Kazim Khan Shaida: the Khattak poet of Rampur

At a glance

• Kazim Khan (کاظم خان) took the pen name Shaida (شیدا), "the devoted" or "the lovelorn". He was a Pashto poet of the Khattak chiefly house, born in the Khattak country about 1722 to 1727. [2, 3]

• His line ran from Khushal Khan Khattak to his son Ashraf Khan, to Ashraf's son Afzal Khan the historian, to Kazim. He was Khushal's great-grandson. [2, 3]

• He left the Khattak country as a young man, spent years in Kashmir and at Sirhind, and passed most of his life at Rampur among the Rohilla Afghans, where he died unmarried. [2, 3]

• His odes are in an Indian-Persian manner of conceits and learned allusion. Raverty found them "highly polished, but deep and difficult". [2]

• Raverty dates his birth to the five years after 1135 AH (1722) and gives no death date. A modern paper gives 1135 to 1194 AH, about 1722 to 1780. [2, 3]

Khushal's great-grandson

Khushal Khan Khattak, the warrior-poet who died in 1689, had sons who wrote, and so did their sons. Pashto literature of the eighteenth century leans on that one family.

Henry George Raverty, the British officer who printed Pashto verse in the 1860s, wrote the first account of Kazim in English. He says Kazim was the son of Muhammad Afzal Khan, chief of the Khattaks and author of several large prose works in Pashto, who was the son of the poet Ashraf Khan. That makes Kazim, in Raverty's count, the great-grandson of Khushal. [2] A modern Urdu paper on his poetry gives the same line: son of the historian Afzal Khan Khattak, grandson of Ashraf Khan Hijri, great-grandson of Khushal. [3]

Raverty owned the only manuscript of Kazim's poems and says so in the preface of his Gulshan-i Roh (1860), which lists "the Poems of Kazim Khan, Shaida" beside the history by his father Afzal. [1]

Why he left

Raverty tells the reason as a chain of events. On the death of Afzal Khan the chieftainship fell to Kazim's elder brother Asad-ullah Khan. Asad-ullah dealt severely with his brothers and other near male kin, "after a fashion too common in Eastern countries" in Raverty's words. Kazim was "quite a youth" and could not bear it. He separated from his brother and gave up the jagir, the land grant, he held. [2]

Asad-ullah, who seems to have favoured Kazim more than his other brothers, sent for him and tried to calm his fears. He gave him more land and betrothed him to a daughter of one of their uncles. Raverty says this only deepened Kazim's suspicion. Kazim had "doubtless" heard how his own father had treated the sons and grandsons of Khushal, and he fled his home in secret. [2]

What the father had done is in Raverty's memoir of Abd al-Qadir Khan, Khushal's son and a poet. Abd al-Qadir wanted the chieftainship that had gone to his nephew Afzal. Afzal, in Raverty's account, saw no way out but to remove his rivals. Abd al-Qadir, ten of his brothers and a number of their sons were put to death in one day at the village of Zaman Garrai and buried in one grave. [2] Kazim's fear of a kindly brother is easier to follow with that behind it.

Raverty gives a second reason that "some say". Kazim disliked the young cousin he was to marry and asked Asad-ullah to break the engagement. Asad-ullah would not listen and, "according to the Afghan custom", named her as the future wife of a younger brother. Raverty does not choose between the two accounts. He adds that this first disappointment seems to have given Kazim a distaste for marriage, and that he died unmarried. [2]

Asad-ullah sent confidential friends more than once to bring him home. Raverty says that on one occasion Kazim went as far as Hasan Abdal, a few miles east of Attock, on an outing with friends. Relatives came to him there from the Khattak country beyond the Indus, two days' journey away, and begged him to return. He would not, and went back to Rampur. [2]

Kashmir, Sirhind and Rampur

Raverty gives the stages of the exile in order. Kazim wandered for several years in Kashmir, "where he acquired considerable learning". He lived a long time at Sirhind in Upper India, and then went to "the Afghan principality of Rampir", where he settled and passed the greater part of his life. [2]

Rampur was a Rohilla state. Raverty explains that the Afghans called their mountain country Roh, and that Afghans in India are sometimes known as Rohillas after it. [1, 2] He describes the Rohillas as descended from tribes who had emigrated from Afghanistan at different times and settled in India. [2] The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica says the Nawab of Rampur is a Rohilla Pathan whose family "established their power over this part of the country in the 18th century". When the Nawab of Oudh, with a force lent by Warren Hastings, subdued the Rohillas, Faiz-ullah Khan was allowed to keep Rampur. [5]

Kazim reached these settlers as a Khattak who had left the hills himself, and two of his couplets mention it. In one ode the beloved treats him with "Indian requital", "me, Shaida! who in heart am a poor simple Afghan of Roh". [2] In another, his own name is the wanderer: "Since Shaida from his home and friends a wanderer became". [2]

The Urdu paper by Javed Iqbal and Muhammad Hanif Khalil repeats the outline. Kazim left his ancestral home of Sarai Akora Khattak in his youth, spent the rest of his life at Rampur, joined a Sufi order in India and died there. [3] On where he lies the two accounts differ. Raverty says that soon after his death his relatives came, took up his remains and carried them to the Khattak country, where they found a resting place at Sarai among the Khattak chiefs and their families. [2] The Urdu paper says his tomb is at Rampur. [3] Neither gives a source for the grave.

