Daulat Lawanai: Roshani poet of the seventeenth century

At a glance

• Daulat (Dawlatullah, who calls himself Faqir Dawlat, "poor Dawlat") was a Pashto poet of the Roshani movement who lived into the seventeenth century. His modern editor, Abdul Shakoor Rashad, calls him Daulat Lawani. [2]

• He wrote of himself as a disciple of Mian Roshan, the name the Roshanis gave Bayazid Ansari. Rashad reasons that he was born about 955 to 960 AH (about 1548 to 1553), and a chronogram of his shows him alive in 1058 AH (1648). [2]

• Raverty printed one of his lines in 1862 and wrote that his poems "are not to be met with in the present day". His diwan was first printed at Kabul in 1974. [1, 2]

• He wrote ghazals in the Persian quantitative metres (aruz). Rashad argues that these make Pashto verse in those metres much older than earlier writers thought. [2]

• His surname is disputed. The verses printed in Rashad's notes call him Nuhani, and a 2019 blog post argues that "Lawani" is a modern mistake. [2, 4]

Name and family

Rashad opens his introduction with the facts he can give. The poet was Dawlatullah, of the Hasan Khel, a Lawani, and his mother was a Wardak woman. [2] He gives the father's name as Dadullah, with a question mark. The diwan itself writes the name Dadaw, and Rashad notes that a Pashto name of this kind often shortens to Dado. [2] A Kunduz University article of 2025 also lists "Dawlat Luwani son of Dadullah" among the Roshani poets who left regular diwans. [3]

The poet's own verse gives his name and his rank. Rashad quotes him as saying that his name is Shaikh Dawlatullah and that people call him Faqir Dawlat. [2]

Rashad ties "Lawani" to a Pashtun tribe, and in a note he says that the Lawani tribe of Kandahar is called Lawan. [2] The poet's own lines, printed in Rashad's notes, do not say Lawani. In one the poet addresses himself as "Hasan Khel Nuhani", and in another as "son of Dad the Nuhani". [2] An anonymous 2019 blog, History of Pashtuns, takes this further. It says the Nuhani or Luhani are a branch of the Lodi and the Lawani a branch of the Miyana, that twentieth-century writers from Afghanistan confused them, and that the poet calls himself Nuhani in his verse. [4] The blog names Rashad and Abdul Hai Habibi among those it says made the mistake. [4] Rashad's own printed lines support the Nuhani reading. His title and the 2012 Peshawar edition keep "Lawani", and so does the poet's common name here. [2, 3]

A disciple of Mian Roshan

The Roshani movement began with Bayazid Ansari, called Pir Roshan, and is told in Pir Roshan (Bayazid Ansari). Rashad gives his death as 980 AH (1572 to 1573). [2] The poet is plain about the link. In a line Rashad quotes from the diwan he says:

زه فقیر دولت مرید د میا روښان یم

za faqīr Dawlat murīd da Miyā Roshān yam

I, poor Dawlat, am a disciple of Mian Roshan. [2]

He names the leader again in verses that Rashad prints as proof of his devotion:

که پیران په جهان هر څو ډېر دي څه شو

په اسرار د روښان نشته برابر یو

ka pīrān pa jahān har tso ḍer dī tsa shaw

pa asrār da Roshān nishta barābar yaw

Though pirs in the world are many, what of it?

In the mysteries there is none equal to Roshan. (translated by Pashtunxwa, for a Pashto reader to check) [2]

The diwan names two other Roshani poets. Daulat mourns Ali Muhammad Mukhlis and praises Mirza Khan Ansari, whom Rashad identifies as a son of Nuruddin and a grandson of Pir Roshan. [2] The Kunduz article puts Daulat with Mullah Arzani, Mirza Khan Ansari, Wasil and Ali Muhammad Mukhlis, and says the Roshani poets wrote the first regular Pashto diwans and made the ghazal their chief form. [3] It adds that Daulat wrote alifnamas, poems with a verse for each letter of the alphabet, and that he accepted that Bayazid had made new letters for Pashto: the writer quotes him as saying the Afghan word was hard to read and used thirteen letters. [3]

When he lived

No source gives his birth or death. Rashad reasons from the poet's own words. The poet calls himself a disciple of Mian Roshan, who died in 980 AH, so Rashad reasons that he must already have been a grown man then, at least twenty or twenty-five. That puts his birth about 955 or 960 AH. Khushal Khan Khattak, born in 1022 AH (1613), then comes out about sixty years younger. [2] The same passage records that the earlier anthology Pashtana Shu'ara put his birth in the tenth century AH. [2]

For the end of his life Rashad points to an elegy. Daulat wrote an elegy for Rashid Khan, a son of Ilhdad Ansari, and Ilhdad was a grandson of Pir Roshan. Rashad reads the date 1058 AH in the last line as a chronogram. [2] He cites the Mughal chronicle Ma'athir al-Umara for the same year, and says that a figure of 1068 given in another book is ten years too many. [2] So Daulat was alive in 1648. By Rashad's estimate of his birth he would have been close to a hundred. [2]

