Tarburwali: rivalry between cousins

A tarbur (تربور) is a father's brother's son. In Pashto the word also means rival, and tarburwali is the relationship between such cousins: competition for land, standing and leadership that can end in killing, while the same cousin is the man a Pashtun turns to when outsiders threaten the family's fields. Akbar Ahmed, who studied the Mohmand in the 1970s, named it one of the two central features of the code, beside the honour of women. [5] The code as a whole is in Pashtunwali: the Pashtun code of honour, and one Mohmand family's forty-year cousin feud is told in Badal. Here the question is why the cousin is the rival, what Pashtun and other writers made of it, and how it is held in check.

At a glance

• Barth found in Swat in 1954 that the men whose fields touch are usually collateral kin, so disputes over borders, water and inheritance fall between cousins. [6]

• Pashto sets the father's brother's children apart from brothers and other cousins with their own word, tarbur, which carries the sense of rival and is used to a man's face only as an insult. [6, 7]

• Elphinstone wrote in 1815 that "Turboor, which literally means a cousin, is now the common word in Pushtoo for a rival." [3]

• Ahmed called tarburwali the root of Pukhtun social structure and argued it limits how much wealth and power any one man can gather. [5]

• Lindholm found the cousin "ambiguous": the paradigm enemy and, when outsiders threaten, a reliable ally. [7]

• Ghani Khan blames it for Pashtun disunity, and he and Wali Khan say the British used it. [1, 2]

The cousin who shares the field

In Swat, Barth reckoned, a village was held by ten to a hundred landowners descended from one ancestor five to ten generations back, and the group that divided one compact area usually numbered ten to forty. [6] The old system of periodic re-allotment gave regions to large descent groups, which split them among their segments, down to individuals. Barth's conclusion: "neighbours with whom conflicts over the borders of fields, irrigation water, etc. arise, are today and have always been also one's collateral agnates, with whom conflicts over succession and re-allotment arise." [6] Fields were swapped in rotation, each share argued over for its irrigation and position, and the system "inevitably produced acute tensions within the small group of sharing collateral agnates". [6]

The language marks the line. In Swat Pashto, siblings, cross cousins and mother's sister's children are all wror (brother) and khor (sister). The father's brother's children, real and distant, get their own term, tarbur, which Barth says has "the connotation of rival, enemy" and is not used as address "except as an insult or challenge". [6] Lindholm, who lived in Swat in the 1970s, heard the same: a man calls his tarbur "brother" or tra zway, the father's brother's son. [7] For Lindholm, land and identity are bound together, and "efforts to increase one's own holdings form the leitmotif of Pukhtun life". [7]

Inheritance feeds it. Ahmed found that among the Mohmand land passes only through sons and is divided equally, with the eldest brother, if the others agree, given an extra share for the upkeep of the family hujra. "Inheritance of land carries the seeds of rivalry between male agnates and is the first step towards fissure in the segment," he writes. [5] If a man dies without sons, his brothers inherit, then his father's brothers, then his father's brother's sons. [5] Lindholm describes a Swat rule in which the last surviving brother of a sonless man takes a double share, so that cousins are glad to guard each other's land against outsiders "while at the same time hoping (and sometimes doing more than merely hope) that the cousin's line will die out". [7] Both record that women do not inherit, against Islamic law. [5, 7] Ahmed suggests the reluctance is tied to fixed clan territories that daughters' marriages would break up. [5]

What the proverbs say

S. S. Thorburn, a British civil officer in Bannu, printed in 1876 what he called the first collection of Pashto proverbs, in English with the Pashto text at the back. His own comment opens the section on enmity: "two cousins, being necessarily rivals, are always at enmity". [4] That is Thorburn's generalisation. The proverbs show the other side too. The best known, "A cousin's tooth breaks on a cousin's", is printed with its Pashto in Badal. Others from his enmity section, in the Pashto of his pages 423 and 424:

چه کم وي لوبوه ئې چه لوی شي نو تربور دي جنګوه ئې

che kam wi lobuh ye, che looy shi no tarbur di, jangwuh ye

Whilst he is little, play with him; when grown up, he is a cousin, fight with him.

