Kuchi jewellery: Pashtun silver, coins and glass

At a glance

• Kuchi jewellery is what Pashtun nomad women of southern and eastern Afghanistan wore on the head, ears, nose, neck and wrists. A Prague museum study of 2019 says photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s show Kuchi women with relatively rich sets, and that their jewellery is now much more modest. [5]

• The pieces tested in that study were mostly an alloy of copper, zinc and nickel of the German silver kind, set with red, green and blue glass. Silver was present in small amounts. [5]

• Many pieces have Pashto names: silsila (headband), tik (forehead ornament), cargul (nose stud), bāhu (wide bracelet) and p'sol (coin necklace) among them. [3, 5]

• Among the Orakzai a bride's ornaments came from several hands: the fiancé, her parents and her husband. In Peshawar district the sum for jewels was counted inside the dower. [1, 2]

• Under the name "Kuchi tribal jewellery", most of what is sold today is new work made in volume, and the label also covers Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen styles. [5]

Where the pieces sat

Most of a Kuchi woman's jewellery was worn above the waist, and most of that on the head. Tereza Hejzlarová, Libor Dušek and their co-authors, who published the study from the Náprstek Museum in Prague, call Kuchi jewellery "still one of the marginalized topics". They list the pieces with their Pashto names. [5]

• Silsila is a metal headband with a round medallion in the middle. [5]

• Rupay (from rupee, a coin pendant), gogrey, tek and tik are round pendants worn on the forehead or in a pair at the temples. Tik is the forehead ornament. [5]

• Stan is a narrow rectangular hair clip. [5]

• Etoy is the whole head ornament: a round medallion on the forehead and two half-moon medallions at the sides, joined together and hung with jingle bells, with hooks to fasten it to the hair, the cap or a cloth ribbon over the head. [5]

• Wāley are crescent earrings hung with small bells. The authors give the Persian name gushwār-e kafasī for the dome-shaped earrings with chainlets. Afghan women's ears were almost always pierced, with holes larger than is usual in Europe. [5]

• Cargul is the nose stud, most often a rosette. [5]

• Ghārgey is the choker: several horizontal rows of chainlets and plates with coins or small plates hanging below. [5]

• Bāhu is a massive wide bracelet with a serrated hoop standing out at one end. Narrower bracelets carried bells, and gutē, rings, were often rosettes. [5]

The same words turn up in older records. Raverty, a British officer, in the second edition of his Pashto dictionary of 1867, has char gul (چارګل), "an ornament for the nose", pezwan (پېزوان), "a nose-ring, an ornament for the nose", and p'sol (پسول), "a necklace or belt of gold or silver coins worn by women". [3] His ṭik (ټيک) is "an ornament for the forehead" and spin washay is "a silver bracelet". [3] How the ornaments sit on the dress is told in Pashtun dress and Pashtun women's dress.

A fuller list from the frontier is in H. A. Rose's Glossary of the Tribes and Castes, printed in Lahore in 1914, in its entry on the Orakzai of Tirah. Rose, a British administrator, says Orakzai women's ornaments did not differ much from those of Pashtun women in British territory, and names them. [1]

• Deodi, large silver earrings, in the lower lobe, and skanri, small silver earrings, in the upper. [1]

• Chargul, a small silver nose ring worn on the left of the nose, nata, a small gold one on the right, and pizwan, a large gold ring below, in the nostril ridge. Only the richer classes wore the pizwan and the nata. [1]

• Haiqal, three flat silver ornaments about an inch and a half square, strung together and worn over the breast. [1]

• Ogi, a silver necklet, and wakhi, a silver bracelet. [1]

• Chingakh, a frontlet of fretted silver worn by women of means. [1]

• Garewān, silver coins and chains with tasselled ends, which Rose calls a distinctive Orakzai ornament. [1]

• Nimboli, a gold cylinder strung with beads and worn round the neck. [1]

Compare the three spellings of the nose ornament: Raverty's char gul in 1867, Rose's chargul in 1914 and the Prague authors' cargul in 2019. For the Orakzai themselves see the Orakzai of Tirah.

