The charbeta: Pashto sung verse of battles, chiefs and love

At a glance

• The charbeta (چاربیته, chārbayta) is a long sung Pashto poem built on a refrain. The first lines set a rhyme, every stanza closes on that rhyme, and the refrain comes back after each stanza. [1, 3]

• After the tappa it is the most popular form of Pashto folk poetry, and a charbeta runs from about 25 to 200 verses. [5]

• Singers perform it in the hujra to the rabab and mangay, and many of its poets could not write. [1, 5]

• Its subjects are battles, the murders of chiefs, the Prophet and his companions, love, and the news of the day, from a railway to a rising. [1, 5]

• It is passed on by voice and by cheap chapbooks sold in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar. [1, 4]

A name and a place in the evening

The name means four verses: chār, four, and bayt, a couplet of two half-lines. [1] Sher Alam Shinwari says its stanzas are usually four couplets. [5] James Darmesteter, counting the half-lines, called it a quatrain. [1] The Pashto heading he prints over a song of 1831 uses the word: da Nūr-ud-dīn Akhūn chārbayta, "the charbeta of Nur-ud-din Akhun". [2] On the instruments and the other sung forms, see the rabab, the attan and Pashtun music.

Jadwiga Pstrusińska, a Polish scholar who set out the forms of Afghan poetry in 1971, describes the order of an evening of singing. The rubāʿī, a slow, moral monorhyme, is sung first, as soon as the music starts, to bring the listeners to attention. The ghazal, the qasida and the charbeta follow, and then the rest. [3] On that couplet, see the landay.

Refrain and stanza

Pstrusińska calls the charbeta one of the most popular Afghan forms and compares its build to the qasida and the masnawi: it suits a tale, or any theme that needs a longer form, and it has the work of a ballad. One motive must be developed from start to finish, not several mixed together. [3] Every charbeta has a refrain, which singers call sar, kasar or piro. The refrain stands at the head of the poem and returns after each stanza. The first one is two bayts long and the later ones one bayt. The first line of the first stanza rhymes with the refrain, and so does the last bayt of every stanza. [3]

Darmesteter, who heard and wrote down such songs at Peshawar and Abbottabad in 1886, calls the cār baita essentially the verse of the ballad and describes its shape in French. The piece opens like a ghazal, with a line of two half-lines that rhyme together. Each stanza then has three half-lines on a rhyme of its own and a fourth that rhymes with the opening. A stanza can also take four half-lines before the rhyme of the refrain, and a doubled form exists in which each half-line becomes a line with its own two halves. [1] He traced the pattern to the musammat of Indian Muslim poets, used in the laments sung at Muharram, and thought Pashto singers took it from there. [1] That is his view, and Pstrusińska does not repeat it.

The sources disagree on how long a stanza is. Pstrusińska gives four to twenty half-lines. [3] Sher Alam Shinwari, reviewing a book of charbetas in Dawn in 2013, says stanzas are usually four couplets, eight lines, and that the whole poem runs from 25 to 200 verses. [5]

They differ on the refrain too. In the songs Darmesteter printed it comes back word for word. Pstrusińska writes that its words change after each stanza and that only the rhyme stays fixed. [1, 3]

Here is the opening of Nur-ud-din's song for Faiz Ullah Khan, the Mohmand chief of Hazarkhani, as Darmesteter printed it. It is a refrain of two lines:

په خزان توی شوی د تمام مهمند سرداره

د بلبلانو سترګی سری شوی له خماره

Pa khazān tuy shwi da tamām Mohmand sardāra

Da bulbulāno stargi sri shwi la khumāra

You have melted away in your autumn, chief of all the Mohmands. The eyes of your nightingales have gone red with drunkenness.

