The patu and the men's chadar: Pashtun blanket and shawl

At a glance

• The patu (پټو, paṭū) is a thick woollen blanket worn over the shoulders. The men's chadar (چادر, chādar) is a thinner sheet or shawl worn the same way. [9, 10]

• Among Kuchi men the blanket is called sharay (شړۍ) and is often white. [8, 10]

• It is used for warmth, as something to sit on and as a prayer mat. [10]

• In the villages of the Peshawar and Bannu districts it was woven on a hand loom from locally shorn wool, spun by women and men. [4, 5]

• In Charsadda the cotton khaddar shawl, called khamta, is still woven on hand looms, and Bacha Khan urged his followers to wear it. [11]

Three words for a blanket

Every Pashtun man's winter dress ends with a blanket. Dupree wrote in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that woollen shawls, čādar or in Pashto patū, are popular with men in winter. [9] The Textile Research Centre in Leiden describes the same garment as a large rectangular blanket, thin if it is a chadar and thick if it is a patu, worn over one shoulder or slung across both. [10] The turban and shirt that go under it are in the Pashtun turban and Pashtun dress.

The words are old. Raverty's Pashto dictionary of 1867 gives pattū as "a kind of woollen cloth, or blanket", with the plural pattūgān, and sharra'i as "a blanket". [8] His chādar is "a sheet, a veil worn by women", marked as a Persian word, so the dictionary of 1867 lists the chadar as a woman's cover. [8] The women's chadar has its own place in Pashtun women's dress. The thin chadar a man wears over his shoulders is the garment Dupree and the Leiden centre describe.

The Leiden centre says Kuchi men wear a large, often white blanket over one or both shoulders and call it sharay. [10] The nomads are the subject of Kuchis and Powindas. When Captain J. A. Robinson listed the dress of Powindah men in 1935, he gave the chadar as "sheet to be thrown over the shoulders", beside the partug, the kamiz and the turban. [6]

The Bannu district gazetteer of 1883-84 gives two other names for the blanket worn by the Marwats and others across the Indus, dhusa and kamal. [4]

From fleece to loom

The Peshawar district gazetteer of 1897-98 quotes a report of 1885 on the woollen trade. [5] It gives the district's wool at 2,690 maunds, with about 200 more brought across the border. The sheep were shorn twice a year, in March and September, and the September wool was the cleanest. The fleeces were washed, spread to dry and beaten with a thin stick about four feet long to clear the dust. [5]

For blankets the wool was spun on a wheel, by women, or on a spindle (dherna) by men, who turned it with a twist of the hand as they walked along. Carding and spinning paid 4 annas a ser. Women did the warping. The warp was coated with size, tested for flaws with a comb, and the weaver then wove about 5 yards a day for a rupee per 32 yards. In 1884 about 125 men and 90 women worked in the trade. Blankets did not meet local demand: in 1881 about 50,000 yards were brought in from the districts east of the Indus. [5]

Elphinstone, who led the British mission to Peshawar in 1809, saw the same division of work among the Durrani. In their villages, he wrote, cloths were made by the women, "who sometimes also weave blankets". [3] In the shepherds' camps the women did all the work inside the tent, made the clothes and often wove the guleem, the camlet for the tents, and a showy rug for covering horses. The shepherds took their felts and blankets to town to sell. [3] The Afghan tent was "a kind of black blanket, or rather coarse black camlet", which he gave as kizhdee in the Afghan language. [3] Robinson found Powindah tents of the same kind in the 1930s, made of strips of coarse goat-hair cloth sewn together. [6]

Not every district had enough wool. The Bannu gazetteer says that nearly everything a Bannu zamindar wore was either home-spun or woven in the district. The one exception was the Marwats of the sandy tracts, who grew very little cotton and had few sheep, and whose women spent their days fetching water, so that they bought most of their clothing in the bazaar. [4]

How it is worn

Elphinstone describes blankets worn as clothes across the Pashtun hills. The common Sherani dressed in a coarse black blanket tied round the middle and another over the shoulders. [3] The Waziri wore a loose great coat of black blanket fastened round the waist with a girdle of the same cloth. [3] Among the Yusufzai the dress was not complete without a loongee, a scarf that hung over the shoulder and was "sometimes used for a cloak, and sometimes for a girdle". [3]