د باهر بدي ورکه شي او د کور بدي نه ورکيږي

da bahar badi warka shi aw da kor badi na warkegi

Enmity with outsiders disappears, but not with one's relations.

تربور خوار لره خو په کار ئې لره

tarbur khwar lara kho pa kar ye lara

Keep a cousin poor, but use him.

Thorburn says the first was repeated by Khushal Khan Khattak to Aurangzeb, in confinement in Hindustan. [4] Offered his freedom for a ransom of 3,000 rupees, the story goes, Khushal refused, saying that he would have paid willingly a few years earlier but now his son Bahram was grown up and conspiring against him. [4] The story is Thorburn's, as the Pashtuns around Bannu told it to him; Khushal's own quarrel with Bahram is in Khushal Khan Khattak and Ashraf Khan Hijri. The saying has been written down with other endings. Ahmed quotes the version Ibbetson printed in 1883: "When he is little play with him: when he is grown up he is a cousin; fight him." [5] Two Peshawar researchers, Irfan Ullah and Sami ud Din, give a Daudzai version in transliteration, tarbur chi warokay yinu luyawah yey ao chi loi shi nu dusman dey jangwah yey, which they translate as playing with a young cousin and, when he is grown, treating him as an enemy and letting him fight others. [8] The last clause differs from Thorburn's.

Thorburn printed the cousin's other face too. "If your relation kill you, he will bury you in the shade", which he glossed as meaning that even a relative in blood feud with you will see your body decently buried, where another would not. [4]

Ahmed's Mohmand informants gave him three more, which he prints in English: "If the tarboor is good he kills others, if he is bad he kills us"; "Tolerate any one but the tarboor"; and, for the uncle, "God knows that the uncle is a kafir". [5]

How the rivalry works

Ahmed's reading of the Mohmand case is that the tarbur may grow up as a childhood companion, then becomes "the chief rival for status and political leadership within the lineage". [5] It is a contest between two men of the same generation from closely related lines, repeated at similar depths of the genealogy, and it is no duel. "It does not occur at an appointed place and time with selected weapons and roughly equal chances of victory but may be a shot in the back at the least expected time," he writes, and no place is safe, mosque or hujra. [5] The tarbur "waits for the moment". [5] In one Mohmand case the stated motives were none of the usual three, land, gold or women, but nang, shame (ghairat), prestige (izzat) and Pukhto. [5] The concepts are in Nang and Ghayrat. Ahmed describes two blocs within every sub-section, each formed round opposed agnates, on the rule that "my cousin's enemy is my friend". [5]

Lindholm's Swat cases show small starts. Two cousins had neighbouring plots, and a path to the farther one touched the other's land. The quarrel over the path ended in a gunfight and the death of one man's son. [7] "It is an axiom among the Pukhtun that tarbur do not fear one another," Lindholm writes: a man whose cousin has grown rich feels pressure to pick a fight and show his own strength. [7] A feud can also be refused. When young men used a room in an uncle's men's house for a rendezvous and the uncle's apple saplings were cut down in the night, the uncle, after consulting his brothers, did nothing. "Thank Allah, I have many enemies," he told Lindholm. "They would like to see me ruined in a fight with my tarbur. Perhaps these enemies cut down my trees." [7]

Land cannot easily leave the family. In Shin Bagh, Lindholm records, a man sold a garden plot to a wealthy man from another ward, and the seller's tarburs told the buyer: "This land is under my hand. Anyone who wants to work it must be ready to fight me." The buyer took his money back and the seller resold to the cousins at a much lower price. To sell land in Swat is begherata, "without honour". [7]

