Poets of the Khudai Khidmatgar: Pashto verse of the Red Shirt movement

At a glance

• The Khudai Khidmatgar movement had its own paper, Pakhtun (پښتون), started in 1928 by Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Poets wrote for it, and the poems were read aloud at meetings. [1–3]

• Muhammad Siddiq Rohi's history of Pashto literature names Fazal Mahmood Makhfi, Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar, Abdul Malik Fida, Ghani Khan and Ajmal Khattak among those who gathered round the paper. [2]

• The British banned the paper in April 1930 and jailed its editors. After partition the Pakistan government banned the movement and destroyed what remained of its records. [3, 4]

• Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar wrote a poem in Gujrat jail in 1930. Abdul Malik Fida wrote the poem on the shooting at Babra on 12 August 1948. [1, 3, 4]

The paper and the poets who gathered round it

Muhammad Siddiq Rohi, in his history of the modern period of Pashto literature, says the Khudai Khidmatgars did a great deal for modern Pashto literature. When Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the movement's leader, brought out the magazine Pakhtun in 1928, a good number of writers and poets gathered round it. [2] Rohi names the leading ones: Fazal Mahmood Makhfi, Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar, Muhammad Akbar Khadim, Abdul Khaliq Khaliq, Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari, Abdul Ghani Khan, Ajmal Khan Khattak, Abdul Malik Fida and others. He adds that some of them were not in the movement at all and simply wrote for the paper. [2]

Hamza Shinwari, quoted by Rohi from his preface to Mir Mahdi Shah Mahdi's Nishan, wrote that the Red Shirt writing had added real beauty to Pashto literature. The British government's harshness, he said, had stirred a reaction among the Pashtuns, and the movement under Bacha Khan had given Pashto new comparisons and images. [2]

سرخپوش ادب هم څه کم ښایست نه دی پیدا کړی

srkhposh adab hum tsa kam shayist na di paida kri

Red Shirt literature too has added no small beauty. (Hamza Shinwari, as quoted by Rohi)

English and transliteration: Pashtunxwa.

The paper itself is described in the movement's biography by D. G. Tendulkar. The first number, he says, ran to more than twenty-five items in prose and verse. Its editorial called for plain language, said the first duty of the journal was to voice the Pashtuns' aspirations and warn them of dangers, and regretted that Afghanistan had no Pashto journal. [3] Readers sent verse, and Tendulkar calls this the most striking feature: men, women and schoolchildren wrote for it, and Ghani Khan contributed short pieces in prose and verse. [3] Mairani's study, a Pashto translation of a work on the literature of the brave people, says its readers included Pashtuns living in Rohilkhand, Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay, and that Pashtuns in America showed their liking for it. [1]

Mairani also quotes a verdict by the author of Gold and Guns on the Pathan Frontier (Bombay, 1945), Abdul Qayyum, whom the Pashto text calls Sahibzada. He said the magazine played a large part in the growth of Pashto and served Pashto readers by printing patriotic articles and verse on freedom and social reform. [1]

Fazal Mahmood Makhfi

Rohi puts Makhfi first in his list. [2] An editor's preface in the same book gives his dates as 1886 to 1967 and says that brief mentions are not enough for Makhfi, Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar and Abdul Karim; each needs a separate introduction with samples of his work. [2] Mairani gives his birth as 1884. [1]

Mairani calls him a major Pashtun poet of the years before the First World War, an active member of the Hizbullah, the Islamic reform and resistance circle round Haji Sahib of Turangzai. He was educated at Deoband, where his teacher Mahmud al-Hasan advised him to join, and he taught at the madrasa at Gudar. [1] His taste for poetry showed in his youth, as a student at Peshawar college, and Mairani says he never gave up literary work and is known in the Pashtun world as a lyric poet. [1] His ghazals and lyrics keep a traditional form, with the qualities of the classical Pashto poets and of folk verse. His language is plain, without artifice, and feeling comes through directly. [1]

The study could not obtain his poems of the Hizbullah years. What it has is a biography of Makhfi by Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar, and Akbar's preface to his own collection Khwaza Tarakha, which says Makhfi's poems made a revolution in the Pashtuns' awareness. Akbar writes that he saw from them how great poetry can be when it serves the people and leads them forward. [1] No poem of Makhfi's is printed in the sources read here, so the article quotes none.

Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar

Mairani gives Akbar's birth as 1900, and the editor's preface in Rohi gives him 1977 as the year of his death. [1, 2] Mairani says he was one of the poets who did not accept the movement's nonviolence: he firmly rejected the idea and called the use of force useful. In February 1939 he printed in Pakhtun a poem addressed to the leaders, asking that the nature of the Pashtun freedom movement be changed, although nonviolence had been chosen as its basis for winning independence. [1] Against him Mairani sets Abu Said Fazal Ahmad Ghar, whose poem in the 1928 Pakhtun urged friends and countrymen to keep struggling with steadiness, but without violence, since in the colonial age nonviolence was in his view stronger than violence. [1] The movement's poets did not speak with one voice on its method.

Colonial courts sentenced Akbar to long terms. Mairani says prison did not turn him to regret, and prints a poem he made in Gujrat jail in 1930, "My dream of freedom". [1] Two lines of it:

کر د آزادۍ زما ناصح ګڼې عبث په څه

زه هره دانه کې تازه ګل بوټي سپرلی وینم

kar da azadi zama nasih ghane abas pa tsa

za hara dana ke taza gul buti spar(l)ay winam

Adviser, why do you count my sowing of freedom as useless?

In every grain I see fresh flowers and plants, a spring.

