Perahan tunban: the Pashtun man's shirt and trousers

At a glance

• Two garments with two Pashto names: the shirt is the kamis (کمیس) and the trousers the partug (پرتوګ). Persian speakers say perahan and tunban, and in Pakistan the outfit is the shalwar kameez. [5, 8, 9]

• The shirt is long, usually collarless, buttoned at one shoulder and worn outside the trousers. The trousers are wide and held up by a drawstring. [6, 9]

• In 1884 a whole outfit in coarse country cotton cost between two and two and a half rupees in the Peshawar district. [5]

• Over the shirt men wear a waistcoat, the waskat. Kandahar is known for embroidered shirt fronts and for a velvet waistcoat called sadri. [6, 9]

• Kabul has twice issued orders about the outfit: King Amanullah's dress rules of the 1920s and the Taliban's order to civil servants in 2022. [7, 14]

Two words for two garments

Raverty's Pashto dictionary of 1867 lists partug as "Drawers, trowsers". [8] It also has a separate word for the cord, which he gives in two forms: partu-ghash in the western speech and partu-ghakh in the eastern. [8] See Kandahari Pashto. The shirt, kamis, he marks as a corruption of an Arabic word and glosses as "shirt, a chemise". [8]

Nancy Hatch Dupree, writing for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, gives tanban and ezar as the Persian words for the trousers, partog as the Pashto, peran and korta for the men's shirt, and ezarband for the drawstring. [9] Louis Dupree adds that in Afghan cities many men also wear payjama, a Hindi word for the same kind of suit, usually of Western make, and that gaudy ones are considered good taste in the street in warm weather. [6]

The Peshawar district gazetteer of 1884 lists the farmer's outfit under the same two Pashto names: a loose coat (khalka) or shirt (kamez) and loose trousers (partug) tied round the body with a running string. [5]

The cut

A man's shirt is collarless and buttoned at one shoulder. Its length varies by region, from the knee to mid-calf or lower. [9] Louis Dupree notes that the tail flaps outside the baggy trousers but can be tucked up inside the waist drawstring while a farmer works in the field, and that Afghans seldom support their baggy trousers with anything but that drawstring. [6]

Not every Afghan wears the wide leg. In the north, Dupree writes, the horse-riding peoples (Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik and Kirghiz) wear more form-fitting trousers, which he says befits horsemen. [6] Men's clothes in Afghanistan are generally cut by bazaar tailors. [9]

Who wore what in 1809

Mountstuart Elphinstone, the East India Company envoy who reached the Afghan court at Peshawar in 1809, thought the wide shirt and trousers of the west were the original dress of the whole Afghan nation. [2] His second volume adds a distinction that is easy to miss. Among the Durranis, the people about the towns, most villagers and the shepherds who were well off wore, in his words, a dress "nearly resembling that of Persia". It was a cotton shirt, a close inner tunic generally of chintz, an outer tunic of wool or strong cotton, usually dark with bottle green the commonest, wide coloured trousers of silk or cotton, and a loongee or shawl round the waist. [3] The small chiefs had coats of silk, satin or brocade. [3] The wide shirt and mantle were the dress of the poorer Durranis, the shepherds above all. [3] The poor, Elphinstone adds, changed their clothes on Fridays, and often only every other Friday. [3]

In the shepherds' camps the women made the clothes, though most caps and boots were bought in the towns. [3]

Elsewhere the pattern changed. Elphinstone reports that among the Kakars (his Caukers) the men's dress was still a kamis, but with a loongee turban in place of a cap and pointed shoes like those of India. [3] In the plains of Damaun the men wore, instead of "the long wide shirt and cap of the Afghauns", a close white cotton dress tied across the breast and reaching a little below the knee. [3] For the Yusufzai tunic and the Peshawar valley's mixture of Afghan and Indian fashions, see Pashtun dress. [3]

Cloth, colour and cost

The Peshawar gazetteer of 1884 is the plainest record of what ordinary men wore and paid. A farmer's whole outfit, turban included, was made of coarse country cotton and cost between Rs. 2 and Rs. 2-8. The coats were often coloured blue "to save washing". The chiefs and the well-to-do wore the same pattern in finer materials, and in winter Peshawar lungis, or scarves, took the place of malmal or khassa turbans. [5]

In Bannu, Thorburn, the British officer who made the district's land revenue settlement, published a sketch of a typical Bannuchi boy's upbringing in 1876. It is a composite, not the record of one family. The boy's father keeps to what he calls the dress of his forefathers: red turban, long shirt, loose indigo-dyed trousers drawn in at the ankles, and sandals. He quotes the saying that every Bannuchi wears a red turban and takes snuff (har Bannudzai sar patkai naswarai), and tells his son that things have changed and he must wear shoes and "English white cotton clothes" like young Bannu. [4]

Hand-woven cotton survives under another name. In Charsadda and across the Pashtun belt, according to Professor Sohail Khan of Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, khaddar is called khamta and is still the most popular fabric for Pashtun clothing. [11] Dawn's Tariq Ullah, writing from Charsadda in January 2021, found young men calling it "Pashtun denim" because it needs no ironing. He quotes in English a line he attributes to Khushal Khan Khattak: "Wear khamta to look better than/different from others". [11] Sohail Khan says Bacha Khan urged his followers to wear khamta to support local weaving, which is why Charsadda's handmade cloth is also sold as "Bacha Khani cloth". [11] A weaver, Gul Khan, told Dawn that only three or four workers in Charsadda still wove it by hand; the rest of the local industry had moved to power looms. [11]

