Abdul Malik Fida: Khudai Khidmatgar poet of Charsadda, died 1957

At a glance

• Abdul Malik Fida (عبدالمالک فدا), pen name Fida, was a Pashto poet of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, born in the village of Pranghar in Charsadda, the son of Abdul Jabbar Khan. [1]

• Pashto literary histories date his life 1897 to 1957 and 1891 to 1957. [1, 2]

• He had no schooling and traded in his youth. In 1922 he joined the Anjuman-i-Islah-ul-Afaghina, the reform society of the Frontier Pashtuns. [2]

• His poem "Margiya ma rātsa dar tsamah" ("Death, do not come, I am coming") answers the shooting at Babra on 12 August 1948. He recited it to Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who wept. [1, 3, 6]

• His collected poems, Diwan-e-Abdul Malik Fida, were first published in Peshawar in 1957 and again in 1972. [4]

A poet without a school

Pashto literary histories agree on the broad outline. Muhammad Siddiq Rohi, in his history of contemporary Pashto literature, calls Fida another devoted member of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement and a famous poet, born in the village of Pranghar in Charsadda, a son of Abdul Jabbar Khan. [1] A second Pashto work, a translation of a study of the contemporary literature of the Pashtuns, says he went to no school or university and did not study abroad. In his youth he did trade, until the movement against the British gathered strength and he would not stay neutral. [2]

The books do not agree on his dates. Rohi gives 1897 to 1957, and the translated study gives 1891 to 1957. [1, 2] Both give 1957 as the year of his death. The year of his birth therefore stays uncertain. Rohi's account of his life is short: he suffered many hardships, imprisonments and torments for the freedom of the Pashtuns, and held to his purpose to his last breath. [1]

The people around him were the poets of the movement. Tariq Rahman, writing on the Pashto language and Pakhtun identity, reports that Ghani Khan named Fida, Fazal Mahmood Makhfi of Charsadda, Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar and himself as the men who wrote nationalist literature in the late 1920s and the 1930s (from an interview with Ghani Khan on 2 November 1993). [5] Other poets from the same movement are Ghani Khan and Ajmal Khattak, and the movement is described in Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

The reform society and the poems of 1930 to 1940

The translated study places his beginning in public life in 1922, when Fida joined the Anjuman-i-Islah-ul-Afaghina. Eight years later, it says, a gifted poet with a loud, fiery voice appeared among the Pashtuns, one who told them to wake. [2] It quotes these lines:

وړوکتوب پریږده اوس دې عمر د شباب راغی

وخت دی د خپل حق اخیستلو په شتاب راغی

wrokotob parēda aws de 'umar da shabāb rāghay

wakht de da khpal haq akhistalo pa shtāb rāghay

Leave childhood behind; the age of youth has come.

It is time to hurry and take your own right.

English and transliteration: Pashtunxwa. The poem ran in the March 1940 issue of the journal Pukhtun, the movement's paper, and many people imitated it. [2] Another poem, in which he complains that Pashtuns have turned away from their mother tongue, appeared in the same journal in 1939 according to the study. [2]

The study also says that at Pashtun poetry gatherings, the mushairas, Fida was always present. At one in the village of Gharib Abad during the provincial election campaign of March 1937 he urged his countrymen to love freedom and their land, not to sell themselves for seats and titles, and to follow Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his companions. [2] It quotes Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum's book Gold and Guns on the Pathan Frontier, which praises "the verse tales and odes" of Abdul Malik of Charsadda as work of high literary quality and says thousands of Pashtuns were waiting for the series; they deal, in his words, with reform in Pashtun society. [2] The study adds its own judgement that his style is simple and understandable to everyone. [2]

The tenets of the Khudai Khidmatgars

Safoora Arbab, in a chapter on nonviolence and Pukhtunwali in a volume of essays on Muslims who opposed the Muslim League, uses one of his poems as the epigraph of her chapter. She names him as a Khuda'i Khidmatgar poet of standing. The poem, which she titles "The Tenets of the Khuda'i Khidmatgars", was published in Pukhtun in 1940 and later in his diwan. [4] She quotes three couplets in her own translation. Two of them read:

We have come out upon the battle-field for the sake of love and affection,

counselling God's creatures for the sake of loving friendship.

