CULTURAL HISTORIES OF PASHTUN NATIONALISM, PUBLIC

PARTICIPATION, AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN MONARCHIC

AFGHANISTAN, 1905-1960

James M. Caron

A DISSERTATION

in

South Asian Regional Studies

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2009

Supervisor of Dissertation

Group Chairperson
 UMI Number: 3381504

Copyright 2009 by
Caron, James M.

INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy
submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations
and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper
alignment can adversely affect reproduction.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized
copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI
UMI Microform 3381504
Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC
All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346
Cultural Histories of Pashtun Nationalism, Public Participation, and Social
Inequality in Monarchic Afghanistan, 1905-1960.

COPYRIGHT

2009

James M. Caron
 iii

Acknowledgments:

Coming out of this dissertation, I find myself indebted to a startling number of people. I

thank Rubab Qureshi above all. I thank also the members of my committee: Brian

Spooner, my supervisor; Suvir Kaul, Lisa Mitchell, Robert Nichols, and Christian

Novetzke. Though not a formal member, Wilma Heston also surely deserves a place in

this company if anyone does! I thank them all for their patience with a slow dissertation,

and for their selfless contributions of time and intellectual effort.

I thank the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, which has

provided me with grants for coursework, research, and writing, as well as both the South

Asia and Middle East Centers at the University of Pennsylvania which funded my study

of Pashto and some Persian through the Title VI program. I also thank the History

Department, Rutgers University at Newark, for keeping me employed in the year after my

fieldwork, and for a very rewarding experience with some wonderful students.

I also thank the following people, all of whom gave their time generously and

taught me something important; facilitated my work; critiqued my work and provided

new perspectives on it; or provided much-needed moral support, keeping me sane while

researching and writing. These categories aren't exclusive of each other. Some have

helped me greatly even though we have never met in person; some, I met far too briefly;

and many, I consider lifelong friends. Their contributions cannot be ranked nearly as

easily as their names can be alphabetized:

The Adeel family; Asif Agha; Rashid Ahmad; Obaid Ahmadi; Mustafa Aka;

Nadeem Akbar; Rohullah Amin; Jamil Alikozai; Whitney Azoy; 'Abd Allah Bakhtanai
 iv

'Khidmatgar'; Taqi Bangash; Aditya Behl; Jody Chavez; Melanie Dean; Hirad Dinavari;

Nancy Dupree and the fantastic ACKU staff; Luke Fleming; Sahar G.; Hazrat Gul, Layla

Jan and family; Bashir Gwakh; Jamil Hanifi; Shah Mahmoud Hanifi; Amruta Inamdar;

Aman Khan; Azmat Hayat Khan and my friends among the staff of the Area Study

Centre library; Kamran Khan; Rajwali Shah Khattak; Fazal-i Rahim Marwat; Michael

Meister, Muhammad Ayaz Muhammadzai; Nasr Allah Nasir and everyone at the

Afghanistan Academy of Sciences Languages and Literatures Branch who welcomed a

random American off the street; the families of Javed Qureshi, Zafar Qureshi, and Aslam

Qureshi; Habib Allah Rafi'; Ghulam Rasul; 'Abd al-Ra'uf; Rosane Rocher; Arwaxad

Sahib Shah Sabir; Mian Wakil Shah; Sanad Shah; Salma Shaheen; Pushkar Sohoni;

Aslam Syed; Guy Welbon; the staff of the VC guest house in Peshawar University; and

Zafar at AIAS Kabul.

My language faculty deserve special mention. They have expended extraordinary

amounts of efforts helping me stitch new clothing for my thoughts to wear, besides

providing me with too many insights to count on facets of texts, history, and life:

Benedicte Santry, with whom I spent more time in coursework than anyone else; Vijay

Gambhir; Surendra Gambhir; Amrit Gahunia; and Pardis Minuchehr. Finally, thanks to

M. Nadir Shahalemi, whose passionately-conveyed interest in the poetry of Malang Jan

intrigued me enough to write about Afghanistan in the first place.

 V

ABSTRACT

CULTURAL HISTORIES OF PASHTUN NATIONALISM, PUBLIC

PARTICIPATION, AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN MONARCHIC

AFGHANISTAN, 1905-1960

James M. Caron

Brian J. Spooner

In this dissertation I inquire into the ideological and social roots of Pashtun ethno-

nationalism in Afghanistan, by analyzing political-economic history; biography; and

written and oral Pashto literature. Demands for the proper public realization of Pashtun

identity were not unified. Rather, as I show, politicized "Pashtunness" emerged as an

ideological arena for struggles of gender and social inequality - in uneven yet interlinked

public spaces that depended on print only marginally, but crossed social and geographic

boundaries. Amid regional shifts in Depression-era political economy, Afghanistan saw

vast changes in social communication channels over the early 20th century. Mobile

populations became more locally rooted, physically and culturally. Local patriarchies and

monarchic power reinforced each other; elites sought to co-opt and hierarchize routes for

all kinds of circulation. Yet, non-elites resisted a vertical rooting of social awareness with

increasingly well-defined, mutually integrated forms of horizontal public interaction.

Intellectuals of the lower gentry built on cross-border links with anti-colonial struggles in

India, fusing anti-patriarchal ideas of Pashtun honor with rural activist networks. Non-

literate poets of very marginal origins maneuvered between landed elite patronage and

liberal reformism to project angry protests of local oppression onto a transnational scale.
 VI

Contents:

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract v

Table of Contents vi

Chapter One - Introduction 1-18

I. Formulation of Research Questions: The Sources of a 2

Pashtun Public Opinion

II. Research Materials and Refinement of the Topic 9

III. Chapter Summary 14

Chapter Two - The Evolution of Public Constitutionalism: From 19-78

Courtier Lineages, through Social Circle, to Print Public, 1905-

1935

I. Introduction: Background 19

II. Kandahari Courtiers through 1919: a Case Study 22

II. 1. The Akhundzadas up to 1905 23

11.2. Lineage Integration Supporting Constitutionalist 26
Critique
11.3. The Radical Poetics of Masculinity and Person 33
Amongst Courtiers

III. From Personalized Aristocracy to Civil Society 41

III. 1. Aristocratic Alliance with Mercantile Elites; the 43

"Nationalization" of Pashto

111.2. Synthesis: Linking Ideologies with 52

Communicative Practices

111.3. Mawlawi Salih Muhammad Qandahari: A 56

Sociological Poetics
 vii

III.4. Public Institutions 63

III. 5. Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun: Sociological 71

Poetics and Social Competition

Chapter Three - The Rise of "Political Pashto": Lineage, Elders, 79-138

and Face-to-Face Public Interactions, 1930-1950

I. Introduction 80

1.1. Curtailing of Urban Public Pashto by Chivalrous, 85

Personalized Pashto

1.2. "Political Pashto" Between Egalitarianism and 88

Hierarchy

1.3. Socio-political and Economic Context 90

II. Lineage Politics and Personal Negotiation 94

II. 1. Momand Negotiations of Power 95

II.2. Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's Biography 100

III. Monarchic Military Authoritarianism and Lineage 104

in the 1930s

III. 1. Reinforcing Hierarchy 104

III.2. New Ideological Directions, and Momand's 112

Role

IV. Muhammad Gul Khan Momand and Face-to-Face 120

Public Interaction

V. Conclusion 134

Chapter Four - From Educational Publics to Social Movements, 139-199

Mashriqi to Kabul: Enlightened Youth and Anti-Patriarchy, 1920-
1950

I. Introduction 139
 Vlll

1.1. A Republican Challenge to Decentered Politics 140

1.2. Elite Cultural Politics 141

1.3. Personal Marginalization 143

1.4. Economic Centrism 144

II. Non-Elite Challenges to Monarchic Power 147

II. 1. Insurgencies 14 8

11.2. Alternative Ideologies 152

11.3. Rural Democratic and Anti-Elite Movements 153

in British India

III. Rural Intellectuals in Eastern Afghanistan 157

IV. Constraints 167

IV. 1. Constraining Publics through Patronage of 167

Cultural Studies

IV.2. Discipline, and Cautious 'Culturalist' Critiques 173

V. Articulation of Structure as Critique; Creation of 178

Structures as Activism

V.l. Ideologies 178

V.2. Public Aspects of the Wex Zalmiyan 186

Chapter Five - Oral Poetry, Social Change, and Rural Publics: 200-259
From Countercultural Passion to Subaltern Political Science,
1900-1960

I. Introduction 200

II. Oral Poetry: Mediations Between Authoritative 203

and Everyday Speech

III. Various Discourses and Modes of Authority in Oral 208

Poetry
 IX

III. 1. Everyday Social Critique and Anonymity 208

III. 2. Authored Poetry and Idioms of Power 213

III. 3. Poetry by Ego-less Authors, and Subaltern 219

Critiques: 1930s-1950s

IV. Malang Jan and the Rise of a Critical, Reflexively 227

Subaltern Public

IV. 1. Rural 1940s Jalalabad, as Experienced by 227

Non-Elites

IV. 2. Malang Jan as a Professional Poet 230

IV. 3. Explicitly Social-Critical Discourse 232

V. Shifting Publics, New Discourses, and Cross-Class 238

Alliance

VI. State Patronage and Pashtunistan 250

Chapter Six - Conclusions 260-276

Appendix - Note on Transcription and Transliteration 277-282

Bibliography 283-301

Index 302-306
 1

Chapter One

Introduction

This dissertation is a cultural history of diverse ideological and institutional threads,

among people of very different background, that collectively led to articulations of ethnic

awareness among Afghan Pashtuns. I label this phenomenon, as a collective, "Pashtun

nationalism", and it provides the backbone for a study of the ways that ideas and people

moved through public space in Afghanistan, from 1905 to 1960. This period saw great

changes in the routes of public political communication and participation in Afghanistan,

changes that were linked with social and economic changes in the society as a whole.

There have undeniably been strong disjunctures in various people's performance

of, and expectations for the promise of, this awareness of Pashtun commonality -

disjunctures stemming from the considerable pull in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, of

numerous simultaneous identities that people have. Yet, as I shall demonstrate, this

awareness existed in nearly all segments of the Afghan Pashtun population. And unlike

earlier and more general forms of reflexively-performed Pashtun identity, in the twentieth

century this self-awareness has almost always been fused with vocal political aspirations

of self-determination. What people expected from "self-determination", and who the

idealized collective "self was, differed. But the broad desire for some form of Pashtun

national self-determination existed across the board nonetheless, and has remained up to

present.
 2

Formulation of Research Questions: The Sources of a Pashtun Public Opinion

The first day of classes in my post-graduate study was September 3 rd, 2001. The

remainder of that month proved fateful for Afghanistan; and debates about the nature and

the goals of the Taliban movement which had come to rule that country were propelled

into everyday American media culture.

Narratives that the Taliban represented a religious atavism did not fully explain

their strongly anti-aristocratic self-narrative, even if they did not rule it out. Such claims

also did not explain a heavy component of self-consciously performed 'Pashtun' identity

in Taliban policies, even while many Pashtuns did not identify with those policies and

denounced them as 'not Pashto,' or against the spirit of Pashtunness. It was clear that the

definition of Pashtun identity, of how that identity should be performed in public, was of

paramount political concern both of Taliban supporters and detractors.

