The Pashto novel and short story: Rahat Zakheli, Zaitoon Bano and the first novels

At a glance

• Pashto prose fiction is about a century old. The first Pashto short story is usually named as Rahat Zakheli's Kunda Jenai (1917), though one account puts the start at 1908. [9–11]

• The first novels in Pashto were translations from Urdu. Mian Muhammad Yousaf Kakakhel's Taubat-un-Nasuh was printed at Rawalpindi in 1904. [4]

• Which novel written in Pashto came first is still argued. Zakheli's Mah Rukhi (about 1910) and Nur Muhammad Taraki's Be Tarbiyata Zoay (serialised in Kabul from 1939 or the 1940s) are the two candidates. [2, 6]

• In Kabul the modern novel arrived through Persian (Dari) translations in Mahmud Tarzi's newspaper, not through Pashto. [6]

• Zaitoon Bano (1938–2021), called the first lady of Pashto fiction, wrote about women's lives from 1958. [12, 13]

A form that came through Urdu

The novel as a printed book reached Pashto from Urdu. Muhammad Dauod Khan and Sher Zaman Seemab, writing in the Pashto Academy's journal, say the novel first appeared in English, passed into Urdu, and came into Pashto through translation from Urdu. [4] Their account of the first translations is not the only one. They give Naqsh-e-Nageen as the first Pashto novel, translated in 1876 and published only in 1957. [4] They also describe Taubat-un-Nasuh, which Deputy Nazir Ahmad wrote in Urdu in 1874: Mian Muhammad Yousaf Kakakhel put it into Pashto, and New Press, Rawalpindi, printed it in 1904. They call it the first published novel in Pashto and the start of the novel tradition. [4]

The same pattern holds for the short story. Dr Nasrullah Khan and Dr Badshah-e-Rome Ali Khel Daryab, in a 2024 article on Rahat Zakheli's stories, write that Pashto fiction has its roots in the subcontinent before 1947, that most writers who read Western literature were influenced by it, and that most Western genres came to Pashto through Urdu. [5] Dr Salma Shaheen, a Pashto writer, said the same at a Peshawar meeting in 2017: Urdu fiction had shaped Pashto fiction, and it was the Progressive Literary Movement that first gave the short story a purpose. [9]

Rahat Zakheli and the first Pashto story

Syed Rahat Zakheli (1884–1963) is the writer named at the head of Pashto fiction. [10, 11] The News on Sunday says he wrote Konda Jenai (the widowed girl) in 1917 and is admittedly the first Pashto short story writer. [10] Dawn's report on a 2017 celebration of "100 years of Pashto fiction" in Peshawar, held by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Culture Directorate, calls Kunda Jenai (the young widow) a classic written in 1917 and the beginning of Pashto fiction. [9] The critic Badarul Hakim said it spoke of the discriminatory and inhuman customs that fell on women of its time. [9]

An older Dawn feature on Pashto literature gives a different year. It says that according to one theory the third period of Pashto literature began in 1908, when Rahat Zakheli "wrote the first ever short story in Pushto language". [11] The two dates are not reconciled in these sources, and 1917 is the one the 2017 meeting used.

Zakheli's stories are gathered in Da Rahat Afsanay ("Rahat's stories"), which Nasrullah Khan and Ali Khel Daryab analyse. [5] The scholar Syed Yasir Ali Shah of the University of Peshawar has written separately on the first symbolic short story in Pashto, and begins from the fact that scholars disagree about who wrote it. [8]

Mah Rukhi, a novel with landays in it

Zakheli's novel is Naval da Mah Rukhe ya Natija-e Ishq (ناول د ماه رخې يا نتيجه عشق), "The novel of Mah Rukh, or the result of love". Zakheli's foreword, which the scholar Zarin Anzoor quotes, says that the book is a true story with an invented name put on it for one reason, that it is an account of recent times, and that it is an eyewitness account of events in 1906, 1907, 1908 and 1909. He wrote it, he says, at the request of a friend, a Mr F. R. N. H. [2]

Habibullah Rafi, who edited Pashto Panga (Kabul, 1977), found a copy of the first printing in the Kabul public library. His description of it gives 144 pages of 22 by 14 centimetres, a prose novel with landays and verses set in at intervals. [2] The Pashto scholar Khalid Khattak, Anzoor says, gave 1910 as the year of the printing in a 2003 article in the Pashto Academy's journal Pashto, and travelled to Kabul to see the copy. [2] Kabul University's cultural council printed a second edition in 1363 on the Afghan solar calendar, prepared by Latif Bahand from the same copy. [2] On the form of the landay itself, see the landay.

