The Pashtun turban: pagri, lungee and kulla

A Pashtun man's turban has parts, and Pashto has a word for each. The cloth is the pagri (پګړۍ, pagṛəy), which Henry George Raverty glossed in 1867 as "a turband", or the paṭkay (پټکی), which he glossed as "a small turban". [2] The end that hangs down is the shamla (شمله, shamla), "the end of a turban". [2] Under the cloth sits a cap, the kholay (خولۍ), "a cap, a covering for the head". [2] In the Peshawar valley the long narrow scarf wound for a turban is the lungee (لونګۍ, lungəy), and the tall embroidered cap it goes round is the kulla. [6] The overview of Pashtun clothing is in Pashtun dress. The records below run from Elphinstone in 1815 to a Kandahar shopkeeper in 2023.

• Names: pagri (پګړۍ) and paṭkay (پټکی) for the turban, lungee (لونګۍ) for the long scarf, shamla (شمله) for the hanging end, kholay (خولۍ) and kulla for the cap. [2, 6]

• Length: 3 to 6 metres, according to Nancy Hatch Dupree (1992). [10] A mid-nineteenth-century silk turban cloth from Punjab in the Victoria and Albert Museum is 964 cm long. [11]

• Cloth: white cotton is commonest, some Pashtun groups prefer black, and silk turbans come in muted greys, browns and pinks. [10]

• Peshawar: a tall conical cap, often ribbed like a melon and stiff with gold, wound with a long lungee of blue, grey or black cloth woven with silk and gold bars; lungees cost 20 to 100 rupees in 1884. [6]

• Kandahar: cylindrical caps embroidered with gold and silver thread, and foldable caps set with coloured glass beads. [10]

• Recorded colours: white in the Yusufzai country (1815), white or blue at Peshawar, maroon among the Waziris (1910), red in Bannu (1876). [1, 5, 8]

Names, and what they meant in different places

The words did not mean the same everywhere. Raverty marked many dictionary entries as eastern (E.) or western (W.) Pashto, and he gave no such mark to pagri, paṭkay, shamla or kholay. [2] The differences lie in use. The 1884 gazetteer of Peshawar District calls the white turban of a villager a patkai, and the Bannu sayings that Septimus Thorburn recorded use patkai for a man's turban, down to the name of a tax. [5, 6] Mountstuart Elphinstone, whose account of the Afghans appeared in 1815, used loongee for a scarf worn at the waist or over the shoulder, and once glossed it as "a silken turban". [1] The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that in Punjab lungi means a waistcloth and a turban cloth is a pag. [11]

Raverty's dictionary has smaller words as well. A chirah is a turban with very small folds, a mir-khana is a turban of fine cloth or the muslin made for it, and a kharattah is a large turban worn by mullas. [2] His entry sar-tarralaey describes a man of the pastoral or nomad tribes, literally "head-bound", so called "from merely wearing a turban without a cap under it". [2] Elphinstone gives the mulla's turban its own description: "a very large white turban of a peculiar shape". [1]

Cloth, colour and length

Dupree gives a turban's length as 3 to 6 metres, with the arrangement of the folds setting one man's turban apart from another's. She adds that the longer the turban, the more fashionable the man. [10] No other source consulted here gives a length for a Pashtun turban. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a red silk turban cloth woven with gold-wrapped thread that measures 964 cm, nearly ten metres. The museum dates it to the mid-nineteenth century and places it in Punjab, probably in present-day Pakistan; it does not call it Pashtun. [11]

The 1884 Peshawar gazetteer put a price on the cloth. A villager's whole outfit, pagri, coat and trousers of coarse country cotton, cost between 2 rupees and 2 rupees 8 annas. Chiefs and well-off men wore the same pattern in finer material, and in winter "Peshawar lungis or scarves" took the place of malmal and khassa pagris. [6] The same gazetteer noted that "some of the turbans are of vast dimensions" and that the head was always shaved. [6]

Henry Walter Bellew drew a line within one people. Among the Ghilzai traders who came down to India in the cold weather, the common caravan driver wore long hair "loosely held together by some careless twists of a coarse cotton turban", while the wealthier merchants appeared in "capacious and carefully adjusted turbans". [9]

