The hujra and the qala: Pashtun guest house and family compound

What a hujra is

In Pashtun villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the hujra (حجره) is the place where a host receives visitors, gives them food and shelter, and entertains them. A study of the institution published in The Dialogue in 2015 calls it the oldest social institution of Pashtun society and describes it as a place of rest and recreation for the whole village, with religious and social functions as well as everyday ones. The word itself comes from Arabic and means a room or cell. [1]

Hujras are held in different ways. Some belong to a single family that can afford to keep one, yet are used by the whole village. Others are built and maintained collectively. Dawn reported in 2020 on a village in which all 100 households, including its poorest resident, contributed money to rebuild a hujra that had collapsed. Where a hujra belongs to a household, its size and furnishings can signal the family's standing. [1] [2]

Names, setting and open doors

The institution goes by several local names. The 2015 study lists hujra or daira in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, kotta in Kabul, sarachah in Khost, jammah in Dera Ismail Khan, chawk in Lakki Marwat, and chowk, baitak or darman in Karak. It may be a single room, a building or an open area with a marked boundary. Many hujras have no door at all, a sign that anyone is welcome. [1]

Hospitality and everyday life

The hujra is the public face of a household's or a village's hospitality. Visiting relatives, officials, friends and strangers break their journeys there and are looked after. On ordinary evenings, older men talk over tea while younger men listen to their experience and serve them. [1]

Dawn's report describes the hujra as a community centre, social club, parliament, dispute resolution centre, wedding hall, and literary and traditional music club all at once. A Pashto scholar quoted in the report notes that other societies keep separate buildings for these purposes, while Pashtun villages gather them in one place. [2]

Councils, learning and the passing on of custom

Village matters are often settled in the hujra. Issues are put before the gathered men, discussed and brought to a consensus before being taken to the wider community, and jirgas, the councils of elders, are also convened there. For this reason the hujra is often described as a school for young men, where they learn the customs of Pashtunwali by watching their elders. [1] [2]

The hujra is also a male space. Dawn's report notes that in a typical Pashtun setting it is used only by men, and quotes the Peshawar women's rights activist Sana Ijaz arguing that women need community centres and libraries of their own in their villages. [2]

The qala: the walled family compound

Where the hujra faces outward, the qala faces inward. The word is used for a fortified "castle house", a family dwelling whose pattern some writers regard as an embodiment of Afghan Pashtun culture. A 2017 study by Sadruddin Tajik and colleagues in the Journal of Fine Arts: Architecture and Urban Planning argues that values drawn from Pashtunwali, namely independence, hospitality (melmastia), the protection of family honour (namus) and seyali, are built into the qala's plan and form. In the authors' account they show up as cooperation within the household, competition with outsiders, hospitality, and the protection of women, wealth and land. [3]

Rural houses in Afghanistan are usually built with what is at hand. Research on earthen building by Mohammadullah Hakim Ebrahimi and colleagues notes that raw earth is the main building material in the country, used as sun-dried brick and as pakhsa (layered cob), with wood and stone set in clay mortar on shallow stone foundations. The same study observes that the inward-looking courtyard house suits local social and cultural needs, and that building styles differ from region to region rather than following one national pattern. [4]

Two spaces, one household

Together, the two buildings separate public and private life. The Library of Congress country study of Pakistan explains that, in Pashtun custom, a man's honour depends on the reputation of the women of his family, and that women were for this reason largely kept within private family compounds in much of what was then the North-West Frontier Province. Guests, by contrast, are met with elaborate courtesy: the same study notes that a host or his sons may decline to sit with the guests they are serving, as a mark of respect. [5]

The qala study makes a similar point in architectural terms, treating the protection of the family's privacy and the welcoming of guests as two values that the house is designed to hold together. [3]

Change and decline

Both the hujra and the walled compound are changing. The 2015 study, based on interviews with 100 married men over 35 in the Karak district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, found that the hujra system still existed there but that its values had changed, and it linked those changes to migration from villages to cities. Its authors also point to economic hardship, insecurity and urbanisation as reasons for a wider decline. [1]

Dawn's 2020 report reached a similar conclusion, noting that the hujra's role has declined in a busy, technology-driven age, while also recording villages where people have chosen to rebuild their hujra together. [2]