No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2024
Regular remarks of early modern Pashtun authors about the language of their literary works and their ethnicity may be read as an attempt to confirm a distinct place for Pashto writings in the Persophone cultural space and also as an echo of the then-ongoing discourse on Pashtun identity. This article examines the verses of Ashraf Khān Khaṫak (d. 1694) and Kāẓim Khān Khaṫak (d. 1780), who sporadically pondered on artistry and ethnicity as intertwined issues within the framework of the classical genre of self-praise (fakhriyya) and left critical essays on Pashto poetry in the forms of qaṣīda and masnawī. By drawing on Persian poetic traditions, these authors contributed much to the emerging literary criticism in Pashto by sophisticating the discussion of poetic art in their native language. While Ashraf elaborated on the idea of poetry as ‘licit magic’, Kāẓim tried to explain the advantages of the ‘new manner’, which is now commonly known as the ‘Indian style’, for the intellectual progress of both Pashtun litterateurs and their readers. The available details from the poets’ biographies and their occasional statements also indicate that the declarative ethnic self-identification of Pashtun men of letters was intrinsically linked to tribalist ideologies.
1 These aspects are expounded in the opening mythohistorical parts and in the genealogical and hagiographical sections of the book (Niʿmatallāh Ibn Ḥabīballāh al-Harawī, Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī, (ed.) S. M. Imāmuddīn, 2 vols (Dacca, 1960–1962), pp. 10‒125, 548‒650, 707‒831); for an English translation of the book's abridged version, see Dorn, B., History of the Afghans: Translated from the Persian of Neamet Ullah, 2 parts (London, 1836)Google Scholar.
2 Focused discussions of self-identity issues have become a recurring matter in didactic and scholarly works by Pashtun intellectuals since the mid-twentieth century. An indigenous perception of two basic components of Pashtun identity is formulated in ʿAbdallāh Bakhtānay's (1925–2017) essay with a hint at Islamic legal norms of evidence as follows: ‘Speaking Pashto (paṡhto wayəl) and doing Pashto (paṡhto kawəl) are two righteous witnesses (ādil shāhidān) who can confirm the claim of Pashtuns to Pashtun-ness (paṡhtunwalī). The one is called Pashtun who does Pashto like he speaks Pashto’ (ʿAbdallah Bakhtanay, Paṡhtanī khoyūna (Kabul, 1955), p. 1). A little later, this emic principle was introduced into scholarship by F. Barth (1928–2016), who, nevertheless, combined doing and speaking Pashto under the single heading of ‘Pathan custom’, admitting that the Pashto language is a ‘necessary and diacritical feature’ of Pashtun identity (Barth, F., ‘Pathan identity and its maintenance’, in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference, (ed.) F. Barth (Boston, 1969), p. 119Google Scholar).
3 Khattak, Raj Wali Shah, An Introduction to Pakhtun Culture: A Collection of Essays (Peshawar, 2010), pp. 29‒30Google Scholar. For a brief summary of the discourse on Pashto as a subject of ‘politics of language and identity’, see e.g. Bartlotti, L. N., ‘Modern written Pashto literature’, in Oral Literature of Iranian Languages: Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, Ossetic, Persian and Tajik. Companion Volume II to A History of Persian Literature (A History of Persian Literature, vol. 18, (ed.) E. Yarshater), (eds.) Ph. G. Kreyenbroek and U. Marzolph (London and New York, 2010), pp. 130–132Google Scholar.
4 For an alternative interpretation of the Roshānī poets’ attitude towards Pashto as ‘a divine and revelatory language’, see W. E. B. Sherman, ‘In the garden of language: religion, vernacularization, and the Pashto poetry of Arzānī in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Afghanistan 5 (2022), pp. 122–147; and also chapter 4 in W. E. B. Sherman, Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands (New York, 2024), pp. 118–150.
5 See Pelevin, M., ‘The inception of literary criticism in early modern Pashto writings’, Iranian Studies 54 (2021), pp. 955–971Google Scholar.