Kandahar, Kabul and Peshawar

Kandahar is known for its embroidered shirts. Nancy Dupree calls the finely embroidered Kandahari shirt fronts, gara or ganda, renowned. [9] Louis Dupree describes the city's specialty as white and brightly embroidered shirts with small mirrors often sewn into the design. [6] The needlework is the subject of khamak embroidery. In March 2024 the news site Amu TV reported that demand for embroidered men's outfits had surged in Kandahar province before Eid, and that tailors resented a new Taliban price list that set the sewing of a simple shirt at 250 afghanis, down from the 500 they had been charging. [16]

The style travels. In April 2024 AFP visited a tailoring shop in northern Kabul where tailors worked 19-hour days in Ramadan to make 5,000 shalwar kameez, priced from 1,500 to 30,000 afghanis. Embroidery from southern Kandahar, which gave the shirts "the undulating texture of snake-skin", was the favourite that year. [15]

In the Peshawar district the 1884 gazetteer says that the chiefs and well-to-do wore the same pattern as the farmers, in finer materials. [5] In March 2026 Dawn reported that in Peshawar, Charsadda, Mardan, Kohat, Swabi and Nowshera some tailors had stopped taking orders before Eid and others were asking Rs2,000 to Rs2,500 a suit, and that many shoppers planned to buy a ready-made white shalwar kameez and wear it with a Peshawari chappal. [13] See the Peshawari chappal.

The waistcoat

Waistcoats, Nancy Dupree writes, are universally popular. In Kandahar and among some Pashtun nomads they are made of black or red velvet with gold braid or embroidery, and the Kandahari kind is called sadri. Many men prefer a second-hand Western vest from the bazaar. [9] Louis Dupree describes the waskat as sleeveless, worn over the shirt, usually made locally and embroidered, and describes city bazaars with large sections for second-hand clothing, including old military tunics. [6]

In Peshawar the waistcoat is part of the Eid outfit. Aaj News reported in 2022 that many believe Eid is only complete in the city with a waistcoat, a shalwar kameez and Peshawari chappals. A shopper at Chitrali Bazaar told the channel that buying a new waistcoat every Eid was "a part of our culture". The same waistcoats that had cost Rs700 the year before were now Rs1,200, and a shopkeeper blamed taxed Chinese cloth, which he said falls better and does not get damaged by regular washing. [12]

The red shirt

One shirt became a uniform. The Khudai Khidmatgar, the Servants of God, were known as the Red Shirts, and in his autobiography Bacha Khan says his followers paid for their own uniforms. [1] He tells how, while he was in Gujarat jail, soldiers surrounded Utmanzai, burned the movement's office and arrested everyone wearing the red shirt. When the deputy commissioner went round shouting, Mohammed Abbas Khan, who had not been enrolled as a member, dipped his own shirt and his servants' shirts in red dye, ran back with them dripping and said: "Yes, there are some more Red shirts, here we are!" [1] Bacha Khan's own conclusion is that whatever oppression the British inflicted, the Pashtuns would not give up their red shirts. [1] The movement is told in Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement.

Orders about dress

King Amanullah's reforms are the best documented attempt to change what Afghan men wore. Leon Poullada, who interviewed people close to the king in Kabul in 1967 and 1968, lists Western dress among the social reforms: required at court functions, around the summer capital at Paghman and in certain parts of Kabul, a late measure only partly carried out. A ban on the kulah, a cap or turban, and on the karakul hat was another. [7] The reasons Poullada was given were that Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and every ethnic group had its own costume and a uniform Western costume would make the divisions less visible, and that the karakul pelts earned foreign exchange and turbans took yards of imported cloth. [7] Poullada also reports the king's remark that a normal country turban took seven and a half yards, which multiplied by some six million male Afghans came to fifty million yards of imports a year. [7] He adds that critics ridiculed the measure and that one informant's mother and her circle of older women refused to wear the required dress and gave up their walks in certain parks. [7] At the Loya Jirga at Paghman in September 1928 all delegates had to wear Western clothes, which writers later mocked. [7]

Whether dress caused the revolt of 1929 is disputed. A long-accepted view, which Poullada reports in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, holds that a conservative people rose against reforms on unveiling, education and the courts. Poullada's own view is that the rebellion was a tribal revolt against the centralising state, and he notes that Western dress was required only in parts of the Kabul area. [7, 10] See Amanullah Khan.

The order of March 2022 went the other way. Reuters reported, and Dawn carried, that the Taliban told all government employees to keep their beards and wear "local clothing consisting of a long, loose top and trousers, and a hat or turban", with officers of the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice checking at office gates. [14] The ministry did not respond to a request for comment. [14] Dupree noted in the early 1990s that Afghan refugees in Pakistan, men and women, kept to their own clothes as a sign of loyalty to Afghan culture and Islam. [9]

The outfit today

Dupree calls the long shirt and wide trousers the basic costume for men, women and children in Afghanistan, and notes that new garments are essential for family, religious and seasonal celebrations. [9] The tailors' reports follow the calendar. Peshawar tailors told Dawn in March 2026 that Ramadan orders were almost double those of a normal month. [13] Kabul's tailors worked through Ramadan in 2024 to fill their orders. [15] For the cap and turban that go with the outfit see the Pashtun turban and the pakol.