Qalandar Momand: Pashto poet, critic and lexicographer of Peshawar

At a glance

• Qalandar Momand (قلندر مومند), born Sahibzada Habib-ur-Rahman, was a Pashto poet, short-story writer, critic, journalist and lexicographer of Peshawar. He was born in 1930 in Bazid Khel, a village near the city, and died in Peshawar on Tuesday 4 February 2003. [5, 9, 12]

• He edited the daily Shahbaz, the organ of the National Awami Party, and the daily Anjam, was jailed several times for his left-wing views, and was founding president of the Peshawar Press Club. [5]

• His first poetry collection, Sabawoon ("The Dawn"), came out in 1976 while he was in prison. [9, 10]

• In 1988 he published Pata Khazana fil Mizan, a book weighing the Pata Khazana anthology and calling its authenticity into doubt. [4, 9]

• With Farid Sahrai he compiled Daryab, a Pashto dictionary that explains Pashto words in Pashto. The Education Department of the North-West Frontier Province began it in 1982, and the Frontier Text Book Board printed the first edition in 1994, as its imprint says; a Dawn report names the Pakhto Adabi Board instead. [1]

A critic from Bazid Khel

Dawn's obituary gave his age as 73 and called him a "progressive poet, journalist, trade unionist, teacher and linguist". [5] The News, writing on his death anniversary, says he was born in 1930 in Bazid Khel, studied English literature to master's level, taught, and was dismissed from teaching for his political activity. [12] A blog tribute adds that his matriculation certificate gives 1 September 1930, that he studied at Islamia College, Peshawar, and held law and MA degrees from the University of Peshawar. [9] Dawn's age of 73 would put his birth a year earlier, so the year rests on the later accounts.

He was a close follower of Bacha Khan and, in the Awami National Party's words on his 18th anniversary, a "staunch nationalist" imprisoned for his progressive views and for Pakhtun rights. [13] In 1962 he founded a literary group, Sahu Leekunkio Adabi Maraka, which later ran a research cell in his name. [11, 12] One speaker at the 2019 anniversary said he had "more foes and opponents than friends because he believed in the true spirit of knowledge". [11]

Newspapers, prison and the press club

Dawn records that he began his journalism in Karachi in the early sixties, edited Shahbaz, the organ of the National Awami Party, and became chief editor of Anjam. [5] He was imprisoned several times. Dawn adds that he was held in Lahore Fort in the cell next to Hasan Nasir, the Communist Party of Pakistan's secretary-general, and was the only witness to Nasir's death under torture during the Ayub Khan years. [5] That is Dawn's account, given in a news obituary.

His friend Saleem Raz told the Press Club evening held days after his death that Momand "went through numerous ordeals while pursuing his ideals" and was physically tortured for his leftist ideas. [6] Momand himself, interviewed in 2001, said he came first in the Public Service Commission examination and was made jobless several times anyway. In his words what he achieved was "imprisonment, imprisonment and more imprisonment for several years in different cities of Pakistan". [8] He was principal of a law college, founding president of the Peshawar Press Club and several times president of the Khyber Union of Journalists. [5] Benazir Bhutto's government awarded him the Sitara-i-Imtiaz. [5]

Poems and a story

Sabawoon was printed in 1976, with Momand behind bars. [9, 10] Its fourth edition was launched in 2019. [11] The Express Tribune's Raza Naeem chose the poem "Address to Khyber" from it: the poet brings good news to the Khyber Pass, once the road of invaders, and tells it that its sons now carry the flag of revolution. Two lines of that English version name the tribal heroes of the 1672 rising, "The sword of 'Aimal' is too now busy / The blood of 'Khushal' is too now fiery". [10] Their story is in Aimal Khan and Darya Khan and in Khushal Khan Khattak.

A second collection, Rannayee, was published after his death. [9] In the 2001 interview he said modern ghazals were better than the old ones, because when Hamza Shinwari began writing ghazals in the 1940s he had no Pashto school to follow, while later poets had Hamza's work to learn from. [8]

His stories were collected in Gajray ("Anklets"). The blog dates the book to 1957, while The News mentions it after Sabawoon, so the date is unsettled. [9, 12] The 2001 profile retells the title story. A poor girl wants fresh flower bracelets, the gajray. Her father is arrested for a crime he did not commit, and as the police lead him away in handcuffs she says she wants the same bracelets he wears, but of flowers, with no chain. [8]

The Pata Khazana debate

His best-known critical work is the argument over the Pata Khazana (پټه خزانه, "Hidden Treasure"), the anthology Abdul Hai Habibi published at Kabul in 1944 as the text of a work Muhammad Hotak is said to have compiled at Kandahar in 1728–29. The book is also the only source for the poet described in Nazo Tokhi. In a commentary printed in the 1977 edition Habibi said that critics had so far "not compiled any detailed or scholastic analysis of the work". [3] Momand's Pata Khazana fil Mizan ("The Pata Khazana in the Balance"), published at Peshawar in 1988, was a book-length answer. A blog tribute says it analysed the book's content, language, terms and dates and concluded that it was not compiled in 1729 and was fabricated by Habibi. [9]

The same blog says Momand was the first notable Pashtun scholar to reject the book outright, and that at least ten books and hundreds of articles were written for and against him. [9] Another blog, summarising his arguments, lists these points as his. [4]

• The compiler writes that he began the book on Friday 16 Jumada II 1141, and Momand says that date was a Monday.

