Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi: Kandahar sardar, Persian poet and exile in Damascus

At a glance

• Sardar Ghulam Muhammad Khan Tarzi (سردار غلام محمد خان طرزي) was born in Kandahar in 1245 AH, about 1829–30, the eldest son of Sardar Rahmdil Khan and grandson of Sardar Payinda Khan, whose son was Dost Mohammad Khan. [1, 3, 8]

• His pen-name was Tarzi, "the stylist". His sources call him a poet of Persian, with some Arabic. None of them quotes a line of Pashto by him. [1, 3, 7]

• Amir Abdur Rahman expelled him from Kandahar at the end of 1881 or in January 1882, charged with conspiring for Ayub Khan. He went by Quetta to Karachi, then in 1885 to Baghdad, Istanbul and Damascus. [3–5, 8]

• He died in Damascus on 15 Sha'ban 1318 AH (December 1900) and was buried in the Dahdah cemetery. His son Mahmud Tarzi and his granddaughter Queen Soraya carried the family name back to Kabul. [1, 5, 8]

A Kandahar sardar's son

Mahmud Tarzi sketched his father's life in Siraj al-Akhbar in 1912, and the sketch is reprinted in the 2002 edition of the diwan. It gives the descent plainly: Sardar Ghulam Muhammad Khan, son of Sardar Rahmdil Khan, son of Sardar Payinda Khan. [1] Mahmud says he heard the reason for the pen-name from his father: the poet had taken a new tarz, a new manner, in his verse. [1] Encyclopaedia Iranica agrees on the line, calling him a son of Sardar Rahmdil Khan and one of the Mohammadzai Barakzai sardars of Kandahar, and gives his years as 1830–1900. [8] Ludwig Adamec's Who's Who, drawn from British records, calls him the eldest son of Rahmdil Khan of the Kandahar sardars. [3] Mahmud puts the birth in "the city of Ahmad Shah, Kandahar" (Kandahar), in 1245 AH. [1]

Dost Mohammad took Kandahar in 1855. Muhammad Masum Hotak, whose Pashto book on the Kandahari sardars is the fullest account of Ghulam Muhammad's life in that language, says Rahmdil then went to Persia and left his son as his agent and executor. Rahmdil died at Tehran and was buried in the Wadi al-Salam at Najaf; Hotak gives 1275 or 1278 AH, and Habibi gives 1275. [5, 6] Hotak says Dost Mohammad gave the young man the title "Arjumand Danishmand" and a yearly honorary stipend of 120,000 rupees. [5] He also tells the family story of the sword: Ghulam Muhammad fought well in the quarrel between his father and his uncle Kohandil, and his father gave him as a prize a blade said to date from the Safavids. [5]

Hotak says he was with Dost Mohammad at the long siege of Herat, and that a rival sardar secretly sent him a large sum to change sides, which he sent back. [5] Under Sher Ali Khan, Hotak says, he fell from favour in the amir's second reign, as other sardars did, and was jailed for a time, charged with friendship for Abdur Rahman. [5] Hotak says he wrote some of his saddest verse in that prison (see "Verses").

Two men called Sher Ali appear in these sources, and one of them is not the amir. Adamec calls Ghulam Muhammad first cousin of Sardar Sher Ali Khan, the former governor of Kandahar, and says he was married to that Sher Ali's sister. [3] This is the Sher Ali who received Ayub Khan at Karachi in 1888, and who, in Hotak's account, spent three years in Karachi with Ghulam Muhammad. [5]

Ayub Khan and the charge of conspiracy

Ghulam Muhammad took the side of Ayub Khan, the victor of Maiwand in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, against the new amir. Hotak says he joined Ayub's movement, and Habibi says he leaned towards Ayub. [5, 6] Abdur Rahman took Kandahar on 22 September 1881 and Ayub fled to Persia. The sources then give four versions of why the sardar had to go:

• Mahmud Tarzi, writing in 1912, says only that he was "banished and expelled" by way of Kandahar to Karachi "because of certain political necessities". [1]

• Vartan Gregorian writes that Abdur Rahman charged him with conspiracy against the state and banished him and his family. [4]

• Adamec lists him among the sardars deported "for alleged rebellion and complicity in the designs of Sardar Ayyub Khan". [3]

• Habibi tells it with a story. Spies reported that Ghulam Muhammad had told a man of Herat that Ayub Khan would soon come back from Persia victorious. The amir ordered Tarzi's property taken and Tarzi sent away, and had the man from Herat chained in a cage on a pistachio tree on the Ghorian border, where he starved, with the words "let him see how Ayub Khan's party returns from Persia". [6] Hotak repeats this from Habibi, who he says took it from Sayyid Mahdi Farrukh's history. [5]

