Melmastia: Pashtun hospitality and the guest's protection

At a glance

• Melmastia (مېلمستیا) is the duty to feed, house and protect a guest. Raverty's dictionary of 1867 defines it as "Hospitality, entertainment, heartiness, conviviality". [10]

• A host's protection covers the guest while he is on the host's land. Elphinstone wrote that it ended at the edge of the village or, at most, the tribe. [1]

• Beyond that edge a traveller needed an escort, the badragga (بدرګه). [2, 4, 10]

• The cost falls on the khan, the village guest house or the household. Barth read the spending as the price of a political following, and Lindholm found Swat villagers who reject that reading. [7, 8]

• Harming a guest stains the host, who must take revenge. [8]

• In the 1970s observers found the custom fading in some villages and strong in others. [8, 9]

The words

Melmastia (مېلمستیا), hospitality, is built on melma (مېلمه), a guest. Raverty gives melmastia as "Hospitality, entertainment, heartiness, conviviality", with a verb phrase for practising it, "To show or practice hospitality, to entertain". He defines melma as "A guest, a visitor", with a plural melmana and a separate feminine form. He also records an idiom, da melmanah starga'h (د مېلمانه ستړګه), literally the eye of the guests. It names the evening star, Venus, "so called because it rises about the time that wayfarers or guests drop in of an evening". [10]

The word is a test of belonging. Akbar S. Ahmed's Mohmand elders equated a Pukhtun with da melma dost, "a friend of guests", and called a miser shoom, an insult. [9] Edward Oliver, writing in 1890, called the miser "a name of infinite scorn". [5] Charles Lindholm, who studied the Yusufzai of Swat, records that villagers name three pillars of the code, revenge, hospitality and refuge. [8] The wider code is described in Pashtunwali: the Pashtun code of honour and conduct.

Swat villagers draw lines around what counts. A follower fed by a khan in return for loyalty is no guest but a kurimar, an eater of the khan's curry. Food given to the hungry is charity, and those who take charity feel shame, while the guest is honoured. [8]

What a host owes

Lindholm describes the ritual as he saw it in Swat. The visitor is put on the most comfortable cot in the guest room. The children and younger brothers and sisters of the household are introduced "as slaves of the guest". Sweet tea comes in the family's formal crockery, and the host sits with him, apologising for the failings of his hospitality, and walks when the guest wants to walk. A chicken, "the most expensive and desired food", has already been killed. The host refuses meat and curd himself and pours clarified butter on the guest's plate, and the guest sleeps on the best bed with the newest quilt. One man told Lindholm that the essence of honour was "never to eat any of the food one has given to a guest". [8]

The host does not ask for the guest's name, and paying for hospitality is bad form. A wise guest brings a gift and presents it before accepting hospitality, because offering anything afterwards would insult the host. [8]

The meal scales with the guest. T. L. Pennell, a medical missionary at Bannu, wrote that a rich chief would be content with nothing less than a sheep for a distinguished guest, while a poorer man killed a fowl and made pulao. One night the chief's son cooked him a fowl. The chief came home, asked "Have you killed for him the dumba?", and on hearing that his son had not said: "This will be a lasting shame (sharm) for me." Pennell was woken about one in the morning for roast mutton and pulao. [4] Ahmed's 1970s diaries from the Mohmand country give a ladder: a chicken for a guest of some importance, a goat or sheep for a jirga, a wedding party or a political officer, and a cow if the Political Agent or another senior official was expected. [9]

How long a guest stays is less settled. In Lindholm's account a visiting malik with a retinue of up to fifty men was obliged to stay at least three days with his host, on pain of insult, and one famed khan gave hospitality for three months before asking a guest's name. [8] A proverb in Thorburn's collection from Bannu says: "The first day a king, the second a Vazeer, the third mixed with the earth (held in no honour)". Thorburn notes that it refers to a guest's treatment by his host. [3] Thorburn printed it in English translation.

Safe on the host's land

Elphinstone put the principle in 1815. "A man's bitterest enemy is safe, while he is under his roof," he wrote, "and a stranger, who has come into an Afghaun's house or tent, is under the protection of the master as long as he stays in the village." Then he set the limit: the protection "does not, however, extend beyond the lands of the village, or at most of the tribe", and he had "undoubted testimonies" of men of predatory tribes who entertained a traveller, sent him off with presents and robbed him when they met him again outside their protection. [1]

He found it puzzling that "the same Afghaun who would plunder a traveller of his cloak, if he had one, would give him a cloak if he had none". His explanation was legal: the Pooshtoonwullee relies on the injured man's relations and tribe to obtain justice, and a stranger has neither. [1]

