Feast food among Pashtuns: Eid, weddings and khairat

At a glance

• On Eid al-Fitr, which Pakistani papers call "sweet Eid" (meethi Eid), a Pashtun visitor is served sweets and vermicelli. In Charsadda villages the sweet put before guests in the house and the hujra is Rajjar methai, and Mardan has its own peera. [4, 6, 8]

• The Pashto name for Eid al-Adha is loy akhtar (لوي اختر), the great festival. The sacrificed animal feeds the family, the neighbours and the poor, and Dawn reports liver and kidneys going to neighbours first. [3, 9]

• A wedding is judged by how many come. In Charsadda the feast is built round Mota Chawal, a meat and rice dish cooked all day by hereditary cooks with the village's help. [2, 10]

• Khairat (خيرات) is "alms, charity" in Raverty's dictionary. Among landowning families of Swat and Mardan it is also the name of a charity meal after a death, to which relatives bring rice, oil and sugar. [2, 3]

• The cost is argued over. In 2022 a jirga in Manglawar, Swat, said weddings would serve only dates and that no tea or sweets would be served in mourning, while admitting it would not impose this. [11]

Sweets and visitors on Eid al-Fitr

Pashto uses akhtar (اختر) for a festival or feast day, and Raverty's dictionary of 1860 gives it as "a festival, a feast-day". [3] Pakistani newspapers call the Eid that ends Ramadan meethi Eid, sweet Eid. [8, 16] Sher Alam Shinwari, who reports from Peshawar for Dawn, asked people in 2016 what the sweets meant. Ramat Jan Kaka, 66, told him that sweets and vermicelli would "mean to forget about the bitterness, if any, that occurred before or during Ramazan". [4] Zareen Mama, 70, remembered that when he was young Eid "was celebrated to end enmities and family feuds". He said Da Khwagu Akhtar os pa tarakhu badal shu, which Dawn translates as "the Eid of sweets now turned sour breeding bitterness". [4]

The sweets themselves were once a smaller matter. Gul Nawaz, whose grandfather opened Lahore Sweet House in Qissa Khwani Bazaar more than 70 years before, told Shinwari that in the old days buying sweets for Eid was "just a symbolic gesture". People made vermicelli at home from dough, sprinkled it with ghee and pieces of gur (unrefined sugar). [4]

The visiting is the heart of it. Shinwari wrote in 2025 that guest houses in towns and village hujras "remain busy in greeting friends and relatives from first day of Eid to third and even beyond". He added that jirgas meet at Eid to settle disputes and that engagements and weddings are fixed, and he judged the festival "a true display of Pashtunwali". [5] That is his opinion, but it matches what the hujra is for. He lists fitrana, the charity due at the end of Ramadan, among the festival's gifts to the poor. [5]

Northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has its own Eid sweets, and Dawn and the wire services have written about them for years. Rajjar methai comes from Rajjar Bazaar, a kilometre north of Charsadda city, where most shops were Hindu-owned before 1947. [6, 7] Local people told Dawn in 2014 that Chacha Halwai (Israr-ud-Din) first made it in 1930 and that his oven still stood. [6] The two papers disagree on what is in it. Dawn's baker, Haji Ashrafud Din, listed desi ghee, sugar, white flour and water, and said its taste and smell last for several months. [6] Arab News in 2023 described jaggery, refined flour, baking soda and ghee, soaked in sugar syrup after baking, and a buyer said it keeps ten to fifteen days. [7] Its owner, Sharaf-ud-Din, 62, said his father learnt the recipe from a Hindu confectioner who left for India in 1947. [7]

A customer, Riaz Ahmed, told Dawn how the sweet is used: "If people in cities present vermicelli, rice and other foods to their guests on Eid, in the villages they are served with Rajjar Mithai." [6] The Associated Press of Pakistan listed more of the same kind in 2024: Mardani peera from Mardan, made with milk, butter and dry fruit by Abdullah Shah, a third-generation seller in Peshawar, sohan halwa from Dera Ismail Khan, and Bannu's carrot halwa. [8] Raverty already listed halwa in 1860, glossing it as "a kind of sweetmeat of flour, ghi and sugar" and marked it as Hindi in origin. [3]