The Peshawar district gazetteer of 1897 to 1898, compiled by British officials, gives a plainer picture of the towns. It calls the jewellery of the district "plain and common-place", and says the ornaments in vogue among the Afghans of Peshawar, men and women, were few and simple, and that even those of Kabuli and Qizilbash origin were less elaborate than the down-country patterns. [2] Mountstuart Elphinstone's list of what Afghan women wore in 1809, strings of Venetian sequins, gold or silver chains ending in two balls by the ears, and a pendant in the nose, is in Pashtun dress. [4]

Metal, glass and coin

Nancy Hatch Dupree wrote in 1992 that Afghan women's jewellery was mostly silver, with silver beads, discs, coins, fastenings and amulets sewn onto clothes, and that among some nomads, the eastern Pashtun above all, the silver was combined with mirror work, gold and silver braid and beading. [9] The Prague team measured instead. They put nine pieces from the museum and a private collection through X-ray fluorescence. Most of the metal was an alloy of copper, zinc and nickel, known as German silver, nickel silver or alpaca, and the ratio of the three decides whether it looks gold or silver. A small amount of silver came, the authors write on the authority of the Austrian ethnologist Alfred Janata, from silver coins melted with scrap from old jewellery. [5]

The readings differ from piece to piece. The back plate of one pendant from the first half of the twentieth century gave between 31 and 55 per cent silver at three points on the plate, while its chain gave about 1 per cent. A second pendant of the same period gave 0.46 per cent. [5]

The colour comes from glass. The Prague authors describe small transparent stones, most often red, green and blue, set in serrated bezels around a plain filigree, larger faceted or oval stones, and flat glass triangles, ovals, crescents and drops with coloured foil under them. [5] Women made their own beaded necklaces from small glass beads. [5]

Coins hang from the pieces, and small silver coins were also used abundantly to decorate children's clothes, caps especially, for the protective power the authors say was attributed to such jewellery. [5] One necklace in the Prague study, dated to the 1980s, carries in its side medallions coins of the communist-era Afghan state, dated between 1978 and 1981 (the date is partly resoldered) and worth one, two or five afghani. [5] A silver necklace in the Mathers Museum at Indiana University, catalogued as "Kuchai or Pashtun", hangs Ottoman coins among fish figures and blue beads; the museum reads the coins as wealth. [8]

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a rigid silver collar, a hasli, from the twentieth century, in which a beaten crescent-shaped plate carries soldered die-stamped parts, three chased domes set with coral and turquoise, and a fringe of hollow silver strips. It weighs 242 grams. [7]

How the pieces were made

The Prague authors state that the makers of metal jewellery were men, who made it for families or individuals to order, or for sale. [5] Louis Dupree, in his 1980 survey of Afghanistan, wrote that jewellers, silversmiths and goldsmiths made pieces for individual use: the customer gave orders face to face, the future owner approved the plans, and the craftsman carried them out. [6]

The techniques the Prague study lists are these. Plates of various shapes, often circular, half circular, square or triangular, were framed with filigree. Small flowers were made by hammering small metal plates into metal dies, and hollow parts were raised with a doming block and a set of punches. The chief way of joining the parts was soldering, soft or hard. [5] The Indiana museum describes a silver bracelet pair as forged or cast from a single piece of silver bent into a crescent, with flowers and end bands cast separately and soldered on, and a silver bridal crown with filigree wire, granulation and embossed leaves. [8]

Amulets, jingles and the fish

The authors call the jewel an amulet as well as an ornament: it protected the wearer against evil forces and helped fertility, and the jingle of chainlets, coins and bells was thought to drive evil spirits away. [5] The ta'wiz case is its plainest form. Cases were square, triangular or cylindrical, hung with chains and bells, and held an amulet against evil forces, above all bewitchery, illness and infertility. Women and children both wore them, singly or in pairs. Under the influence of Islam, prayers from the Qur'an most often served as the amulet, with other objects such as coins added, and in many cases the cases became flat ornaments with nothing inside, though the belief in their protection stayed. [5] Raverty's dictionary has dawā (دوا) as "a medicine, a remedy" and also "an amulet, a charm, a square piece of silver worn round the neck by women". [3] On the shrines where amulets were bought, see shrines, ziarats and urs.

