Nang (ننګ): Pashtun honour and the nang and qalang divide

Nang (ننګ) is the Pashto word for honour, and Raverty's dictionary of 1867 gives it two meanings in one entry: honour, reputation, good name, esteem; and, second, disgrace and infamy. [12] The pairing fits how nang works. A man has it only while others say so, and loses it the same way. Anthropologists have argued since 1959 over how far it reaches: whether every Pashtun lives by it, or only the tribes of the hills, with the Pashtuns of the irrigated plains living under a different principle that Akbar S. Ahmed called qalang. The code as a whole is described in Pashtunwali. Here the subject is the one word.

At a glance

• Raverty (1867) lists nang with nang aw nāmus, nangyālay (the honourable man) and be-nang ("shameless"). [12]

• Peghor (پېغور), the taunt that reminds a man of a lapse, is how nang is usually enforced. [4, 12]

• Ahmed (1980) sorts Pashtun societies into nang groups, without chiefs, in rain-fed hills, and qalang groups, ruled by khans on irrigated land and paying rents and taxes. [4]

• He puts the Mohmand on the nang side and Fredrik Barth's Swat on the qalang side, and Barth wrote that honour and shame measure a Swat chief's right to lead. [4, 5]

The word and the words around it

Raverty marks nang as a Persian word and prints these entries together in column 989. [12]

• ننګ (nang): "Honor, reputation, good name, esteem. 2. Disgrace, infamy."

• ننګ او ناموس (nang aw nāmus): "Honor, reputation. 2. Disgrace, ignominy."

• ننګيالی (nangyālay): "Honorable, reputable, esteemed", and as a noun an esteemed or respected person.

• ننګ کول (nang kawul): "To act honorably."

The opposite is in column 137: بې ننګ (be-nang), "Shameless", and بې ننګ او ناموس (be-nang aw nāmus), "Without name or character". [12] Peghor (پېغور) is in column 212: "Calumny, slander, railing, reproach, opprobrious language, abuse". [12]

Later writers spell it their own way. M. Jamil Hanifi, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, writes of male honour as "nang or ʿezzat" and sets it against shame, sharm. [13] Barth uses izat and sharm in his 1959 account of Swat's chiefs, and the word nang does not appear in it. [5] Ahmed says Pukhtunwali "may be freely equated to nangwali or the Code of Honour". [4] Lutz Rzehak, writing for the Afghanistan Analysts Network in 2011 from books by Afghan authors, quotes one of them: "Nanga means to defend one's rights and the rights of one's tribe honourably". A man who lives up to it is called nangyālai. [7]

What nang asks of a man

Rzehak's reading is that a Pashtun's honour is tied to the standing of his lineage, since only there does he find allies, and that conduct is judged by how it looks to others. He gives the rule "A Pashtun is he who disgraces neither himself nor others", and a verse he attributes to the poet Hamid Baba: "He who cannot defend the honour and reputation of another person doesn't defend his own honour and reputation." [7]

Ahmed, who did his fieldwork among the Mohmand, narrowed it. In the Mohmand villages, he found, "The very concept of nang is equated and reduced to tarboorwali and tor", cousin rivalry and the chastity of women. [4] The prize in a quarrel between cousins is not land, which is poor, or water, or women, since all Pashtun women are kin. He names what they fight for as "saritob, ghairat and sharm" (manhood, a sense of honour, shame) and sums up: "The prize is negligible, the price is exorbitant." [4]

Barth saw the same thing from the top of Swat society. A chief there needs land and wealth, but also respect, and "any insult, any action or condition which 'shames' a Pathan, requires him to defend his honour, if he is not to suffer permanent loss of respect and status". [5] A man can be rich and still lose his following. Swat men said of such a chief: "He may be wealthy (maldar), but he's a woman (khéze)." [5] The only defence of honour that works, for Barth, is revenge "equal to or beyond the extent of the original insult". [5] One admirer described the ideal in a named chief, Jamroz Khan of Babuzai: "He was an enormous man, powerful, with a bristling moustache. He used to eat a whole ox-liver for breakfast." Barth's history of the Babuzai blocs later records Jamroz Khan's murder, arranged by the Badshah of Swat and the bloc he had joined. [5]

