The landay: Pashto two-line folk verse (tappa, misra)

At a glance

• A landay (لنډۍ, landəy) is a two-line Pashto verse: nine syllables in the first line, thirteen in the second. [3]

• Other names are ṭapa and misra. [3]

• No one signs a landay. It is sung, passed from mouth to mouth and changed as it goes. [3, 4]

• Women make and sing many of them, at the spring, at weddings and at births, but men compose and sing them too. [4, 5]

• James Darmesteter printed landays with French translations in his Chants populaires des Afghans (1888–90). [1]

Two lines, nine and thirteen syllables

Pstrusinska, writing on Afghan poetic forms in 1971, describes the landay as one bayt, a line holding two misras (hemistichs). The first part always has nine syllables and the second thirteen. [3] Darmesteter, the French scholar whose Chants populaires des Afghans appeared in 1888–90, called it an unrhymed couplet that says one idea or one feeling and makes a whole poem, as simple and beautiful as a lied of Heine or an Italian stornello. [1] On rhyme the writers differ. Darmesteter calls the couplet unrhymed, and Pstrusinska says it rhymes "in -a exclusively", that is, both lines end on the vowel a. [1, 3]

A landay from the collection that Liza Schuster and Riaz Shinwari gathered shows the count. A young woman tells the man she loves to go to India and earn money, because her mother will not give her in marriage for a handful of rupees: [4]

هندوستانی شه روپی راوړه

په کورنیو روپو مې مور نه درکوینه

Hindustānəy sha rupəy rāwṛa,

pə kornyo rupo me mor na dar-kawina.

My lover, go to India and earn your fortune.

My mother will not give me in marriage for a handful of rupees. (Schuster and Shinwari's translation)

Schuster and Shinwari took it from Suliman Laiq's Pashtu Landay (New Kabul, Peshawar, 1982), page 482. [4]

H. G. Raverty, a British officer who compiled a Pashto dictionary in 1867, defined lanḍaʿī in two senses: a small poisonous snake of Afghanistan, "like a snake with a nob at the tail", and a kind of poetry of seven or eight syllables to the line. [2] That count does not match Pstrusinska's nine and thirteen. [3]

What the names say

Pstrusinska says it is "sometimes called tapəy, tapakəy or tapa", and misra. [3] Darmesteter pointed out that misra means a hemistich, so a landay is really a couple of misras. [1]

Who makes and sings them

The author is nearly always unknown. [3] Louis Dupree, the American anthropologist who surveyed Afghanistan in 1980, wrote that both men and women compose and sing landays, and know hundreds of traditional ones handed down. [5] Schuster and Shinwari put it more strongly for the collections they used: landays are composed more by women than by men, and the voice most often heard is the woman left behind. [4] They quote Sayd Majrouh, whose collection of women's landays appeared in English in 2003: "the great originality of this popular poetry is the active presence of woman." [4]

Where women sing is part of the verse. Schuster and Shinwari say that in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan men and women meet apart, and that women compose, sing and trade landays when they gather at the well or the river and at weddings and births. Because no one signs a landay, they say, women can say things in it that they could not say in their own names. [4]

Women were not the only singers. Darmesteter wrote that poets in their contests "make assault" with misras, quoting old ones or improvising new ones. Some are love verses of "exquisite simplicity", and some call and answer each other as dialogue. [1] His example pair has a man say that the lips of the girl are roses and her teeth white, and she answer that her lips and teeth are his, and that for others she has only the dust of the earth. [1] Pstrusinska says landays are sung one after another "usually during a march" until the singers ran out of eagerness, memory or invention. [3] For the other songs sung beside the landay, see the rabab, the attan and Pashtun music.

Landay with a refrain

Pstrusinska describes the nimakay, a short song sung mostly by women at weddings, and says it always comes with a landay. In her first pattern the nimakay opens and closes the performance and is worked in between the lines of the landay. Her example has the two-line nimakay "The water is winding above the hamlet, Sinwari carnation-fragrant", and a landay that says: "He is my beloved and I am his beloved. If he were to sell me at the bazaar I shall still follow him." The whole nimakay is sung first, then the first line of the landay, then the second line of the nimakay alone, then the second line of the landay, then that line of the nimakay again, and last the whole nimakay. [3]

What landays say about love and honour

Love fills most of them. Six landays on the site's poetry pages give a sample: a woman asking to be made a flower at the spring (Make me a flower at the spring), a red shawl at the spring (A red shawl at the spring), a lover asked to stay as close as the lightning is to the rain (As the lightning is with the rain) and a girl going down to the lower spring (The water of every spring is sweet). Pstrusinska prints the red shawl one in English as "The red kerchief appeared near the ford. I said to myself: the black water began to burn, my darling." [3] The spring (gudar) appears in three of the six. Where women's movement outside the house is limited, the spring is a place girls may go. [4] On what honour asks of a woman and a household, see namus and nang.

War and honour are the other great subject. Pstrusinska says landays were often used to encourage people to fight, and her battlefield examples are tender and hard together: "May you come wounded with swords, I should dress [your] wounds and give you my lips", and "Fall on the battle field, I shall spread my shawl on your grave." [3] The poet Abdul Rauf Benawa collected landays in Kabul in 1958, and Dupree translates two of his: "If you don't wield a sword, what else will you do? You, who have suckled at the breast of an Afghan mother!" and "My beloved returned unsuccessful from battle; I regret the kiss I gave him last night." [5] The Spit on my grave landay on the poetry pages belongs here too.