There was a commonplace narrative in the US media, at least, that the reason for

features of the Taliban's highly illiberal rule was that the Taliban were parochial in their

outlook; and that Afghanistan did not have the sort of sophisticated social or media

institutions that would foster anything like a 'public sphere.' A conflation of ethnic and

religious rule was, in this narrative, just another symptom of a more general low level of

social awareness.

In place of ideas examining public opinion, many American journalists and foreign

affairs specialists in the academy, early on, pointed out the role of the madrasa education

system and militancy networks in explaining the trans-regional pull of the Taliban.

Others who were less prone to 'clash of civilization' thinking had pointed out that the
 3

networks were originally funded by none other than the US, or the US, Pakistan, and

Saudi Arabia. That was a very important point to make, and it explained a lot about

recent history. Still, though, both sides - and the range of views in between - implicitly

led readers to a single conclusion. All there was, particularly in rural areas, was networks.

If that were so, why did the Taliban look so different from other militarized groups

that had arisen in Afghanistan? It looked to me, at least, like the mobilized result of a

case of anti-aristocratic, anti-warlord, anti-foreign intervention, populist, and Pashtun-

nationalist public opinion. That public opinion may have been mobilized and selectively

channeled by networks wielding the carrot and stick of financial reward and coercion,

perhaps, and not mobilized within everyone, but it was public opinion nonetheless. That

was doubly true as military action in Pashtun regions dragged on, and independent

'Taliban' organizations began growing across the Pashtun region.

Leaving aside the specifics of the Taliban, where did this collective public

awareness come from; and how did it come to be so fused with battles over Pashtun

identity? What was its deeper history? Surely it could not have arisen from out of nothing

during the civil wars, as traumatic and world-shaking as they were. What was the cultural

'prehistory' involved? I did not want this dissertation to be about the Taliban in any way,

and it is not; but it does represent an attempt to address those questions.

From one direction, a trend of describing Taliban action as reducible to the

historical dynamic of networks spared people who were opposed to the Taliban

(occupying any and all points along the ideological spectrum) from asking tough

questions about legitimacy. Invoking "networks" did not, and does not, have any
 4

association with legitimacy in western political discourse in the way that invoking

"public opinion", in the mainstream American use of that word, does. Therefore, viewing

and representing the Taliban as a matter of networks may have been a moral and political

choice, whether fully conscious or not, in many cases.

But this was not only a political question. My questions about the history of the

Taliban's populism and trans-local public opinion were not satisfied by a historiography

of Afghanistan that privileged vertical bonds such as militia organization during the

1980s and 1990s war, or supposedly non-modern forms of social organization like

lineage before the wars. Nor did the basic idea of an anti-warlord reaction, or the

Taliban's own narrative of 'security amidst chaos', satisfy my curiosity. Those narratives

were all well and good, but just noting the fact of the narrative said nothing about where

the social mechanism inculcating such a common sentiment over a great, politically-

diverse stretch of territory might be located. The wars had produced many zones of

micro-politics, each characterized by very local power negotiations which might be

hypothesized to fracture any unified public opinion; yet the Taliban appeared capitalize

on just such a unity, at least in many Pashtun regions.

As I argue elsewhere, most historiography of Afghanistan had always assumed,

implicitly or explicitly, that the real action in Afghan history was located in Kabul, and

that local consciousness of rural areas, whether Pashtun or not, was too fragmented - too

local - to foster an idea of "the common people" upon which populism or nationalism

would rest.1 As a result, in this view, local action was always reactive, or reactionary, and

not worth centering in historical study. Hierarchical states acted; egalitarian, inward-
1
Caron 2007
 5

looking tribesmen reacted. Rebellions were the result of the state model being imposed

upon people who lived in a prior stage of development. If the goal of historical study is

the study of change, why bother trying to center people who only react to change?

It often seemed to me that this view rationalized away the difficulty of researching

social and cultural historical change of largely non-literate people outside the center, in a

setting where the researcher did not have much in the way of documentary records to go

on - there was very little "there" there to study, unlike in territories where a colonial or

post-colonial state kept meticulous revenue records, and where a variety of archives were

publicly accessible. With some notable exceptions, the topic of rural Afghanistan after

1930 and up to the 1978 coup d'etat was instead the domain of a particularly static form

of anthropology - even when doing oral history, the resulting focus tended to be social

and cultural microsystem, rather than large-scale change. From much of what I read, the

'rural' often seemed to be construed only in terms of fragmented and disjointed networks

of awareness that focused on tribe and religion, and sometimes also the state in an

antagonistic role.

The issue of the formation of public opinion in rural areas, as a topic of inquiry for

historical study, seemed either to be on everyone's back burner; or was actively ignored

at the expense of more 'provincializing' phenomena. Yet, the issue of a strongly-felt

Pashtun nationalism, one that transcended tribal loyalties, seldom seemed to be in doubt.

Far before the rise of the Taliban, it was something that many authors commented on and

moved past, without devoting any further attention to it, in the midst of studies about

other aspects of Afghan life. This was a dilemma.

 6

In the absence of some degree of shared public awareness, how could nationalism

have taken root? Because, nationalism seems to rest on considerable degrees of prior

public awareness. Both are forged by people imagining themselves to exist in a shared

relationship, a common social space, with strangers.

In this dissertation, I define 'public' more specifically than commonplace uses of

the word - as, for example, in uses of the word that invoke a mainstream universality,

and thus some form of democratic political legitimacy. Here I use it in a more restricted

meaning. Drawing on the work of Michael Warner, I use this word to refer to any social

space that people create in their minds by virtue of their shared participation in the

circulation, recirculation, reformulation, and even repudiation of specific bits of culture,

especially ideas and commentary which relate to issues of the day.2 It is different from a

social circle or a network, in that the people involved do not all know each other, not

even secondarily through a relatively simple series of links. Rather, it is the mutual

recognition of a shared realm of discourse which defines a public; and this recognition

means that when someone participates in that realm of discourse, they reinforce their own

recognition of it as a realm. It follows that there can be numerous 'publics' in any given

society, by this definition; and that they can be, and usually are, characterized not only by

inclusion but by exclusion too. They need not be limited to "rational critical" criteria as

per Habermas's conception of the 'public sphere';3 and it should also be noted that

publics are rarely static over time.

Around the same time as I was asking myself questions about the historical

2
See Warner 2002 for a condensed version of his arguments in this regard.
3
Habermas 1991
 7

development of social spaces in Afghanistan for the circulation of populist and nationalist

'public' opinion; and was looking for sources on rural pre-war Pashtun history in

Afghanistan, I came across some intriguing leads.

I was introduced to the poetry of Malang Jan by the University of Pennsylvania's

assistant Pashto instructor, M. Nader Shahalemi. Malang Jan started life as a non-literate

casual laborer on the margins of even the rural Pashtun society near Jalalabad in which he

was born; but for a number of reasons I discuss in this dissertation, he became a very

well-known oral poet with a fairly large body of transcribed and recorded work. Some of

Malang Jan's poetry opened up for me an alternative view of rural society form the

bottom, speaking of countless day-to-day indignities suffered by the rural poor, and

imposed by a cast of landlords and state administrators and tax collectors. Quite unlike

pictures of Pashtun 'tribal egalitarianism' in much social science literature, Malang Jan

envisioned power relations very much as 'authority', rather than 'influence.' There was

also a great deal of local and trans-local political-economy critique in his work. It spoke

of the high prices of imported commodities and the poet's feeling of indignant shame that

Afghanistan could not produce those goods itself. It spoke of a desire that the head of

state should be a servant of 'the people.' This was all in the monarchic period under Zahir

Shah, whose long reign lasted from 1933-1973. Unlike many narratives that saw the era

as idyllic and naive, characterized by consensus and devoid of the social conflict that

started in the late 1970s and persists to the present, Malang Jan saw his own society as

one teetering on the brink of social collapse. He saw conflict everywhere, and shouted

that it was getting in the way of the full political realization of a collective spirit that
 8

already existed. Further, in his poetry he cast himself (or his persona) as an agent in the

development of this collective spirit in the domain of performed poetic discourse in

particular. That is, he sometimes spoke about performed popular poetry in ways that

highlighted it as a discrete universe of political communications.

Upon deeper research into oral poetic practice in mid-twentieth century

Afghanistan, it was pretty clear to me that face-to-face poetry performance and

circulation was itself one zone within which a very wide-ranging public awareness was

stitched together, across the Pashtun region. Thus, I thought that analyzing more of this

sort of poetry in socio-historical context would say interesting things about the possibility

of a sort of 'mass' public rooted in contingent and 'mouth-to-mouth', rather than

mechanically reproduced, circulation of texts; running counter to expectations by authors

ranging from Shir Muhammad Rawan, to Benedict Anderson, to Walter Benjamin.4 At

the same time, I thought, it would give me a window into the perspectives of Pashtuns

belonging to a rural underclass that I had not seen described before, for that time and

place, in any historical literature at all.

4
I refer to Rawan 2002; B. Anderson 1991; Benjamin 1968 (especially "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Storyteller"). David Edwards 1993 analyzes Pashto poetry as a
focusing factor in trans-local public opinion; but he does so in relation to the later phenomenon of
(mechanically produced) audio cassettes of jihad-era poetry. Meanwhile, Darmesteter 1888 makes
similar claims about Pashto poetry with face-to-face circulation, as does Sho'ur 1367 SH [1988]; but
neither says anything on specific routes of circulation or how they affected discourse. Sa'id Samatar's
study of oral poetry and nationalism in Somalia, however, is a very good study for comparative
purposes, as is the work of Steven Caton on poetry in Yemen. On a very different scale, Lila Abu-
Lughod's study on Bedouin poetry is useful as a foil. I draw on her work in Chapter Five of this
dissertation.
 9

Research Materials, and Refinement of the Topic

Upon traveling to Peshawar and Kabul, I found that the best way to research poetic

practice as well as poetry itself from the 1940s and 1950s, a time from which not many

poets remain, was combing through thousands of individual biographical sketches

included by the compilers of Pashto biographical directories called tazkiras. A number of

them were particularly interesting, in that many of the sketches were actually provided by

the subjects themselves; and the compilers served as transcribers and copy editors more

than they did authors in a strict sense. Many of these sketches provided excellent

information linking ideology to interaction in various social contexts, and all of them

provided literary or other examples of discourse produced by the individuals themselves.

The biographical directories traced specific sections of society. Some were quite

restricted, focusing on groups like specific families, or the notables of particular cities, or

professional musicians. But others took into consideration broader categories like 'poets',

which cut across nearly all socio-economic boundaries. Every conceivable demographic

in Pashtun society, after all, produced poets. Poetry was one of the primary modes of

formal public speech in Pashtun society, and it even punctuated informal speech - a

situation not uncommon in many parts of the world. It almost seemed as if the compilers

of such tazkiras were attempting to present a four-dimensional cross-section of society -

to approach social history through another means, by presenting poets from different

backgrounds and points in time partially as tokens of their social categories, yet without

overdetermining such categories or subordinating the individual to them.

From engaging this tazkira literature, I found two things.