The Pashto is copied from the printed text [2] and the English is Darmesteter's French put into English; the transliteration is not his. The song has seven stanzas and the refrain closes them. [1] The nightingales are the women of the chief's house, as Darmesteter's note says. [1]

A shorter specimen in Pstrusińska's article, by a poet named Khanamir, shows what her stanzas are like in the patriotic mood: [3]

pə čap ke ḍāl pə ṣe xandžar nisama

də yalim maxa barābar nisama

yā ba sidka hpəl watan ši zmā

ya ba pə sro wino kafan ši zmā

I shall take a shield into my left hand and a sword into my right, I shall stand facing my enemy. My country will be truly my own, or there will be red blood on my winding sheet.

The singer and the hujra

Darmesteter's name for the singer is dum, which he translated as minstrel and compared with the bard of the Gauls. [1] He says that the learned poet who has read Hafiz and Sa'di and writes imitations in Pashto looks down on the dum, but that the people like him. They come to hear his songs and rhymed tales in the common room of the village, the hujra. [1] On the house itself, see the hujra and the qala.

His account of an evening is worth giving whole. "The song is the passion of the Afghans," he wrote. "When three Afghans are together, there is a singer among them." Often at the evening gathering a man stands up, takes the rabab and sings. Perhaps he is under a charge that could cost his life, perhaps tomorrow he will be in the hills looking for shelter, but while the song lasts everything is forgotten. [1]

The singer is trained. A new singer goes to a famous master, the ustād, and becomes his shāgird. The master teaches him his own songs, then those of the great singers living and dead and the best loved songs of Khushal Khan Khattak, and takes him to the hujra and to festivals, private and public, where he has been asked. The master keeps half of the fee and shares the rest among his pupils. [1] Darmesteter says a good singer died rich: Mira, the author of the song called Zakhme, in old age would not open his mouth for less than 50 rupees and at the wedding of the Nawab of Peshawar's son was paid 500. [1]

The poet puts his name in the last verse. That makes theft easy, as Darmesteter noted: you need only put your name where the real author's stood. A Pashto saying he cites, from the singer Shamak, who was said to have done just that, means "Enough, Shamak, you have only signed at the end." [1] The young man of Abbottabad who recited to him a song on Ahmad Shah's victory at Panipat claimed it, and Darmesteter thought he had only put his name to a song that was older. [1]

Darmesteter had a theory about who these singers were. He thought the dum belonged to a hereditary caste of musicians, that a Pashtun was too proud to perform in public, and that the forms and the poets were Indian. [1] His own list does not bear this out. The poets he names include an oil seller, a gardener, a washerman, a weaver, a retailer, and Mira, whose father was a Pashtun. [1] Ahsan Baba, below, belonged to a Pashtun literary society.

What the songs are about

Darmesteter put the 114 songs he published into five groups: historical, religious, romantic legends, love, and customs and folklore. [1] The Pashto singers did not use his categories, but they show how wide the subjects are. Dawn adds a history of the form. The earliest charbetas, in the early seventeenth century by Sher Alam Shinwari's account, retold Islamic fables, hymns and the lives of the prophets, and Muvaiz Yousafzai is the earliest poet he names. [5]

The historical songs are the ones that outlast their singers. A chief is killed, a battle is lost or won, and a song is made within days. Darmesteter's collection holds songs on:

• Faiz Ullah Khan of the Mohmands, killed by treachery in Pir Muhammad Khan's palace at Peshawar, a brother of Dost Muhammad Khan. Darmesteter's translation volume dates this 1829 and the heading of the Pashto text 1831. In the song Faiz Ullah says he saw a chain of death fall on him in a dream, and answers the messenger who calls him to the Barakzai sardars with a question: will we ever leave the palace of traitors alive? The nightingales of the refrain are his women. [1]

• The defeat of Yar Muhammad Khan Barakzai by Sayyid Ahmad's men in 1828, in a song whose refrain prays for God to give the victory to the Sayyid. [1]

• Sayyid Ahmad's last battle at Balakot in 1831, in a song of Gul Muhammad. [1]