The Bannu gazetteer of 1883-84 says the zamindars wore much the same clothing all year, and in the cold weather a sheep's wool blanket was added. A sheet was also worn as a plaid over the shoulder or as a waist-cloth. [4] For labouring men in Marwat and elsewhere across the Indus, the gazetteer gives a long coarse woollen blanket with a slit for the head, kept close with a belt of rope, leather or a strip of cloth. [4] Among the poorest Marwats it was the only garment: half was worn round the legs like a petticoat and the other half thrown over the shoulders. [4]

The blanket was bedding too. A proverb that Thorburn collected in Bannu says "Go inside with a fan, outside with a blanket". [7] Thorburn, the British settlement officer of Bannu, explained that a man should begin sleeping in the house at the end of August while it is still hot enough to need a fan, and begin sleeping outside in early May while he still needs a blanket. He called these two rules "the health code of all Marwats and Bannuchis, if not of Pathans generally". [7]

The Leiden centre adds that the blanket is used to sit on and as a prayer mat. [10]

Badshah Khan, in his autobiography, records another use. When he and Maulvi Fazl Mohammed left secretly for Bajaur and found police guards at the entrance to Malakand, he could not hide his height. "All that I could do was to wrap myself in my chaddar," he wrote. The tonga driver told the guard there was nobody in the tonga, and after looking him up and down the guard let the tonga through. [2]

Blanket and shawl in verse and proverb

The blanket is the poor man's cloth and the shawl the rich man's, and Pashto sayings use the two to talk about honour. Thorburn recorded one in Bannu that a poor man says to a great one: "Don't put hands on my blanket, and I won't put hands on your shawl." He read it as a reminder that, though they differ in station, they are equal in honour. [7] The saying also stands in Pashto proverbs, and the same idea is behind nang.

Hamid, the Mohmand poet of Mashokhel, uses it in a couplet that Raverty translated in 1862 (see Hamid Baba). After asking the rich not to envy his poverty, he says:

This poor blanket, for that shawl, I will not exchange with thee! [1]

Elsewhere in the same collection he turns it round: when a superior picks a quarrel with an inferior, "through folly, he exchangeth a shawl for a woollen blanket". [1]

Other proverbs in Thorburn's collection hang on the blanket as an everyday thing. "Mayest thou be damned, O blanket! which art neither for wind nor for rain" is said, Thorburn writes, of a lukewarm friend. [7] "The owner of irrigated lands wears out broad scarves; the owner of Thal lands coarse blankets" means that the first is better off and has less work. [7] A Marwat saying runs: "Whoever is (too) open-handed makes for himself loin cloths of black blankets", that is, he beggars himself. [7]

Khaddar, Charsadda and Bacha Khan

Not every shawl is wool. Tariq Ullah, a Peshawar journalist, wrote in Dawn in 2021 that Charsadda is known for hand-woven coarse cotton cloth called khaddar or khadi, which is khamta in Charsadda. [11] Gul Khan, who was 60, wove it for cloth and shawls on three hand looms in a room of his mud house. The set-up, made by local carpenters, cost 10,000 to 15,000 rupees. [11] A handloom takes at least a week to weave one shawl, and a power loom does it in hours. A handmade shawl sold for 3,000 to 10,000 rupees and a machine-made one for 500 to 2,000. [11] Only three or four workers were weaving by hand in Charsadda then. [11]

Women spun the thread on the charkha, and in the past the spinning wheel was part of a girl's dowry. [11] Khan, the weaver, remembered thread at 40 to 60 rupees a kilogram and said it had risen to 2,000. [11]

Professor Sohail Khan of Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, told Dawn that khamta is mentioned in the poetry of Khushal Khan Khattak, and the paper printed a translation of two lines: "Wear khamta to look better than/different from others". [11] (See Khushal Khan Khattak.) The Pashto of the verse is not given in the article.

Weaving carried a stigma. Dawn reports Sher Alam Shinwari, who writes on the culture of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, saying that weavers were once counted as outcastes because they were not landowners but had come from elsewhere to Pashtun country. According to Sohail Khan, Bacha Khan challenged this with the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, and he urged his followers to wear khamta to boost local weaving. That is why Charsadda's handmade khaddar is also sold as "Bacha Khani cloth". [11] The movement is told in Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar.