affection for a friend that has "severed me" from his kin. [2] Raverty also prints a claim to the first place among Pashto poets. The sixteenth poem ends:

دا محال دي چه شاعر به په پښتو کښې، بل هجري غندې په فن د شعر فرد وي

Dā muhāl dē che shā'ir ba pa Pakhto kkhe, bal Hijrī ghandē pa fan da she'r fard wī.

It is out of the question altogether, that in Pushto any other bard shall, like The Separated, so unrivalled in the art poetic be. [1, 2]

Raverty's selection also shows what a ghazal of the period carried: in one poem the beloved's plaited forelock, nose-ring and eyelashes are described, and Raverty adds a long footnote on the girls' hairstyle of the time. [2] The same poet who wrote those lines wrote the poems of exile.

Pelevin's 2025 article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society places Ashraf among two classical Pashtun poets who developed the idea of poetry as "licit magic", and quotes him calling his verse siḥr-i bayān, "the magic of speech". [5]

Death in Bijapur

Raverty gives the date of death as 1105 AH (1693), "in the 60th year of his age". [2] Caroe says he died after ten years of exile. [4] Pelevin gives 1694. [5] The difference is a year; no source says where in Bijapur he lived or how he died.

His son brought him home. When Afzal Khan "became firmly established in the chieftainship", Raverty says, he had his father's remains taken from Bijapur to Sari'e, where the Khattak chiefs were usually buried, a distance of some fifteen hundred miles. [2] Raverty gives no year. Khushal had died in 1689, so he did not see the burial. In his lifetime Khushal had asked, as Raverty tells it, that if any of his faithful children ever laid hands on Bahram the Malignant, they should divide the body in two and burn one half at the head of his grave and one at the foot. [2]

Afzal Khan and the Tarikh-i Murassa

Afzal Khan, Ashraf's son, became chief after Bahram. Raverty writes that the whole tribe favoured Afzal, in whom the hereditary right lay. [2] Raverty reports a harsh settlement of the succession. He says Afzal saw no way, "according to the custom of those days", except to get rid of rivals, and that Abd-ul-Qadir, the poet, with ten of his brothers and a number of their sons were put to death at the village of Zaman Garraey in one day and buried in one grave. [2]

Afzal was also a writer. Raverty calls his history "that rare, excellent, and extensive Afghan history, entitled 'Tarikh-i-Murassaz'" and quotes Afzal's account of his grandfather's last stand against Mukarram Khan, Bahram's son. [2] Caroe adds that Afzal acted as tribal aide to the prince Shah Alam and, when news of Aurangzeb's death came to Attock in 1707, was left in charge of his family's old duty, the highway to Peshawar. [4] Raverty names Afzal as the father of the poet Kazim Khan Shaida, born within five years of 1722; see Kazim Khan Shaida. [2]

For the wider background of Pashto poetry, see Pashto literature and oral poetry.