We are the sepoys governing the whole nation,

neither for one person's imperialism nor for one ideology.

Her reading is that Fida replaces the norm of the battlefield with the norm of counsel, and the rule of one ruler or one doctrine with sovereignty through service. [4] That is one scholar's argument. Arbab sets it beside Abdul Ghaffar Khan's own words about the movement's two aims, the freedom of the country and the awakening of the Pashtuns to brotherhood. [4]

Babra, 12 August 1948

On 12 August 1948 the police fired on a gathering of Khudai Khidmatgars at Babra in Charsadda. The article on Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar gives the figures and the political setting, and Abdul Qayyum Khan the provincial ministry's side. Of all Fida's poems, Rohi prints this one in full. He adds that Fida recited it at a meeting about Babra in a way that made Bacha Khan himself and thousands of Pashtuns weep. [1]

Two other accounts bear this out. G. D. Tendulkar's biography of Abdul Ghaffar Khan says that in July 1955, when Bacha Khan visited the village and prayed for the Khudai Khidmatgars killed in 1948, "a moving piece on the Babra massacre, composed by Abdul Malik Fida, a well-known Pakhtu poet, was recited", and that Abdul Ghaffar and hundreds of others wept. [3] Asfandyar Wali Khan told Voice of America's Deewa service on a Babra anniversary that he was small, but that when Abdul Malik Fida read his poem about Babra to Bacha Khan, he remembered well that tears came into Baba's eyes. [6] The accounts differ on the number who wept, hundreds in one and thousands in the other.

Every stanza of the poem ends with the same line, "Margiya ma rātsa dar tsamah", "Death, do not come to me, I am coming to you". Tendulkar's biography gives the opening lines in English:

کفن په ترخ کې د سیالۍ میدان له ځمه

مرګیه مه راځه درځمه

سر په تلۍ کې د الله دربار له ځمه

مرګیه مه راځه درځمه

kafan pa tarkh ke da siālai maidān la tsamah

margiya ma rātsa dar tsamah

sar pa talai ke da Allāh darbār la tsamah

margiya ma rātsa dar tsamah

With the shroud under my arms on to the battlefield I march,

Tarry awhile O Death, I come to embrace you,

With my head on palms to God's Seat of Judgement I walk on.

The Pashto is Rohi's and the English is Tendulkar's; the transliteration is Pashtunxwa's. [1, 3] The whole poem, in 23 stanzas, is on its own page in the Poetry section. The speaker is a marcher at Babra. He takes a shroud, leaves home at evening with his mother's leave, stands among the national ranks facing soldiers with cannon and machine guns, sees the women of Charsadda going in front of their brothers with infants and the Qur'an, is hit in the heart, and ends by laying his riddled chest before God on the Last Day. The last stanza names the poet: "Abdul Malik Khan has made himself an offering". [1]

The poem itself calls the fallen shahidan, martyrs. [1] Arbab reads a later stanza, which puts the government's army on one side and "a nation, empty handed" on the other, as an answer to the state. In her account the killings destroyed the movement's organisation, the Khudai Khidmatgars were declared traitors (ghaddar) soon after, and the movement's literature and records were systematically destroyed. [4] The poem is therefore the movement's own record of the day, written by a member of the movement.

Death and burial

Rohi reports what Bacha Khan said at Fida's burial: that he had laid the great revolutionary poet of the Pashtuns in the grave with his own hand, that the Khudai Khidmatgars who gain the rank of martyrdom in the national struggle should lie at Sardaryab, and that this "national martyr" spent his whole life in the people's service and in the end gave up his breath laughing, for love of the homeland. [1] Both Pashto histories place his death in 1957. [1, 2]

When he died, the translated study says, the whole of Pakhtunkhwa grieved, and the Pashto Society in Kabul showed its sorrow. An article in the Kabul magazine said he wrote verse close to the people, and that as water gives strength to plants, his poems gave strength and courage to the people and opened a new current in Pashto literature. [2] His diwan appeared in 1957, the year of his death, with a second edition in 1972. [4]

The wider tradition he belongs to is described in Pashto literature and oral poetry, and other twentieth-century poets of the Frontier are in Qalandar Momand and Hamza Shinwari.