Rashid Khan's town, Rashidabad, lay near Shamsabad in Uttar Pradesh, and Rashad thinks Daulat probably settled there with the Roshanis after 1028 AH (1619), the year Ilhdad went over to the Mughals. [2] He quotes a verse of Daulat's that speaks of Rashidabad. [2]

Other poets name him. Raverty gives the closing lines of an ode of Rahman Baba, in his English:

Rahman, this ode reciteth in reply to that which Dawlat wrote:

"Should the beloved present me continually the wine of her love!" [1]

Raverty adds in a note that Dawlat was "an Afghan poet, a cotemporary of Rahman", whose "poems are not to be met with in the present day". [1] In the next ode Rahman declares, in Raverty's version, that "Khushhal Khan and Dawlat are but slaves of mine". [1] Rashad cites the ode as a tazmin, a poem that builds on another poet's lines, and prints the Dawlat couplet from the diwan's third page that Rahman worked from: [2]

چې امید په عمارت د دې دنیا کا

د کاغذ په کښتۍ سیر د دریا کا

chi umīd pa ʿimārat da de dunyā kā

da kāghaz pa kishtay sayr da daryā kā

He who puts his hope in the buildings of this world

goes sailing the sea in a paper boat. (translated by Pashtunxwa, for a Pashto reader to check) [2]

See Rahman Baba for the poet.

Rashad also quotes a poem in Khushal Khan's diwan in which poets of the day are graded by weight, and reads in it a mention of "Faqir Dawlat". [2] For Khushal see Khushal Khan Khattak. A manuscript of Daulat's diwan in the Raza Library at Rampur was copied in 1101 AH (1689 to 1690), a year after Khushal's death. Rashad takes it, with Rahman's tazmin, as a sign that the diwan was read and imitated in Pashtun literary circles by the end of that century. [2]

What he believed

The Roshanis were accused of heresy by their enemies, and Rashad says that much of what was written against them cannot be tested. [2] He asks instead what Daulat's own verses say, and prints a poem in which each stanza takes a heading: God, the Quran, the Prophet, the end of prophecy, the law, the school, the king. [2] On the Prophet the poem says that he is the last of the messengers. On the school it says:

زه «دولت» سني مسلم چار یار منم

za "Dawlat" sunnī muslim chār yār manam

I, "Dawlat", am a Sunni Muslim and I hold to the four friends (the first four caliphs). (translated by Pashtunxwa, for a Pashto reader to check) [2]

Rashad offers this as Daulat's own answer to the charge of heresy. [2] The charge came from the Roshanis' opponents, the party of Akhund Darweza and Pir Baba of Buner, who wrote against Bayazid Ansari's teaching. Their case against the movement is told in those articles.

Verse in Persian metres

Rashad's main claim for Daulat is about form. Pashto verse, he says, was long thought to follow no quantitative metre. Khushal Khan boasted in a poem of 1095 AH (1684) that he had given Pashto poetry its structure and that before him it had neither measure, scansion nor aruz. [2] Writers in Kabul magazines had named a poet called Sharaf, a contemporary of Ahmad Shah Baba, as the first whose Pashto ghazals could be scanned in the Persian way, and Abdul Ali Akhundzada Kakar had published five of them with their scansion. [2] Rashad answers that Daulat's ghazals push the date back to three and a half centuries before his own book, roughly 150 years earlier than Sharaf. [2] He prints eight of them, in the ramal and khafif metres, with the foot-by-foot scansion beside each. [2] He quotes a verse where Daulat says it himself: "this metre is sound, look at it", followed by the feet faʿilatun mafaʿilun faʿilat. [2]

One of the ghazals Rashad prints, with the refrain bāndi ("upon"), begins:

اې چې عاشق یې په اشنا باندې

نور نظر مه کړه په هیڅ چا باندې

هر چې عاشق شي د دلبر په جمال

غم شو شیرین لکه حلوا باندې

ay chi ʿāshiq yi pa ashnā bāndi

nor nazar ma kṛa pa hīts chā bāndi

har chi ʿāshiq shi da dilbar pa jamāl

gham shaw shīrīn laka halwā bāndi

You who are a lover of the Friend,

look on no one else.

Whoever becomes a lover of the Beloved's beauty,

grief turns sweet to him as halwa. (translated by Pashtunxwa, for a Pashto reader to check) [2]

The diwan

Raverty could not find the poems in 1862. In 1974 the Pashto Tolana, the Pashto society at Kabul, printed the Da Dawlat Lawani Divan, with Rashad's long introduction, in the year of the commemoration of Bayazid Roshan's death. [2] It prints Daulat's ghazals, qasidas, quatrains and three masnawi poems from a manuscript kept in the society's library, which names no copyist and gives no date. [2] Muhammad Ismail Sarbin compared it with a second manuscript held by the Ministry of Information and Culture. [2] A new edition by Rashad came out at Peshawar in 2012 from the Danish Publishing Society. [3]

Almost everything known about the poet comes from that one editor. The dates are Rashad's reasoning from a handful of lines, the family is the diwan's own words, and the claim that Daulat was the first in Pashto to write aruz ghazals is Rashad's, resting on the poems he printed.