Yusuf Khan and Sherbano: the Pashto love story and its 1970 film

At a glance

• Yousaf Khan aw Sherbano is a Pashto love story of a hunter from Turlandi, in today's Swabi district, and a girl from a neighbouring village. [1, 7]

• It belongs to the tradition of the sung narrative poem, the dastaan or badala, which was heard in hujras and later on cassettes. [6]

• Retellings disagree on the plot: some send Yousaf Khan to Akbar's court in Delhi, and they differ on how he returns and how he dies. All end with his death and hers. [1, 3, 4]

• The poet Ali Haider Joshi is credited with a verse version and with the script of the 1970 film. [6–8]

• The film, released in December 1970, is called the start of the Pashto film industry. [8, 10]

The story as people tell it

No single text of the story is the story. The versions below are retellings in English: one printed in the Pashto magazine Sahar in January 2011 and copied to a blog in 2017, a version posted on MySwabi.com that follows it, a folk-tale blog from 2007, and a site of folklore posted in 2023. [1, 3–5] They name the same village and the same hills, and differ on much else.

Yousaf Khan lives in Turlandi, a village the Sahar version places in Swabi district. [1] He is a hunter. His father has died, and he feeds his mother and his sister on what he brings down in the Kharamar hills. [1] He walks there with his father's dogs, whose collars carry silver bells. [1, 3] In one telling it is the bells that Sherbano hears from her house as he passes. [3]

Sherbano is a girl of a village near his route. She falls in love with him without a word passing between them. [1] The retellings split over how the news reaches him. In the Sahar version her friend tells his sister Boolanda, and Yousaf scolds the sister for repeating it. [1] In the folk-tale blog's version Sherbano herself asks the sister, there called Bandey, to carry her proposal to her brother, and he strikes Bandey and refuses. [3] The father's name is Mahmud Shah in the first and Shad Mohammad in the second. [1, 3]

The rope

Every version has the cousins and the rope. Yousaf goes hunting with his cousins. A wounded ram falls into a ravine, and the cousins let him down on a rope to fetch it. Then they cut or drop the rope and leave. [1, 3] The dogs come home without him. His mother and sister follow them into the hills, and Sherbano joins the search. They find him, wounded, and the villagers bring him home. [1, 3] Sherbano's father is angry. Yousaf's mother, in the folk-tale version, calls Sherbano her son's honour and pride and promises to bring the elders. [3] The two marry. [1, 3]

One writer, Hidayat Khan of The Express Tribune, puts the cousins' motive plainly: they wanted to take Yousaf's wealth. [7] The Sahar version adds that the cousins had recently made peace with him. [1]

Delhi and the return

Here the story forks. In the Sahar version Yousaf is consumed by revenge and leaves for Delhi, where he has heard the cousins are hiding. [1, 5] The cousins declare him dead and seize his house. Sherbano's father takes her home. She refuses to marry again and asks for a year, and he agrees, saying, in the version printed in Sahar, "Do not let my honor become the laughing stock of the village." [1] Yousaf meanwhile defeats a band of robbers in a distant village. The emperor Akbar hears of it, gives him command of men, and, when Yousaf tells him his story, sends him home. [1, 5] He comes back in disguise and finds his house turned into a barn. Sherbano is about to be married off to a cousin. He sends her his cap, and she understands. [1, 5]

The folk-tale blog of 2007 tells a version with the same Delhi journey but a different return. Yousaf rides west with Akbar's soldiers and reaches the village on the wedding day. He breaks up the celebration and kills some of the cousins, and the rest make peace or pretend to. [4] In the Sahar version his men surround the village, but Sherbano persuades him to spare the men, and a jirga rules that he was wronged and gives back his property. [1] On the council itself, see the jirga.

