The Pata Khazana: Habibi's 1944 anthology of early Pashto poets

The Pata Khazana (پټه خزانه, "the hidden treasure") is a book that claims to be an anthology of Pashto poets written at Kandahar in 1728–29, with fifty entries running from 718 to 1688. It came to light in 1944 through the Afghan scholar Abdul Hai Habibi, who edited it, translated it into Persian and published it in Kabul. If it is what Habibi said it is, Pashto has written poetry from the eighth century. A 2016 survey of Pashto literary history says most experts consider it a forgery, and in 1960 Morgenstierne wrote that its authenticity could not be settled until the manuscripts were open to philological study. [1, 3]

What Habibi announced in 1944

Habibi's introduction, dated Kabul, March 1944, says the book was written at Kandahar in 1141–42 AH (1728–29) by Muhammad bin Daud bin Qader Khan Hotak, a scholar at the court of the young ruler Shah Hussain Hotak, a son of Haji Mirwais Khan. The author, he says, was secretary of the Hotak court. [1] That court is described in the Hotak dynasty, and Mirwais is the subject of his own article.

The book has three parts, called treasures. The first covers poets of the past, from 100 AH (718) to 1000 AH. The second covers the author's contemporaries and the third covers women poets, followed by a conclusion in which the author writes about his own life and works. Habibi counted fifty poets in all, dated between 100 and 1100 AH (718 to 1688). [1]

How Habibi came by it is told twice. In the 1944 introduction he says he obtained a copy in the spring of 1944 and showed it to Afghan literary figures, among them the Minister of Education, Sardar Mohammad Naim, who urged him to publish. [1] In remarks added to the fourth edition (Kabul University, 1977), he says he obtained the handwritten manuscript in 1943, through the late Abdul Ali Khanozay, a Kakar, at Psheen. [1] The English translator, Khushal Habibi, says the manuscript was transcribed in 1886. [1]

Each page of the 1944 edition prints the Pashto text with the Persian translation facing it, and footnotes giving the manuscript's spellings. [1, 2] The book was reprinted in 1961 in 5,000 copies, and a third edition in 1976 carried a complete facsimile of the handwritten manuscript. A fourth edition followed in 1977. [1]

Amir Kror and the oldest poem

The poem that carries the weight of the claim is the one attributed to Amir Kror (امیر کروړ), called Jahan Pahlawan. In the Pata Khazana he is a son of Amir Polad, a chief of the Suri family at Mandesh in Ghor, and he died in 154 AH (771) at the battle of Poshanj. [1, 2] The entry gives his poem as quoted by Shaikh Kata Mathizay in a book called Larghoni Pashtana ("Pashtuns of old"), which in turn took it from a History of the Suris that Kata had found in Balishtan. [1]

The poem is a boast of a warrior. It names Kabul, Zabul, Herat, Jurm, Bamiyan, Takhar, Merv and Zaranj as places where his sword is known, and every stanza ends on one line, which Khushal Habibi translates as "There is none mightier than me." [1] Habibi dated it to about 130 AH (752). He argued that it shows a literary language already refined, since a poem of such force implies earlier verse, and he listed old words in it that later fell out of use. [1]

Habibi did not call it the first Pashto poem. He wrote that no poem can honestly be called the first, and that the poem of Amir Kror is "the first known poetic work" of Pashto on the evidence of this book, adding that older works may be found. [1] In his notes Habibi adds that when Pashtuns want to say something is very old, they say it is from the time of Amir Kror. [1]

Pashto poetry before the book

Habibi set the Pata Khazana beside another find of his. He published a few pages of the Tazkirat al-Awliya of Sulaiman Mako, which he dated to 612 AH (1215), as the oldest Pashto prose, in the Kabul almanac for 1940–41; until then, he writes, he had been told that the rhythmic prose of Akhund Darweza and Pir Roshan was the oldest. [1] A 2016 survey of the periods of Pashto literature offers the Pata Khazana and Mako's work for the time before 1500, and cites Afzal Raza (1992) as saying that stage is unknown for lack of historical evidence. [3] The wider picture of oral and written verse is in Pashto literature and oral poetry, and the two-line folk form is in the landay.