Nang costs money. A Swat chief told Barth he had sold much land to feed the visitors in his men's house, and that if people stopped coming "I shall lose the land even faster; only this constant show of force keeps the vultures at bay." [5] Ahmed added that "the Code of honour is expensive to maintain in terms of life and wealth". [4]

A colonial administrator's view is less reverent. S. S. Thorburn, writing about Bannu in 1876, said a Pathan's honour "indicates little more than his successfully concealing from the world things done in his family, which, if known, custom would condemn as dishonourable". The Bannuchis, he added, were "perpetually harping about their 'honour'", while the Marwats, who had more of it in his sense, used the word seldom. [3] His example was an aged chief whose eighth wife, a Marwat girl, eloped with his young cousin. The neighbours agreed the chief's honour was lost and that he must wash it clean in the abductor's blood or go on pilgrimage to Mecca; had the pair kept to stolen meetings, Thorburn says, the old man "would have winked at everything". [3] Rzehak records the same logic in later Pashto sources: "a shame is not a shame as long as nobody is aware of it". [7]

Thorburn printed the Bannu proverbs on honour in English only. One, said by a poor man to a great one, is "Don't put hands on my blanket, and I won't put hands on your shawl"; he glosses it as meaning that the two are equal in honour though not in station. [3]

Shame and the taunt

The word that carries shame into daily life is peghor. Ahmed's glossary defines it as the invocation of shame, a reminder after a lapse from honour or a departure from the Code. [4] In the Mohmand villages it is a constant pressure: women are shamed at the water tank or the well, men in the hujra, and it works as "a powerful social mechanism for conformity". [4]

Bernt Glatzer, who studied nomads in western Afghanistan, writes that to be called benanga is "the worst possible insult in Pashtu and a deadly threat to the social position of the insulted", and that killing the insulter is an accepted way of regaining one's nang. [8]

The best-known use of the word in a landay is the one attributed to Malalai at Maiwand, on 27 July 1880:

که په میوند کې شهید نه شوې

خدایږو لالیه بې ننګۍ ته دې ساتینه

Ka pə Maywand ke shahīd na shwe, khudāy-zho lālya, be-nangəy ta de sātīna.

If you do not fall a martyr at Maiwand, by God, my love, someone is keeping you for disgrace.

The Pashto is as printed by Afghanistan International in 2026; the earliest printed source for it was not found. [14] The story is told in Malalai of Maiwand.

Nang in verse

Khushal Khan Khattak, chief of the Khattaks and the best-known Pashto poet of the seventeenth century, used nang in more than one mood. In the war against the Mughals it was a charge against other Afghans. Raverty's literal translation of 1862 has him say of the Afghans who courted Mughal titles: "Shame and reputation, fame and honour, are of no account; But, certainly, they talk enough about offices, rank, and gold." [2] In a love poem he drops the subject: "Speak not unto Khushhal of honour and reputation; For they, who are in love, care not for name or fame." [2] (See Khushal Khan Khattak.)

His best-known line puts the word beside the sword:

د افغان په ننګ مې وتړله توره

ننګيالی د زمانې خوشال خټک يم

Da afghān pa nang me wutaṛala tura; nangyālay da zamāne Khushāl Khaṭak yam.

I girded on the sword for the honour of the Afghans. I am Khushal Khattak, the man of honour of this age.

