Nazo Tokhi (Nazo Ana): poet and mother of Mirwais Hotak

At a glance

• Nazo Tokhi (نازو توخي), called Nazo Ana (نازو انا), is remembered as a Pashto poet and as the mother of Mirwais Hotak, who took Kandahar from the Safavids in 1709.

• Everything detailed about her life comes from one book, the Pata Khazana ("Hidden Treasure", پټه خزانه), a biographical anthology of Pashto poets that Abdul Hai Habibi published in Kabul in 1944. Its authenticity is disputed. [1, 2]

• That book gives her father (Sultan Malakhai Tokhi, a chief), her birth (1061 AH, about 1651), her husband (Salim Khan Hotak), four sons, a dream before Mirwais was born, a story of her holding a fortress, and one quatrain. [1, 2]

• No death date appears in the book. Raverty's 1862 Selections from the Afghan poets does not mention her. [1, 4]

One book names her

Most of what is told about Nazo Tokhi can be traced to a few pages of the Pata Khazana. Its compiler, Muhammad Hotak, wrote at Kandahar in 1728–29 for the young Hotak ruler Shah Husayn, a son of Mirwais, and gave Nazo an entry among the women who made poetry, the "third treasure" of the book. [2] He tells most of her story as he had it from his father, Daud Khan, and from "trusted narrators". [1, 2]

So the entry is a family tradition set down roughly a dozen years after Mirwais died, by a writer who served his sons. That is worth knowing before reading what follows, and a later section sets out the argument over whether the book is genuine at all.

Her family in the Pata Khazana

The entry opens "It is narrated" (hase naql ka): Nazo was the daughter of Sultan Malakhai (Malkhay) Tokhi, born in 1061 AH, which Khushal Habibi's English translation gives as 1651, near a place called Tazi. [1, 2] Habibi's footnote in the Persian edition places Tazi north-east of Kalat on the Kabul road and says Malakhai's descendants still lived near it. [1] In the compiler's words her father ruled the tribes "from Ghazni to Jaldak" as an independent chief with no rival. [1, 2] The Tokhi are a Ghilzai tribe of the Kalat and Tarnak country, the Hotak's neighbours; see the Ghilzai.

As a girl, the text says, she learned from Pashtun women and from white-bearded scholars, and men were amazed at her courage and generosity. [1, 2] She married Salim Khan Hotak, son of Karam Khan, of the Salim Khel branch of the Hotak, which the text calls the present rulers of Kandahar and Isfahan, and had four sons: Haji Mir Khan, the eldest, then Abdul Aziz Khan, Yahya Khan and Abdul Qadir Khan. [1, 2] Haji Mir Khan is Mirwais. Abdul Aziz is the brother whom the Hotak history names as his successor, which is the one point in the entry that other accounts confirm.

The fortress and the guests

The first story is a siege. Her father died fighting near Sur Ghar, the book says, and her brother Haji Adil rode out to avenge him, leaving the house and fortress to Nazo. She tied on a sword and, with the young fighting men of the household, kept raiders from the fortress. [1, 2]

The second is hospitality, again told "as my father related it". In winter, when caravans arrived, hundreds of guests stayed at her fortress. She fed them, gave clothes to those who had none, and her name for generosity spread "from Khyber to Kosan", a place west of Herat. [1, 2] This is the generosity that *melmastia* asks of a household, told of a woman who was also its defender.

The dream and the teaching of Mirwais

The third story concerns Mirwais. When he was born, the text says, Nazo dreamed that Shaykh Bitani (شيخ بېټني) told her to bring the child up well: he would do great deeds, make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and father kings who would make the faith shine. [1, 2] She taught him the duties of religion by the age of seven and told him to serve God and the people. In the book's account he said later that his mother had left him the great work to do, and in 1119 AH (1707 in the translation) knelt in thanks after freeing his people from tyranny, saying it was the task she had entrusted to him. [1, 2]

Two cautions. The book's dates differ from today's: modern histories put the rising in 1709 and Mirwais's death in 1715, while the book gives 1119 AH for the rising and 28 Dhu al-Hijja 1128 AH (1716) for his death. [2] And the dream belongs to a family of Mirwais stories. Tanvir Ahmed, writing on the Afghan accounts of Mirwais's uprising, says in passing that Nazo Ana is also told as having offered her cheek as a girl to a wonder-working saint. His essay does not say where that version comes from. [6]

The one poem

The compiler says Nazo composed praise of God, left a diwan of two thousand couplets (bayt), and wrote in a style "better than men". [1, 2] He gives only one quatrain from it, which he says he heard from his father. Here is the Pashto as printed on page 180 of the Kabul edition. [1]

