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Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts: The life of an Afghan student in Germany, Abdul Ghafur Brechna

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2021

MARJAN WARDAKI Open the ORCID record for MARJAN WARDAKI [Opens in a new window]
MARJAN WARDAKI*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In 1919, Afghanistan embarked on a series of reforms that led to the presence of Afghan students at various European universities, facilitating the circulation of peoples, ideas, and goods. Focusing on one of these cases, this article examines how an Afghan student engaged critically with ‘Western’ art and translated artistic ideas and technologies through the grid of Afghanistan's own history of the fine arts. Through an exploration of the work of Abdul Ghafur Brechna (1907–1974)—artist, music composer, poet, and writer—I argue that, despite his desire to train at German technical schools, Brechna translated, then connected, his Western training to restore Afghanistan's traditional visual and literary arts, making it problematic to define his oeuvre as purely ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’. The first aim is to situate Brechna within the intellectual milieu of Weimar Germany, placing emphasis on how he curated the course of his education to support his aims. By tracing out the evolution of his artistic knowledge to Afghanistan, the second part of this article connects his earlier training to the newly emerging scholars in Kabul who also grappled with national renewal and an ‘Aryan’ literary and cultural heritage. Lastly, I discuss his attempt to rewrite the history of the arts by closely analysing his visual and literary work, emphasizing in particular his attempt to reconnect to themes and genres that had previously been lost or neglected.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 5 , September 2021 , pp. 1544 - 1580
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to extend special gratitude to Nile Green and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for extensive readings and comments on various oral and written versions of this article. I also thank Benjamin D. Hopkins and Norbert Peabody for their insightful comments and continued support of this manuscript. Comments from the two anonymous reviewers of MAS substantially improved this article. Sohaib Baig, Robert D. Crews, Scottie Hale Buehler, Ali Nehme Hamdan, Fredrick Walter Lorenz, Mejgan Massoumi, David Sabean, and Jesse Sadler generously offered comments throughout.

References

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2 All Persian names and words follow the IJMES transliteration system. However, ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Brishnā is standardized as Abdul Ghafur Brechna, as per the Brechna Archive, throughout the text, except for sources and references published outside the Brechna Archive.

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24 Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Office) (hereafter AAmt): R 63256-7: ‘Die Aemani/Amani Oberrealschule, 1927–1934’.

25 Ibid.

26 Emadi, Hafizullah, Dynamics of political development in Afghanistan: the British, Russian, and American invasions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schinasi, May, ‘Femmes afghans: instruction et activités publiques pendant le règne amâniya (1919–1929)’, Annali dell'Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli, vol. 55, no. 4, 1995, pp. 446–462Google Scholar.

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28 This estimate comes from British surveillance records that traced the numbers carefully; see India Office Records, British Library/L/PS/10/1015/1: 1921–1928: Afghanistan: Education of Afghan Youths in Europe and Turkey.

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35 The process is documented in his memoir, see Brechna Archive: Abdul Ghafur Brechna, Khātirahhā-yi Abdul Ghafur Brechna, 1959–60; and ‘Afghan artist returns from international art exhibition’, Kabul Times, vol. 10, no. 201, 1971, pp. 2–4.

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38 The German Foreign Office banned intermarriages between migrants and German women, and therefore monitored the itinerancy of Germans going to Afghanistan. See the files held at the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives), Koblenz (hereafter BArch): R 901/28136: ‘Überwachung des Auswanderung nach Afghanistan, 1924–1938’. Brishnā's letter sent to the German Foreign Office was kept in these same files that monitored German émigrés; see, in particular, ‘Überwachung des Auswanderung nach Afghanistan: Anschrift an das Auswärtige Amt, Sept. 1928’.

39 Madhavan K. Palat and Anara Tabyshalieva, History of civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. 6 (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2005), p. 766.

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43 Ibid, p. 96. See original: Pirūfīsūr Fārinkrūg ustād-i anātūmī va pūrtrit-i mā, ʿalāvah bar naqqāshī, shāʿir va adīb ham būd. Asarī banām-i lūsīfar yaʿnī iblīs dārad. Aghlab tāblūhā-yi ū (bashīvah-yi rūmāntīk) hamīn mawżūʿ rā namāyish mīdahad. Bar ʿaks ānchi man shaytān rā taṣavvur mīnamūdam bāl va dumī barāyash qiyās mīkardam ū iblīs rā qashang rasm mīnamūd.