• A twelfth-century poet in the book uses "Attock" for the Indus, though Momand says the name was given by Akbar to his fort.

• The book is printed with the letter ځ, which, citing Abdul Shakoor Rashad, he says took its present shape through Wazir Muhammad Gul Khan Mohmand.

These are a blog's account of his points, not quotations from the book. [4] The News said at the 2019 anniversary that he had "earned worst criticism from stalwarts of Pashto literature" for his objections. [12]

His own later essays show how he argued. They were gathered after his death in Mezan ("The Balance"), published by the Qalandar Momand Research Cell. [2] In one he says the book gives Rahman Baba's birth and death years from a notebook of a Muhammad Rasul Hotak, about whom it says nothing, and he calls the story of how that knowledge reached Kandahar a "mere fable". [2] The only firm evidence for Rahman's dates, he says, is in Rahman's own poems. He notes that Khushal Khan, who names many poets, never mentions Rahman, while Khushal's son Ashraf Khan Hijri does, and concludes that Rahman's fame was not yet wide at Khushal's death in 1689. [2] See Rahman Baba for the dates other sources give.

In an essay on the Roshani-era poet Mulla Arzani he says the Pata Khazana carries Pashto poetry back to the second century of the Hijra. Arzani's divan, he says, shows that verse of the tenth century still stressed syllables in the wrong place to fit its metre, which does not suit the polished poems the anthology prints for earlier centuries. [2]

Another essay, "Kamil Marhoom aw Pata Khazana", tells how the doubt began. Momand says that before printing his first article on the book he read it to his friend and teacher Dost Muhammad Kamil Momand, who agreed with its conclusions. Kamil, he adds, was the first to criticise a part of the Pata Khazana after its publication, the date it gives for Rahman Baba's death. [2] A critic, Zarin Anzor, objected that a claim about a dead man's opinion cannot rest on spoken testimony. Momand answers at length. [2]

The debate has not ended. The blog tribute says the original manuscript is not open to the public and nobody knows where it is, while Habibi said in 1977 that it was preserved in the Calligraphy Library of the Ministry of Information and Culture and had been published in facsimile. [3, 9] See Nazo Tokhi for the book's own account of itself and for the other scholars, Morgenstierne and Loi, whom Habibi and his translator named.

What he wrote on Khushal Khan

In the essay "Pashto ta da Khushal bakhshani" ("Khushal's gifts to Pashto") in Mezan, Momand credits Khushal Khan Khattak with three things. [2]

• A script. Khushal began writing when, by his own admission, Pashto was still an untouched girl, and he gave it a spelling with a small hamza above each heavy letter. [2]

• New metres. Before Khushal, nearly all Pashto verse was in seven-syllable lines. Khushal introduced lines of fifteen and fourteen syllables. [2]

• New forms and new uses. He brought the quatrain, mukhammas, musaddas, tarkib-band and tarji-band into Pashto, and used verse knowingly for a political aim, with the sword and the pen as one purpose, something Momand suggests nobody in recorded history had done before. [2]

In 2001 Momand named Khushal among his favourite writers, with Faiz, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Ajmal Khattak. [8] See Ajmal Khattak.

Daryab, the dictionary

The work he spent most years on was a dictionary. The 2001 profile calls it "his largest contribution to Pushto literature", sponsored by the Education Department of the North-West Frontier Province and worked on from 1983 to 1993. [8] The dictionary's own preface gives different dates. It says the Education Department began the Pashto Dictionary Project in 1982 under Momand's direction, that the work was finished by 1991, and that the Frontier Text Book Board at Peshawar then took it over, and three more years of fast work followed before it was offered to readers. [1] The first edition, of 4,100 copies, is dated 1994 (1415 AH) on the imprint page and priced at 450 rupees. [1]

The title page credits Qalandar Momand and Farid Sahrai. The Board's chairman, in a foreword, called them the "soul" of the dictionary. [1] The preface says why it was made. It praises the Orientalists' dictionaries but says they were made for government needs, are now scarce and do not explain Pashto words in Pashto, and that other lexicons are incomplete or give no Pashto meanings. [1] Daryab explains each word in Pashto, marks the pronunciation, adds the names of trees, plants, animals and birds so far as they could be found, and tags words taken from another language (م, mund, "source") or shared with it (ش, sharik, "shared"). [1] The preface thanks Professor David Neil MacKenzie of Göttingen for the Pashto computer fonts and the basic outline of the software. [1]

His last years and memory

By 2001 his eyesight was failing. He said he had written no book since 1990, though he still dictated critical notes, and that his one habit was going to the weekly meeting of the young writers' group he had founded. [8] He died in Peshawar on Tuesday 4 February 2003, and Dawn said he left two sons, Jalawan and Zalan Momand, and a daughter, Durre Nayab Sahibzadah, all journalists. [5]

Within weeks the Press Club's cultural society and the Peshawar chapter of the Pakistan Academy of Letters held gatherings in his name. [6, 7] Yar Mohammad Maghmoom said at one that Momand "never felt any shame" in admitting he had not understood a point, and spoke of him as a critic who told people to their faces when he thought them wrong. [7] Speakers at the 2019 anniversary called him the "Dr Johnson of Pashto". [11, 12] Professor Zubair Hasrat said he worked in fiction, criticism, research, linguistics, lexicography, journalism and even film script, and brought modern criticism to Pashto. [11]