Regions and tribes as the records have them

Elphinstone described the Yusufzai country first. The men wore a cotton tunic of dark blue or pomegranate-bark grey, trousers, sandals and "a large, loose, white turban". Their dress was incomplete without a loongee that "hangs over the shoulder, and reaches below the middle", and served as a cloak or a girdle. For Fridays and great occasions they had a better suit of coloured silk, except the turban. [1] Among the tribes of Peshawar he saw "a white or blue turban", with a loongee twisted round the waist or worn over the shoulder. [1] The 1884 gazetteer used nearly the same words for the Khalil of the Peshawar plain: "a white and blue turban", with "a lungi, either twisted round the waist or worn over the shoulder". [6]

Further south, among the tribes of Damaun, Elphinstone found turbans that were "extremely large and loose" even in winter, while those of the Indians were "rolled close round their head". [1] Among the eastern Ghilzai he noted white turbans, worn with a cap like the Durrani cap but "much higher". [1] The Durrani dress he described had a cap about six inches high of quilted silk or chintz. The small khans wound a shawl round the cap, and old men twisted a second loongee round theirs "like a turban". [1] In the eastern Kakar country the men wore a loongee turban instead of a cap. [1]

Later records add colour. Charles Enriquez, writing of the frontier in 1910, said that among the Waziris "maroon coloured pugrees are much affected", and that their Pathan neighbours had a saying: "a Waziri will murder you for the sake of your pugree". [8] In Bannu a father told his son in Thorburn's account that his forefathers had worn a red turban, long shirt, indigo trousers and sandals, and that people used to say "Every Bannuchi wears a red turban and is a snuff-taker", adding that "all of us counted our ages by our turbans". [5] Horace Rose's glossary says the Bangash of Upper Miranzai in Kohat kept the dark blue turban and shirt with a grey sheet for a lungi that Elphinstone had noted across the tribe. [7] In Dawar, west of Bannu, Thorburn heard that at the Eid festival the maliks put roasted fowls on their turbans and let anyone who could carry them off. [5] No source consulted here assigns a particular way of tying to the Afridi, Mohmand or Khattak, or sets down a Kandahari tying.

The kulla and the lungee in Peshawar

The fullest account of the Peshawar turban is in the 1884 gazetteer's chapter on manufactures, which quotes an earlier writer without naming him. He calls it the most picturesque head-dress on the frontier and describes two parts. The first is "a tall conical cap" that is "often ribbed like a melon, with embroidery and stiff with gold". Round it is wound, in large sweeping curves, "a long narrow scarf or lungi of blue, grey, or sometimes black cloth of fine texture, into the ends of which are woven lines and bars of silk and gold". [6] The lungee was the staple of a large class of weavers, with prices from 20 to 100 rupees each, and Kohat also made good ones, though the Peshawar trade was the largest. The town also made embroidered caps for undress wear, and "Peshawar topi" was the recognised name of one shape, worn under the turban or instead of it in private. [6]

Dupree records the Kandahar counterpart. The cylindrical caps embroidered with gold and silver thread are called golābatūnī, and the foldable caps encrusted with coloured glass beads are called marīdārā. Among the Shinwari of the east she lists conical caps of wheat straw, called druzaw kholay. [10]

Tying the turban on a chief, a mulla or a boy

Binding a turban on someone marks an office or an inheritance, and the colonial accounts of Pashtuns record the act more often than any name for it. Elphinstone describes a Ghilzai village in Kuttawauz where a war leader, the chelwashtee, was "formally invested with his office by the Mullik, who binds a turban round his head in the presence of the whole village". [1] A mulla, once examined and passed by an assembly of mullas, was invested the same way: the turban "is bound round his head by the principal person in the assembly". [1] Rose records the word dastarbandi, "turban-binding", for the Baloch custom of tying a pagri on the head of a dead man's heir at the asrokh gathering. [7]

The Abdali tradition that Raverty printed in the introduction to his Pashto grammar puts a turban at the origin of the Durrani chiefship. Malik Esau had three sons, and at his death he left "the turban of authority" to Zirak, his sword to Is'hak and his prayer carpet to Ali. [3] Among the Sheerani, Elphinstone wrote, before any expedition the troops passed under the turban of their chief, the Neeka, stretched out by him and a mulla, which they believed secured them from wounds and death. [1]

In the Peshawar valley the turban was a due as well. At a Peshawar wedding the bridegroom paid the village fees of the bride's village, usually about 10 rupees, which included payment to the artisans, the imam and the "hak pagri" for the malik. [6] In Thorburn's account of a Bannu marriage the mulla received "two rupees and a turban as his fee" for a marriage, and a Bannuchi boy leaving his mulla's school was put into a white cotton turban by his proud father. [5] Dupree writes that a boy signals the coming of manhood by ceremoniously donning a turban. [10]

Khushal Khan Khattak, the poet and chief, wrote a treatise on the turban, the Dastar Namah, which Raverty lists among the works that had come under his own observation. It covers "the various modes of wrapping it round the head, and the prayers to be used on such occasions". [3]

The turban and honour

Raverty's dictionary defines nām-o-nang (نام و ننګ) as "honour, reputation" and, in the same line, "shame, disgrace". [2] Proverbs that Septimus Thorburn collected in Bannu, and printed in Pashto and English in 1876, put the turban on the honour side of that line. Under honour and shame he gave:

سر که غټ وي هم پټکي غواړي

Sar ka ghaṭ wi, ham paṭke ghwāṛi.

"Though the head be large, it even requires a turban."

Thorburn's note says a large head is a mark of good breeding, and that an honourable man should not rest content but strive for more honour. [5] Under pride and lame excuses he gave a bride's complaint on finding her husband's house empty:

په کور کښې دې نه چڼه شته نه بټه، په شمله دې شوم غلطه

Pə kor ke de na chaṇa shta na baṭa, pə shamla de shum ghalaṭa.

"You have not got a grain of gram or barley in your house. I made a mistake about the fringe of your turban."

Thorburn says it is said of men who pinch at home to keep up appearances abroad. [5] The Pashto follows Thorburn's printed text in modern spelling; the transliteration is added here. [5] The shamla in the proverb is the hanging end that Raverty glossed, and it is the part a fop shows off. Khushal Khan Khattak wrote: "Vain is his affectation respecting the end of his turban." Raverty's note to the line reads: "There is a good deal of foppery manifested in the East regarding the tail or termination of the turban, which hangs behind." [4] A verse by Abd-ul-Hamid, in Raverty's translation, warns: "From a slight blow, this turban will fall unto the ground, which, from pride, thou placest so jauntily, one side of thy head." [4]

The same cloth was a way to ask for mercy or to refuse a tax. Elphinstone describes a rare way of seeking relief that people thought degrading: the distressed man went round the neighbouring villages, stopped outside each and waved his loongee, and the signal was understood and never failed to bring a contribution. [1] On 20 September 1871 the Muhammad Khel, a clan of the Ahmadzai, came in to Edwardesabad after fifteen months of exile; Thorburn writes that the men, "with heads bare and turbans and ropes tied round their necks", threw down their arms at the feet of the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner and begged for pardon. [5] In the 1840s the Marwats of Bannu besieged the new fort at Lakki, swearing they would never submit "to the indignity of a 'patkai' (turban) tax", a poll tax that the revenue farmer had tried to levy. [5]

Elphinstone mentions the jirga at Peshawar, where trifling disputes went to the chief or to a jeerga, and he says nothing of turbans there. [1] The records above put the turban earlier in public life, at the moment an office is given: the mullik who binds it, the malik who is owed a pagri, the Neeka under whose stretched turban the troops pass.

Today

Amu TV reported on 29 December 2023 that sales of the Kandahari hat, kolah Kandahari, had risen after the Taliban took power, especially among young people. It quoted a Kandahar shopkeeper, Ahmad Musa, saying that "everyone, young and old, is wearing it now", and another merchant, Shabir Ahmad, saying that a newer design called the Yaqoubi had been popular for five years. [12] The report gives no prices, names no maker and does not say whether the hat is worn under a turban. No dated report consulted here describes the kulla and lungee makers of Peshawar.