6 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Dīwān, (ed.) M. ʿAbd al-Qādir (Peshawar, 1963), p. 73.
7 Ibid, p. 42.
8 ʿAbd al-Qādir Khaṫak, Dīwān: Ḥadīqa-yi Khaṫak, (ed.) S. Anwār al-Ḥaqq (Peshawar, 1969), p. 175. The Khaṫaks belong to the Karlāṅay branch of the Pashtun genealogical tree, while the Momands are a division of the Ghoryakhel group, which is a part of the Saṙbanay branch.
9 Ibid, pp. 54, 105.
10 For a study of Ashraf Khān's life and works, see Z. Andzor, Də zandzīrūno shāʿir Ashraf Khān Hijrī: Də Hijrī zhwandlīk (Kabul, 1985).
11 The two mentioned sources are Khushḥāl Khān Khaṫak, Kulliyāt, (ed.) D. M. Kāmil Momand (Peshawar, 1952); and Afżal Khān Khaṫak, Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ, (ed.) D. M. Kāmil Momand (Peshawar, 1974), pp. 254–513.
12 Afżal, Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ, p. 350.
13 Khushḥāl, Kulliyāt, pp. 586–587, 831, 844.
14 Afżal, Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ, p. 493.
15 Ibid.
16 See e.g. SSharma, ., Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier: Masʻûd Saʻd Salmân of Lahore (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 68–106Google Scholar.
17 His other two poetical signatures are ‘Khaṫak’ and ‘Rohī’ (‘the one from Roh’), the latter being an adjective from the historical toponym ‘Roh’ that was used in early modern times in India as a designation of the Pashtun tribal areas (Paṡhtūnkhwā). On Roh, see H. G. Raverty, Notes on Afghanistan and Part of Baluchistan, Geographical, Ethnographical, and Historical (London, 1888), p. 657; O. Caroe, The Pathans 550 B. C. – A. D. 1957 (London, 1958), p. 439; J. J. L. Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c. 1710–1780 (Leiden, New York, and Köln, 1995), pp. 9–10, 104–113.
18 Ashraf Khān Hijrī, Dīwān, (ed.) H. Khalīl (Peshawar, 1958), pp. 93–96.
19 Ibid, pp. 139–141, 142–148, 535–536, 547–548.
20 Ibid, pp. 171–179, 257–262.
21 Khushḥāl, Kulliyāt, p. 180.
22 Ashraf, Dīwān, p. 501; cf. pp. 537, 549, 552, 577. Ashraf is said to have left a collection of poems in Persian that can be extracted from the manuscripts of his Dīwān in Pashto (e.g. Andzor, Də zandzīrūno shāʿir, p. 61; Z. Hewādmal, Də paṡhto adabiyāto tārīkh: larghūne aw məndzanəy dawre (Peshawar, 2000), p. 153).
23 J. S. Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton, 1987), p. 54; J. S. Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London, 2003), p. 64; Al-Bukhari, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, (trans.) M. Muhsin Khan (Riyadh, 1997), vol. 7, p. 366. Once, Ashraf Khān describes his verses as ‘the magic of speech’ (siḥr-i bayān) (Ashraf, Dīwān, p. 537). For the interpretation of poetry as an art of ‘licit magic’ in Islamic culture, see also J.-C. Bürgel, The Feather of Simurgh: The ‘Licit Magic’ of the Arts in Medieval Islam (New York, 1988).
24 For a summary of al-Jurjānī's works, see W. P. Heinrichs, ‘ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078 or 474/1081)’, in Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols, (eds.) J. S. Meisami and P. Starkey (London and New York, 1998), pp. 16–17.
25 J. W. Clinton, The Divan of Manūchihrī Dāmghānī: A Critical Study (Minneapolis, 1972), pp. 85–86. In some manuscripts of Manūchihrī's poems, the words siḥr-i nīkū are rendered as bahr-i nīkū (‘good fortune’); see Manūchihrī Dāmghānī, Dīwān, 2nd edn, (ed.) M. Dabīrsiyāqī (Tehran, 1996), p. 110.