Some landays are about named events. Darmesteter says that for the Afghans "the song takes the place of a newspaper", and that his collection could retell Afghan history from 1828 to 1881. [1] His set on the war of Buner in 1863 tells the ghazis to stay close to their walls while the bullets of the Firangis "rain down by the bushel", and ends with the enemy lying in the ravines of Ambela, "with their yellow belts, heads dishevelled". [1] Another set is about Gulbat Khan, who killed a cousin for his Delhi fortune and was himself killed on the road to his wedding with Tarkani, a girl of Bajaur. In the landays his mother goes from roof to roof, the way women went from house to house, crying that the guests have come, and Tarkani weeps to her mother that she had a flower on her breast and by morning it had faded. Darmesteter says these were sung to the flute and moved tender hearts. [1]

Landays of leaving

Schuster and Shinwari read about 700 landays for what they say about migration. [4] The voice is mostly that of a woman whose husband or fiancé has gone to India or to Iran for work. In Pashto and English: [4]

په سفر ځې خدای ته دې سپارم

که راته راوړې د کشمیر شینکي شالونه

Pə safar dze Khudāy ta de sparam,

ka rāta rāwṛe de Kashmīr shinki shālūna.

You are going on migration, may Allah protect you.

And if you could bring me the green shawls of Kashmir… (Schuster and Shinwari's translation)

Sixteen of the 700 encourage the man to go, often because he must find the bride price. Most plead for his return, or speak of years wasted and hair gone grey waiting. [4] They expected war in them and, to their surprise, found few explicit references to it. One they give is probably from the 1980s, when many Afghans lived as refugees in Pakistan: [4]

ځما وطن کې بمباری شوه

جانانه الړې زه دې چاته پریخودمه

Dzmā watan ke bambārəy shwa,

jānāna alṛe, zə de chāta prekhowdəma.

There is bombardment in my homeland.

My love, you left, and who will care for me now? (Schuster and Shinwari's translation)

They put the earlier landays, from before 1979, as often teasing and glad, and the later ones as sad. [4]

Malalai at Maiwand

The best-known landay in Afghanistan is the one given to Malalai at the battle of Maiwand in 1880. Dupree gives it, with a note that Malalai used her veil as a standard, as "Young love, if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God, someone is saving you as a token of shame." [5] Pstrusinska calls the singer a seventeen-year-old girl and says the verse was put on a monument. [3] Her story, the second landay and the doubts about the tradition are in Malalai of Maiwand, and the text of the verse is on the poetry page.

How old, and where from

Nobody knows. Pstrusinska calls it "a very old form" and repeats, from the Soviet scholars A. Gerasimova and G. Girs (1963), a story of a landay composed about a thousand years ago by the sweetheart of one of Mahmud of Ghazna's generals, sung from a distance to tell him where her army stood and where to meet. [3] Darmesteter thought the form came from India: a Pashto misra, he wrote, fits word for word the definition of the Multani dorha in M. O'Brien's glossary, a two-line poem that Jat villagers sing at work and play, "eighty-nine in a hundred" of them about love, separation from home, fate or farm life. [1] The idea that landays were born in nomad caravans as call and response is Elizabeth Gray's, in a review of Eliza Griswold's collection, and is described in Pashto literature and oral poetry. None of these is documented history.

Collectors and studies

Raverty's dictionary of 1867 defines the word on page 878. [2] Darmesteter's second volume, of 1888–90, prints landays under the heading Miçrâ's, each with a French translation: the Buner and Gulbat Khan sets, and a set of love landays, some of them dialogues. His pages also give the laments that women say over their dead, which are a different verse. [1] Philip Kreyenbroek, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, describes the lanḍəy (misrəy, tapa) as a single distich, cites D. N. MacKenzie's "Pashto Verse" (1958) for it, and notes that in performance several short texts are recited together. [6] Later Pashto collections that Schuster and Shinwari drew on include Benawa's of 1958 (they give its title as Landaye Askari, Dupree as Landai), Suliman Laiq's Pashtu Landay (1982), Ali Akbar Saayad's Melancholy's scorched laments (Peshawar, 1995) and Salma Shaheen's collection published by the Pashto Academy in Peshawar in 1994. [4]

Phones, radio and secrecy

Mirman Baheer, a women's literary society, meets in Kabul in the open, and in more conservative places in secret. An AFP report from Kandahar in February 2016 describes a basement room where women gather, some bringing a younger sister as an alibi. Women who cannot leave home phone their poems, mostly landays, to a hotline, and a coordinator in Kabul writes them down. Some callers use different numbers each time, afraid of being seen buying phone credit. A caller whose calls stop, the coordinator Pakeza Arzo told AFP, has probably been killed or married off. [7] Schuster and Shinwari, in a project that ended in 2018, took their landays from old and new anthologies, social media, and family and friends, and say landays "are regularly exchanged via social media". [4] Kreyenbroek notes that in recent decades Pashto popular poetry has reached large audiences on cassette tapes. [6] The radio and press are described in Pashto radio, television and press, and women's schooling and public life in Pashtun women today.For the longer sung poem, see the charbeta.