Pashtunkhwa (Pakhtunkhwa): the name for the land of the Pashtuns

At a glance

• Pashtunkhwa (پښتونخوا, Kandahar Paṣ̌tunkhwā, Peshawar Pakhtunkhwā) is Pashtun plus khwā, "side, quarter, locality". Raverty's Pashto dictionary of 1860 glosses it as "the Afghan country". [3]

• The two spellings in English follow the two ways of saying one letter. ښ is sh in the south and south-east and kh around Peshawar, so the same word is Pashtunkhwa in one mouth and Pakhtunkhwa in the other. [3, 5]

• Abdul Hai Habibi's Kabul edition of Ahmad Shah's diwan (1940) prints the couplet about forgetting Delhi's throne at the sight of "Pashtunkhwa's mountains", and uses the word in his own prose for the Pashtun country. [1]

• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the official name of one Pakistani province since the Eighteenth Amendment, which received the president's assent on 19 April 2010. Pakhtunkhwa alone is the older word and covers more than that province. [2, 4]

• Pashtunistan (Pakhtunistan) is a different word with a different history: a political demand for a Pashtun state, put in different senses in Kabul and in Peshawar. [4]

The word and its parts

Pashtunkhwa is a compound. The first part is Pashtun (پښتون), which Raverty defines as "an Afghan, one whose language is the Pushto or Pukhto". [3] The second is khwā (خوا), which he glosses as "side, quarter, locality". [3] The compound means the Pashtuns' side or quarter, and so their country.

Raverty's Dictionary of the Pukhto, Pushto, or Language of the Afghans (1860) gives the word in four shapes, pukhtun-khā or pukhtun-khwā in the eastern pronunciation and pushtun-khā or pushtun-khwā in the western, and defines it as "the Afghan country, Afghanistān". [3] Raverty marks the two dialects himself with (E.) and (W.), and his single sentence puts the Pashtuns' country and Afghanistan in one definition. [3]

Three letters are worth knowing before reading the spelling.

• ښ is one letter, written the same everywhere and said differently. The Linguistic Data Consortium's guide to Pashto describes it as a retroflex sh in Kandahari, a velar kh (x) in the north-east around Peshawar and Jalalabad, and a plain sh in the south-east around Quetta. [5]

• خ, the first letter of khwā, is a different letter. Raverty prints it as kh in the western form too, pushtun-khwā, so only the first consonant of the word varies. [3]

• The sound linguists write x is the kh of Scottish loch. The consortium's guide uses x for the north-eastern value of ښ. [5]

Pashtun and Pakhtun, the same word in two mouths

Olaf Caroe, the British frontier officer who wrote The Pathans (1958), set out the split in his introduction. The language is Pakhtu, he says, in the north-east and Pashtu in the south-west. [4] The dividing line runs roughly east and west from the Indus just south of Attock through Kohat and the Miranzai valley to Thal, and south of the Kurram river to Shuttargardan. North-east of it the "hard" language is spoken, by the Peshawar tribes, Dir, Swat, Buner, Bajaur, the Afridi, Orakzai, Shinwari and Bangash. South-west of it, in the "soft" speech, are the Durrani, nearly all the Ghilzai and the tribes of Khost, Waziristan, Bannu and the Derajat. [4] The Khattak are the one tribe he finds split between the two. [4]

Caroe adds a practical point. The city is called Pekhawar in the hard dialect, and he decided to write Pakhtu "seeing that Pakhtu is the language of Peshawar". [4] He also complains that readers were confused by the variants Pakhtun and Pashtun. [4] The LDC guide gives the people the same pattern: Pakhtoon in the north, Pashtoon in the south. [5] More detail on the sounds is in Pashto dialects: soft and hard speech.

So Pashtunkhwa and Pakhtunkhwa are one name. A Kandahari says the first, a Peshawari the second, and each is right in his own dialect. The English spellings Pukhtunkhwa, Pakhtoonkhwa, Pukhtoonkhwa and Pashtoonkhwa are further renderings of the same two pronunciations. Raverty himself printed pukhtun for the eastern form. [3]

Pashtunkhwa in older Pashto writing

The best-known line is Ahmad Shah Durrani's. Habibi, editing the king's diwan for the Pashto Tolana at Kabul in 1940, quotes it in his introduction under the heading "Ahmad Shah Baba and the love of homeland". He writes that the king preferred the bare mountains of Pashtunkhwa (سپېره غرونه) to the ease of the lands he conquered, that he remembered his own country even when he sat on the throne of Delhi, and that he wrote verses in love of its soil. [1] The couplet as Habibi prints it:

د ډهلی تخت هېرومه چه رایاد کړم

ځما د ښکلی پښتونخوا د غرو سرونه

Da Ḍehlī takht hērūma che rāyād kṛum, ẓmā da khkalī Pakhtūnkhwā da ghro sarūna.