The Pashto is from Mairani's printed page. The transliteration and English are Pashtunxwa's. [1] On the same page Mairani introduces another of Akbar's poems, "I will not forget the English age", dated 20 May 1930, after the Peshawar rising had been put down; its lines remember the day of 23 April. [1]

Abdul Malik Fida

Fida, from Pranghar in Charsadda, wrote the best-known poem of the movement. He has his own article, Abdul Malik Fida, which prints his Babra poem whole. In 1928 he sent the new paper a poem welcoming it, and in 1939 another on the Pashtuns' neglect of their mother tongue. [1] Of the first, one couplet runs:

هر کله راشه پښتون اخباره

خدای دی ورک مه کړه زموږ غمخواره

har kala rasha Pakhtun akhbara

Khudai de wrak ma kra zmoza ghamkhwara

Come whenever you come, paper Pakhtun;

may God not lose you to us, our sympathiser.

The Pashto is from Mairani's page; the English is Pashtunxwa's. [1]

Ghani Khan, Ajmal Khattak and the younger poets

Tariq Rahman reports that Ghani Khan, in a 1993 interview, named Makhfi of Charsadda, Abdul Malik Fida, Abdul Akbar Khan and himself as the men who wrote nationalist literature in the years before partition. [5] Tendulkar notes the early contributions of Ghani Khan to the paper. [3] Ajmal Khattak belongs to the next generation; Rohi lists him among the writers round the paper, and his own article tells the rest of his career. [2] Rohi's list also names Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari, Mahmud Qalandar, Mir Mahdi Shah Mahdi and others, so the group was larger than the four names Ghani Khan gave. [2] Other works on Pashto literature and oral poetry set these poets in the longer tradition.

Verse at meetings

Mairani says patriotic writers and poets walked in the front rows of demonstrations and meetings and were the first to meet the British soldiers. [1] Fida appears in the sources more often than the others. The study places him at the mushairas, the poetry gatherings, and at one in the village of Gharib Abad in March 1937, during the election campaign, he urged his countrymen to love freedom and their land, not to sell themselves for seats and titles, and to follow Abdul Ghaffar Khan. [1] Rohi and Tendulkar record the same poet reading his Babra poem to Bacha Khan, who wept. [3]

Two governments and one body of verse

The British government treated the paper as a political danger. Tendulkar says Pakhtun appeared monthly until it was banned in April 1930, when Abdul Ghaffar Khan was jailed; it came out again a year later, was banned again in 1931, and was issued thrice a month after he entered the province in 1937. [3] Mairani says it appeared monthly until 1947, with three breaks, and that the colonial government three times put restraints on it. [1] Tendulkar adds that the British scrutinised the issues only to prosecute the editor, and that some of the paper survives only in English translation in the National Archives of India in New Delhi. [3] Mairani cites the Pashto linguist Sayyid Bahadur Shah Zafar Kakakhel's preface to his dictionary: the British, he wrote, did not want the Pashtuns to compete with the country's other peoples in education. [1]

After partition the government of the North-West Frontier Province under Abdul Qayyum Khan treated the movement as a danger to the new state. Tendulkar says that on 8 July 1948 it took extraordinary powers to outlaw by ordinance any organisation it judged "objectionable to peace and security", and that in mid-September the Khudai Khidmatgar organisation was declared unlawful. [3] Safoora Arbab, a scholar of the movement, writes that the 1948 Public Security Ordinance outlawed mass gatherings and allowed arrest without charge. She says the Khudai Khidmatgars were soon declared ghadars, traitors, and that the literature and records of the movement were systematically destroyed. [4] Tendulkar says Pakhtun was banned for good by the Pakistan government and its issues destroyed, so that probably no library holds a full file; some issues may be at the Kabul library. [3] The provincial government's communiqué of 1949 spoke of a plot among Red Shirts in Hazara; Jawaharlal Nehru answered that India repudiated any suggestion that money had passed from India to them. [3] The sources read here give the government's measures through its critics. The ministers' own statements on the poets and the paper were not found, and the article does not put words in their mouths. For the minister's career see Abdul Qayyum Khan.

Babra and the poem

On 12 August 1948 police fired on a gathering of Khudai Khidmatgars at Babra in Charsadda. Tendulkar gives three accounts. The official count was fifteen killed and fifty injured. An eyewitness estimated about 150 killed and 400 injured. Another swore on the Qur'an that two thousand died. [3] He quotes Abdul Ghaffar Khan's account: a procession led by an old man, women carrying Qur'ans on their heads, machine-gun fire as they approached the mosque, and survivors beaten and told they were Hindus with no right to pray. [3] That account is Bacha Khan's, and it was written after he himself had been jailed. The article on Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement and the one on partition and the 1947 Frontier referendum give the wider history. The Khudai Khidmatgars martyred at Babra are the subject of Fida's poem.

Arbab reads Fida's poem on Babra as the movement's lament for its destruction. She sets its picture of the government's guns and machine-guns against "a nation, empty-handed". [4] Tendulkar reports that in July 1955 Bacha Khan went to Babra to pray for the dead, and that a poem of Fida's on the massacre was recited there, to the tears of Bacha Khan and hundreds present. [3]

What survives

Rohi's editor still asks for separate studies and samples of Makhfi and Akbar. [2] Tendulkar doubts that any library has the whole file of the paper. [3] Arbab says the records were destroyed. [4] The surviving verse is mostly what other books quoted. Fida's poem is whole in Rohi, Akbar's jail poem is in Mairani, and the rest of Makhfi's work has yet to be found in print by the sources read here.