Person · Pashto poet & chief

Khushāl Khān Khattak

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Not assessed

Worth knowing

He asked to be buried where no Mughal horse could raise dust over his grave, and his tomb at Akora Khattak was sited accordingly — a poet choosing his plot as a last line of verse.

Connections (2)

• CampaignAurangzeb's Tomb, Khuldabad

  Khushāl Khān served Shāh Jahān, holding the Attock road for the empire, and was imprisoned by Aurangzeb at Delhi and then Ranthambore. On his release he spent the 1670s in open revolt, trying to weld the Pashtun tribes into one force against the emperor and writing about the attempt as it failed — his bitterest verse is about Pashtun disunity, not about Mughal power. Aurangzeb came north himself in 1674 and spent a year and a half at Hasan Abdal managing the frontier, which is the measure of what the revolt cost.

• Canonised by textPashto literature

  Pashto's canon rests on two seventeenth-century figures who are read as a pair, and Khushāl is the political one. Some forty-five thousand couplets survive — battle poems, satire, love poetry, advice to his sons, and a sustained and unforgiving argument that the tribes' inability to combine was their own doing. He wrote in the middle of the events, often in the field, which is unusual for a poet of his standing anywhere, and it is why the Pashto tradition has a political register that its Persian models do not.

On these journeys

• The frontier — the Durand Line and the Pashtun century

Sources

Wikipedia, “Khushal Khattak”. Kulliyāt-i Khushāl Khān Khattak, Pashto Academy Peshawar; D. N. Mackenzie, Poems from the Dīvān of Khushāl Khān Khattak (1965).

• Wikipedia — Khushal Khan Khattak