• The Buner war of 1863, in Nur Shali's song for the mujāhids. Its refrain says that they have come from India and set out for the holy war. It says the Firangis, the British, had gathered a dense army at Topi, that the news went from Calcutta and the Company as far as London, and that when the men of Buner pursued them, shouting their war cry with curved swords and shields in hand, the Firangis left their ramparts empty. Darmesteter noted that the East India Company had been abolished six years earlier, but that people in Buner did not know it. [1]

• The fighting of 1879 in the war of Kabul. In Ali Jan's song, Mullah Khalil goes from village to village praying and begging men to rise, raises an army, and sees the men run when the cannon sounds. The refrain says that fine flowers have gone from Chār Mēsā, as Darmesteter spells the name, and that many martyrs have gone, cut by shining swords. A traitor, the song says, took foreign money. [1]

• The song Mahmud Jan made for the opening of the railway from Attock to Peshawar about 1880, which tells the listener to leave this wonder and look at another, the news that goes along a wire. [1]

A singer could also judge. Nur Shali's Buner song names Zaid Ullah Khan of Dagar, who went to the British at night, and tells how an officer called James promised him five annas a day for life. The poet's answer is a prayer that God strike his family with leprosy. [1]

Darmesteter wrote that the Afghans had no press and that the song took the place of the newspaper: every event of politics at once found an echo in popular verse, and one could rewrite the history of modern Afghanistan from songs, a history, in his words, that would differ greatly from the one the Europeans wrote. [1] He also reports that Hayat Muhammad, who published a history of the Afghans at Lahore in 1865, put a large part of the rising against the British in 1839 down to the sermons of mullahs and the songs of the poets. [1]

The poets

Darmesteter's best known names are Nur-ud-din of Barbar near Peshawar, whom he calls one of the best known poets of the Sikh period, Muhammad-din of Nowshera, called Tilai, "the oil seller", and Mira. [1] The names of these men are known because they signed their songs.

The twentieth century made the charbeta a tool of the reform movement. Dawn's review of Charbetay, a book of 267 pages published by the Pukhto Adabi Tolana Kheshgi Naukhar and compiled by the poet's grandson, says that under British rule poets used the form to move people against the authorities, which led to arrests and the confiscation of their works. [5] It says Bacha Khan asked poets to rouse the people, abandon old customs and educate women, and that Akhun Meer Hassan Ahsan Baba (1906 to 1987) was the first to follow that advice closely. He joined the Naukhar Pukhto Adabi Jirga, founded in 1933, and in 1935 won an award for a charbeta made on the spot about the Quetta earthquake. [5] The reviewer says his poems uphold Pashtunwali, justice and moral integrity and condemn British aggression and the ills of Pashtun society. [5] He gives the marks of a good charbeta: continuity, fluency, coherence and mastery of the language. [5]

From voice to page

Darmesteter heard his songs the way singers still pass them on. He had a singer brought in, who sang; his munshi wrote the words from dictation and they studied them together, because the songs were full of allusions he could not otherwise follow. [1] Singers seldom had written copies, and he calls oral teaching the great means of transmission. [1] He worked at Peshawar in April 1886 and at Abbottabad from May to September, where Maulavi Muhammad Ismail Khan gave him most of his collection. [1] He found some of the songs in a manuscript that a literate police officer had made for a British deputy commissioner of Hazara. [1]

In the twentieth century the print came from Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar, the Bazaar of the Storytellers. Wilma Heston, whose collection is now at the University of Pennsylvania, began buying Pashto chapbooks there in 1982. The booklets were first meant to supply the texts of sung verse tales that were then recorded and sold on audio cassettes. [4] The narrative verse in them is often broken up by shorter forms, among them the ghazal, the tappa and the chārbaita, which the finding aid of her collection at the University of Pennsylvania calls a quatrain. [4] William Hanaway and Mumtaz Nasir collected over 800 chapbooks between September 1989 and February 1990. The year of printing is usually not given, and an author's pen name often changes from one printing to another. [4] Chapbook printing in Pashto goes back to the nineteenth century. [4]