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56 One of these colleagues was Aḥmad ʿAlī Kuhzād (1907–83); see Ahmad Ali Kohzad, ‘Les relations culturelles entre l'Afghanistan et l'Inde’, Afghanistan, vol. 1, no. 2, 1946, p. 14.

57 Shahwali Ahmadi, ‘Fiction in Afghanistan’, Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 9, no. 6, 2012, pp. 603–606.

58 Nile Green, ‘The Afghan discovery of Buddha: civilizational history and the nationalizing of Afghan antiquity’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2017, pp. 47–70. See also Aria Fani’s excellent close reading of Āryānā, which uncovered both the local and transregional processes of new disciplinary formations. Aria Fani, ‘Disciplinizing Persian literature in twentieth-century Afghanistan’, Iranian Studies, forthcoming.

59 This tandem collaboration manifested in the naming of the national airline ‘Ariana’, new sporting clubs (such as the Klub-i Āryānā Kābul Afghanistan, and political tracts that reflected a uniform message highlighting Afghanistan's regional centrality. See for instance: ‘Tārīkhcha-i Klub-I Āryānā Kābul Afghanistan (The History of Aryana Club, Kabul Afghanistan)’, Afghanistan Digital Library, available at http://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/search/?start=0&sort=title.sort&q=Tarikhchahi+Klubi+Aryana+Kabul+Afghanistan, [accessed 26 February 2021]; and Abdussattar Shalizi, Afghanistan: ancient land with modern ways (Kabul: National Government of Afghanistan, 1961).

60 Ali Ahmad Naïmi, ‘Afghan calligraphy, illumination and miniature—work in ninth century A.H.’, Afghanistan, vol 1, no. 1, 1946; Ali Ahmad Naïmi, ‘Behzad’, Afghanistan, vol. 3, no. 2, 1948; and Ali Ahmad Naïmi, ‘Une famille d'artistes’, Afghanistan, vol. 3, no. 3, 1948.

61 Naïmi, ‘Une famille d'artistes’, p. 43. See original: ‘Comme l‘art gréco-bouddhique dont le foyer était á l'Est de notre pays, avant l'Islam, l'art de la peinture miniature, l'incrustation, la calligraphie, l'art de la reliure lesquels sont nés à Hérat aux IX et X siècles de Hégire, sont les arts propres à l'Afghanistan.’

62 For Safavid Iran, see David Roxburgh, ‘Kamal al-din Bihzad and authorship in Persianate painting’, Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, vol. 33, 2016, pp. 119–146. For Mughal India, see Abū’l Fazl ibn Mubārak, The Ain-i Akbari, trans. and reprint Henry Blochmann and H. S. Jarret (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 2010).

63 Naïmi, ‘Afghan calligraphy’, p. 35.

64 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, objects, histories: institutions of art in colonial and post-colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

65 Roxburgh, ‘Kamal al-din Bihzad and authorship in Persianate painting’.

66 A. G. Breshna, (trans.) Maliha Fazil Zafar, ‘A glance at the history of fine arts in Afghanistan’, Afghanistan, vol. 25, no. 3, 1972, pp. 11–22Google Scholar.

67 Ibid., p. 11.

68 See this argument developed further by one of Brishnā’s contemporaries: Enayatullah Shahrani (Ināyat Allāh Shahrānī), ‘Art education in Afghanistan’, PhD thesis, University of Arizona, 1978, p. 45. See also Shahrānī, Sharḥ-i aḥvāl va āsār-i pirūfīsūr Ghulām Muḥammad Maymanagī.

69 Most notably for the 1965 film Waqt (1965). See ‘Imaginary encounter with a maestro’, The Hindu, published online on 24 October 2018, available at <https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/music/imaginary-encounter-witha-maestro/article25313029.ece>, [accessed 14 April 2021].

70 Breshna, A. G., (trans.) Nurullah Sahraii, ‘Haji Mirwais Khan: a historical play in 3 scenes’, Afghanistan: Historical and Cultural Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2, 1970 [1349], pp. 59–81Google Scholar.

71 ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Brishnā, Jāddah-’i afyūn (Kabul: Dawlatī-i Maṭbaʿah, 1967 [1346]).

72 I thank Ahmad Rashid Salim for this point.

73 Green and Arbabzadah (eds), Afghanistan in ink.

74 Ahmadi, ‘Fiction in Afghanistan’.

75 For a history of radio in Afghanistan, see Mejgan Massoumi, ‘The sounds of Kabul: radio and the politics of popular culture in Afghanistan, 1960–79’, PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2021.