The Naqshbandi poet

Raverty says that when "the gift of poesy was bestowed upon him", Kazim took the pen name Shaida, "for he had now turned devotee". He became a disciple of the holy men of Sirhind and, as the Sufis teach, thought of himself as devoted to the love of the Divine. [2]

The Urdu paper quotes a sentence from Kazim's own preface to his diwan. In its Urdu the writer of the page is Muhammad Kazim, pen name Shaida, Khattak by descent, Hanafi by creed and Naqshbandi by way, who offers his work to those who know speech and have bright minds. [3] The authors say he was a learned Sufi and give his guide as Mir Masum Shah, a Naqshbandi master of India. [3] Raverty does not name the guide. He says only that Mian Muhammadi, son of Mian Abd-ullah of Sirhind and of the family of Shaida's spiritual guide, asked for a copy of the poems. [2]

The paper raises one doubt about the poems. Amir Hamza Shinwari, the Pashto poet, wrote in a foreword that Kazim held the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi line and ought to have taught the doctrine of "witnessing" (tawhid-i shuhudi). The Urdu translator of the diwan, Anwar-ul-Haq, he says, instead explained a verse of Shaida in the manner of the "unity of being" (tawhid-i wujudi). [3] That is a point among scholars of Sufi thought, and the sources read here do not settle it.

The diwan

Raverty obtained Kazim's poems at Lahore in a single manuscript, which he describes as "most beautifully written and illuminated", with odes added in the margins. The odes were arranged alphabetically in the book in 1181 AH, which is 1767. [2] Mian Muhammadi had asked for the copy, and the poet sent it with the impression of his seal. [2]

Raverty supposed it to be the only copy ever made. His reason was that Kazim's descendants, who lived near Peshawar, had never seen the poems although the poet was celebrated among them, until he showed them his. [2] In 1860 he wrote that he held "the original and only copy", a work "that even his own descendants of the present day had never seen until shown to them by me". [1] He printed the Pashto of many of the odes in Gulshan-i Roh and twenty-two of them in English in his Selections two years later. [1, 2]

An Indian-Persian manner

Raverty put the manner in a sentence. Shaida's poetry is "highly polished, but deep and difficult", and it "approaches nearer to that of the Persians than of any other of the Afghan poets", whose simplicity is "the chief charm of their writings". He adds that Kazim brings in more Persian and Arabic words than they do. [2] He also says, as of Mirza Khan Ansari, whose poems stand in the same book, that Shaida's poetry is deeply tinged with the mysticism of the Sufis. [2]

The Urdu paper names the Persian tradition. It says Shaida belongs to the "Indian style", sabk-i hindi, the manner of Bedil, Ghani Kashmiri and Abu Talib Kalim in Persian and, later, Ghalib in Urdu. Because Ghalib came after him, it says, only the Persian poets make a fair match. [3] It lists his marks as fresh images, delicate fancy, subtle similes and metaphors, and meaning packed into few words. [3] A 2024 article in the journal Pashto calls him a classical Pashto poet of "Hamid Baba's school" who wrote in the Indian style and drew on the genres and ideals of beauty of Persian poetry. [4] For two Pashto poets of the generations before him, see Hamid Baba and Rahman Baba.

Verses

Both couplets below are from Raverty's printings: the Pashto from Gulshan-i Roh (1860) and the English from his Selections (1862). Each Pashto line is one half of a couplet. The transliteration follows the printed Pashto.

The first couplet closes Raverty's first ode. [1, 2]

که پرواز لکه شهباز وُه کا هاله شي

ګیرائي د هغه دام په شیدا څه کا

ka parwāz laka shahbāz wuh kā hāla shī

gīrāʼī da haghah dām pa Shaidā tsa kā

Did he, like unto a falcon, soar in air, then it might avail;

But what shall the restraint of that net, now, unto Shaida do?

The second closes an ode on the beloved's curls. Shaida asks how he is to get free of a noose that can bind the lions of the forest with one hair. [1, 2]

له کمنده ئي شیدا څه رنګ رها شي

چه شیران د دشتي بند کا په تار زلف

la kamanda ī Shaidā tsa rang rahā shī

che shīrān da dashtī band kā pa tār-i zulf

In what way shall Shaida become released from their noose,

When the curls, with a single hair, the lions of the forest bind?

The commonplaces of Persian love poetry run through the odes: the curl, the gazelle, the nightingale and the rose, Majnun, Farhad and Alexander. Raverty's English notes explain many of them for his readers. Some verses turn to other matter. In his fifteenth ode Shaida writes:

All praise be unto the nakedness of that bare head,

Which hath neither under turban nor diadem bent! [2]

In his second ode the waves are his figure for the world: "Rising and falling, without ceasing, is the world of the waves!" and "The lowly and humble are more powerful than the haughty and proud". [2] Raverty's Pashto for these two odes is in Gulshan-i Roh, but only his English is quoted here.

Dates that do not agree

Raverty is exact about the beginning and silent about the end. He says Kazim was born "some time during the five years subsequent to" 1135 AH, and gives that year as 1722. The five years carry the birth to about 1727. [2] He gives no year of death. He shows only that Kazim was alive in 1181 AH, 1767, when the diwan was copied. [2]

The Urdu paper gives the lifespan 1135 to 1194 AH in its text, which is about 1722 to 1780. [3] Its abstract gives 1125 to 1194 AH, which would put the birth near 1713. [3] The two figures in one paper cannot both be right, and 1135 agrees with Raverty. The earlier year may be a misprint.

A date for the end therefore rests on one recent paper, and a date for the birth on Raverty's range of five years. A reader who needs one figure for each can say "about 1722 to 1727" and "about 1780".

How he is read

Raverty thought the poetry difficult and said so. [2] Recent Pakistani writing treats him as a classical Pashto poet. A 2022 paper studies the Naqshbandi order in his poems, and a 2024 paper studies his sense of beauty and his vocabulary of love. [3, 4]