26 Nāṣir Khusraw, Dīwān, 2nd edn, (ed.) J. Manṣūr (Tehran, 1996), p. 301.
27 Ashraf, Dīwān, pp. 535–536, 548, 577.
28 For examples of the use of this metaphor by Anwarī and Khāqānī, see Meisami, Structure and Meaning, p. 181; and M. L Reisner and N. Yu. Chalisova, ‘Obraz poezii v poezii: literaturnaia refleksiia v persidskoĭ klassike X–XIV vv. (kasyda i masnavi)’, in Poetologicheskiie pamiatniki Vostoka: obraz, stil’, zhanr (Moscow, 2010), pp. 203, 207.
29 Ashraf, Dīwān, pp. 243, 408, 496, 552.
30 Ibid, p. 405.
31 For an early example, see e.g. Nāṣir Khusraw, Dīwān, p. 301. For a discussion of the ‘comely bride’ image in Saʿdī Shīrāzī's (d. 1292) poetry, with an emphasis on its erotic connotations, see D. Ingenito, Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry (Leiden and Boston, 2021), pp. 95–97.
32 Khushḥāl, Kulliyāt, p. 131.
33 Ashraf, Dīwān, p. 241.
34 Ibid, pp. 238, 240, 406, 426–427, 548, 577.
35 Ibid, pp. 426, 496, 504.
36 Ibid, p. 243.
37 Ibid, p. 537.
38 Ibid, pp. 237–239.
39 Ibid, pp. 240–241, 558–560.
40 Ibid, pp. 152, 181, 396, 408, 560.
41 Ibid, pp. 535, 548.
42 Ibid, p. 482.
43 Ibid, p. 93.
44 Ibid, pp. 244–249.
45 Criticisms of ignorance that prevail among compatriots is a common motif in the Pashto didactic texts of the seventeenth century, regardless of their genre characteristics, ideologies, and functional purposes. For example, the Roshānī poet Mīrzā Khān Anṣārī (d. 1630/31), who often complained about the lack of education among his audience, concluded one of his philosophical ghazals with the exclamation: ‘If you are so firmly attached to the mores of ignorance (jahl), / why are you listening then to Mīrzā's words, o Pathan (paṫān)?’ (Mīrzā Khān Anṣārī, Dīwān, (ed.) Dost [Shīnwāray] (Kabul 1975), p. 193). The Sunni preacher Bābū Jān (d. after 1661/1662) assessed his Pashtun listeners in the same way: ‘Bābū Jān told this story (about the prophet ʿĪsā) to ignorant (jāhil) people’ (Bābū Jān, Kitāb-i Bābū Jān (Ms. C 1907, Saint-Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts), fol. 107a). Khushḥāl Khān also regretted that Pashtuns had insufficient knowledge (ʿilm) to differentiate between true scholars and swindlers, and asserted that his fellow tribesmen, the Khaṫaks, were eager to treat every spiritual master as God (rabb) ‘out of ignorance (jahl)’ (Khushḥāl Khān Khaṫak, Swāt-nāma, (ed.) ʿА. Ḥabībī (Kabul, 1979), pp. 62–63).
46 Khushḥāl Khān Khaṫak, Dastār-nāma, foreword by Ṣ. Rishtīn, glossary by D. M. Kāmil Momand (Kabul, 1966), pp. 23–24.
47 Ibid, p. 547.
48 Ibid, pp. 237, 243, 501, 535.
49 Of such works, Ashraf Khān should have known Sikandar Khān's Pashto translation of Niẓāmī Ganjawī's (d. 1209) Laylī wa Majnūn that dated from 1679/1680.
50 Zarīn Andzor, Də Ṣadr-i Khushḥāl zhwand aw āsār (Peshawar, 1996), pp. 70–72; Hewādmal, Də paṡhto adabiyāto tārīkh, p. 159.