 10

I initially focused my attention only on the oral poets, since they tended, like

Malang Jan in his early life, to be the sorts of people we know the least about in modern

Afghan history. Despite this focus of mine, though, passive attention to other domains

was unavoidable. By reading as much of this tazkira literature as possible, I eventually

noticed that local poetic performance in rural society interacted with other social

domains, each definable by specific genres of discourses and specific modes of

circulation. In particular, it seemed that oral poetic performance sometimes intersected

ideologically with other horizontal yet more elite zones of public participation best

defined by people's ties to print media; and other times, poetic performance intersected

with personalized zones of participation that linked lineages, landed elites and state

officials together. It was possible to trace institutional histories of these publics too

through the hundreds of tokens provided in tazkiras.

Moreover, the rise of these 'publics' was related to the way that individuals reacted

to political and economic trends in the larger region. Different genres of interaction were

loosely correlated with specific social formations that most resembled class stratification

- though this was also mitigated by a number of other vertical factors, especially access

to the state executive structure on various levels. Unlike would generally be the case in

the reflexive performance of membership in a social class, single individuals often self-

identified with more than one public at once. The most interesting this about these

spheres of circulation, though, is that they were not always defined around terms through

which rural Pashtun society had been constructed. The domain of personalized ties, what

might be called 'tribalism' and the local state, was confirmed by narratives in 'Who's
 11

Who'- type political tazkiras. The same was true of spiritual networks. But, there were

other spheres of participation that were equally important, if not as politically dominant

on all levels; publics which linked people who did not enjoy access to those personalized

ties. What had been presented as 'Pashtun' across the board, now seemed best interpreted

as 'locally elite Pashtun'.

The second thing I noticed from this tazkira literature - and the interplay of

biography, society, and textual instances of ideology that tazkiras highlighted

uncommonly well - was this. In the case of Malang Jan and others who produced oral

poetry, it was the combination of (1) an attention to the suffering of the rural poor, and

(2) a growing interaction with other public realms beyond oral poetry, that gave rise to

nationalist ideologies within the public domain of oral poetry. Malang Jan's oral poetic

performance, and the ideologies in it, changed according to where, when, and how he

performed; and how the performance was circulated and recirculated also helped

determine what ideologies were present. As he interacted with other public spaces over

time, his poetry picked up layers of discipline from various sources even while a broad

concern with social alienation permeated most things he said, regardless of where.

Many discussions of nationalism have focused on nationalism as the product of the

externalized perspective of some form of elite, whether concentrated in the state

machinery, in a bourgeois-liberal or Marxist cosmopolitan urban class, or in a more

general cosmopolitan urban literate class.5 Other authors have highlighted the role of

rural gentry.6 In contrast, in his early life Malang Jan was a landless laborer on the

5
Refer to Hobsbawm 1990; Hroch 1985; and B. Anderson 1991 respectively.
6
Cole and Kandiyoti 2002
 12

margins of even the rural society in which he was raised, much less the national stage.

What was his stake, emotional, social, or otherwise, in being such a strong articulator of a

grassroots Pashtun ethno-cultural consciousness, when it often seems that the inequalities

built into eastern Afghan Pashtun society directly contributed to his marginality? And

also, ethnic solidarity can often de-emphasize inequality, a factor which helps ruling

structures maintain power through vertical ties of consent. This could particularly be the

case under a monarchic system which did not claim equal rights of all in citizenship.

What was the interplay of Malang Jan's stake in ethno-nationalist awareness with the

Afghan dynastic state's requirements for rule?

The answers appeared to be that in this case, nationalism was not produced by the

interests only of one demographic. Some of the most cross-sectional tazkiras, when

supplemented with other information, presented a view that could prove to be quite

nuanced. This view of the ways that people and ideas moved and adapted through public

spaces prompted me to rethink my ideas of how ideology related to society. My tazkiras

forced me to overcome sharp dichotomies - of urban vs. rural, of ruler vs. ruled, of

dominant vs. subaltern, and by extension of active vs. passive-reactive - while still

preserving a view of unequal power relations in production and consumption of ideology.

In this regard, the case here can tell us a lot about nationalism in general. Rather

than nationalism representing the culturally dominant interests of one social group that

was then internalized by others, it seemed that the growing integration of all the public

spaces attached to such interests is what produced Pashtun nationalism, even though each

space preserved many of its own specific perspectives at all times. And accordingly, this
 13

integration produced nationalism not as a well-defined ideology of positively identifying

national characteristics, but as a sort of battlefield upon which different people fought out

negotiations of inequality. Pashtun identity itself became a high-stakes political

commodity, bound up in negotiations of 'proper' or 'moral' hierarchies of gender and

age; hierarchies of social status vis-a-vis nobility of lineage and access to state power;

and access to economic rights.

I realized that studying the history of nationalism involved studying the history of

various zones of public participation not in isolation but in their interactions with each

other. Fortunately, I was able to locate tazkiras available for other social demographics as

well - such as literate authors, the nobility and landed elites, and state administrators. I

supplemented my extensive use of Pashto and Persian tazkira literature with additional

literary texts and memoirs in those languages; some archival and other informal field

research in Peshawar, Kabul, and the US; and secondary source material, when possible.7

As individual actors rooted in different publics fought out these battles over

inequality upon the ideological terrain of Pashtun nationalism, most sought to increase

the scope of their publics to increase their leverage, and to link up their interaction with

other publics. Moreover, people sought to constrain the scope of publics that aided actors

and ideologies against which they were aligned. These processes too had an influence on

ideologies. The most powerful aligned their visions of Pashtun national identity with

strongly internalized perceptions of the Afghan state. Those with lesser leverage found

support in publics that crossed all manner of borders, including international - or perhaps
7
I was unable to work extensively in either the National Archives of Afghanistan or the Tribal Research
Cell of the Civil Secretariat, NWFP; though I spent much time with archives and individuals in the
Kabul Public Library, the Afghanistan Academy of Sciences, the General Library at Kabul University,
the Area Study Centre in Peshawar University, and the Pashto Academy in Peshawar.
 14

we should only say 'inter-state'? - ones, to include reformists and holy men in India.

Broadening the scope of public interaction necessarily changed the terms on which

strangers addressed each other.

Chapter Summary

I have divided these trans-local zones of public participation into four broad

categories, and traced their trajectories across the first half of the twentieth century in

four chapters. I do not claim that these were the only zones of public participation that

existed; and my choice reflects a bias toward those areas which have not been as fully

explored in western-language literatures. For example, I consider David Edwards' study

of the trans-local public awareness surrounding the Sahib of Hadda to be quite useful in

outlining yet another zone of participation, one which interacts with several of those I

discuss here in its later developments; and I do not seek to reproduce that analysis here

but rather reference it in passing.8 Following this introduction, the dissertation is divided

as follows:

Chapter Two: Publics of Constitutionalism, from Courtier Lineage through Social Circle

to Print Public, 1905-1935.

In this chapter I explore the development of an urban elite public sphere defined by

elite participation in Pashto print, centered in the cities of Kandahar and Kabul. I narrate

how ties of family, friendship, and educational institutions among courtiers were

gradually expanded outward to include other classes - especially, among Pashtuns, the
8
See especially Edwards 1996.
 15

elite mercantile families of Kandahar. This does not exclude similar ties in other cities

among non-Pashtuns, but my focus is on how the expansion of these networks into print

publics was related to the rise of Pashtun ethnic awareness; and thus Kabul and Kandahar

form the primary spheres of analysis. I explore this trajectory through the biographies,

texts, and contexts of the members of a family attached to the Afghan court since 1747;

the elite public institutions that they created and managed on behalf of the crown; and the

changing ways their political agenda vis-a-vis the monarchy was related to the way they

interacted in public settings. During my era of study, I find, Pashtun identity was

sometimes disowned by urban elites as 'the other' to political morality; was sometimes

rehabilitated through 'civilization'; and was sometimes privileged almost as 'virtue' in

the Machiavellian sense, or vitality in action. Ideological differences were correlated with

how elites positioned themselves within publics, and how they used publics for political

activism.

Chapter Three: The Rise of "Political Pashto": Lineage, Landed Power, Layered

Sovereignty, and Face-to-Face Publics, 1930-1950

Here I explore elite rural channels of public circulation as they developed after

1930, though building on traditional roots. After a civil war, a new Pashtun dynasty could

only reconquer the throne with the help of certain tribes; and the monarchy was forced to

create public institutions that lessened apparent distance between crown and provincial

Pashtun localities, both culturally and politically. I describe how political distance and

hierarchy was mitigated by the feeling of personal, face-to-face connection to the king via
 16

a personalized chain of known intermediaries; and to other Pashtuns through extensive

genealogical narratives linked to a narrative of the Afghan monarchic state. This feeling

of face-to-face links between people built on its ideological similarity to ties of extended

family, and existed in a mutually reinforcing dialectic with people's specific relationships

with village and lineage elders that were rooted in social and geographical space. In terms

of institutions, I explore how the reflexive circulation of ideologies of face-to-face, and

thus mitigated, hierarchy was itself achieved in a way that reproduced this hierarchy -

through institutions such as the hujra, or men's lodge, that housed face-to-face public

interaction. Through biographical narrative, I give instances where intermediaries

between crown and lineage helped maintain such a system. Through juxtaposing accounts

of contingent negotiations with textual analysis, I also note how the egalitarianism

involved in the ideology of kinship as a model for rule, an egalitarianism born out of

compromise between the center and a heavily-armed periphery, helped affect the way this

face-to-face public was realized from the bottom up, not just the top down.

Chapter Four: From Educational Publics to Social Movements, Mashriqi to Kabul:

Enlightened Youth and Anti-Patriarchy, 1920-1950.

In this chapter I trace the way a grassroots liberalist critique of the rural power

structure under monarchy arose out of religious-educational publics: a shared interaction

of educated lower gentry in memorized canonical texts that transcended individualized

personal networks, and that flowed all the way between Kabul and Punjab in India. While

it appears that some defined their interaction in education by their individual teachers and
 17

spiritual authority of a charismatic type, for others discourse itself was clearly the

organizing principle. These types of educational publics interacted with provincial print

culture both in Afghanistan and British India, and people in those publics found solidarity

across local and state boundaries in spite of the attempts by the monarchic state to root

public identity firmly in its own institutions. Educational publics also interfaced with, and

served as the glue to interlink, more personalized local publics across the Pashtun region.

I follow the rise of several individuals from roots in these cross-border publics to the

center of Pashto cultural studies in the print culture of Afghanistan; and I show how their

creative mobilization of new sites of public identity around reformist literature was

related to their critique of the growing state structure described in Chapter Three. In the

process, activists were able to significantly rebrand Pashtun identity, especially Pashtun

masculine honor, as only being realizable through egalitarianism and civic youth activism

under a liberal parliamentary political order.

Chapter Five: Oral Poetry, Social Change, and Rural Publics: From Countercultural

Passion to Subaltern Political Science, 1900-1960

In this final chapter before the conclusion, I explore the rapid change in oral poetry

as a route of social communication, from a mostly locally-focused practice to one that

increasingly addressed national-scale matters. Oral poets from the rural poor, in tandem

with more 'middle class' activists from the educational publics in the previous chapter,

were able to project social critiques over much wider ranges through the development of

new joint public forums. In the process, the nature of this critique changed. In locally-
 18

oriented oral poetry (which nonetheless traveled across great geographical distances)

poor men and women alike criticized the ideologies of masculine propriety that equally

bolstered state power; local landed elite power; and families' dominance by male elders.

