Pashto academies: the Pashto Tolana, Peshawar and Kabul

At a glance

• Afghanistan's first official learned society, the Kabul Literary Society of 1930, worked in Persian. Pashto institutions grew beside it and then replaced it: a Pashto Society at Kandahar in the early 1930s, and the Pashto Academy, the Pashto Tolana, in Kabul in 1937. [3, 5, 6]

• Sources date the changeover differently, 1937 or 1940, because the Literary Society's monthly Kabol turned fully to Pashto only in 1940. [3–5]

• A decree of 1936 is credited with making Pashto the national language of Afghanistan and with giving officials three years to learn it. [8]

• In 1978 the Tolana was merged with other bodies into the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan. [6]

• The Pashto Academy at the University of Peshawar was founded in 1955 by Maulana Abdul Qadir and publishes the journal Pashto. [7, 9]

A Persian society and its Pashto rivals

Pashto had no learned society in the modern sense until the 1930s. Mohammad Nadir Shah opened the Kabul Literary Society (Anjoman-e adabi-e Kabol) in 1930, and Wali Ahmadi's Encyclopaedia Iranica entry calls it the first official academic and cultural association of Afghanistan. Its purpose was to promote modern Persian literature, and its members were mostly authors and poets who wrote in Persian. [3] Its monthly, Kabol, first appeared on 15 Jawza 1310 (5 May 1931) under the poet Mohammad Anvar Besmel. In the 1930s it printed some Pashto, mostly as Persian articles about Pashto language and literature. [3, 4]

Christine Noelle-Karimi writes that Nadir Shah founded the Literary Society in Kabul and a Pashto Society (Pashto anjoman) at Kandahar in the early 1930s, modelled on the scientific institutes of France. [5] The Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan gives a longer family tree on its own page. It names a first body, Pashto Mraca, set up under Amanullah in 1922 and gone by 1928, then the Kabul Academic Association of 1930, the Herat and Pashto academic associations of 1932, and the Pashto Tolana, formed in 1937 by merging the Kabul and Kandahar associations. [6] The Academy's account and Noelle-Karimi's agree on 1937. Iranica names the Literary Society's founding secretary as Mohammad Nowruz Khan, the chief royal scribe. [3]

Iranica's article on the Literary Society says it was "formally replaced" by the Pashto Society in 1940, and its article on Kabol gives the reason: to support the monarchy's efforts to make Pashto the national language. [3, 4] Minister of education Mohammad Naim Khan had begun actively promoting Pashto in 1937. [3] Noelle-Karimi says the monthly switched to Pashto when the Academy was created in 1937. [5]

The decree of 1936

The state's side of the story is a decree. The Afghan writer Younus Negah, in an analysis printed in 2026 by the Kabul newspaper Hasht-e Subh, says that Zahir Shah's decree of 1936 declared Pashto, then called Afghani, the national language and required all government officials to learn it within three years. [8] Negah, who writes in Persian, treats the decree as the start of serious state effort. The state, he says, lacked the resources to put Pashto where Persian had been in offices and markets, and the plan was delayed again and again. [8] The 1964 and 2004 constitutions, he says, did not separate a national language from an official one, but the informal title "national language" stayed in political talk, and Pashto kept its place on banknotes. [8] The constitutional texts are in Standard written Pashto. The king and his ministers are in Mohammad Zahir Shah and Hashim Khan and Shah Mahmud Khan.

Swat did the same. A paper on Pashto in Swat says Pashto was declared the official language of the state of Swat in June 1937, and that after Swat merged into Pakistan in 1969 it stayed in use for a time and was then replaced by Urdu and English. [1] The ruler is in Miangul Abdul Wadud, Wali of Swat.

What the Tolana did

The Kabul yearbook and the monthly carried the Academy's work. Noelle-Karimi lists the Kabul yearbook compiled by the Literary Society, which ran from 1932 to 1981 under changing names: Sal-nama-ye majalla-ye Kabol in 1932 to 1934, Sal-nama-ye Kabol in 1935 to 1939, Da Kabol kalanay in 1940 to 1950 and Da Afghanistan kalanay from 1951. [5] When Kabol became a Pashto magazine in 1940, only a handful of the original contributors went on writing for it. Iranica names Gul Pacha Ulfat, Abdul Rauf Benawa and Siddiqullah Rishtin. [4] Their lives are told in Gul Pacha Ulfat and Abdul Rauf Benawa.