51 Khushḥāl, Kulliyāt, pp. 533–534, 861–862.
52 Ashraf, Dīwān, pp. 102, 169, 238, 240, 241, 265, 462, 501, 549.
53 On Raḥmān Bābā, see e.g. J. Enevoldsen, Selections from Rahman Baba (Herning, Denmark, 1977).
54 Qalandar, Dīwān, (ed.) Z. Hewādmal (Kabul, 1977); see also Hewādmal, Də paṡhto adabiyāto tārīkh, p. 217.
55 Ashraf, Dīwān, pp. 97–102; cf. Hewādmal, Də paṡhto adabiyāto tārīkh, p. 168.
56 Ashraf, Dīwān, pp. 97–98.
57 Ibid, p. 549.
58 Khushḥāl, Kulliyāt, p. 681; on Sikandar's reference, see Hewādmal, Də paṡhto adabiyāto tārīkh, p. 168.
59 H. G. Raverty, Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans, from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, Literally Translated from the Original Pus'hto; With Notices of the Different Authors, and Remark on the Mystic Doctrine and Poetry of the Ṣūfīs (London, 1867), pp. 305–307; cf. Kāẓim Khān Shaydā, Dīwān, (ed.) ʿA. Benawā (Kabul, 1954), pp. i–xi; Hewādmal, Də paṡhto adabiyāto tārīkh, pp. 221–222.
60 Afżal, Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ, pp. xxxix–xlix.
61 In Kāẓim's two chronogram quatrains on his father's (wālid) death, the latter is not named, but the enciphered date indicates that he passed away in 1184 A.H. (1770/71), i.e. much later than Afżal Khān (Kāẓim, Dīwān, p. 216).
62 Kāẓim left a qaṣīda with a brief laudatory description of the Naqshbandī spiritual lineage (silsila) and three short encomiums dedicated to the eponymous founder of this lineage Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband (d. 1389), the ‘Renewer (mujaddid) of the second millennium’ Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1624), and his own Naqshbandī teacher (pīr-u murshid) Ghulām Maʿṣūm (d. 1747), a descendant of Aḥmad Sirhindī (Kāẓim, Dīwān, pp. 203–206). On the rise and manifold ideological and political impacts of the Naqshbandiyya in Mughal India, see e.g. Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India. Vol. 2. From the Sixteenth Century to Modern Century (Delhi, 1983), pp. 174–263; A. F. Buehler, ‘The Naqshbandiyya in Tīmūrid India: the central Asian legacy’, Journal of Islamic Studies 7 (1996), pp. 208–228; I. Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition (London, 2007), pp. 49–67; Muzaffar Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500–1750 (Albany, NY, 2021), pp. 70–92, 331–388. For notes on the recruitment of Afghan followers into the Naqshbandiyya community in the first half of the seventeenth century, see N. Green, ‘Tribe, diaspora, and sainthood in Afghan history’, Journal of Asian Studies 67 (2008), pp. 198–199. For a survey of the far-reaching missionary activities of the Naqshbandī–Mujaddidiyya, including its influential Maʿṣūmiyya branch, in the Durrānī state (1747–1823), see Waleed Ziad, ‘Transporting knowledge in the Durrani empire: two manuals of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi practice’, in Afghanistan's Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban, (ed.) N. Green (Oakland, CA, 2017), pp. 105–126; and Waleed Ziad, ‘From Yarkand to Sindh via Kabul: the rise of Naqshbandi–Mujaddidi Sufi networks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, (eds.) A. Amanat and A. Ashraf (Leiden, 2019), pp. 125–168. For Aḥmad Shāh Durrānī's personal connections with the Naqshbandī–Mujaddidiyya leaders, see Sajjad Nejatie, ‘The Pearl of Pearls: The Abdālī-Durrānī Confederacy and Its Transformation under Aḥmad Shāh, Durr-i Durrān’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2017), pp. 341–346.