Ghani Khan, the poet, told the same thing as a story in The Pathans (1947). In "Revenge", Dalaire Khan, the Khan of his village, sees his cousin Kurban Khan come home from fourteen years in prison and draw the young men away from his own table. Dalaire persuades his nephew Sher that Kurban shot Dalaire's father on purpose, and Sher arranges for Kurban to be shot. Dalaire then swears to Kurban's brothers that Sher did it. When Sher comes out of prison and asks for the promised village, Dalaire refuses, and Sher has him killed and ends as an outlaw. Kurban's son, the story closes, is strong and proud and "not afraid of his uncle Sher Khan". [1]

Three scholars, three readings

Barth argued that the tension between collateral agnates "prevents the descent groups from fusing for political purposes" and "serves to direct the Pakhtun's political attachments to non-rivals in neighbouring communities". [6] A man's natural allies, he wrote, are those with whom he is not in competition, so the alliances of Swat mirror the tensions between cousins. [6] The tension does not split a bloc at once: Barth records the word mariz for men who are local rivals yet belong to one bloc. [6] Small landowners must stay together to count at all, and he saw large descent groups hold together in the upper valleys, where Pakhtuns are a third or half of the population, while cousins split in the lower valley around Thana, where they are under a tenth. [6]

Ahmed made the cousin the centre of the whole system. The "primary principle", he says, is tarburwali, which "crudely ensures a ceiling to the wealth and power an individual may accumulate" and so pushes society towards "an intense spirit of democracy". [5] He calls it a zero-sum contest, following Barth: "while appropriating power agnatic rivals are excluded from it." [5] In the Shati Khel feud, he notes, the exceptional men Abdullah, Atta and Shahzada, who elsewhere "may have left their mark on local history", were each "opposed and balanced by equally exceptional cousins", so that tarburwali acts as "an in-built check to 'eruption' of charismatic leadership". [5] He also reads the deaths and expulsions as a "crude Malthusian balance" between population and land, though the prize is "negligible" and the price "exorbitant". [5]

Lindholm disagreed with both on emphasis. Barth, he said, made the strategy of individuals into a structural principle, and even in Swat party alliances are set aside in blood revenge: "no man would support the murderer of his tarbur under any circumstances, even if the killer were a long time party ally". [7] He holds that the tarbur relation is ambiguous: "He is not only the paradigm for enemy, but also, under proper circumstances, a reliable ally. A man without tarbur stands naked to the assaults of genealogically more distant enemies, and while strong tarbur evoke jealousy, they also inspire pride." [7]

In leadership and politics

Elphinstone thought family attachment strong among the Afghans, since "power consists in the number of a man's relations", but he made an exception for the rivalry over the headship of a clan. It does not often happen between brothers, he wrote, but it is common enough among "more distant relations" for tarbur to mean rival. [3] Lindholm, an American anthropologist, gives a Swat case from the early twentieth century: Abdul Wadud, the Akhund's grandson who became the Badshah of Swat, "had personally killed his two patrilateral first cousins" before the khans elected him leader, and Lindholm's reading is that "the Pukhtun only follow a leader in times of war". [7] Other histories of Swat tell the cousins' deaths differently; the Badshah's rise and reign are in Miangul Abdul Wadud.

Pashtun political writers read the same habit as a cause of disunity. Ghani Khan wrote in 1947 that every Pathan imagines himself Alexander the Great, "the result is a constant struggle between cousin and cousin, brother and brother and quite often between father and son", and that the Pathans had not become a great nation "because there is a Jinnah in every home, who would rather burn his own house than see his brother rule it". [1] He adds that the British political service set tribesmen against each other, so that "the Pathans were too busy cutting one another's throat to think of anything else". [1] Wali Khan, writing about the 1937 elections, says the British would not let their "self-created Nawabs and Khans" unite, "their motive being to encourage dissension and enmity". [2] Both writers speak of how the rivalry was used. Barth and Ahmed place its origin in land and descent.