Anzoor, who wrote a history of modern Pashto narrative literature, does not claim the book is a modern novel. He says it was an early attempt, still under the hard influence of folk tales. The hero and heroine meet and fall in love suddenly, as in the tales. The characters' names (Shams al-Nazir, Mah Rukh, Hasan Afza, Mahfil Afza, Dilfroza) come from folk and verse stories. Long, tiring arguments on one subject sometimes stand where events should be. And the prose sits between folk-tale prose and the newer literary prose. [2] He argues that it should be judged as a first experiment, not by today's standards. [2]

Which was the first Pashto novel

The dispute is about printing, completeness and authorship. In 2014 the researcher Rasheed Ahmad published a 59-page booklet at Peshawar, Da Pakhto Wromanai Naval? (د پښتو وړومبنے ناول؟, "The first Pashto novel?"), which Anzoor summarises in four points. Mah Rukhi was never printed before the 1363 edition. It is a translation, not an original. It is incomplete, since it ends with the words tamam shud hissa awwal ("end of part one"). And the first Pashto novel written is Be Tarbiyata Zoay (بې تربيته زوے, "The son without upbringing") by Nur Muhammad Taraki, serialised in the Kabul magazine in the 1940s, though only a few instalments appeared. [2] Shah and Saneen, in an article on Kabul's novel, date its appearance to 1939 and call it the first Afghan novel in Pashto. They give 1919 and Jihad-e-Akbar for the first in Dari. [6]

Anzoor, answering in the journal Pashto in 2019, rejects each point. He says Khalid Khattak's 1910 printing and Rafi's description of a printed copy settle that the book was printed, that Zakheli's foreword calls the story his own and never calls it a translation, and that Zakheli puts Pashto landays into it, which a translation would not. He grants that part two may never have been written, and notes that Taraki's novel is also unfinished: only parts reached print in the magazine, and Dr Sadiq Zhirak later published the pieces he found as a separate work. [2] His conclusion is that, on the evidence now in hand, Mah Rukhi is the first printed Pashto novel and Taraki's is not, and he hopes documents will turn up that point to something earlier. [2]

Louis Dupree, an American anthropologist, wrote in 1980 that the Western-style novel was virtually unknown in Afghanistan and called Taraki "a budding Persian-language novelist". [7] Pashto scholars treat Taraki's fiction as Pashto. The site's article on Nur Muhammad Taraki gives M. Hassan Kakar's dating of his first novel to 1957, while Rasheed Ahmad names a different title. [2]

Tarzi and the novel in Kabul

In Kabul the first modern novels were in Persian. Irfan Ali Shah and Kiran Saneen, in the Pashto Academy's journal, write that the modern novel entered Afghanistan through translations from Turkish into Dari early in the twentieth century. [6] Mahmud Tarzi had lived in Damascus and Istanbul for about twenty years, returned to Afghanistan in 1902, and founded and edited Siraj-ul-Akhbar from 1911 to 1918. [6] The paper says he translated novels by Jules Verne and Xavier de Montepin, among them Montepin's Les Viveurs de Paris, and that he pressed for the European "novel" over the old tales of fairies and magic. [6] The paper does not claim Tarzi wrote Pashto. His father is in the site's article on Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi.

Abdul Rauf Qatil's Dwa Yaran ("Two friends") was printed in Afghanistan in 1337 on the solar calendar and is described by Anzoor as an important novel on social reform and the worth of women. When Anzoor wanted a copy, the only one he could find in all Afghanistan was in the library of the poet Abdullah Bakhtani Khadimgar. [2]

Magazines, societies and the writers who came after

Dawn's feature on Pashto literary history lists the magazines. Bacha Khan launched Pakhtoon in 1927 under the Anjuman Islah-i-Afaghina, and writers from the movement contributed poetry and prose, until his arrest in 1930 closed it. [11] Abdul Haleem Asr brought out the weekly Insaaf from Mardan in 1948. The magazines Pakhto and Qand also contributed to modern Pashto literature. [11] See Bacha Khan and Pashto media.

In 1950 Dost Muhammad Kamil, Amir Hamza Shinwari and Kakaji Sanobar Hussain founded the Ulasi Adabi Jirga. Dawn says the group produced writers including Ajmal Khattak, Qalandar Momand, Hamish Khalil and Mir Mehdi Shah Mehdi, and introduced new literary genres. [17] The article on Hamza Shinwari gives a differing account of its beginnings. The News on Sunday divides Pashto fiction into three periods: before partition (1900–1947), the early years after it (1949–1982), and the modern era from 1983. [10] It lists Mian Gul Azad, Hamza Shinwari, Master Abdul Karim, Mian Syed Rasool Rasa, Taraki, Ajmal Khattak, Hamesh Khalil, Samandar Khan Samandar, Zaitoon Bano, Hassan Khan Sooz, Mohammad Din Zhwak, Mir Mehdi Shah Bacha and Qalandar Momand among the writers who wrote stories and novels. [10]

At the 2017 meeting Shaheen named Qalander Momand, Ajmal Khattak and Hasan Khan Soz as writers who carried their ideas into fiction, and Kazim Khan Shaida and Afzal Raza as writers who tried to change Pashtun thinking. [9] The site has articles on Qalandar Momand, Ajmal Khattak and Kazim Khan Shaida.