Sheer khurma, vermicelli cooked in milk and dates, is the Eid dish of Muslim homes across the region. Bisma Tirmizi explains in Dawn that the name is Persian for milk and dates. [16] It turns up in Pashtun reports without being theirs alone: Mingora's sweet shops "overflowed" with it, beside halwa puri and laddoos, before Eid al-Adha in 2026. [9]

Eid al-Adha and the sacrifice

Raverty gives the Pashto loy akhtar (لوي اختر), literally the great festival, for the Eid held in memory of Abraham's offering of his son. The namkeen article follows the meat of the sacrifice into karahi and the Namak Mandi crowds, and gives the division of the animal into thirds. Dawn's Peshawar report of 31 May 2026 describes the day across the province.

Shinwari wrote that the menu "remained sacred": mutton karahi, chapli kebab and saag cooked with liver. [9] In Charsadda, he reported, women prepared the feast at home while the men went to the mosque. In many households "the liver and kidneys were distributed to neighbours as a symbol of immediate charity". [9] In Upper Dir a woman stirred a large degh, a cauldron, of trotters (paya) for guests. [9] In Kohistan, where resources are scarce, families "pooled money to buy a collective animal, ensuring no one was left out". [9] The report is a descriptive feature that gives people's words without a count, so these are one reporter's observations.

Weddings

Mountstuart Elphinstone, whose mission reached Peshawar in 1809, wrote about Afghan marriage in the volumes published in 1815. In the 1842 edition he describes the formal proposal in towns: the suitor's father asks the girl's father to accept his son as his servant, "sweetmeats are brought in, of which both parties partake", after the Fatiha is recited, and the couple count as engaged. [1] The bride then goes in procession to the groom's house with music and horsemen firing matchlocks, and "the whole concludes with a wedding supper". [1] Elphinstone says that the ceremonies are "so exactly the same with those of the Persians" that a short account will do, so the supper is his picture of Afghan custom in general, not of Pashtun cooking in particular. [1] He also noted that Afghans gave "large entertainments" at marriages and similar occasions. [1]

The most detailed account of what a modern Pashtun wedding asks of a household comes from Aminah Ahmed, a social anthropologist, then at the University of Cambridge, who studied landowning families from Swat and Mardan. Her term for weddings, funerals and births together is gham-khadi, sorrow and joy, and she describes them as occasions in which hospitality, one of the principles of Pashtunwali, is acted out. [2] At weddings and funerals "the familial house is thrown open to all", with men going to the hujra and women to the kor, the house. [2] A wedding is visited from morning to evening for three days. [2] The success of an event is judged by the number who come, and a thin attendance can leave a family unrecognised. [2]

That standard is costly. One woman in Mardan told Ahmed of a widow who had borrowed the clothes and the rice for her son's wedding, because, the widow said, "people will laugh at me if I don't have these things to show". The woman telling the story had refused to borrow and had not given a single wedding meal for any of her four sons. [2] Ahmed notes that the henna day, nakreeza, runs beyond the nikah and the walima, the only two wedding events that graduates of an Islamabad religious school say the hadith names. [2]

In Charsadda the wedding dish is Mota Chawal, also called Charsadwali Chawal, and Arab News described it at a double wedding in Ibrahimzai village in September 2024. [10] The hereditary cooks arrive the day before, and some families slaughter a buffalo while others buy meat. The meat is boiled for four to six hours, shredded by hand at dawn, and returned to the pot after the rice has been stirred for up to three hours with spices and turmeric, until it is sticky and brown-green. A cauldron takes less than 10 kilograms of meat to 14 or 16 of rice and serves up to 140 people, three or four to a tray. [10] A local journalist, Muhammad Tayyab, told the paper the dish began in Rajjar. [10]

Other rice dishes belong to weddings too. Sajid Nawaz of Sadda told Dawn in 2017 that Kurram rice, cooked with black gram, is served to guests most often at weddings, iftar parties and festivals, and Subhan Ali said it comes on large open plates called khaanak. [12] The Kabuli palaw article tells how that dish reached Peshawar's wedding tables. Sweets follow the meal: customers told Dawn that guests at Eid or a wedding "always demand" Rajjar methai. [6]