They did so in very deflected terms that foregrounded their moral superiority, focusing on

the abjection of romantic obsession and the trope of begging for favor before an

indifferent object of desire. When transported to regional and national parameters of

address, and circulation structures that enabled this address, oral poetic critique dropped

certain gender concerns and came to focus its gender critique only on inter-masculine

paternalistic hierarchy. At the same time, when transplanted to wider parameters of

address, oral poetic critique envisioned a Pashtun nation as one in which Pashtunness

signified freedom for all Pashtun men from any form of domination at all. There was an

ambivalence to all forms of political power, whether a nation ruled by a liberal-

democratic state; a nation ruled by a republican state; or an absolute monarchy

characterized by personal politics.

The final chapter consists of concluding remarks and analysis, in which I attempt to

situate the importance of this dissertation in the wider comparative historical literature

surrounding local and trans-local public spheres that exist outside of print.
 19

Chapter Two

The Evolution of Public Constitutionalism: from Courtier Lineages through Social

Circle to Print Public, 1905-1935

/. Introduction: Background

Many contemporary narratives of Afghanistan's modern history trace the founding

of that state to a moment in 1747 when the Durrani Pashtun lineages united under Ahmad

Shah and conquered the territories currently comprising Afghanistan. Other narratives

follow the story of a series of dynasts steadily monopolizing political power at the

expense of other lineages. The initial empire under Ahmad Shah had been defined in

terms of influence that federated Durrani patriarchs had over polities, which provided

land revenue and fighting forces to the "joint state" in a piecemeal way. The subsequent

centuries resemble, in many ways, the dynamics Nicholas Dirks describes in The Hollow

Crown - intermediary power retained ideological weight but steadily lost its threat and

legitimacy.1 Events that might once have been viewed as the self-assertion of lineages

were viewed by the Amir 'Abd al-Rahman in 1900 as "rebellions".

At the same time, in a dialectic relationship with repeated military action (and

other, no less intrusive political pressure) by British India, the Durrani monarchy was

able to gradually reorient Afghanistan's economy to its, and the British empire's, benefit.

Flows of credit and money were channeled toward Kabul; and Afghan trade with British

India to the southeast, and Russia to the north, was harnessed for purposes of taxation by

the crown.2 The discipline and fragmentation of traditional low-scale trade, and its
1
Refer to Dirks 1987
2
Refer to S. M. Hanifi 2008, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press), and
2004, "Impoverishing a Colonial Frontier: Cash, Credit, and Debt in 19* Century Afghanistan" Iranian
 20

separation from a new, officially dominant (and taxable) elite trade accompanied a

consolidation of territorial border regimes.

Afghanistan thus came to resemble a large princely state of the British Empire both

politically and economically. The reign of the colonially-appointed Amir 'Abd al-

Rahman (1880-1901) was simply an accelerated formalization of the process. A treaty

establishing Afghanistan's borders with British India ceded Afghanistan's control over its

own foreign policy, and provided the Amir with a sizable subsidy of cash and military

aid, which the Amir used to ruthlessly crush any military opposition. He was able to

decisively solidify Kabul's economic and political hegemony over the territory of

Afghanistan and to install the rudiments of a surveillance regime throughout the country.

All of this involved the increasing elaboration of a Persianate-imperial

bureaucratic/documentary regime, updated to fit the needs of a firmly bounded territorial

state on the eve of the twentieth century.

Neither Afghanistan's extreme closedness nor its monarchic absolutism was to last

long, however. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, as Afghanistan's links to

the global capitalist economy deepened, so did the political power of the elite actors who

managed the monarchy's economy (and made their own profits as well). The monarchy

gradually came to rely on the revenues of commodity traders - primarily in luxury skins,

wool, fruit and nuts, and cotton - whom it obliged by granting them chartered

monopolies in foreign trade. In short, there was a major shift from land as a source of

power, to elite trade and state management as a source of power. The institution of

alienable private property solidified that trend. The situation increasingly attracted the ire

Studies 37(2): 199-218 for an overview.

 21

of rural landed power as it progressed, and as later portions of this and the following

chapter will note, it gradually impacted on informal nomadic trade as well. This situation

only increased with Afghanistan's assertion of full independence in 1919, which removed

the British subsidy as a source of state funding. The government looked to increased

taxation of its own people.

As the exclusivist state became more elaborated in its needs for management

personnel, and as its elite registers became more and more isolated from rural power

networks and populations, new classes rose from older aristocracies. The power of an

absolutist monarchy was challenged in numerous ways through political action. Actors at

multiple social levels sought pieces of sovereignty for themselves and for others.

This chapter will explore the increasing importance of a class of Kandahari scholar

bureaucrats, which initially consolidated itself through lineage. Ties of family and

friendship were a major medium for the circulation of political capital and

communication in court circles. As Kandahari trade increased, aristocrats extended those

ties to involve mercantile interests. And as these networks grew in strength, they were

increasingly vocal with demands for a greater say in governance.

This is more than political genealogy. What initially started out as a consolidation

of lower- and mid-ranking aristocrats aligned against monarchic absolutism - a demand

for a greater say in governance - led to a class alliance between bureaucratic scholars and

a nascent bourgeoisie. The results included new forms of sociability and mediation. The

modalities of elite anti-absolutist ideologies transformed too, as social circles

incorporated strangers through print and expanded into nascent publics.

 22

In this chapter I illustrate the political and cultural history described above, as

manifested over the career of a particular family of scholarly courtiers. Throughout, I

analyze links between political (or political-economic) and intellectual activity. The final

portion of the chapter is devoted to the links of mediation between political and

ideological spheres, and the social transformations that such mediations had the potential

to produce. In the process, through the close reading of specific Pashto texts in their

social context, I trace developments in elite Pashtun identity; and the rise of various

construals of "Pashtun nationalism" within this social domain.

//. Kandahari Courtiers through 1919: a Case Study

The work of Senzil Nawid illustrates the importance of elite scholars, who also

possessed sizable land grants in some cases, as well as private military forces. Among the

"small, important families" that "dominated the upper echelons" of not only the 'ulama,

but official and intellectual life in Afghanistan, we can above all include the Kakar

Akhundzada family centered on Bamlzai Kucha, in Kandahar city.3 A contextualized

study of this family can illustrate the shifting nature of aristocracy in Afghanistan. At the

same time, it sheds light upon the early twentieth century court and the agency of the

state's mediators; and on the development of early nation-state ideologies as well. For

this study the historian is indebted to the substantial efforts of Muhammad Ma'sum

Hotak, who has painstakingly collated earlier information on the family from a variety of

prosopographical sources and published his notes in a 2004 lineage tazkira under the title

Drana Korsnay [A Substantial/Prominent House].

3
The quotes arefromNawid 1997: 584.
 23

ILL The Akhundzadas up to 1905

The lineage traces its lineage back to the migration of a Mulla Fayz Allah from

Zhob to the Kandahar court of Ahmad Shah Durrani; whereupon he served as an educator

to the crown prince TTmur. Fayz Allah's son was bom in Bamizai Kucha around 1800,

and went by the nickname Habbu Akhundzada.4 His cosmopolitan training was rooted in

the 'ulum-i manqul - the mostly evidence-based, transmitted sciences. These included, as

M. M. Hotak enumerates them,

sarf [morphology], nafrw [syntax], balaghat [preaching/oratory], tafsir

[Qur'anic exegesis], hadis [accounts of the life of the Prophet, to be collated as
sources of Islamic positive law], fiqh [jurisprudence], akhlaqiyat [post-
Aristotelian ethics].5

Hotak goes on, however, to note that Habbu Akhundzada singlehandedly revived the

study in Afghanistan of the deductive-logical ma 'qui sciences as well, which had been

suppressed the loss of centralized imperial cities in Central Asia following the Mongol

devastation of the thirteenth century.6 Earning the sobriquet 'allama for his efforts,

Habbu traveled to India, Iran, and Hijaz in order to attain knowledge in these branches,

which included "riyazi [mathematics]; najum [astrology]; hey'at [astronomy]; falsafa

[post-Aristotelian rationalist philosophy]; and mantiq [logical disputation]."7

As Juan Cole argues in his study of post-imperial monarchic structure in Awadh, a

ma 'qul-hescvy curriculum was particularly well-suited to the professional requirements of

an military-bureaucratic aristocrat ruling an estate within a larger agrarian empire:

As nawabi rule grew more regionally centered and more autonomous from
4
M. M. Hotak 1382 SH [2004]: 12. Refer also to Zalmai 1349 SH [1970]: 164 and subsequent
5
M. M. Hotak, op. cit.. Translation is mine. Here the status of akhlaqiyat is ambiguous; it seems to me
that it should more appropriately be counted among the ma 'qui sciences.
6
M. M. Hotak, op. cit: 15
7
M. M. Hotak, op. cit.: 14-15
 24

Delhi, and as the province's revenues increased, more opportunities arose for
government service locally. Farangi Mahall produced a rationalist culture
useful to the Muslim and Islamized Hindu notable and service classes who
administered their own estates or served in the bureaucratic arm of the
prebendal state, and its method spread widely in India.8

The table of works included in the curriculum of the Farangi Mahal provided by Cole, on

the same page as the above quote, corresponds closely to the list provided by Hotak

above in proportion of content. Can we take the addition of new subjects to the

Akhundzadas' repertoire to be a response to a perceived need? A similar prebendal state

began to arise in Kandahar under Timur Shah, a short few decades after Farangi Mahal's

rise. In short, since the rise of a Pashtun aristocracy as independent monarchs the

Akhundzada family had been well-entrenched in the development of its cosmopolitanized

intellectual infrastructure, and integrated itself to varying degrees with ruling

aristocracies.

The career of the Akhundzada family after the state consolidation of the Amir 'Abd

al-Rahman illustrates a process by which aristocratic scholars gradually consolidated

their power against the monarchy. As the state apparatus created by 'Abd al-Rahman and

the Amirs before him grew more complex, it relied on aristocrats to manage its

operations who, like most men of means, were privately educated in the cosmopolitan

canon of Perso-Islamicate liberal arts.9 In many cases, the Amir Habib Allah drew upon

the expertise of the Durrani sardars and their retinues whom his father, the previous

Amir 'Abd al-Rahman, had exiled as rivals during the previous generation. A generation

spent abroad in British India (or in a few conspicuous cases, Iran or the Ottoman Empire)

8
Cole 1989: 44
9
This canon was passed down "in authority-bearing and rich households": "pa muqtadaro aw shtamano
koranayo fcce". Ghowsi and UNESCO 1347: 7
 25

reduced many of those aristocrats' political networks which made them dangerous rivals

in the first place; and also reinforced a new scale of pan-Pashtun, and pan-Afghan, self-

awareness in the returnees. Few things serve as well as exile does to reinforce ethnic or

national identities, or to transform preexisting genres of self-awareness into ethnic or

national identities. At the same time, many of these returnees brought cosmopolitan ideas

of social change from Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta, Tehran, and Istanbul, introducing, in

the words of literary scholar Zewar al-Dln Zewar, "deluvian reforms" upon their return to

Afghanistan.10

The Hotak Akhundzadas, not quite dangerous enough to be exiled in the first place,

thrived in the vacuum and persisted once the exiles returned; and rose to great

prominence in the period from 1901 to 1928.

During the reign of the Amir Habib Allah, Mawlawi 'Abd al-Rabb Akhundzada

served as personal mulla to the Amir. He took a leading role in the new Teachers'

Training Institute, or Dar al-Mu 'allimin, as well as in the new elementary school system.