Ghani Khan's English sketches

Ghani Khan is known as a Pashto poet. His prose book The Pathans: A Sketch, published at Bombay in 1947, was written in English and is not a Pashto novel. Its contents list includes chapters called "An Incident" and "A Fairy Tale". [1]

Zaitoon Bano

Zaitoon Bano was born on 18 June 1938 in Sufaid Dheri near Peshawar and died on 14 September 2021. [12] Her father, Pir Syed Sultan Mahmood Shah, and her grandfather were poets, and they let her go to school. [12] Dawn's 2021 obituary says she wrote her first story under the name Razia Begum while in class nine, and revealed herself as the author only when a Peshawar publisher sent a money order of 250 rupees for her first book, Hindara ("Mirror"), about a girl married to an old man without her consent. [12] Dawn's 2010 interview puts that book in 1958 and says Maat Bangree ("Broken bangles") followed the next year. [13] The News on Sunday calls Hindara her first story, from the 1960s. [10] The dates are not the same in each.

She worked as a producer at Peshawar radio, presented the programme Da Khwendo Narrai ("Women's world") and married the Urdu and Hindko writer Taj Saeed. [12] Dawn counts more than two dozen books between 1958 and 2008, among them Juandi Ghamoona ("Living pains"), Khoboona ("Dreams"), Kachkol ("Begging bowl") and Zama Diary ("My diary"). [12] The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Directorate of Culture has published a 700-page collection of her Pashto stories, Da Shagu Mazal, covering 1958 to 2017. [12] The News on Sunday summarises Zanzeroonna ("The chains"), in which a widow named Shamo is called ill-omened and rebuilds her life through education in the city. [10]

Bano said her characters were drawn from her own surroundings and sometimes kept their real names. [13] She said honour killing is not a genuine Pashtun tradition. [13] Dawn says her stories dealt with honour killings and domestic violence, subjects male writers did not take up with her force. [12] Her work is also mentioned in Pashtun women today. Her Urdu books are described in two ways: The News on Sunday calls them story collections, and Dawn lists several as novels. [10, 12]

Taizi, Afridi and other later writers

Sher Zaman Taizi, born at Pabbi on 3 November 1931 and dead on 22 December 2009, wrote novels, stories and verse in 32 titles in Pashto and English, according to the Express Tribune. [16] His first novel was Gul Khan. The Tribune says it is still taught in bachelor's courses in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and that his contemporary Pareshan Khattak compared it to Tolstoy and Dickens in a preface. [16] Amanat, Rahman Korona and Ghunday followed. His story collection Sheplai holds a three-sentence story called "The field". [16] Dr Muhammad Azam, quoted there, put him third on the list of great Pashto novelists after Shahibzada Idrees and Syed Rasul Rasa. [16] Inam Ullah argues in Pashto (2022) that Taizi is rightly called the pioneer of symbolism in the Pashto novel, because all four of his novels use symbols on purpose. [3]

Tahir Afridi was born on 4 January 1939 and died in June 2021. [15] He never went to school, started in poetry, and turned to fiction. [14, 15] Dawn says he published his first story collection, Da Mahaloonu Khwake ("Beside the palaces"), in 1971, and that his second, Panry Panry ("Dog-eared pages"), won the Pakistan Writers Guild award in 1976. [14] It counts about 22 titles in Pashto and Urdu and says he earned the title of pioneer of the abstract short story in Pashto. [14] His Urdu novel Teri Ankhain Khobsurat Hain appeared in 2009. [14] He was also given the Ghazi Mir Bacha Khan Medal by the Afghan government. [15] Pashto scholars do not agree on who wrote the first symbolic short story. [8]

What Pashto fiction has been about

At the 2017 meeting the speakers agreed that stories drawn from the land could change Pashtun thinking. [9] Shaheen cited Nawaz Tahir's story "Gunah De Cha Wa?", based on a true honour killing. [9] Hakim said that from Kunda Jenai to Noorul Amin Yousafzai's Dehshatgard ("The terrorist") Pashto fiction has been about morality, and that writers had not yet told the human stories of the people of Malakand during the recent conflict. [9] Another speaker, Suleman Kamil, asked for stories on the 21st century: 11 September, disasters and displacement. [9] Shaheen thought young writers lacked forums and technique. [9]