Tradition · literary tradition · Pakistan
Pashto literature
A literature with two capitals, Peshawar and Kandahar, and an unusually flat social distribution: its canon is quoted by people who cannot read it. Bayāzīd Ansārī's sixteenth-century prose stands near the start; then Khushāl Khān Khattak's political verse, Rahmān Bābā's mystical Dīwān, Abdul Hamīd Mohmand's love poetry, and in the twentieth century Ghani Khan, Bāchā Khān's son. Alongside the written tradition runs the landay, a two-line form composed and sung largely by women, anonymous and frequently unprintable.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 34.050, 71.900
Worth knowing
The landay's anonymity is structural rather than accidental: the couplets say things a named woman could not safely say, so the form's authorship is collective by design and the best of them have no author at all.
The Pata Khazāna, an anthology claiming to preserve Pashto verse from the eighth century, is regarded by most philologists as an eighteenth-century or later compilation and its early attributions are not accepted.
Connections (3)
- Canonised by textKhushāl Khān Khattak
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.
- Canonised by textRahmān Bābā
Rahmān Bābā is the other half of the Pashto canon and its most widely quoted voice. Where Khushāl writes politics, Rahmān Bābā writes renunciation — the uselessness of rank, the sufficiency of love, the equality of the grave — in a register plain enough that the couplets have passed into ordinary speech, quoted in arguments and at funerals by people who could not name the source. His Dīwān is sung at his shrine at Hazārkhwānī, which militants bombed in 2009 for that reason; the singing resumed.
- AnalogueDakhnī
Two vernaculars that became literatures under courts that did not speak them first. Dakhnī grew in the Deccan sultanates as a northern Indian speech transplanted south and fed with Persian, and produced a poetry that Delhi later condescended to. Pashto was made into a written literature in the seventeenth century in the space between the Mughals and the Safavids, by a tribal chief and a Sufi. Both were vehicles for people asserting that they were not provincial versions of Persian culture, and both are read now mainly by their own speakers.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pashto literature and poetry”. Pashto Academy, University of Peshawar; Eliza Griswold, I Am the Beggar of the World (2014), on the landay.
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