His juridical prominence was sufficient for the poet 'Abd al-Hadl Dawl to write, looking

back on the Habib Allah era in the pages of the newly-established paper Aman-i Afghan,

that the loss of Amir Habib Allah, Mawlawi 'Abd al-Rabb, and the Sufi leader Zia

Ma'sum created great voids in the realm of "rulership, law, and religious brotherhoods",

respectively.11 Among his works, 'Abd al-Rabb published a series of doctrinal texts on

the divine right of monarchs in a new public forum: the second publication run of the

paper Siraj al-Akhbar headed by the prominent young intellectual Mahmud TarzT (a

10
Zewar 1385: 55
11
That is, saltanat, shari'at, and tariqat. Refer to Aman-i Afghan no. 1, 22 Hamal, 1298 SH (1919)
[Library, Area Study Centre, Peshawar University].
 26

member of the royal family) and founded by 'Abd al-Rabb's father 'Abd al-Ra'uf

Akhundzada. It is clear that the Akhundzadas cultivated a close long-term relationship

with Tarzi's family, though the full nature of that relationship is less clear.12

II.2. Lineage Integration Supporting Constitutionalist Critique

'Abd al-Rabb's brother Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' Qandahari had an even more

striking career, in Kabul, which lasted beyond the Habib Allah era.13 Mawlawi Wasi' was

engaged in the first movement aimed at circumscribing the absolutist power of the Amir:

the first wave of the "Constitutionalist Movement" (Junbish-i Mashrutiyaf) which took

shape in 1905 or so. This movement had a three-fold structure, according to M. G. M.

Ghobar.14 The first rank - 'Abd al-Wasi' among them - was composed of liberal

aristocratic courtiers who wished to reform the monarchic system. They probably had

access to liberalist and reformist periodicals in Persian such as the Habl al-Matin from

Calcutta and the Akhtar-i Istanbul from Istanbul, as Wakmsn suggests.15 There is no

doubt that the Afghan constitutionalists drew inspiration from the revolutionary

constitutional agitations in Iran of 1905, and had access to the Persian literature produced

by that movement. They must have also been aware of mass protests in Bengal against

British absolutism around the same time, mass action which eventually forced the British

to make some concessions of representation to imperial subjects. The intermediation of

12
Tarzi hailed from a returned expatriate family of the royal lineage, and his daughter Sorayya married
the crown prince Aman Allah. Though he probably had little facility in Pashto, he advocated for its
development as a modern cosmopolitan language akin to Persian. Tarzi claimed that Farsi's role in
countries from Turkey to India, excepting Persia, was analogous to French as an official or diplomatic
language in non-Francophone countries of Europe; and that all Afghans regardless of background
should consider the "Afghani", or Pashto, language to be their national language. See Siraj al-Akhbar
Afghaniya, Jawza 1296 (HQ). [Princeton University Library].
13
M. M. Hotak 1382: 66. My translation and bracketed annotation.
14
Ghobar 1359: 716-720 passim.
15
Wakman 1384 SH [2005]: 16.
 27

individuals such as Mahmoud Tarzi, who had a deep engagement with outside literature,

was important.16 Finally, many early critiques of absolutism with which I am familiar

drew upon ideas from globalized pan-Islamic 'political modernists' such as Sayyid Jamal

al-Dln al-Afghani.

Even so, there is no need to draw only links of an intellectual-genealogical nature,

or of wholesale borrowing from the outside. That line of argument ultimately serves only

to remove a view of historical agency and dynamism within Afghanistan from the

historical narrative. Similarly, the arguments of Leon Poullada and Vartan Gregorian that

the changes in Afghanistan in the early twentieth century represent the logic of court-

directed "modernization" may possess a certain appeal, given the rise of certain

stereotypically "modern" institutions like schools and newspapers, as well as

constitutional reform.17 However, this view also serves to obscure the agency of the

individuals who actually managed those institutions and fought hard for checks on

monarchic absolutism. Also, while some developments of the period may fit the broad

contours predicted by modernization theory, other phenomena do not fit - for example,

the maintenance of family as a political strategy.

In contrast to an argument based in an abstract political-scientific model of

"modernization", or an intellectual genealogy divorced from the socio-political stakes

held by individuals, I suggest here that the rise of a tightly-integrated aristocratic

managing class with links to the upper ranks of royalty itself was part of the reason for a

chipping away of the absolute authority of the monarchy. Mawlawi Wasi' is a case in
16
Refer to Ahmadi 2008, especially Chapters 1 -2
17
See Gregorian 1969, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization
(Stanford University Press) and Leon Poullada 1973, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919-1929:
King Amanullah 's Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Cornell University Press)
 28

point, displaying an increased integration of sub-royal, soon-to-be oligarchic lineages. He

himself married into a very prominent landed, aristocratic Hotak family of Kandahar.

Fortuitously, he had seven daughters and married them strategically, diversifying his

social assets. M. M. Hotak writes:

One was married to QazT 'Abd al-Samad Khan Kakar; another was married to
Muhammad Qasim Akhundzada 'Attar [a trader from a very prominent family
of Kharuti intellectuals]. A third was married to that servant of the Pashto
language, MawlawT Salih Muhammad Hotak [grandson of a highly prominent
trader from Kandahar's elite Hotak lineage, and son of 'Abd al-Wasi's sister].
The fourth was married to the famous scholar and intellectual MawlawT
Muhammad AmTn KhuganT; and the fifth was married to Muhammad Anwar
Khan Popalzai [from among the rural landed gentry of the royal Durrani super-
tribe]. His eldest daughter was married to Kaka Muhammad Sa'Td, and the
youngest was married to HajT Sultan Muhammad Hotak, better known as Lalu
Jan [son of Mirza Khan Muhammad Khan Hotak, the brother of 'Abd al-
Wasi's wife]18

Although the above example speaks only of ties of marriage, many ties in this rising

aristocratic integration blended professional and personal aspects. Much activity centered

around the new Habibiya Madrasa, founded in Kabul in 1903 with a traditional Persianate

liberal arts curriculum under the heavy consultation of the Akhundzada family.19 Western

liberal arts subjects were included along with imported teachers in 1906, at which time

the Madrasa was relabeled 'Habibiya Lycee'. The college's students consisted mainly of

the aristocratic "sons of khans, other influential persons, and traders."20 A number of

Habibiya teachers who belonged to the courtly level of the constitutional movement

recruited nearly 300 students in a secret organization aimed at working for constitutional

18
M. M. Hotak 1382: 66. My translation and bracketed annotation.
19
For information on the Akhundzadas' role in the state educational infrastructure, refer to the foregoing
discussion. For information on Constitutional activities in the Habibiya Lyc6e, refer to the three best
works, all in Afghan languages, which discuss this period: Wakman 2005; Ghobar 1359 SH [1980]; and
A. H. Habibi 1383 SH [2004]. The latter two are based on first-hand or second-hand experience; while
thefirstcollates and critically analyzes the accounts contained in the others.
20
Wakman 1384 SH [2005]: 15
 29

monarchy, as well as "spreading civilization [tamadduri] to the masses."21

The overwhelming preponderance of gentleman scholars belonging to Kandahari

families in the ranks of the first phase of the constitutional movement is striking indeed.

Of those leaders of the movement listed in 'Abd al-Hayy Habibi's landmark work on the

subject,22 we can include the movement's leader, Mawlawi Muhammad Sarwar Wassif

Kandahar! and his brother Sa'd Allah Khan, as coming from Kandahari families beyond

any doubt; along with around two-thirds of the rest.23

I suggest that in addition to their control over the state's ideological and

bureaucratic apparatus, the strength derived from building extensive linkages between

these families is what enabled them to make the demands they did against the royal

family and the monarchy under Habib Allah. And, buoyed by the moral power of

constitutional and reform movements across Eurasia, they did indeed make demands -

which shaped policy under the subsequent monarch, Aman Allah.

Under the Amir Habib Allah, who inherited the throne in 1901, a scion of the

Akhundzada family, Mawlawi 'Abd al-Ra'uf, was notable for founding the court

newspaper Siraj al-Akhbar, by far the leading periodical of the time, which features

prominently in all studies of elite politics in the period and in all accounts of the growth

21
Refer to Ghobar 1359 SH [1980]: op. cit. For the quote about civilization, see Wakman 2005: 17.
22
This should be counted among A. H. Habibi's most reliable works, based as it is on his personal access
to many of those involved. Habibi himself was a member of the Akhundzada family, a much younger
cousin to Mawlawi Wasi'. Its limitations appear to be related to Habibi's historiographical perspectives,
more than they are to what might be called an imaginative approach to historical evidence (this note
appears necessary, inasmuch as some western and Afghan scholars have accused Habibi of inventing
primary sources; refer to Chapter Four passim for more extended remarks).
23
Refer to A. H. Habibi 1383 SH [2004]: 24 and passim; Zalmai 1349 SH [1970]; Ghobar 1359 SH
[1980] for notes on biodata. Even considering a certain degree of Kandahar- and Pashtun-centrism
present in Habibi's and Zalmai's perspectives, the number of Kandahari elites involved in the upper
echelons of the movement is still noteworthy. Not all were Pashtuns by lineage; however, that only
supports the argument here.
 30

of nation-state ideologies in Afghanistan.24 In 1906, Mawlawi Ra'uf, along with a number

of other prominent intellectuals and aristocrats, presented an eleven-paragraph demand to

the Amir Habib Allah for the founding of this paper, which they wanted to print news

about local affairs as well as about affairs in Turkey, India, England, and the Middle East.

Each paragraph was signed with an "aristocratic signature" (dastikhat-i sardar-i wala), a

signature by a member of the royal family which would lend the demand some weight

and protection. M. Wall Zalmai, the compiler of a biographical dictionary of Kandahari

notables, understands the signature to be that of 'Abd al-Quddiis I'timad-i Dawla

(subsequently the Prime Minister under Habib Allah's son Aman Allah).25 Notably, the

third paragraph stated that the news should be sent to some form of Parliament, who

would decide what was worth publishing for the people of Kabul - an implicit nod to an

oligarchy in formation.26

This demand was only the beginning. In 1909 members of the Constitutional

Movement felt confident enough that they presented a demand for a constitutional

political order to Habib Allah, in which they implicitly threatened an uprising on the

ongoing Iranian model.27 Unfortunately for the movement, however, this came on the

heels of reports outlining a plot against the king's life, and 1909 saw a year of harsh

reprisals.28

24
For a sustained and interpretive discussion on the Siraj al-Akhbar, the best source is now Wali Ahmadi
2008. For Mawlawi 'Abd al-Ra'uf s role in founding the paper, refer to M. M. Hotak 1382 SH [2003]:
38. Refer to Zalmai 1349 SH [1970]: 253-262 for a more extended discussion on the life and especially
the works of Mawlawi 'Abd al-Ra'uf than Hotak provides.
25
Refer to Zalmai op. cit.: 246
26
A summary of the demand is included in Zalmai op., cit: 246-247.
27
Both A. H. Habibi 1383 SH [2004] and Ghobar 1359 SH [1980] replicate the same list of goals for the
movement; while neither replicate the written demand for constitutional order. This information comes
through oral histories of the participants in the movement with whom Ghobar and Habibi spoke.
28
Wakman 1384 SH [2005]: 23.
 31

The movement found renewed strength with the reestablishment, in 1913, of the

Siraj al-Akhbar, under the management of Mahmoud Tarzi. The constitutional movement

remained strong until the assassination of Habib Allah in 1919, and the accession of

Aman Allah to the throne. Aman Allah promptly asserted Afghanistan's independence

from the British empire, and convened a Loya Jirga in order to legitimate his rule with

rural power.