Not everyone accepts the expense. In July 2022 the Manglawar Qaumi Jirga in Swat resolved that weddings would be simple and that guests would be served "only dates". The nikah would be in a mosque, the walima would match the families' means, with no marriage hall, and the bride's father would send no food to the groom's father. The participants said the decisions would not be imposed but implemented by consent. [11]

Khairat and food after a death

Khairat (خيرات) is an Arabic word that Raverty glosses as "alms, charity", and gives "to give alms" for the verb phrase. [3] Ahmed gives it a narrower use in Swat and Mardan, a charity meal. A woman from Mardan told her: "If you do gham-khadi you can't go empty handed. That's not our way. To help in that khairat (charity meal) you have to take something", and she listed money (paisay), a gift (thofa), rice (wreeje), oil (ghwaree) and sugar (cheenee). [2] A table of one elder woman's gifts over four months of 2001 lists, for the death of her husband's nephew, five darai of rice (the paper gives no unit), a cow and a buffalo, together valued at Rs 10,900. [2]

Funerals draw large crowds. As many as two thousand people from every part of society may come to a big landlord's funeral. [2] Women commemorate a death together for forty days after the burial, the salwekhtamma, and again at a year, the kaal. [2] Those who miss the important days are not invited to the fortieth-day commemoration. [2] Elphinstone's account of the rites is plainer: the dying man is attended by a mullah, the body is washed, shrouded and buried, and "if the deceased was rich, Moollahs are employed to read the Koraun for some days over his grave". He says that circumcision "is attended with a feast" and mentions none at a funeral. [1]

Critics inside the community have their own view. Ahmed describes women who attend classes at Al-Huda, a reformist school in Islamabad, and say that the hadith forbids mourning beyond three days, except for a husband. Some now leave after the third day, and one brought the forty-day anniversary forward to the weekly Friday one. [2] The Manglawar jirga went further in 2022: "neither sweets nor tea would be served during the mourning period", and soyam and chehlum would not be held after the funeral prayers. [11]

Charity meals are also given at shrines. When the 447th urs of Pir Baba in Buner ended in April 2017, Dawn reported that "lungar (meal) was distributed among the participants" after the wreath was laid on the tomb and the Quran recited. [13] Dawn calls it lungar, a langar, and does not use the word khairat for it.

Iftar

During Ramadan the daily meal at sunset is as much a gift as a dinner. In Hashtnagri Bazaar in Peshawar a Sikh shopkeeper, Rawandar Singh, 42, has handed out dates and pakoras to fasting Muslims since 2012, continuing what his father began. [14] Dawn's wire report of March 2025 lists the roadside iftars at Qissa Khwani, University Road and elsewhere, where long sheets are laid with "food, dates, pakoras, jalebi snacks, fruits and sweet beverages" that anyone passing may sit down to. [14]

Kurram rice crosses into Ramadan as well. Subhan Ali of Kurram told Dawn it is a winter dish that people also cook in Ramadan, and Sibtain Turi, who lives in Peshawar, gives a Kurram rice iftar every year for friends from other districts. [12]

Who cooks, and what is fading

Ahmed says that preparing for and attending gham-khadi is understood as "women's work". [2] At the Charsadda wedding the dish was made by men, hereditary cooks, and Arab News calls it "always a community effort": locals join the chef at various stages, and at dawn people gather to shred the meat by hand. [10] The two accounts describe different tasks, and neither contradicts the other.

The old forms are changing. In 2021 Haji Nawaz Khan, in his eighties, told Arab News in Tank that "very few families" in his settlement still served traditional Pashtun food to Eid guests, and blamed the displacement of families during the military offensive in the area. [15] Anwar Shakir Wazir of Wana said that painda, made of rice or baked bread and set in one bowl round which seven or eight people sit, was still eaten. [15] He remembered that in the past "people were more eager to entertain uninvited guests or strangers than those they were expecting". [15] That is the same rule of welcome set out in melmastia.