The doubts

The first printed doubt in the sources comes from the Norwegian philologist Georg Morgenstierne, in the first volume of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition (1960, p. 220), which Habibi quotes in full. Morgenstierne wrote that no Pashto work older than the 17th century had been published until Habibi's finds, that these works "raise a number of grave linguistic and historical problems", and that the question of their authenticity "cannot be finally settled until the manuscripts are made available for philological investigation". He added that even if the book were admitted as genuine, Muhammad Hotak's dating of the oldest poems might be doubted. [1] Habibi says that when they met in Kabul in 1946 Morgenstierne told him his study of Pashto had not reached the point where he could judge its literature. [1]

Louis Dupree, in Afghanistan (Princeton, 1973, p. 83), wrote that the authenticity of the book "has been recently questioned", and that Pashto literature does not come into its own until the 17th century. Habibi answered that Dupree's reference, Donald Wilber, had written no such thing in the article cited, and the translator's note adds that Wilber's Afghanistan (1962, pp. 108–109) lists Amir Kror's poems without comment. [1]

The most detailed objections Habibi answers are those of Ali Akbar Jafari in the journal Sukhan (1968, vol. 17, no. 4), who says at the start that he is not familiar with the subject. As Habibi reports them, Jafari said that no historian mentions Amir Kror, that the Tabaqat-i Nasiri names Amir Polad but not a son of that name, that a poem of 130 AH written in Arabic script and following Arabic prosody, far from Arab influence, is hard to credit without earlier prose and poetry, that Indian words in some poems look recent, and that Muhammad Hotak, a court secretary, may have included such a poem to please his king. [1]

Habibi also notes that some writers in Afghanistan said he had composed the book himself, and others that Muhammad Hotak had forged it to please Shah Hussain. He wrote that the critics had given only brief expressions of doubt, with no linguistic or etymological analysis. [1]

A later and shorter charge concerns spelling. Maldonado García and Munir, writing in a University of the Punjab journal in 2016, say the anthology "has not been authenticated and has been termed as forgery" because it uses letters found in the Pashto alphabet only after 1936, when Afghanistan reformed Pashto spelling and made Pashto a national language by royal decree; they cite Campbell (1999). [3] The letters themselves are described in Pashto alphabet and grammar, and the language policy of those years in the Pashto academies.

What Habibi answered

Habibi's replies, printed in the 1977 edition and translated in 1997, rest on a few arguments. He says historians each draw on their own sources, and that Minhaj Siraj, the author of the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, was writing in Delhi away from the sources he had left in Ghor. Several rulers governed parts of Ghor at once, so a son of Amir Polad could have ruled alongside his nephews. [1]

He compares the book to Persian biographies of poets, such as those of Awfi and Daulat Shah, which also quote lost books, and asks why Persian and Arabic verse should be accepted on a single citation and Pashto verse should not. [1] On the claim of fame as far as Rome, he says the poem is epic boasting, and sets beside it lines quoted in the Lubab about a ruler and a boast of the sultan Alauddin Hussain. [1] On prosody, he says Arabic metre existed before al-Khalil codified it, and that Amir Kror's poem does not follow al-Khalil's system at all. [1]

His last argument is that a forger, if there was one, would have put the old poem under the name of Amir Polad, who is known from the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, and not under that of his son. [1] He does not claim to defend every statement in the book: he says some claims about the early Persian poet Marwazi in the Lubab are untenable, and he calls for scholarly criticism on linguistic grounds. [1]

Where the matter stands

Morgenstierne's condition was access to the manuscript for philological study, and Habibi's 1976 third edition printed a complete facsimile of the handwritten copy. [1] His wider doubts about the language and the dating of the oldest poems, and the objection about spelling, stand in the published record beside Habibi's answers. [1, 3]

Maldonado García and Munir report in 2016 that most experts consider the Pata Khazana a forgery and that the existence of Amir Kror is controversial; they still name him as the author of the earliest piece of Pashto poetry, citing Khalil (2006). [3] The same survey names Bayazid Ansari, who lived from 1525 to about 1581, as the first author of the second period of Pashto literature, 1500 to 1650. [3]