The Pashto is given by Shahbaz Khan and Himayatullah, citing Khushal's Kulliyat, as the last line of a long poem in which Khushal turned down an offer from the Mughal governor. [10] Olaf Caroe, visiting the poet's grave, saw the same line on the plain marble slab over the tomb and translated it: "I bound on the sword for the pride of the Afghan name, I am Khushhal Khatak, the proud man of this day." [9]

The present mausoleum carries a second couplet on its marble front, which calls all the Pashtuns from Kandahar to Attock one in the cause of honour. [1]

Pashtun historians do not all take the nang of Khushal's war at his word. Shahbaz Khan and Himayatullah report that Sultan-i-Rome thought Khushal fought "just for his personal survival", to which "he tried to give the name of the Pakhtuns nang", and that Allah Bakhsh Yusufi said he "painted his personal opposition and revenge as a national one". The authors conclude that Khushal was unsure what to do, helped Mughal friends while opposing the empire, and only later worked to unite the Pakhtuns against it. [10]

Nang and qalang in Ahmed

Ahmed published his Mohmand study in 1980. In chapter 4 he sets out a typology he had first proposed in 1976, "the fundamental division between those organized around the principle of nang as it is interpreted locally and those organized around qalang which divides and creates superior and subordinate positions in society". Nang and qalang "conceptualize two antithetical forms of Pukhtun social organization, the former free and unencapsulated and the latter encapsulated". [4] His glossary defines qalang as "rents and taxes among Yusufzai of Mardan and Swat", and adds that it also means gifts to religious groups like the Mians elsewhere. [4] The pair already existed in a proverb, he says: "Honour, nang, ate up the mountains and taxes, qalang, ate up the plains". Ahmed gives it in English; the Pashto was not found. [4]

The nang tribes he names are the Mohmand, Afridi, Orakzai, Mahsud and Wazir. The qalang Pukhtuns include the Yusufzai of Swat and Mardan and the Muhammadzai and Barakzai. [4] He sets the Mohmand model beside the Swat model in a table. Some of its rows: [4]

• Land: scant rainfall, unirrigated, a single crop in the Mohmand hills; heavy rainfall, irrigation, double cropping, cash crops and rice in Swat.

• Who counts as a Pukhtun: lineage membership among the Mohmand; land ownership in Swat.

• Government: a segmentary tribal system with no central authority; a politically centralised society.

Ahmed's account of how a hill society turns into a plains one is ecological and political. "It is significant that nang areas are almost defined by rain-fed lands producing one crop." Irrigated land that allows double cropping lets wealth build up, and a khan appears when a neighbouring state takes an interest, as the British did when they made chiefs. [4] The move runs one way: "There is a tendency for Pukhtun society to move uni-directionally from nang to qalang in acts of migration", and a hill family on the plain must accept a subordinate place, compromise its nang or meet hostility. [4] The split runs through single tribes: the Mohmand khans of Lalpura and Goshta in Afghanistan, on land watered by the Kabul river, organised their tenants as qalang groups, while the Mohmand of what became the Mohmand Agency stayed on nang lines. [4]

Each side judged the other. A British soldier, Oliver, quoted by Ahmed, said the hill Pashtun "is certain to be filthy and he may be ragged, but he will saunter into a Viceregal durbar as proud as Lucifer". The plains khan Churchill met near Swat wore crimson and gold lace and rode a stallion. [4] Qalang society, Ahmed says, sees nang as the ideal and "lays down a social line beyond which nang values are not permitted to disturb or challenge qalang elitism and hierarchy". [4] The hill elders thought differently about money: to the Shati Khel elders, "excess of money and power was kofar, an attribute of the kafir; it was un-Islamic." [4] Amir Abdur Rahman called the Mohmand country "the land of rebellion", and the Wali of Swat called Swat's own earlier history "the Pukhtun period", a time of anarchy. [4] Ahmed adds that "even for a Pukhtun king the nang tribesman is a formidable subject to dominate", and quotes Yaqub Khan's cry of 1879, as the tribes gathered in Kabul against him: "I would rather be a grasscutter in the English camp than ruler of Afghanistan." Ahmed takes it from Spain's The Pathan Borderland. [4]