The primary factor that undermined constitutional agitation, though, was Aman

Allah's concessions to urbane intellectual and managerial oligarchic lineages, along with

a very select few landed/military aristocrats (and, as we shall see in Mawlawi Wasi's

case, lines between the two could sometimes be blurry). They were allowed to buy in to

absolutism. Under the new king, elite Pashtun scholarly activity was sufficiently tied in

with central governance that the intellectual activities of this class played a role

determining the scope of integral policy. Sardar ' Abd al-Quddus, under whom Mawlawi

'Abd al-Wasi's personal militia fought in the 1919 campaign for Afghan independence

from British India, was installed as an official in the office of the Prime Minister.

Meanwhile Mawlawi Wasi' himself wrote the two-volume legal code for the new regime

(entitled Tamassuk al-Qaza'at-i Amaniyyd) while helping to draft legislation in the

Justice Ministry under the tutelage of Turkish advisors. Hotak claims that during the

Aman Allah period, so great was the legislative role of Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' that "a

majority of the Nizam-namas [edicts] passed during that time were enacted after

receiving his signature. On those documents his name appears as Khadim al-'Ulama'

[Servant of the Learned Clergy] Muhammad 'Abd al-Wasi' Qandaharl."29

29
M. M. Hotak 1382 SH [2003]: 45. The holdings of the Digital Afghanistan Library project confirm a
 32

Aman Allah's calling of the Loya Jirga was the first of many self-consciously

"Pashtun" symbols employed during that time, and increasingly thereafter - many

scholars saw it as a case of 'manufactured tradition'.30 For the time being, though, we

should note that during the Aman Allah period, an ideology of aristocracy integrated into

imperial-cosmopolitan ideologies of rule far outweighed the sort of nativist, rural

Pashtun-oriented symbolism in strong evidence later, which I explore in the next chapter.

Indeed, as a key text by Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' presented in the following section

makes abundantly clear, post-Mughal and post-Safavid imperial-cosmopolitan ideologies

were the language of power in which Pashtun court scholars expressed themselves

against rural power.

In the setting of the period after the constitutional movement, elite scholarly

adaptations of older monarchic ideologies, produced within the monarchic state apparatus

itself, simultaneously argued against the politics of lineage rule at the center, and against

lineage or 'tribal' competition patterns in the Pashtun hinterlands. There was in reality a

great range and fluidity in actual Pashtun lineage dynamics, which defies typologization,

as Noelle points out.31 Despite that fluidity, in this elite discourse we find the some of the

first suggestion of a rural elite politics of competition framed as 'Pashtun', 'provincial',

and 'tribal'; which was juxtaposed in contrast to a universalism located in values of

rather high frequency of this signature, though "a majority" might perhaps be an overstatement.
30
As M. Jamil Hanifi (2004) points out, there is little in Pashtun history until this time sanctioning a
"loya" (grand) jirga as tradition. The Loya Jirga is a state tool of legitimacy, simultaneously invoking
and creating visions of ethnicized political practice. Ghobar 1356 SH [1980]: 810, in relation to the
subsequent Loya Jirga of 1924, is almost unique in emphasizing a dimension of local hierarchy creation
too: "...The selected participants of the jirga were mostly, in the majority, from the religious leaders,
khans, and large landowners and traders, and they defended only their own class interests, not the
interests of the broad masses of sharecroppers, pastoralists, and artisan/service workers." My translation
from Persian.
31
See Noelle 1997, especially Chapter 3.
 33

popular individual participation in sovereignty and the rule of law. This universalism

derived its legitimacy from an intellectual tradition that happened to be developed in

Persian, but was not tied to the social identity of that language. It was a tradition that was

easily transmissible across linguistic boundaries - unlike what was to be the case with the

signifiers 'Pashto' and 'Pashtun'.

II. 3. The Radical Poetics of Masculinity and Person amongst Courtiers

In 1925, Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' composed a notable poem in 116 couplets, which

he gave an Arabic title derived from a Qur'anic exhortation: "Wa Ta'awanii 'ila l-Birri

wa 'l-Taqwa", or, "Cooperate toward Righteousness and Piety". For various reasons, it

seems likely that it was composed as a public address, though this cannot be claimed with

certainty.32

Superficially, this poem is a fairly dense treatise on the formal post-Aristotelian

discipline of akhlaq, outlining a Utopian world derived from the proper implementation of

ethics. Reading this poem is productive for cultural historians in two ways. In reference

to its positive argument, we gain some insight into the character of Afghan

constitutionalist thought and its assumptions of individual agency in the state.

Meanwhile, in reference to the negative argument contained in the poem - reading it

'against the grain' - we can gain an appreciation of how elite actors such as Mawlawi

Wasi' viewed the agency of their rural, lower-level counterparts in the Pashtun

hinterland. In other words, we gain a picture of how some central elite intellectual circles

32
Versified addresses were highly common in Pashto public life around the turn of the 20* century - refer
to Caron 2007 for some discussion. Mawlawi Wasi' was a primary orator in the Pul-i Khishtl mosque in
Kabul; and he was frequently deputed by the monarchy to address tribal gatherings as well.
 34

'provincialized' the hinterland in their narratives, and framed ideas of Pashtunness in

semi-official state communication. For some state intellectual elites during the 1920s,

even Pashtun ones, Pashtunness came to be the self-destructive opposite of Utopian

universality. By bringing this aspect into the discussion, I mean to suggest that this sort of

activity helped demarcate the saliency of Pashtunness more strongly as a social category,

regardless of any value judgment involved; at the same time it discursively articulated a

particular type of state.

II. 3. A. Internalizing the Rule of Law as Empowerment and Masculine Self-Realization

The poem is roughly divisible into three segments. First is a highly abstract section

employing a number of concepts derived from cosmopolitan Perso-Islamic akhlaq, or

ethical, literature. It seeks to link perfection of the masculine subject, and even true

masculinity and humanity itself - sqrJtob, "the state of being a (hu)man,"- to the search

for wisdom.33 It then equates wisdom with wijdan, or the reflexive, self-searching faculty

of conscience.34 Finally, it claims that models of humanity and masculinity based on

social custom, rather than acquired transcendent wisdom, place a person in a category

somewhere between boy and animal:

This conscience, called as such--/-- In the consensus of same-aged youth

Is not conscience, but the urges of nature--/—Playing around with words is a
great problem
If it were a conscience of [hu]manhood, these urges--/--Would be harmonized
33
I thank M. Jamil Hanifi (personal correspondence, Dec. 2008) for pointing out that there is a component
of rationality overlaying that of masculinity in the concept of saritob - similar to the Persian adamiyat.
On the other hand, rationality itself has historically been equated with ideas of patriarchal masculinity,
not only in the Islamic world but indeed in the ancient Greek philosophy from which this particular
ethical tradition was derived.
34
This word would be better known as vojdan to most Persianists. Here, I use the pronunciation given in
Rahimi and Rohi (1979) in their Pashto dictionary, which generally privileges the Kandahari usage. It is
also similar to the broader South Asian pronunciation of Indo-Persian terms, as for example in Urdu
discourses on ethics.
 35

on questions of good and shame

My object of praise would not be yours of reproach~/~Bad would be bad; and
good, good, for all humanity

Mawlawi Wasi' thus builds upon gerontocratic ideals of masculinity as mature

elderhood, not simply maleness alone. He then situates individual wijdan as the source

for collective law, once it is aggregated in consensus; and as an individually internalized

microcosm of societal law also. Since wijdan is a divinely-inspired attribute, in a perfect

world formed of well-adjusted, complete masculine subjects, there would be "no talk of

Islam and unbelief--/-- everyone would just do what is right".35 The argument decides

that rule of law is inherently just, regardless of its source, since it comes from the distilled

perfection of men, and from their divinely-bestowed faculty of wijdan. This not

coincidentally justifies one major criticism of Mawlawi Wasi's authority noted by

Olesen: that it was based on western models and was against Islamic natural law, or

shan'a.36 This critique had some damaging potential in it: much of Mawlawi Wasi's

activity was centered around legitimating the highly secularized legal advice of Aman

Allah's Turkish legal experts.37

In the conclusion, Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' wraps his theory of the individual

masculine subject, empowered as a self-sovereign citizen through the individual and

collective dimensions of wijdan, into political theory. In the classic imperial-Persianate

political-ethical theory of Khurasan and India - the deductive/rational discipline of

akhlaq - the link between individual microcosm and sociopolitical macrocosm was the

divine light of God's sovereignty, refracted through the ordering principle of the king,
35
'Abd al-Wasi' Akhundzada 1925: line 21
36
Refer to Olesen 1995, especially 134-136.
37
Refer to Poullada 1973 and McChesney and Katib 1999 for opposing views on the roles of the two
Turkish jurists.
 36

and so on down through state officials into households and the individual patriarch.

Divine order in each nested sphere, each headed by a real or metaphorical father figure,

mutually reinforced order in the others.38

The Mawlawi recasts wijdan here not as a result of divinely-ordained monarchic

rationalization of the social universe, but as a collective phenomenon of law. The law as

wijdan is, in the poem, placed physically above society in the form of a vast mirror

planted in the Char-Su crossroads of Kandahar City. What does this mirror reflect, in this

constitutional moment? It reflects the light of popular sovereignty, empowered by

individuals.

Everyone has this sort of mirror in their home—/-But it's covered in rust and
tarnish [...]
What is this rust, but self-interest and ego--/—This one becomes 'Sir'; I,
'Reverend'; she, 'Lady' [...]
If this idea of cooperation is ever loosed upon the world~/~Then it's clear that
all men will become nobility39 [...]
So then, Pashtun! Desire this blessing above all—/-That you will be able to live
by this little speech of mine [...]
In our houses there is an old mirror—/-- Rust can't affect it; it is clear ...
It's proudly passed down from our fathers~/~And now it's in my inheritance
[...]
Come! Let's place it atop the Char-Su crossroads—/--And the whole world will
see it from the four directions [...]
Benefit and injury will be clear for all to see~/~The winners and losers will be
visible
Our place will be filled with the exercise of cooperation—/-Each individual
person will be resplendent

This device - an externalized mirror of conscience - reinforces the individual tool of

self-analysis crucial to the alignment of internal and external forces, macrocosm and

This topic has been studied quite extensively in recent years by Muzaffar Alam, Rosalind O'Hanlon,
Lisa Balabanlilar, and Catherine Asher, among others across disciplinary boundaries; and only
Mawlawi Wasi's adaptation on the tradition is discussed here. Refer to Muzaffar Alam 2004, especially
Chapter 2, "Sharl a, Akhlaq and Governance"; Catherine Asher 2004; Lisa Balabanlilar 2007; and
Rosalind O'Hanlon 2007. See also the work of Ruby Lai 2005, on the Mughal family.
Nobility: literally khawas, the "special" or "particular" (as opposed to the 'awam, the "generalized" or
"mass").
 37

microcosm in universal harmonious order. Rule can be legitimate when it derives from

the self-sovereign subject, but that subject must polish his own mirror in order for the

social mirror to shine its light back to the individual and empower him or her. If properly

realized, though, this universal order would foster a total egalitarianism, as described in

the above lines (which appear in original sequence, but with intervening lines edited out

for brevity).