The ending

Yousaf Khan dies at Kharamar. The versions agree on that and on little of how. In the Sahar version he goes hunting again, comes home empty-handed, quarrels with Sherbano over a pot, and is found dead in the ravine where his cousins left him. [1] In the 2007 blog he returns with two cousins who now pose as friends, and they cut the rope a second time. [4] In the 2023 post he falls from the hill while chasing a goat, and Sherbano finds him dying. [3]

Sherbano dies of grief. [1, 3, 4] The 2007 blog has her climb the mountain when she hears of his death and die there. [4] The 2023 post buries him on the hill and her in the village where she was born. [3] Hidayat Khan sums the whole story in one sentence: Yousaf is killed by his scheming relatives and Sherbano dies of a broken heart. [7]

A story in a village landscape

Three of the retellings name places a visitor can find. Turlandi is the hero's village. [1] The 2007 blog places it on the road between Mardan and Swabi, and says Kharamar rises about 500 metres above the Yusufzai plain and is covered in pine, acacia and wild olive, with ravine deer and partridge. [4] The 2023 post puts Turlandi near Shewa Adda and Sherbano's village, Shera Ghund, near Kalukhan. [3] Hidayat Khan says the tale is set in the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar, and that Yousaf was a resident of Torlanday village in Swabi. [7] For the plain and its people, see Mardan and the Yusufzai plain and Yusufzai Pashto.

The quarrels in the story are household quarrels. A brother strikes his sister for carrying a girl's message. [3] A father tells his daughter not to make his honour the laughing stock of the village. [1] A mother declares a girl her son's honour and promises to bring the elders. [3] For the ideas of honour behind such scenes, see honour in the household and nang.

Verse versions and who sang them

Narrative poems of this kind are called dastaan or badala. The Express Tribune described them in 2014 as narrative poetry set to music that gained prominence in hujra gatherings, the star attraction of evening meetings there, until cassettes took them out of the hujras to a widespread audience. [6] Specialist singers made their names; the article lists Wahid Gul Ustad, Syed Muhammad, Abid Noor and Fazal Qayum. [6] On the hujra itself, see hujra and qala.

The Pashto scholar Wilma Heston, working with Pakistan's National Folklore archives, translated a sample of these songs from tapes collected in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani, the Storytellers' Bazaar, and from the chapbooks the singers used. Charles Lindholm, reviewing the book in the Journal of American Folklore, wrote that some of the songs date to the seventeenth century or earlier and reached their final form in the nineteenth. [2] He names Adam Khan and Durkhanai among them. He does not name Yusuf Khan and Sherbano.

The 2014 article says that in the 1970s Ali Haider Joshi and Ewez Khan emerged as leading awami, or people's, poets, and rewrote the dastaans of Yousaf Khan Sherbano, Sher Alam Mamonai and Adam Khan Durkhanai in the popular vernacular instead of the language of the literary aristocracy. [6] Hidayat Khan, writing in 2015, says Joshi immortalised the story in a poem in the early twentieth century. [7] The two dates cannot both be right, and neither writer says which text he means. Dawn calls Joshi a celebrated folk poet. [8] For the form behind these long songs and the shorter landay, see Pashto literature and oral poetry.

The film of 1970

Yousaf Khan Sherbano opened in December 1970. [8, 9, 11] Dawn credits a script by Joshi, and gives the director as Aziz Shamim in 2013; in 2024 and 2026 it names him Aziz Tabassum. [8–10] Badar Munir and Yasmin Khan played the leads, and Hidayatullah, Rehana Yasim and Nighat Akbar sang for them. [9]

Tabassum told Dawn in 2024 that the leading man and the other players were paid Rs2,000 each and the heroine Rs3,000, and that the costumes and cameras were borrowed. [9] A February 2026 Dawn report says Rs300,000 were spent on it and it earned Rs4 million. [10] The Daily Times says it ran twelve weeks without a break on the big screen in Peshawar, and that Badar Munir's fame came from it. [11] Dawn calls it a milestone for the Pashto film industry and says the romantic tale set the tone for the social and cultural films that followed. [8] The full story of that industry is in Pashto cinema and drama.

A story that stays

The tale has been sung, put on tape, filmed and retold in print and online. The 2007 blog ends Sherbano's part by saying she "gave up her own ghost", and the 2023 post closes by saying the love story continues to be passed down today. [3, 4] Lindholm notes that different singers emphasise different parts of a story according to their own mood and intention. [2] For the spread of such songs on tape, radio and screen, see Pashto media.