Malalai of Maiwand: heroine of the Battle of Maiwand

Who was Malalai?

Malalai of Maiwand (Pashto: ملالۍ, Malāləy) is one of the best-known heroines in Pashtun and Afghan memory. According to Afghan tradition, she was a young woman who was present at the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880 and was killed there. Her story is told as that of a teenager who turned the tide of a battle against a British-Indian army. [2] [3]

Almost everything known about her comes from Afghan and Pashtun tradition rather than from written records made at the time. That does not make the story worthless as history, but it means that her life and her exact role should be read with care. This article separates the well-documented battle from the remembered heroine. [3]

The Battle of Maiwand

The battle took place during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. British-Indian columns invaded Afghanistan in November 1878, after the emir Sher Ali had received a Russian mission and refused a British envoy. In 1880 another of Sher Ali's sons, Ayub Khan, launched his own bid to become emir. [1]

On 27 July 1880, a British-Indian brigade sent to intercept Ayub Khan was overwhelmed near Maiwand by an army that the National Army Museum describes as up to ten times its size. The survivors fell back to Kandahar, which was then besieged. The Horniman Museum gives figures of about 25,000 Afghan fighters against roughly 2,500 British and Indian troops, and nearly 3,000 Afghan dead. Other estimates differ, and all such numbers should be treated as approximate. [1] [2]

Maiwand was a serious defeat for the British, but it did not end the war. General Roberts marched a relief force about 500 kilometres from Kabul to Kandahar in 20 days and defeated Ayub Khan outside Kandahar on 1 September 1880. The war ended with Abdur Rahman as emir and with Britain controlling Afghanistan's foreign relations. [1]

Malalai's role in the sources

The heart of the story is a moment of crisis. As the Afghan lines wavered, Malalai is said to have taken up the Afghan standard and called out a verse to shame the men into fighting on. The Horniman Museum's account records her as being killed in the battle and honoured afterwards as a martyr. [2]

British accounts of the battle do not mention her. The historian William Dalrymple has noted that Malalai "does not appear in any British account of the Battle of Maiwand", while adding that if the Afghan sources are accurate, her actions led to what he calls the British Empire's greatest defeat in a pitched battle in the 19th century. A Reuters report from 2015 describes the story as Pashtun tradition, in which she rallied a demoralised force with a verse about martyrdom. [3] [4]

Details that often appear in popular retellings, such as her exact age, her village, a wedding planned for that day, or the use of her veil as a banner, are not found in the sources consulted here and are best treated as part of the legend rather than established fact. [3]

The landays attributed to her

Malalai is remembered above all through two short poems in the landay (لنډۍ, landəy) form, the brief oral couplet sung and recited across the Pashtun lands. The Horniman Museum gives these English renderings of the lines attributed to her: [2]

• "Young love! If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame."

• "With a drop of my sweetheart's blood, shed in defence of the Motherland, will I put a beauty spot on my forehead, such as would put to shame the rose in the garden!" [2]

Because landays were passed on by word of mouth, there is no contemporary manuscript that proves Malalai composed these exact words. They are best understood as the verses that tradition has attached to her name, and their survival is itself a sign of how strongly the story was kept alive. [2] [3]

Legacy and the name Malala

In the decades after Maiwand, Malalai became a folk heroine, and her deeds are remembered across Afghanistan. [2]

The most famous modern bearer of the name is the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. Her father chose the name in honour of Malalai of Maiwand. This link was retold in the 2015 documentary He Named Me Malala, and it has brought the older story to a new audience far beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. [5] [4]

Dalrymple observes that among Pashtuns the name still calls to mind a brave teenage heroine from 1880, not only the modern campaigner for girls' education. Both meanings now sit side by side. [3]