Hotak adds that Ghulam Muhammad spent three months in the Kandahar prison, where he wrote an ode of sixty-two couplets in praise of Abdur Rahman, and adds that the amir was not a man to keep snakes at home. [5] Habibi writes that the family had long been hostile to British influence, and that Ghulam Muhammad's support for Ayub in the war of Maiwand was the reason Abdur Rahman exiled him to Karachi. [6]

The number who left differs by source. Adamec says his own following was about 27, with five sardars and nine women, and that about 150 expelled people reached Quetta on 17 January 1882. [3] Hotak says he gave himself up with 35 of his family to a British officer, Waterfield, at Pishin. [5] Habibi says 36. [6] They reached Karachi on 28 January 1882. [3]

Karachi and the tour of India

Iranica puts the family's years at Karachi between January 1882 and March 1885. [8] The British gave Ghulam Muhammad a monthly allowance, which Hotak puts at 600 rupees. [5] A report by the Bombay foreign secretary dated 13 December 1883, quoted on the Tarzi family's own website, reads: "As far as we know, he has never rendered a service to the British government and therefore we are in no way indebted to him." [2] The same report, the family site adds, notes that his cousin the former governor did not think well of him. [2] Adamec says the former governor was against Ghulam Muhammad's staying in Karachi. [3]

Hotak quotes a letter from Karachi in which the sardar, calling himself "the sorrowful Tarzi", says that in the thicket of Karachi he has not sat idle, and that he spends his days setting words like pearls. [5] He travelled through India for some months, and Hotak lists Bombay, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mysore, Madras, Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Agra, Delhi, Sirhind, Amritsar, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. [5] Mahmud's preface to the diwan, as Hotak quotes it, says that after about six months of this his father would not spend what remained of his life under the protection and the pay of unbelievers, and resolved to leave India for the Ottoman state. [5]

Baghdad, Istanbul and Damascus

Mahmud's own sketch gives the route. In 1302 AH they went from Karachi to Baghdad; six months later to Istanbul; and from there, "by the exalted will of Sultan Abdulhamid", with pay and honour, to Syria, "as a special guest of His Majesty", where the sardar stayed until the end of his life. [1] Iranica and Hotak date the departure from Karachi to 1885. [5, 8] Gregorian is shorter and names only Karachi and Damascus, where the sultan let the family settle. [4]

Hotak says the sultan fixed the pay at 2,000 qirsh a month and that Ghulam Muhammad had visiting cards printed at Beirut that called him "special guest of His Majesty" and "nephew of the late former amir of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad Khan". [5] He made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and in 1306 AH (1889) he wrote a book, Akhlaq-i Hamida, and sent it to Istanbul with Mahmud; the sultan added 1,000 qirsh to his pay and gave 2,000 for Mahmud's journey. [5] Mahmud's sketch adds that the Naghma-yi Ahang-i Hijaz, a work of prose and verse, came out of six months of retreat at the Kaaba and Medina. [1]

The diwan holds a comic prose piece in which the poet describes the sultan's slow answer to the Akhlaq-i Hamida. A "parliament" of his own qualities, with members such as Delicate-Temper Khan, debates whether to give up the Ottoman pay and leave Damascus. One member recalls the hardships of Amir Sher Ali's time, of Abdur Rahman's, and of the heart-eating years under Sardar Sher Ali in Hindustan. The debate ends when a telegram from Mahmud Bey says the sultan loved the book, with 1,000 qirsh added to the pay and 2,000 for the road. [1]

Mahmud also recorded his father's reply to Jawad Pasha, the Ottoman grand vizier, who asked why Abdur Rahman had driven out friends and relations whose experience he could have used. According to Hotak's quotation of Mahmud's Siyahat-nama, Tarzi answered that the amir was wholly in the right. Those who had sided with the British had been exiled for betraying country and nation, and the others, each of whom thought himself sole conqueror of Afghanistan and obstructed the amir out of pride, left him no choice but to send them away. [5] Hotak adds that Tarzi never let Afghan amirs be belittled before foreigners, whatever had been done to him. [5]

Death in Damascus

Mahmud gives the date of his father's death as the night of Friday, 15 Sha'ban 1318 AH, and the burial place as the tomb of Hazrat Dahdah, "to the south of the city of Damascus", where many companions of the Prophet and famous scholars lie. [1] Habibi also has 15 Sha'ban, a Friday, and puts the death in December 1900; Hotak says Thursday, 15 Sha'ban, and converts it to 28 December 1900. [5, 6] Iranica gives 1900. [8] The Tarzi family website says the night of Friday, 15 Shawwal 1318, which would be early 1901. [2]