Jirga, ceasefire and marriage

Barth noted that much of a prominent leader's work is "arranging settlements and compromises between groups of allies", since a leader needs his bloc whole. [6] In the path case the village jirga, made of elders from elite families, persuaded the dead boy's father to take blood money and give up revenge on his tarbur, because the two men were clients of Pukhtun patrons who feared being drawn in. [7] Elites themselves, Lindholm adds, tend to carry a feud to the end, which "usually entails the ruin of all the participants". [7] The jirga itself is described in The jirga. In the Daudzai area near Peshawar, Irfan Ullah and Sami ud Din write, a tigah, a ceasefire, is declared by elders from both sides, who take a power of attorney and a pledge from each party and can extend the truce if no settlement is agreed. [8]

Marriage does the closing. Ahmed notes that the mechanism ending violent agnatic rivalry "is the giving and taking of women in marriage from enemy groups", as in the settlements of his Mohmand case-studies, and finds a paradox in it: "both the murders and marriages underline the close kin relationships of the actors". [5] Giving a girl to settle a killing, swara, is now a crime in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as Badal explains. Lindholm found another use of marriage. Among the Malik Khel of Swat, marriage to the father's brother's daughter was 25 per cent in the great-grandparents' generation (4 of 16), 17 per cent in the grandparents' (5 of 29), 27 per cent in the parents' (14 of 52) and 41 per cent in the present generation (19 of 46). Elders told him: "since war is finished, we no longer need seek allies outside our own people." [7]

The ally against outsiders

The cousin is also the man who stands with you. Lindholm: "Even though one's tarbur are, by definition, one's enemies, they also are the people one turns to in cases of external aggression." The patrilineage holds land and "is obliged to stand united against intrusion". [7] Barth's version: "Tension between collaterals is thus kept within bounds by the tactical advantage of presenting a solid front to outsiders." [6] Ahmed records that Khanzada, as a police superintendent in Bannu, was approached by a murderer who offered to kill Major Sultan Jan for 10,000 rupees. He refused: "it was our affair as we are the descendants of one father." [5] Support from outside the clan, Ahmed adds, stops at sympathy, and the killing is done by men sharing close descent. [5]

Tarburwali today

Barth thought in 1959 that permanent settlement had not removed the tension. [6] Ahmed saw families expelled from the tribal territory grow rich as tenants and landlords in the settled districts, then return "to reinvest it in the continuation of lineage feuds". [5]

Two Peshawar researchers, Irfan Ullah and Sami ud Din, studied the Daudzai Pukhtuns of the plain near Peshawar and published in Pashto, the Pashto Academy's journal, in 2018. They found tarburwali still there, but "limited to the notion of siyali", competition in making property, building a new house, getting a better education. [8] Land can be sold to anyone, though the tarbur is "intentionally ignored" in a sale, out of jealousy and fear of his rise, and he may use the legal right of pre-emption, shufa, to buy it. Selling land is still beghairati, as in Swat. [8] Khans in Daudzai, they write, handle their cousins "through tricky means, just like diplomacy in international affairs", cordial in front and subduing each other in the back, and the main cause of conflict is land between cousins and between brothers. [8] Court cases, moqadima bazi, are "rampant", fought for decades to take land from a brother or tarbur and "to maintain one's nang and ghairat". [8] The influence of "khanism", they say, has fallen as the area turned semi-urban. [8] Inheritance is divided under Pakistan's law, though some families still withhold women's shares, while most give them, "though unwillingly". [8]

Other Pashtun writers want the whole complex reformed. Himayatullah Yaqubi, writing in The News on Sunday in 2016, lists tarburwali with revenge, love of weapons, taunting (peghor) and the guarding of women's chastity among the elements of Pakhtunwali that "need to be reformed in the light of true teachings of Islam and modern day requirements". [9]