His own mission supplied a case. On the road to Peshawar, two of its members, Mr Fraser and Lieutenant Harris, rode to Deraubund, the chief town of the Meeaunkhail, to climb the Takht-i-Sulaiman. The chief's brother sent dinner to their tent. The chief, Omar Khan, got them safeguards from his own enemies, in whose country the mountain lay, and sent a guide of his own. On the way back seven horsemen came out of a ruined village, led by the chief's nephew, who in Elphinstone's words "probably was as hospitable as the rest, while the gentlemen were his guests" and thought himself "at full liberty to plunder them after they had quitted the lands of his tribe". The guide talked him out of it, and then talked a man with a levelled matchlock out of shooting Harris. [1]

Pennell tested the first half of the rule. His plan was to put himself "entirely in their hands", trusting "their traditional treatment of a guest for my safety". At a village full of outlaws the chief set his bed in a ring of six armed retainers. In the morning he heard that the more fanatical men had wanted to kill him in the night, but the others had said: "See, he has trusted himself entirely to our protection, and because he trusts us he is sleeping so soundly; therefore, no harm must be done to him in our village." [4]

Lindholm adds the hardest part. If a guest is insulted, injured or killed, it is a stain on the host's honour and he must take revenge. He gives a Pukhtun joke about a Hindu guest whose host's village wanted to kill him. Terrified, the Hindu asked how his host meant to cope. "Do not fear," the host said. "Your death shall be revenged." A man should shelter even the killer of his own son if he appears at the door, and Lindholm says cases of this are cited in local history. [8] Refuge is taken up under nanawatai in the Pashtunwali article.

James Spain, who toured the frontier for The Way of the Pathans (1962), told one of the few recorded breaches. He wrote that the Wazirs "stand convicted of one of the very few failings of the Pathans in observing the obligations of Pukhtunwali". In June 1897, he says, a British political officer, Mr Gee, came without warning to the Maizar villages near Datta Khel with an unusually large escort to choose a site for a fort. The villagers were suspicious but laid out a meal, and while the British "relaxed with the food and the security of the protection which the extension of melmastia... always entailed", the tribesmen attacked and killed several officers. Spain says this touched off the uprising of 1897. [6]

The badragga, an escort across the border

Raverty defines badraga'h (بدرګه) as "An escort, a convoy, a guide, a guard". [10] It is the arrangement that carried a traveller from the end of one host's protection to the start of the next.

Henry Bellew, a surgeon of the Corps of Guides, described it in his report on the Yusufzai of 1864. He doubted the whole subject: what passed for hospitality, he wrote, was "a mere customary interchange of services or favors", since there were no sarais and tribes lodged each other. A guest in a remote place might be robbed or murdered by his host "as soon as beyond the protecting limits of the village boundary", unless a stronger convoy took him through. The badraga was "merely an armed body of men who, for a consideration, agree to convoy travellers through their own limits". Only the one supplied by the district's chief was safe, and beyond the limits "men of the next district take their place". [2]

Pennell and Oliver stress honour. In parts of the border country a traveller needed a fresh guide every few miles. Inside a tribe's boundary any clansman, even a child, was often enough, "as that is sufficient to show that the traveller has received the sanction of the tribe". [4] Oliver wrote that even a Bangash had to take a Turi badraga "or safe conduct", and repeats Plowden's story of a Turi malik who gave his cap as a badraga to an Afridi caravan. The caravan was plundered and the malik died avenging it. [5] Spain says a chief may extend protection to a guest by giving him a dagger or an article of dress, a token that "reminds all who see it that the honour of the protector is intimately associated with the well-being of him who carries it". [6]

Who pays

Fredrik Barth studied Swat in 1954 and gave the argument its classic form. Landowners took three quarters to four fifths of their tenants' crop, far more than a household needed, and in an economy without money grain could not become lasting capital. Under competition, chiefs spent "far beyond what they have gained from their land". Barth wrote that the "striking hospitality and reckless spending only seems intelligible if we recognize that the underlying motives are political rather than economic", and compared it to the potlatch. Gifts and hospitality control people, he argued, "not because of the debts they create, but because of the recipient's dependence on their continuation". [7]

Chiefs under pressure spent more, not less. One had sold extensive lands over ten years to feed the visitors to his men's house, and told Barth: "if people stop sitting in my men's house, I shall lose the land even faster; only this constant show of force keeps the vultures at bay." [7] The building where this happened is described in the hujra and the qala.

Others show the same drain without Barth's theory. Thorburn, who settled Bannu, wrote that the cost of a village guest house was "either defrayed by the head men, or divided amongst the whole community", and that old families sometimes ran into irretrievable debt to keep their name for hospitality. [3] Oliver said a tribal malik "will entertain as recklessly as the old-fashioned Irish landlord, or the Bengal planter, and will get deeply into debt to do it". [5]

Ahmed met the same men in the 1970s. In the tribal-area Mohmand village of Shati Khel, Shahzada's name was "synonymous with melmastia, even at the cost of keeping himself out of pocket", and his strength came from a reputation for generous hospitality "which even his enemies concede". In Bela, in the settled area, Shamshudin paid for his guests' tea although he knew melmastia "no longer brought honour to the host", and had almost sunk into debt.