The Academy's best-known scholar-president was Abdul Hai Habibi of Kandahar (1910 to 1984), who held the post in 1940 and was dean of the faculty of letters in 1941 and 1942. After exile in Pakistan from 1951 to 1962 he became president of the Historical Society in 1966. [5] Noelle-Karimi writes that his research followed his Pashtun nationalist leanings, tracing Pashtun elites in the lands of today's Afghanistan back to 1400 BCE, and that his account of the time after the Timurids rested on the Pata Khazana, an anthology she calls purported. [5] The disputed anthology is discussed in Halima Khattak.

Herbert Penzl, writing at Kabul in 1959, noted that the meetings the Academy arranged at Kabul in 1942, 1948 and the summer of 1958 dealt with spelling and with the standing of some forms used by writers. He wrote that they were rightly announced as dealing with orthography only, and that no spoken standard had ever been formulated, described or taught. [2] What those meetings decided is in Standard written Pashto.

From Tolana to Academy of Sciences

The Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan gives 1978 for its own start, as a merger of the Pashto Tolana, the Afghanistan History Association, the Aryana Encyclopedia and an international centre for Pashto researchers. [6] It now lists more than 300 research fellows in three sections: social science, natural science and Islamic studies. [6] The Pashto edition of Kabol seems to have stopped in the unrest of the 1990s, and in 2004 the Academy's department of languages and literatures relaunched it as a scholarly journal. [4]

The Pashto Academy at Peshawar

Pashto in British India and then Pakistan had no court or ministry behind it. Sher Alam Shinwari wrote in Dawn in 2009 that Pashto "has never enjoyed official recognition and patronage", and that even Ahmad Shah Abdali and Sher Shah Suri, both Pashtuns, kept Persian for court business. [10] He lists the early Pashto magazines, among them Bacha Khan's Pakhtun, launched in 1927. [10] For that press see Pashto radio, television and press.

The University of Peshawar's Pashto Academy came from one man's work. Maulana Abdul Qadir (1905 to 1969) had edited a Pashto literary magazine, Nun Paroon, from New Delhi before 1947, and Dawn calls him the founding director of the Academy. [10] Prof Hanif Khalil said at a seminar in his memory in July 2023 that Abdul Qadir founded the Academy in 1955, "to light up the candle of research and motivate scholars and writers", and that he travelled to many countries to find old Pashto manuscripts. [9] Other speakers praised how he drew scholars to the university, and said the Academy had met many of the targets he and his colleagues set about seventy years earlier. They asked that all his works be reprinted. [9] The Academy's later part in fixing spelling, including the Bara Gali decisions of 1990, is in Standard written Pashto.

The Academy's journal is Pashto, a peer-reviewed, twice-yearly journal in Pashto and English on the language, literature, history, art and culture, free to read online. Its chief editor is the Academy's director, and its patron is the vice chancellor of the university. [7] Its pages are quoted across the Pashto and English articles on this site, for example on Pir Roshan.

Other academies and what is unsettled

Shinwari counted more than a hundred Pashto literary magazines in 2009, published in Afghanistan and in Peshawar, Kohat, Mardan, Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan, Charsadda, Karachi and Quetta, most of them out of print for want of money. [10] At Quetta, Dawn reported in 2018, the Balochistan government funds academies for Balochi, Pashto and Brahui, and grants to them rose under a former chief minister. [11]

What the institutions never produced is a single authority for both countries. Kabul's Tolana and Peshawar's Academy each ran their own conferences, and their writers still follow two spelling traditions, set out in Standard written Pashto. Negah's view is that decree and title cannot do the work of schools, books and trained teachers, and that support for Pashto should go there. [8] The script itself is in the history of the Pashto script, and dictionaries are in Pashto dictionaries.