Gregorian writes that in 1902, after both Abdur Rahman and the sardar were dead, the Tarzis returned under an amnesty proclaimed by Amir Habibullah. [4] Iranica says Mahmud paid a first visit in 1902 and came back with his family in January 1905, after twenty-three years away; the amnesty is told in Habibullah Khan. [8] He ran the translation office and then the newspaper Siraj al-Akhbar. [8] He signed it "Tarzi", the name his father had given him. [8] His daughter Soraya became the wife of King Amanullah, whose reign is told in Amanullah Khan. [8]

The diwan

Mahmud lists what the father wrote: qasidas, ghazals, masnavis, tarji'-band, tarkib-band, takhmis, ruba'is and short qit'a. [1] The collected poems were printed at Karachi in 1311 AH at the Faiz-i Muhammadi press, managed by the poet's nephew Muhammad Anwar Khan and copied in a fine hand by his eldest son Muhammad Zaman Khan; the colophon dates the finish to 27 Muharram 1311 and says the poet was still alive in Damascus. [1] Iranica dates the printing 1892–93. [8] The 2002 Tehran reprint, edited by his great-grandson Nangyalay Tarzi, gives 1892 on its title page. [1] Gregorian notes that his diwan and Qazi Mir Hussein's had to be printed at Karachi or Lahore, because there was no press in Afghanistan. [4]

Adamec calls him "a poet in Dari". [3] Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghubar, in his history of Afghan literature, says he left a printed diwan and the Naghma-yi Hijaz in Persian and Arabic. [7] Habibi describes the style as Indian. [6] The printed diwan has no Pashto in it, and no source on his life quotes a Pashto line by him or calls him a Pashto poet.

Hotak, drawing on Allama Rashad's list, also names a manuscript in the National Archives in Kabul, Waqi'at-i Sitta or Tuhfa-yi Shami, and a notebook in Tashkent in the sardar's hand with selections from Bidel, Sa'ib and Sa'di. [5] Mahmud calls him a master of painting and illumination as well as verse, and Hotak calls him a good calligrapher and miniaturist. [1, 5]

Verses

Hotak prints a ghazal that he says Ghulam Muhammad wrote in prison under Sher Ali, where the poet writes of the prison corner and the chain. The first couplets, as Hotak prints them from the diwan, read:

دلم در کنج زندان روی آسایش نمی‌بیند

نظر در خانهٔ تاریک بینایی کجا دارد

Delam dar kunj-i zindān rūy-i āsāyish nami-bīnad / nazar dar khāna-yi tārīk bīnāyī kujā dārad

My heart in the prison corner sees no face of ease; where would an eye in a dark house have its sight?

زبس در کنج غم بشکست اجزای وجود من

تنم چون حلقهٔ زنجیر سرتا پا صدا دارد

Zabas dar kunj-i gham bishikast ajzā-yi vujūd-i man / tanam chūn halqa-yi zanjīr sar-tā-pā ṣadā dārad

So much did the corner of grief break the parts of my being that my body, like a ring of the chain, rings from head to foot.

The translation is Pashtunxwa's. [5]

He also wrote odes to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Gregorian says the sardar greatly revered al-Afghani, and sent Mahmud to him at Istanbul with a letter. [4, 5] Ghubar prints the opening of the ode he took from the diwan:

نسیم صبح در گلشن وزید از جانب صحرا

عبیر آمیز و عنبر بیز و روح انگیز و روح افزا

Nasīm-i ṣubḥ dar gulshan vazīd az jānib-i ṣaḥrā / ʿabīr-āmēz u ʿanbar-bēz u rūḥ-angēz u rūḥ-afzā

The morning breeze blew in the garden from the side of the desert, mixed with perfume, scattering amber, lifting the spirit.

تو نور افغانستان اخگر تو عود افغانستان مجمر

تو جان افغانستان پیکر تو روح افغانستان اعضا

To nūr-i Afghānistān akhgar, to ʿūd-i Afghānistān mijmar / to jān-i Afghānistān paykar, to rūḥ-i Afghānistān aʿzā

You are the light of Afghanistan, its live coal; you are its aloes-wood, its censer; you are the soul of Afghanistan, its body; you are its spirit, its limbs.

The translation is Pashtunxwa's. [7] Hotak notes that the printed diwan has "jahan", the world, where Ghubar has "Afghanistan", and that the diwan's heading names the person praised as Sayyid Jalal al-Din, "who had come from Rum". He thinks "Jalal" is a scribe's slip for "Jamal" and that the ode was composed in Afghanistan before 1881. [5]