Fish figures are read as a sign of fertility. The Indiana catalogue entry for the fish necklace says the many fish represent fertility. [8] Dupree wrote that the groom's family, if it could afford it, gave the engaged girl a silver necklace with fish pendants, "ancient symbols of fertility", and that a circle on jewellery was meant to guarantee the couple good luck. [6]

Betrothal, marriage and the dower

Elphinstone, a British envoy writing in 1815 of the Afghans in general, says the bride's relatives spent the time between betrothal and wedding preparing her dowry of furniture, carpets, plates, brass and iron vessels and personal ornaments, and that the bridegroom was collecting the price of his wife, which always greatly exceeded her dower. The contract, he writes, provided for the wife in case of divorce or her husband's death. [4]

The Peshawar gazetteer says the same of the Pashtuns of Peshawar district: the sum the suitor paid was fixed by his position and means, and included a sum for expenses and another for jewels, counted inside the dower (mahar) and the only part of the dower paid before the marriage. [2] The gazetteer adds that the bridegroom bore all the costs of the wedding, that presents were exchanged on the understanding that equal presents would be returned, and that failing to return jewels borrowed for the occasion was "a fruitful source of feuds". [2]

Rose's Orakzai entry says who gave which piece. The haiqal was given to a girl by her fiancé at the betrothal, the ogi by her parents at the marriage, the garewān and wakhi by the husband just before it, and the girl usually got the skanri and chargul in her parents' house in childhood. The bride wore all of them at the wedding and generally for five months after. Then they were laid aside for rejoicings, except the wakhi, the ogi and the skanri, which were always worn. For marriages between relations Rose puts the settlement at 100 to 240 Kabuli rupees, with food, clothes worth ten rupees and ornaments worth sixty furnished besides. [1]

Dupree describes the engagement feast, in Pashto khwalish-khwari, "taking or eating sweets", at which the women of the groom's family bring dresses, some jewellery and a silver toilet set. [6] Before the wedding the groom's women deliver bridal jewellery of silver or gold; he lists a wrist bracelet (karah), an arm bracelet, an ankle bracelet, a necklace of small silver pieces that hisses as it moves (selselah), a forehead pendant (tik), a locket, earrings and finger rings, and says the nose ring, once popular, was going out of style, particularly in the towns. The marriage contract fixed the bride price and the mahr: the part she could demand at any time, and the part she received on her husband's death. If the husband divorced her she could demand both. [6] Dupree adds that Afghan women, or their husbands, went on buying gold, silver and brass jewellery after marriage as far as they could afford it. [6] The place of marriage gifts in the wider custom is in feast food at Eid and weddings, and women's standing in Pashtun women today.

Museums and who made what

The museum labels show how uncertain attribution is. The Mathers Museum at Indiana University files its Dee Birnbaum collection pieces as "Kuchai or Pashtun", "Possibly Pashtun or Kuchai" or plain "Pashtun", and one headpiece as from Afghanistan or Pakistan. [8] The Victoria and Albert Museum's hasli is marked as made in Afghanistan, "probably in the region of Ghazni, but it may have been made for the Pastun market in Pakistan, possibly in Sindh", and the record cites a similar rigid necklace in the Ghysels Collection attributed to the Swat valley. A second V&A hasli is entered as Sindh, "possibly" Afghanistan, with a reference to Janata. [7] Both belong to Waltraud Ganguly's gift, collected from dealers in India and Europe, and both were bought from one Jaipur dealer in November 2012. [7] Two of the Prague pendants were acquired by the museum in 1991. [5]

The Prague authors say the only more extensive work on Afghan jewellery based on field research is Janata's Schmuck in Afghanistan (1981). Janata stayed in Afghanistan several times between 1958 and 1975. Among earlier catalogues they name Scerrato and Taddei's Monili dell'Asia dal Caspio all'Himalaya (1963), which describes 342 objects from Afghanistan and Pakistan. [5]

The Kuchi trade and its copies

Janata spoke in 1975 to three Pashtun jewellery merchants from Ghazni, who said they had bought jewellery across the country for years before opening a shop in Kabul. He also bought a collection of nomad jewellery in Gardez and Khost in Paktia, where nomads returning from their winter pastures had brought it. [5]

The authors find Kuchi women's jewellery now much more modest than in the 1950s and 1970s, and think it probable that Kuchis sold it as political and economic change and war overtook them. [5] For who the Kuchis are, see Kuchi and powinda nomads.

By the early twenty-first century, they write, Western interest was growing, with buyers mainly dancers. Under "Kuchi tribal jewellery" shops list pieces in the style of the Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmens, mostly of base metal alloy with glass or plastic stones, and some sellers name the wrong people, which the authors put down to ignorance rather than intention. The main suppliers are Pakistani traders selling by weight or by the piece, and the pieces are now mostly made in large volumes. Old pieces are scarcer and cost much more. [5]