I forget the throne of Delhi when I remember the summits of my beautiful Pashtunkhwa's mountains. [1]

Habibi's page spells the word with ښ. [1] The poem is discussed in Ahmad Shah Durrani's diwan, and the king's career in Ahmad Shah and the founding of the Durrani state.

Habibi uses the word again in his own voice. A few pages before the couplet he writes that many great kings had come from among the Pashtuns, and that the Lodis and Khaljis ruled "Hindustan and Pashtunkhwa" with great splendour, and Sher Shah Suri after them. [1] Later he says Ahmad Shah's "national idea" was to form an independent state of Afghanistan in the mountains of Pashtunkhwa. [1] For Habibi, writing in Kabul, Pashtunkhwa is the land of the Pashtuns and Afghanistan the state set up in it. The couplet reaches readers through Habibi's edition of manuscript copies.

Caroe, writing in English in the 1950s, uses the word as the name of the homeland. Coming up from Lahore, he says, the traveller smells "the scents of the home-land" near Margalla, forty miles before the Indus and close to ancient Taxila, and "This is the Pakhtun Khwa, the land of the Pathans." [4] Beyond the Indus he finds the Peshawar valley, ringed by hills and entered by three passes, the Khyber, Kohat and Malakand. [4]

The oldest dated dictionary entry for the word is Raverty's of 1860. [3]

From a word for the land to a political name

The word for the country became a political name because the province of the Pashtuns had none of its own. The British made the North-West Frontier Province in 1901, according to Radio Free Europe and the Christian Science Monitor. [7, 11] RFE/RL adds that it was called the North West Frontier Province because the territory lay north-west of the capital, Delhi. [7] The Monitor adds that it was the only Pakistani province not named for its main ethnic group. [11] Pakistan kept the name after 1947, and a province that was merged with the others in the "One Unit" of 1955 got its separate existence back when General Yahya Khan dissolved the Unit in July 1970. The 1973 constitution continued with the British name. [10] Caroe, writing in 1958, hears the complaint of the Pathan nationalist in the One Unit years: the Frontier Province, "the limited stage on which heretofore they could walk", seemed to have "lost its identity, merged in a larger whole". [4]

The Awami National Party, which traces itself back to the Khudai Khidmatgar movement of Bacha Khan, took up the demand for a Pashtun name, and its members at a 2016 celebration described the Khudai Khidmatgar as the start of that struggle. [14] A Foreign Policy article of April 2010 cites the columnist Rahimullah Yusufzai for a party resolution in favour of the name of Pakhtunkhwa in November 1997. [8] In February 2008, after an election that made the ANP the largest party in the province, its president Asfandyar Wali Khan told Dawn that the party wanted one of three names for it: Pakhtunkhwa, Pakhtunistan or Afghania. [13] Afghania was the name Chaudhry Rahmat Ali had given the region when he coined the word Pakistan, Dawn explains. [13] The Monitor says Pashtun-led parties were turned down for more than 60 years when they asked for "Pashtunistan" or "Afghania", since both sounded too secessionist. [11]

Two leaders of the party's wider movement are covered in Khan Abdul Wali Khan and Ajmal Khattak. In the south, Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai broke with the National Awami Party in 1970 and formed a party with Pashtunkhwa in its name, and its successor is the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party. Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai tells that story with its sources.

Pashtunistan is a different word

Pashtunistan and Pakhtunistan use the Persian ending -istan, "place of", and belong to the politics of 1947. Caroe says the theory came into the open in 1947 and "has assumed very different shades of meaning" as seen from Kabul and from Peshawar. [4] Before the transfer of power, he writes, the Afghan government put in a formal claim that the whole Pathan country as far as the Indus should come back to Afghan sovereignty. [4] Afterwards the claim was put as a demand for a separate Pathan state to be carved out of Pakistan, and Kabul said the Durand Line had lapsed. Caroe reads this as veiled irredentism and notes that Kabul said nothing of including the Pashtu-speaking areas of Afghanistan. [4] That is Caroe's reading, written by a former British official, and the Afghan side would not put it that way.

He gives Bacha Khan's version separately. It is a Pathan state within Pakistan, of semi-autonomy, "realizing Pathan national consciousness as a force which calls for a separate organism to express it". [4] Caroe says its supporters hardly considered whether such a state could stand, and he also pays tribute to the sincerity with which they held the idea. [4] Dr Khan Sahib's request for an independent Pathanistan as a third choice in 1947 is told in Partition and the 1947 Frontier referendum, and the Afghan claim in The Durand Line, 1893 and Mohammad Daoud Khan.