63 Kāẓim, Dīwān, pp. 196–197.
64 On Muḥammad ʿUmar Tsamkanay and his descendants, see ʿAbd al-Shakūr Rashād, Də Tsamkano Miyā ʿUmar (Kabul, 1981); Timur Khan, ‘A “good Qaṣba”: Chamkanī and the confluence of politics, economy and religion in Durrānī Peshawar, 1747–1834’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 65 (2022), pp. 638–642. For an overview of Miyān Muḥammadī Ṣāḥib-zāda's miscellaneous contributions to the Pashto-language literature and intellectual culture, see Zalmay Hewādmal, ‘Də stər rūḥānī aw farhangī shakhṣiyyat Muḥammadī Ṣāḥib-zāda də dwasawayəm talīn pə munāsabat’, Lemə (The Afghans’ Quarterly Literary and Cultural Magazine) 13–14 (2000), pp. 17–24.
65 Kāẓim, Dīwān, p. 7.
66 Ibid, pp. 60, 87, 106, 111, 148, 161, 166.
67 Ibid, pp. 206–207.
68 Ibid, pp. 120, 210.
69 For summaries and re-examinations of long-lasting debates on the ‘Indian style’ in Persian literature, see e.g. J. Rypka et al., History of Iranian literature (Dordrecht. 1968), pp. 295–302; W. Heinz, Der indische Stil in der persischen Literatur (Wiesbaden, 1973); Muḥammad Riżā Shafīʿī Kadkanī, ‘Persian literature (Belles-Lettres) from the time of Jāmī to the present day’, in History of Persian Literature from the Beginning of the Islamic Period to the Present Day, (ed.) G. Morrison (Leiden and Köln, 1981), pp. 145–165; E. Yarshater, ‘The Indian or Safavid style: progress or decline?’, in Persian Literature, (ed.) E. Yarshater (Albany, NY, 1988), pp. 249–288; Muzaffar Alam, ‘The pursuit of Persian: language in Mughal politics’, Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998), pp. 330–342; M. Alam, ‘The culture and politics of Persian in precolonial Hindustan’, in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, (ed.) Sh. Pollock (Berkeley, LA and London, 2003), pp. 171–189; S. R. Faruqi, ‘A stranger in the city: the poetics of Sabk-e Hindi’, Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004), http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/18639 (accessed 18 April 2023); Rajeev Kinra, ‘Fresh words for a fresh world: Tāza-Gūʾī and the poetics of newness in early modern Indo-Persian poetry’, Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory 3 (2007), pp. 125–149; Rajeev Kinra, ‘Make it fresh: time, tradition, and Indo-Persian literary modernity’, in Time,History, and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia, (ed.) A. Murphy (London and New York, 2011), pp. 12–39; Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA and London, 2012), pp. 206–11.
70 Kāẓim, Dīwān, pp. 135, 142, 147, 149, 158, 159, 160, 164.
71 Ibid, pp. 32, 45, 83, 109.
72 Ibid, pp. 105, 170.
73 Ibid, p. 52.
74 Ibid, pp. 176–183.
75 Ibid, p. 48.
76 Khushḥāl, Dastār-nāma, p. 24.
77 Kāẓim, Dīwān, p. 41.
78 Ibid, p. 53.
79 Ibid, p. 36.
80 Ibid, pp. 87, 98.
81 Ibid, p. 153.
82 Ibid, pp. 13–21.
83 Ibid, p. 13.
84 Cf. Khaṫak, Khushḥāl Khān, Firāq-nāma, (ed.) Z. Hewādmal (Kabul, 1984), p. 28Google Scholar.
85 Terms such as mażmūn (Pl. mażāmīn), maʿnī (Pl. maʿānī), khiyāl, ṭarz, and rangīn/rangīnī were among the key markers of both poetical and speculative discourses on the ‘Indian style’ poetics. For a comprehensive discussion of this terminology, see Faruqi, ‘Stranger in the city’, pp. 25–47.
86 Ḥāfiẓ Shīrāzī, Dīwān, (ed.) S. A. Anjawī (Tehran, 1967), p. 86; cf. e.g. Alam, ‘Culture and politics’, p. 155.