Ahmed does not say the plains have no honour. Murders over cousin rivalry and women, he notes, are common in Peshawar District, and he suggests they come from "the anxiety and tension of qalang society wishing to live up to the nang ideal but finding it difficult to do so in an encapsulated situation". He adds that both kinds of Pukhtun "see themselves and define themselves unequivocally as Pukhtun societies upholding Pukhtun values", and of his own table: "I am, of course, like all model-builders, holding constant as many variables as possible so as to exaggerate and bring into relief what I argue to be the determinative factors of change, and am therefore guilty of over-simplifying." [4]

Barth's Swat

Barth's Political Leadership among Swat Pathans (1959) is the work Ahmed puts on the qalang side, and he complains that "authoritative writers" had taken nang values for granted while describing qalang society. [4] Barth's Swat is a valley of landlords. The landowner takes four-fifths of the crop and the labourer one-fifth. [5] A Pakhtun holds daftar land, which gives him a voice in the assembly. If he sells it to someone of another caste it becomes siri land and the right to speak goes with it. A Pakhtun who loses all his land loses his caste status. [6] Ahmed's table says the same in its own words: in Swat a Pukhtun is defined by land, in the hills by lineage. [4, 6]

Barth also shows why a Swat khan would not take a wage: "To receive from any person a salary or any stipulated payment is to engage as the servant of that person; it implies a general subordination to him." Chiefs of high status refuse such a relationship. [5] That is the line Ahmed draws with qalang: a rent or a tax puts one man under another. [4] Swat by then was also a state. Barth dates its rise between 1917 and 1926, built by "seeking influence rather than possession of land", and records that in 1926 the British recognised it and gave the Badshah the title of Wali and an annual subsidy. [5]

In the introduction to his collected Swat essays in 1981, Barth wrote that he had been criticised for casting his analysis of Swat "in theoretical moulds adopted from other sources", citing Ahmed (1976), and that "perhaps the experience of Swat Pathans has at times unduly dominated my general understanding of Man". He also named the Swat Pathans' "yearning for social independence, for honour and security through self-sufficiency". [6] Ahmed reports that a nang Pukhtun from Waziristan once challenged Barth over the Pukhtunness of the Swat Pukhtun. [4]

Two accounts of one case

Glatzer and James Spain both tell the case of Ajab Khan of the Bosti Khel Afridi, and they differ where it touches nang.

Both date it to 1923 and the cantonment at Kohat. In Spain's version rifles were stolen in February, a police party searched Ajab's village in his absence, and "the story got around, and persists today, that some of the village women were subjected to search and insult". "Goaded on by his women and relatives, Ajab planned his badal." In April he raided Kohat again; Mrs Ellis was killed and her daughter Mollie, about fifteen, was carried off. She was returned unharmed after negotiations conducted mainly by two Pathan political officers. [11]

Glatzer tells it as the story Pashtuns use to teach honour. Soldiers had come too close to the women of the Bosti Khel, so the clan's namus was violated; Ajab and two companions kidnapped Molly Ellis; an English nurse walked into Afridi country unarmed and persuaded him to let her go. In his reading, "if I cannot kill the one who disgraced me I have to disgrace him also", and an act done by one man with two companions can turn disgrace into honour. [8] He leaves out Mrs Ellis's death. Spain leaves out the nurse.

The endings differ more. Glatzer has Ajab leave for northern Afghanistan on his own to spare his tribe, calls voluntary exile the highest sacrifice a Pashtun can offer, and has him die in 1961 "a highly honoured khan". [8] Spain has Ajab cross in and out of Afghanistan, give himself up to the Afghan governor at Jalalabad in 1924 and be interned beyond the Hindu Kush, with land near Mazar-i-Sharif, despite British demands for his surrender. In Spain's account the Bosti Khel were fined 42,000 rupees, Ajab's lands were confiscated and his village was pulled down; Glatzer gives the same fine. [8, 11]

What the divide leaves out

Rzehak says plainly that "ideals never come up to reality, of course", though they guide behaviour. [7] Glatzer saw in nang two halves, tura, the sword, and aql, reason, the second held by the white-bearded elders and meant to check the first. [8] Ahmed's caution about his table, and Barth's about Swat, show that the line between nang hills and qalang plains arranges the cases without settling them.