Pakhtunkhwa in the provincial politics of the 2000s was a different demand from either: a name for the province as it stood, to match Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab. [8, 11]

The renaming of April 2010

The step came in the constitutional package that became the Eighteenth Amendment. On 1 April 2010 the parliamentary committee on constitutional reforms sent the new name to the speaker of the National Assembly, Radio Free Europe reported, a day after the parties reached agreement on the package. [6] Asfandyar Wali Khan told journalists: "today the name of Pakhtunkhwa has appeared on the map of Pakistan." [6] The same report described informal parades and music in Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi, and protests in Hazara. [6] The Senate approved it on 15 April, by 80 votes to 12 on Radio Free Europe's count, and President Asif Ali Zardari gave his assent on 19 April 2010. [2, 7, 9]

The text is short. Section 3 of the Act changes Article 1(2)(a) of the constitution, which lists the provinces: for the words "North West Frontier" the words "Khyber Pakhtunkhwa" are substituted. [2] The Amendment names the province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It does not call it Pakhtunkhwa. Dawn, in a 2016 report on an ANP celebration, says the party had insisted on just Pakhtunkhwa and that 80 senators voted for the new name. [14] Foreign Policy says hyphenating "Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa" became the compromise that nearly everybody could accept, after a run of other names (Khyber, Neelab, Abaseen, Gandhara and Afghania) had been proposed. [8]

The Pashtun case for the name

Supporters said the name was owed. The Radio Free Europe correspondent Abubakar Siddique said it was the first time the Pakistani state officially recognised Pashtun identity, and that Pakhtunkhwa "has been called this way in Pashtun folklore, in the Pashto language, and in particular Pashtun literature". [7] The ANP's Mian Iftikhar Hussain said Pashtun nationalists had worked 63 years for the change. [7] A trader in Peshawar told the Monitor: "If the Punjabis have Punjab, the Sindhis have Sindh, and the Balochis have Balochistan, why should we Pashtuns not have our own name?" [11] The ANP's Arbab Tahir argued that naming their own identity "helps close the door on the mullah", and Dawn's 2016 report quotes party members calling it the result of a long struggle from the Khudai Khidmatgar onward. [11, 14]

The Hazara case against it

About a quarter of the province's people were not Pashtun. Gulf News put the Hindko speakers at more than five million, one in four of 21 million, mostly in Hazara Division, with Abbottabad the centre of resistance. [10] It said Seraiki and Baloch speakers in Dera Ismail Khan were unhappy too. [10] Protesters said the name left them outside it. Gulf News described "genuine grassroots dissent against a name that the non-Pakhtun, Hindko-speaking population of the region does not identify with". [10] A Hazara student, Sarosh Tahir, told the Monitor she feared the name was not inclusive and tied the province to Afghanistan. [11] A former mayor of Haripur proposed a referendum, [10] and Foreign Policy says the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz had officially called for one the previous September. [8] Many in Hazara demanded their own province, which Umer Ayub of the Hazara Province movement said they would pursue peacefully after the signing. [7] The ANP answered that it would accept a constitutional route to a separate province and promised the minorities the same rights as Pashtuns. [6, 7]

The protests were deadly. Reports of the same days give different figures. Foreign Policy says at least seven were killed and more than 100 injured in Abbottabad on Monday 12 April; Radio Free Europe says at least ten killed that day; the Monitor counts eight dead across the two weeks; and Gulf News counts twelve dead and more than 200 injured over a week of clashes. [7, 8, 10, 11] A peace-studies writer, Zahid Shahab Ahmed, argued that party politics drove the unrest, and that PML-N and PML-Q leaders guided the protesters. [12] Gulf News records the same reading, that the Abbottabad violence was tied to a struggle between the PML-Q and the PML-N. [10] The Hazara protesters' own account is that the name excluded them. [10, 11]

Others wondered whether it mattered. Most Peshawar residents the Monitor interviewed said the fuss was overplayed beside electricity shortages, inflation and insecurity, and the journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai said extremism and terror were linked to Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion and foreign forces, not to names. [11]

The word across the border

The 2010 amendment named a Pakistani province, and Pakhtunkhwa alone has never meant only that province. Raverty glossed it in 1860 as the Afghan country and put Afghanistan in the same gloss. [3] Habibi in Kabul used it for the country of the Pashtuns and the base of an Afghan state. [1] Caroe's Pakhtun Khwa begins near the Indus at Margalla and takes in the Peshawar valley and the hills about it. [4] Raverty's dictionary also divides the Afghans at the Khyber Pass, into the Western or "Upper" Afghans west of it and the Eastern or "Lower" Afghans east of it, which treats one people as living on both sides. [3]

Today the Pashtun lands spread across both sides of the Durand Line and into northern Balochistan. The Pashtun lands: mountains, rivers and passes gives the geography, and The Durand Line, 1893 the border that cuts through them. A 2024 Pashto book on the province's mineral resources by Shaheed Maulana Khanzeb is titled Shtamana Pakhtunkhwa, "Prosperous Pakhtunkhwa".

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa therefore names a province, and Pashtunkhwa or Pakhtunkhwa names the homeland the province is part of. Which one a writer means depends on the sentence.

The spelling on this site

This site writes the name Pashtunxwa, with the southern sh and the x that linguists use for the kh sound. [5]