سحرګه وه، د نرګس لېمه لانده / څاڅکي ئې له سترګو څخېده

ما وېل څه دی، ښکلې ګله، ولې ژاړې؟ / ده وېل ژوند مې دئ یوه خوله خندېده

Saharga wa, da nargis lema landa / tsātski ye la stargo tsakhéda

Mā wel tse day, ṣkule gula, wule zhāre? / Da wel zhwand me dai yawa khwla khandéda

At dawn the narcissus petals were wet, / like tears, flowed each crystalline droplet. "Why do you cry thus, O pretty flower?" I asked: / "My life is just a fleeting smile," replied the floret. (translated by Khushal Habibi, 1997) [2]

Habibi, who prints the quatrain in his preface as an example of the book's poetry, compares it with a verse of Muhammad Iqbal's. [2] The verse is the only thing of hers that can be read, and it comes from the same book.

The argument over the book

Habibi said he obtained the manuscript through Abdul Ali Khanozay, a Kakar of Pishin, in 1943, though his preface of March 1944 says spring 1944. He edited it, translated the Pashto into Persian, and published it through the Pashto Academy in Kabul. The manuscript, he says, is a copy made in 1886 of Muhammad Hotak's work of 1728–29. [2] The anthology claims to cover Pashto poets from the eighth century to 1688, which would put Pashto poetry centuries before the sixteenth-century writing described in Pashto literature and oral poetry.

Doubt came at once. The Norwegian linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1960), in words Habibi quotes, that the book raises "a number of grave linguistic and historical problems" and cannot be judged until the manuscripts are open to philological study; even if it is genuine, he added, the dating of the oldest poems may be doubted. [2] Dupree's Afghanistan said its authenticity had recently been questioned; Habibi answered that Dupree gave no reasoning and relied on Wilber, who knew no Pashto. [2] The Italian scholar Lucia Serena Loi studied the book in 1987. According to her reviewer C. J. Brunner, as the translator's note reports, Loi showed that most of the 216 words Habibi had listed as rare appear in nineteenth- and twentieth-century dictionaries, and so removed "the only prop" of the 1729 dating. [2]

Habibi's replies were general. Critics had given no detailed analysis; a single forger could not have written in so many styles and dialects; and no one rejects Persian anthologies for citing poets the others omit. He said the original is kept in the Calligraphy Library of the Ministry of Information and Culture and open to view, and that a facsimile was published in 1976. [2] Ahmed describes that facsimile as a 1975 edition. [6]

For Nazo the effect is plain. If the Pata Khazana is what its editor says, the entry is a Hotak family tradition written down in 1728–29. If it is a later work, there is no early witness to her at all. The published debate has not settled it.

What later writers added

Later accounts say more than the book does. Palwasha Kakar, in a Harvard paper on women's authority in Pashtunwali, names Nazoo Anaa as a national-level leader, "Mother of Afghan Nationalism" in legend, who called for Pashtunwali to be the law of the Afghan confederacy and arbitrated between tribes to unite them against the Persians. [5] Her notes for these pages cite Massoma Ismati's and Fahima Rahimi's books on Afghan women and an interview, and she adds that many of the stories rest on hagiographical accounts. [5] The Pata Khazana entry says nothing about law or arbitration. [1, 2] Kakar also writes that Nazo and her daughters died fighting beside Mirwais when he was defeated, which fits neither the book, where Mirwais dies in Kandahar, nor the Hotak history. [2, 5]

A short web article by Mohammad Osman Mohmand, reproduced on Khyber.org, retells the book's entry in English and renders 1061 AH as 1682, which is wrong; 1061 AH is 1650–51. [7] It also calls Mirwais the eldest son, as the book does. [2, 7]

The name Ana and how she is remembered

Ana (انا) is, in Raverty's 1867 dictionary, "a grandmother, paternal or maternal". [3] The book itself already writes "Nazo Ana". [1] The title is a mark of respect, as Kandahar's Nika ("grandfather") is for Mirwais; see the Hotak article.

Her name is carried by schools. In November 2008 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported from Kandahar that classes at Nazo Ana high school for girls were cancelled after an acid attack on schoolgirls, with only about 35 of 1,300 pupils attending. [8] That is evidence for the school, not for her life. Web pages also list a Nazo Ana school in Kabul, and they disagree on whether it is for girls or boys.

Her verse is part of the wider tradition described in Pashto literature and oral poetry, and the generosity and honour told of her are those of Pashtunwali. Raverty's 1862 Selections, which translates Afghan poets from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, has no entry for her. [4]