II. 3. B. Externalizing State Masculinity as Dominance.

The middle section of the poem is, in this connection, extremely interesting.

Mawlawi Wasi' has argued that true, mature masculinity is achievable only through the

individual subject's harmonization of internal motivating desires. This harmonization is

achieved through subjectivity's existence in dialectic with a macrocosmic social

conscience, which is to say, law. The achievement of true, complete masculine

subjectivity is a spiritual harmony achievable only through external alignment with

society. Moving into the second section with a hypothetical situation Mawlawi Wasi'

elaborates upon a popular Pashto proverb, and describes a village dystopia of anarchy,

stagnant economy, and starvation.40

I say it to myself; now you listen too--/-- "Even if my father owns the water
mill, I still wait my turn."
And he'd give everyone a turn, my father--/—But what if I preempted everyone
else's turn?
I'd turn the mill myself for a tiny bag of wheat—/--And if I wore out the seat of
my pants doing it
I'd not ask my family or my village for even a patch~/~If someone called out,
I'd become deaf and turn away
Thinking only about this flour in the sack~/~I'd end up empty handed,

The proverb - ka da plar zranda wa ham pa war da.- seems to be quite widespread. It appears almost
identically in the Pakistan-produced proverb collection Rohi Mataluna (Tair and Edwards 2006: 287) as
zranda ka da plar da ham pa war da..
 38

wretched every year [...]

Every man brings self-interested behavior into being~/~I am my own; and you,
yours : this is our ideal manhood
The wellspring of prosperity, cooperation, is left behind~/--I tell you to shut
up; you tell me to shut up.
In all the silence, religion and the world go astray~/~We'd have no
professions, no goods, no bounty [...]
Since when does a youngster have patience for advice~/~And what tasteless
acts do the elderly commit?!
A "long-beard" lays down beside a boy~/~Leave him to his sport; he has no
shame [...]
Those who don't want guidance can't be guided~/~Hungry, blind, wretched,
needy, powerless [...]
Cooperation is gone from the qabila [tribe], and the qawm

[tribe/people/nation]--/--We may have long beards but we act like boys

A word on the context of this poem is highly important. As noted above, the Aman Allah

years were marked by charges of massive corruption among self-interested provincial

government officials. Some even tried to create factions aimed at overthrowing the state,

which the monarchy defused by playing them against other tribal factions aligned with

the state. Entire lineages were destroyed in this way.41 Most importantly, a very major

1924 uprising in the Pashtun border district of Khost was initially sparked by provincial

bribery and conflicts of interest between state officials. Arising out of a very local matter

over marriage, it rapidly ballooned into a massive armed conflict in protest of a number

of issues relating to gender.42 Among these issues were the state's insistence on military

conscription according to a new system, which removed the ability of lineage elders to

keep their sons out of service. As Deniz Kandiyoti reminds us, military conscription as a

state policy creates a particular form of masculine subjectivity within very hierarchical

relationships of subordination. It also supplants the authority of the conscript's lineage -

41
Refer to Ghobar 1359 SH [1980]: 800 for one such account during the early Aman Allah years.
42
Poullada, op. cit., especially 121-123. For a full, and cynical, account, see Ghobar 1359 SH [1980]:
806-811.
 39

the state in effect becoming a substitute father.43

Secondly, much of the ideology evident in the Khost uprising revolved around the

state's adherence - or not - to the shari 'a in its gender legislation. Mawlawi Wasi' was

sent to convince local mullas that the reforms which he had helped draft were not in

conflict with religious law.44 Yet, this was not simply a blanket condemnation of an

irreligious state. As both Poullada and Aman Allah himself noted, the criticism was

specifically directed against marriage reforms, which restricted polygamy and raised the

legal age of marriage.45 In a situation where kinship was a major source of power even at

the center, and strategic marriage helped consolidate power of rural political networks,

restricting marriage could be tantamount to restricting the ability of men to be politicians.

Shari 'a may have provided a powerful vocabulary in which to mount this critique; but if

a general adherence to doctrine had been the only issue, Mawlawi Wasi' might have left

his discussion to those initial observations on wisdom, rather than extensively dealing

with the ethics of masculinity and self-sovereign, personal empowerment through law.

As might be guessed, the reason for this digression is that this 1925 poem seems to

contain more than a little response to the events of 1924. Mawlawi Wasi' was one of the

state's chief negotiators at the Loya Jirga that year, mediating between the monarchy and

rural landed power that the monarchy sought to rule.46 Certain lines in the poem also

appear to reference specific events in the chain that led to the Khost uprising: "Don't tell

the religious scholar that someone's done bad --/— How much will it take to set a khan
43
Refer to Kandiyoti 1994 for some remarks on the effects of military conscription upon ideologies of
masculinity in present-day Turkey (and it might be only slightly irrelevant to note that the Afghan
national army drew heavily on Turkish advisors at the time in question)
44
Olesen 1995: 135.
45
Poullada op. cit.
46
Olesen op. cit.
 40

against him?"

Composed during the period of this political context, this portion of the poem is

aimed at one of two things. It may simply be an aristocratic complaint about the baseness

of provincial populations, intended for circulation within only restricted circles.

However, the majority of the poem's optimistic, highly encouraging didactic tone and its

strong progressive socio-political program seems to undermine this reading. Additionally,

given Mawlawi Wasi's role as a mediator with anti-government mullas and at the Loya

Jirga; and considering the social uses of such texts in early modern imperial political

systems, it is tempting to conjecture further. The Mughal emperor Akbar recommended

that texts with strikingly similar vocabulary and politico-ethical theory be used daily by

state officials in their own self-examination.47 Could this text have been intended for

public reading at the Loya Jirga, or at subsequent local gatherings designed to reactivate

the arguments of that Jirga? If so, it would be an impassioned attempt at convincing

provincial and local elites to set aside a commitment to a zero-sum politics of rivalry and

competition, and to refine their ethical sense to avoid moral corruption in favor of the

common goal of social unity.

In short, the text constructs an ideal "Pashtun" audience, as evidenced by the

language it is in, and by the explicit address "Ay Paxtuna!" near the end. In form, at least,

it aims at persuading what Mawlawi Wasi' considered authentically "Pashtun-style"

politics - khan and malik (landed lineage or village head) politics - out of lower
47
The vocabulary parallels are strong indeed. Mawlawi Wasi's term for universal harmony is Tusi's and
Abu'l-Fazl's sulh-i hull; and this is only the most glaring example. Regarding the social domain of the
texts, O'Hanlon 2007:907 points out that akhlaq texts were, in Akbar's period, meant to be read out
loud in darbars (courts) on various levels for the edification of officials. Those officials also were
encouraged to enlist support of confidants in order to engage in self-reflection as to their internalized
harmony - the better to harmonize their own households and socio-political domains in turn.
 41

governmental echelons in provincial settings, much as Mughal didactic works were

intended to do. It also seeks to refine the consciousness of lineage and village leaders, the

sort of person who, like the Mawlawi himself, would actually be in the position to own

the village mill.48

Mawlawi Wasi' sets up an alternative rubric of manhood in order to help achieve

this goal, a positive commitment to the word "masculinity" being the common discursive

field where the two typologized political systems he is working with - khan politics and

the state - can meet. He critiques a masculinity based on individual zero-sum competitive

worthiness; equates it with pederasty and other paternalistic forms of intimate social

relations characterized by sharply unequal power relations; and claims that this

masculinity is equivalent only to the chaotic psychology of boyhood. Thus, the theme of

individualized and rationalized masculinity is Mawlawi Wasi's point of entry for

establishing his, and the Afghan state's, ideological dominance over the (postulated)

zero-sum lineage and faction politics of the hinterland. This was, moreover, bound up in

reasserting models of appropriate governance, and warning local state officials against

becoming influenced by local political involvements.

7/7. From Personalized Aristocracy to Civil Society

In the most central of state circles, such as that in which Mawlawi Wasi' worked,

Pashto and those who communicated primarily in it often appear to have been regarded

through a lens of provincialized alterity. Yet this was not the case for aristocrats who

48
M. M. Hotak's footnote to the original poem informs us that Mawlawi Wasi's use of the proverb was
interesting for the fact that his father did actually own the village mill (and presumably the rest of the
village) as part of his estate in rural Kandahar. Refer to M. M. Hotak 1383 SH [2004]: 55.
 42

might have been equally powerful in some sense, but were not as integrated into the

cosmopolitan central state. The generation of scholars under Aman Allah received quite a

bit of patronage for the development of Pashto. Whether it was out of a hypothetical

shared ideological commitment on some level; or whether it was in hopes of integrating

and subordinating more extensive Pashtun populations into, and under, the elite

cosmopolitan textual umbrella of the state, is unclear. The latter might more plausible,

based on what we can see from an analysis of Mawlawi Wasi's work.

On the immediate subject of governmental patronage for Pashto cultural activity, it

appears that an early form of ethnic nationalism aiming at cosmopolitan status for Pashto

was coterminous with the rise of civil society in Kandahar.49 The driving motor for this

rise of civil society was a growing integration of elite aristocracy with mercantile elites:

networks of men from nominally less royal, though equally powerful and probably

wealthier, lineages.

An early organization called Da Paxto Maraka, or Pashto Conference, was founded

in Kandahar in 1306 [1927 or 1928], according to a history of a later institution indirectly

descended from the Maraka: the Da Paxto Totena [Pashto Society], which was the state's

official Pashto Academy.50 That history also states, however, that the Maraka was one of

the first institutions established in the Aman Allah period (1919-1929). And indeed,

Zalmai Hewadmal places the date of the Maraka's founding quite a bit earlier - to 1923,

citing 'Abd al-Ra'uf Benawa.51 Reconciling the dates involves noting that the Maraka

was established through private local efforts in Kandahar at first, while the later, more
49
By civil society I refer to the sum total of non-state, and also non-religious, organizations that formed
an intermediary between state and individual.
so P J L J j355. vjj s e e a i s o Senzil Nawid, forthcoming, p. 4.
51
Hewadmal 1996: 652
 43

commonly cited date was its date of official recognition through official edict.52 Indeed,

Hewadmal's history of Pashto prose indicates that the Maraka began as a private salon

and incorporated a large number of cosmopolitan intellectuals, even including Mawlawi

Wasi' sitting in Kabul. The congruence between a list of the members of this salon

reproduced in Hewadmal's 1996 work; Habibi's list of the participants in the

Constitutional Movement; and those in the ranks of the intellectuals who presented the

demands for a newspaper to Habib Allah should be noted.53

III.l. Aristocratic Alliance with Mercantile Elites; the "Nationalization" of Pashto

Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' undeniably contributed to the growth and development of

the Pashto language, and used it as a vehicle for political-spiritual theory as well as state

communication as we have seen above. In terms of a reflexive exercise aimed at

"developing" Pashto, though, it is Mawlawi Wasi's son-in-law and nephew (via his

sister), Mawlawi Salih Muhammad Qandaharl Hotak, whom 'Abd al-Wasi' personally

educated, that better exemplifies this trend during the period of 1915 to 1930.

