Pashto literature and oral poetry: from the Roshani writers to the landay

Song first, writing later

Much of what Pashtuns have sung and told for centuries was never written down. The Encyclopaedia Iranica's survey of Iranian folk poetry notes several kinds of Pashto verse that circulate by ear: romantic and moral tales told in verse (qissa), which are today widely available on audio cassettes and in cheap printed booklets, and lyrical songs, including historical ballads, that rely on allusion and on complex rhyme schemes. [3] The entry points out a feature of such songs that matters for anyone studying them: because they depend on listeners understanding the references, they tend to lose their popularity once the references are forgotten, and recorded texts rarely go back further than about a century before they were written down. [3]

The first written Pashto

Written Pashto literature begins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the middle of a religious argument. The Roshani movement attracted many followers among the frontier tribes, and the orthodox replied. Olaf Caroe describes Akhund Darweza, a Tajik from Nangarhar, as the first extant writer in Pashto and the champion of orthodoxy against the Roshani doctrines of Bayazid Ansari, who was born in 1525 at Jullundur to parents from Kaniguram. Caroe calls Darweza's book a doctrinal diatribe and doubts that its arguments would have prevailed over the Roshani teachings without the support, for political reasons, of the Emperor Akbar's arms. [4] The Roshani side had its poets too. Sergei Andreyev notes that the Roshani poet Mirza Khan Ansari, who died around 1630, adapted the natural metres of popular Pashto songs to verse forms inherited from Persian. [1]

Historians also have to be cautious about claims for earlier Pashto poetry. The Afghan historian Abd al-Hayy Habibi built his account of the period after the Timurids on a purported early record of Pashto poetry called the Pata Khazana, and Iranica's phrase for it is exactly that, "purported". [2] On Commons, a manuscript of the Pata Khazana copied in Quetta in 1886 is catalogued with the note that Habibi, who announced the discovery in 1943, never produced the original for examination before his death in 1984. Because its authenticity is debated, this article does not use it as evidence for early Pashto poetry. [2]

Khushal Khan Khattak

The best-documented early Pashto writer is Khushal Khan Khattak (1613–89), chief of the Khattak tribe and, in Andreyev's words, a towering figure in Pashto literature. [1] He was arrested by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in April 1664 and spent more than two years in custody in India, where he wrote prolifically. In 1672 he resigned his Mughal rank and joined the rebel confederacy of the Afridi and Mohmand tribes. [1]

Tradition says he wrote 350 books in addition to the poems of his divan, a figure Andreyev calls no doubt an exaggeration. He did write many works in both Persian and Pashto on subjects including war and statecraft, medicine, divination, falconry, house-building, child-rearing, theology and ethics. His only undoubtedly extant Pashto prose work is the Dastar-nama, a manual of advice for rulers. [1] Like Mirza Khan Ansari before him, he adapted the natural metres of Pashto songs to Persian verse forms: the metre is syllabic, with the rhythm created by stress that usually recurs on every fourth syllable. [1]

Andreyev describes his poetry as courageous, harsh and straightforward, and notes that he wrote consciously as a national poet, the first to express an ethnic sentiment for uniting all Pashtuns, and used poetry as a political weapon against the Mughals. He kept stressing Pashtunwali, the tribal code of honour, while also severely criticising his fellow Pashtuns' faults. Falconry gave him vocabulary and metaphors, and many of his poems start from what he saw. He argued fiercely against the Roshani movement, yet claimed to be the equal of its famous poets as a master of the pen. [1] A Persian manuscript of his Baz-nama, the book of falconry, is dated to 1689–90. [1]

Pashto and Persian side by side

For historians of the Sadozai period (1747–1818), Christine Noelle-Karimi notes, the works of Khushal Khan and of Mohammad Hayat Khan, a nineteenth-century author, point to a body of Pashto literature produced locally. Persian, however, remained the main medium for writing about government and the state. [2] The linguist Elena Bashir observes that Persian models stimulated the beginnings of literary writing in most of the languages of the frontier region. She adds that Pashto uses its own conjunctions for relative clauses and shows fewer of the Persian grammatical features that have spread through its neighbours. [5]

Institutions in the twentieth century

The institutions that promoted Pashto as a written language date from the 1930s. According to Noelle-Karimi, Nader Shah founded a Literary Society in Kabul and a Pashto Society in Kandahar in the early 1930s on the model of French scientific institutes. The Literary Society's monthly Kabul, first published in 1931, switched to Pashto when the Pashto Academy (Pashto Tolana) was created in Kabul in 1937. [2] Abd al-Hayy Habibi, from Kandahar, served as president of the Pashto Academy in 1940. [2]

The landay

The best-known living form of Pashto oral poetry is the landay. The Poetry Foundation defines it as a form of folk poetry from Afghanistan, meant to be recited or sung and often anonymous, a couplet of 22 syllables: nine in the first line and thirteen in the second. A landay ends on a "ma" or "na" sound and deals with love, grief, homeland, war or separation. [6] In Pashto the word landay is reported to mean a short, poisonous snake, a reference to its brevity and its bite. [9]

The poet and reporter Eliza Griswold, who devoted the June 2013 issue of Poetry magazine to the form, writes that landays were created by and for the more than twenty million Pashtun women who live on both sides of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. They are traditionally sung aloud, often to the beat of a hand drum. They sometimes rhyme but more often do not, and they are known for beauty, bawdiness and wit as well as for expressing common truths about war, separation, homeland, grief and love. [7] Old words are swapped for new ones, so a colonial British officer in an old couplet can become an American soldier in a recent one, and a book can become a gun. [7] Griswold also describes how landays began among nomads and farmers and were shared around a fire, after work in the fields or at weddings, and how today they travel by radio, text message and social media. [7]

Where the form came from is not settled. Griswold writes that caravans of Aryan nomads likely brought such poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, [7] while the poet and critic Elizabeth Gray, reviewing Griswold's book, mentions a theory that landays were born in nomad caravans and that their form reflects call and response on the journey. [8] Both are theories rather than documented history.

In many communities poetry, and especially love poetry, is not welcomed for women, and Griswold reports that singing can be associated with immodesty, so women often sing landays in secret, in front of close family, or to a visiting foreign woman. [7] Hand drums and other music were banned by the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, and in some places still are. [7] Griswold names Mirman Baheer, a women's literary group that meets in Kabul and runs a phone line for girls in the provinces, as one of the groups that gave women an audience for their poems. A young poet from Helmand who wrote as Rahila Muska, and whose death in 2010 led Griswold to begin her reporting, called Mirman Baheer from her village. [7]

Landays have been collected before. Griswold names the poet and intellectual Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, who collected them in refugee camps during the civil war of the 1980s. [7] She and the photographer Seamus Murphy collected most of theirs in 2012–13 and translated them word by word with Pashto speakers. Her English versions rhyme more often than the Pashto originals, because rhyme was the best way to carry the sound of the Pashto into English, so they are interpretations and not literal translations. [7] The resulting book, I Am the Beggar of the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), contains more than one hundred landays and about fifty photographs by Murphy, according to Gray's review. [8]

A note on sources

The written history of Pashto literature is contested in places, including the dating of the earliest texts and the authenticity of the Pata Khazana, so this article leaves some points open. The landay section relies mainly on Eliza Griswold's reporting, which is that of a journalist and translator rather than a linguist, together with the Poetry Foundation's definition. [6] [7] [8] [9]