Two hosts, one guest

Elphinstone's rule that carrying off a guest is the greatest of affronts (see the Pashtunwali article) still held in Lindholm's Swat. There was competition over the right to entertain a new arrival, and a guest lured from his first host could cause a feud between the two. [8] Thorburn has a proverb for the guest's side: "The guest of two houses fares badly", since each host thinks the other is entertaining him. [3]

Ahmed gives an official's version. On his first tour of the remote Mullah Khel, the three sub-sections of the local sub-clan agreed to suspend their quarrels for his visit, but only if he ate a ceremonial meal with each. He could schedule only lunch and dinner, since breakfast is not counted as a meal. The solution was two lunches, the second at 12.30, and one dinner, with everyone pretending that each was the day's single main meal. [9]

Why they do it

Elphinstone could not explain the mixture of generosity and rapacity. Later writers offered answers, and Lindholm sets them side by side. [1, 8] Bellew called it a practical exchange between travelling tribesmen. Lindholm replies that Swat villages were self-sufficient and the most valued guest was a stranger. [2, 8] Barth called it political, and Lindholm answers that entertaining an unknown visitor who will never return can hardly be a political act. [7, 8] Ahmed, quoted by Lindholm, called hospitality a symbol that helps "maintain cultural identity and ethnic boundaries". Lindholm objects that this explains the custom by its existence. [8]

Lindholm's own account is that hospitality is a ritual of friendship in a society that leaves men little room for it. The host dominates: it is "a one-way flow of prestations" which the guest receives passively. "In a very real sense, the guest is the prisoner of the host," he writes, and the guest is "a mirror which reflects the host's generosity". He also insists that the welcome is warm and sincere, and quotes a line he credits to G. Khan: "Look at the warmth of my eyes and not at the hardness of the corn bread before you." [8] Spain took a harder view: "Melmastia, it must be confessed, is more a matter of personal prestige and self-aggrandisement than of charity or brotherly love." [6]

Women and the guest

The guest room is a men's space, and the work behind it falls to the household's women. Lindholm writes that the wife feels her honour at stake in offering melmastia, though she never sees the guest unless she spies on him through a hole in the wall. She is proud of the entertainment because it reflects on her abilities. But "too much hospitality wears on women". Husbands often wreck the household's finances through open-handedness, the wives protest "but to no avail", and "the woman must cook and provide for the sake of her own pride." [8]

Women also stand on the other side of the custom. Lindholm records that a desperate family may send a woman to beg a powerful man for refuge, and that a request from a woman would be "extremely dishonorable to ignore". A woman who flees her husband and asks for refuge on her own account is afterwards assumed, he says, to be her host's concubine and servant, and will never be allowed back into her own or her husband's house. [8]

A shelter in Kunar, 2005

In June 2005 a wounded US Navy SEAL, Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor of a four-man patrol ambushed on 28 June, was sheltered in the village of Sabray in Kunar province, Afghanistan. [13] The Daily Beast's Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau interviewed the villagers in 2013. Mohammad Gulab and his neighbours, they reported, protected, fed and clothed Luttrell, and an elder carried a note he had written through Taliban lines. Gulab told them: "By rescuing and keeping him safe for five nights in our home we were only doing our cultural obligation." A local Taliban commander, Qari Moued Safi, rejected the defence: "Pashtunwali does not extend to helping oppressors and infidel aggressors such as that American soldier who is an enemy of Islam." [12]

The two positions are two readings of a guest's protection. Lindholm's Swat informants held that it operates "regardless of the rank of the guest, his nationality, religion, or personal characteristics". [8] Safi held that it stops at the faith. Gulab left Sabray, insurgents burned his lumber business, and Safi said he remained a target. The report adds that within a year the US military jailed Gulab for several days, and the village chief as well. [12]

A custom under strain

At the time of Lindholm's fieldwork, cooperation among neighbours had greatly diminished, with the decline of the men's house and of the khan's power over his clients. Villagers no longer saved food for guests and sold the surplus for status goods. Better-off families built their own guest rooms, betak, thirty-four in Shin Bagh, and guests were almost always relatives or work acquaintances. Still, he writes, the rite continued "in its central place in the consciousness of the people". [8]

Ahmed found a split among the Mohmand. Melmastia, he wrote, was "another dying institution especially in SAM", the settled-area villages, because elders were away at jobs in Karachi or Kuwait or found guests too costly, while in the tribal area it was still "highly regarded". In his questionnaires 67 per cent of tribal-area Mohmand named melmastia the foremost feature of Pukhtunwali, and in the settled area nang came first with melmastia second at 50 per cent. Ahmed himself warned: "I do not attach much significance to these quantitative percentages of qualitative features." [9] A 2024 Austrian government research paper, compiled from interviews in Afghanistan, says guests live "in complete immunity" among Pashtuns and that families "want to show off their economic strength and family ability" with a party or hospitality. [11]