Under the Amir Habib Allah, Salih Muhammad served as a Pashto instructor when

Habibiya Lycee first began teaching the subject in 1915, and wrote a series of early

pedagogical works for the language, as well as a Pashto grammar (in Persian).54 He began

serving as deputy director (under his other maternal uncle, Mawlawi 'Abd al-Rabb) of all

state-run elementary education in 1916.55 When the next king, Aman Allah, decided to

52 pjLT 1356: op. cit. Refer also to Government of Afghanistan, Da Asasl TashkTlato Nizam Nama of
1306 (Library, Peshawar University Area Study Centre).
53
For the latter, refer to Zalmai 1349 SH [ 1960]: 246.
54
Unless specifically cited, biographical information here about Mawlawi Salih Muhammad comes from
OLII: 842-856.
55
A. H. Habibi 1350 SH [1971]: Alif
 44

implement a more standardized curriculum throughout the country, he sent Salih

Muhammad to serve as the director of education in Kandahar. Salih Muhammad's

connections to the region's Pashtun nobility afforded him the politically ability to

implement the plan; but logistically he was only able to found Kandahar's school system

through the financial contributions of the city's elite trading families.56

Salih Muhammad was very active in expanding the social domain of Pashto, in all

the new elite public zones being established. Under Habib Allah, he appears to have been

among the first authors consistently using Pashto in the Siraj al-Akhbar. In the

biographical directory Ossni LTkwal [Contemporary Authors], the author of the entry

states that only Ghulam Muhayy al-DTn "Afghan" is worthy of mentioning in this

capacity alongside Salih Muhammad.57 Salih Muhammad notably published a Pashto

poem in the Siraj al-Akhbar in 1917, crying out in coded imagery for the political

independence of Afghanistan from the British Empire; and thereby fusing twentieth

century Afghan nationalism with Pashto literary expression for perhaps the first time.58 It

apparently gained such wide attention that in Kandahar, "even women" circulated it

through recitation.59 Classical in nature, the poem appears to have been very closely

modeled on a Persian poem by 'Abd al-Hadi Dawi, also published in the Siraj al

Akhbar.60 'Abd al-Hadi Dawi's poem brought down a royal threat of retribution upon its

author - interestingly, the threat was phrased in the same metaphorical language as the

56
A. H. Habibi op. civ. Be
57
OLll: 844. G. M. Afghan was another nationalist, born in Kandahar and returned from exile in British
India (Lahore and Rawalpindi), where he fled with Ayyub Khan at the time of 'Abd al-Rahman's
purges. He also served in the education infrastructure under Habib Allah, as director of the Teachers'
Training Institute (Dar al-Mu 'allimm). Refer to OLI, p. 68.
58
A full version of this poem is reproduced in OLll: 851-854.
59
Zewar 2006: 76.
60
A. H. Habibi 1353: 228.
 45

original poem - but Salih Muhammad was spared such treatment.61 It is unclear whether

this was because the royal family possessed little to no facility with Pashto, or because of

the influential position of Salih Muhammad's family.62

While in Kandahar under Aman Allah, simultaneous with his duties establishing

and managing the provincial school system, Salih Muhammad founded the Tulu'-i

Afghan. This was a lithographed weekly periodical in Persian and Pashto which would

later become notable as the locus of the first intensive Pashto literary and lexicographical

studies, though his duties as Director of Education in Kandahar became onerous enough

that he passed off editorial control of the Tulu' after a few issues.63

As illustrated above, by the end of the Aman Allah era, notable in the Kandahari

literature as well as the public spheres arising in that city was the rise to prominence of

the mercantile class. Part of the rationale in bringing the work of Salih Muhammad into

the discussion is to place his career in the trajectory of an increasingly wide aristocratic

stratum. This trajectory appears to have led ultimately to the de-legitimation of

aristocratic privilege at the expense of an absolute state composed of citizens and the rule

of law - an ideology present in elite texts such as those by Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi'.

Meanwhile, in this era in Kandahar, the marriage strategies of a member of an intellectual

and landed elite such as Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' clearly note a sliding preference toward

elite mercantile families. This is no doubt due to the courtly patronage of elite monopoly

trade in commodities; elite trade was a route to courtly integration in the new state. We

note that even though Salih Muhammad was educated by his mother's aristocratic scholar
61
Refer to Zewar, op. cit., for the threat. Rohi 2005 contains additional remarks on the incident.
62
Considering that his uncles were imprisoned without a second thought for their activities in the
Constitutionalist movement, the former seems more likely.
63
OLI: 844
 46

family (in part by 'Abd al-Wasi' himself), it was his connections via his father's elite

trading family which projected Salih Muhammad into the position of Director of

Education for Kandahar.

The case of a final person's life and career, that of Muhammad 'Usman "Paxtun",

neatly illustrates all of the trends hinted at thus far. His personal life and career shows the

shifting fortunes of landed aristocracy and mercantile power. It also illustrates the shift

from Pashto as a mediator of Persianate learning and ruling ideologies, to the medium of

a newer cosmopolitan elite learning. This new cosmpolitanism synthesized Indo-British

vocabularies of commerce and power along with the contemporary adaptations of

classical Persianate political imagination; and it also was provided a heavy injection from

Pashto folk and traditional literary sources outside the elite Persian canon. Finally, the

life of Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun, as his very choice of appellation suggests, mirrors

the rise in a newly reflexive emphasis on Pashto and a growing overdetermination of

'Pashtun' imagery in early articulations of civil society in Kandahar.

Muhammad 'Usman, of a Barakzai lineage, was born on his grandfather's estate in

rural Kandahar. During the purges of the 'Abd al-Rahman period, his father fled to

Chaman across the Gomal pass on the Afghan-Balochistan border, far more directly

incorporated into British empire than was Afghanistan. There Muhammad 'Usman grew

up. Upon the death of his father during the reign of Habib Allah, he returned to the

family's land, but was unable to succeed there because, as he relates himself in the

tazkira OsdnT Likwal (Contemporary Writers), he had become too cosmopolitan for that

aristocratic yet rural life.64 He re-emigrated to Chaman, and apprenticed himself to a

64
OLl, p. 171. Muhammad 'Usman says, "Pd de wakht ke zma plar wqfat sho aw za Arghastan ta
 47

tailor presumably working in a British garrison, since he learned English and Punjabi (the

language of substantial numbers of Indian traders in Balochistan's garrison towns) during

that period.65 Muhammad 'Usman eventually started his own business, becoming so

successful that he ended up in Bombay where he learned the Hindustani language and

gained some facility in Gujarati, and continued his studies in English. Although he does

not relate anything on the subject in his entry in Osdm LTkwal, it seems plausible that his

experience outside the Pashtun regions of either Kandahar or northwestern Balochistan

might have reinforced a more keenly-felt self-image as "Pashtun", as opposed to some

other identity. Certainly the stereotypes of "Kabulis" or "Pathans" common throughout

India at the time would have textured his interpersonal relations in a place like Bombay.66

In any event, Muhammad 'Usman planned to further emigrate to the US in order to

study geological and mineral sciences; but in 1919 Afghanistan declared its full

independence from the British sphere of influence, and in the aftermath of World War I,

British India let it go without much of a fight. Muhammad 'Usman returned to

Afghanistan at that point, settling in Kandahar. He leveraged his polyglot talents into

governmental service, during a time when Kandahar city was on the rise due to new

economic developments.

The fact that Muhammad 'Usman worked in the Customs and Passports Directorate

raghlam, sd ranga che plar zma tarbiyat pa xdri aw 'ilmJ dawal karai '5, no yaw kho me pa sara ke
chalaw na kedai... [At this time my father passed away and I returned to Arghastan. Since my father had
raised me in an urban and intellectual manner, in the first place I couldn't possibly return to the
wasteland...]"
65
On the deeply non-local character of traders in Balochistan's garrison towns, see Aijaz Ahmad (1973)
"The National Question in Baluchistan" Pakistan Forum 3(8/9): p. 11.
66
Refer to S. Bhartacharya 1981 (esp. p. PE42) for information attesting to the reification of "Pathan"
identity in Bombay a few decades later, both despite and as a result of highly particularistic class
identities of Pashtun migrants there. For a fictitious, yet more penetrating, example, one might refer to
Rabindranath Tagore's famous short story "The Kabuliwala" set in (most likely) Calcutta.
 48

is no coincidence. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the decline in caravan-

centered middleman trade was in part a direct result of an upswing in elite urban-

managed trade: the rise of a two-tiered structure of import-export capitalism. Disciplining

commerce through the documentary regime of customs and passports is, we will recall,

part of the process through which elite trade - sanctioned by the state and benefiting both

the state and its commercial family allies - came to exercise dominance over the caravan

trade since the 1890s. Additionally, caravan trade suffered quite a bit during a general

and broad-based economic reorientation of India during World War I.67 The Indian credit

markets only gradually recovered confidence in nomadic Pashtun small casual

moneylenders and peddlers after the latter's massive defaults in 1914-15. By that time

other credit specialists had moved into the temporary gap in India, and this crucial leg of

the nomadic trade slowly withered under competition right up until the chaotic upheavals

of 1929 and 1930 in Afghanistan.68

After World War I, despite - or partly as an opportunistic result of- the downturn

in nomad traffic, there was an upswing in elite transregional trade between Kandahar and

the British Empire. Aman Allah lost his subsidy when he declared total independence. He

seems to have tried to make up the resulting lost state revenue through various means.

One of these was collection of land revenue. More important was a strengthening of

official (easily taxable) exports, as evidenced by a rise in the number of monopoly

companies, and the vacuum caused by a loss of strength in the caravan trade must have

been an enabling factor of this. The entire southern region, including Kandahar, may also
67
For Indian economy in World War I, Bose and Jalal 1998 (especially Chapter 12) offers a concise
narrative.
68
Robinson 1978 [1934]: 27. The latter Ghilji traders appear to have eventually reinvested in land in the
uplands of the Southeast, according to Robinson.
 49

have received a boost from the loss in northern trade with Russia in 1917-1919 due to

upheavals there, which caused an acute shortage of consumer goods in the north of

Afghanistan.69

In any case, in 1919, work on a road from Kandahar to Chaman was revitalized; in

1921, an Anglo-Afghan Trade Agreement was signed that exempted traders from paying

Indian customs duties on foreign goods destined for Afghanistan via India. By 1923 the

road from Kandahar to Chaman was made passable for motor transport. In contemporary

intelligence reports, Captain J. A. Robinson highlights the severe effects that these

developments had on revenues both of traditional caravan traders on the southern routes,

and on "Hindu traders" (the latter phenomenon also likely stemming from attempts from

'Abd al-Rahman up to Aman Allah at limiting the role of foreign traders in

Afghanistan).70

If import trade on the Kandahar-Chaman road was not benefiting Indian traders,

and was not benefiting nomads, it seems reasonable to surmise that it was to the

advantage of Kandahari merchant families. The lengths to which both British India and

the Afghan government were going in order to facilitate this trade indicates a process of

incorporating Kandahari mercantile elites into the upper, state-complicit tier of

Afghanistan's evolving mercantilist system. As of 1959, economic geographer Mahmoud

Habibi notes that soon after the metalled road between Kandahar and Chaman was

constructed, commerce was only carried out via trucking, and was monopolized by a

relatively few companies.71 While this may be a retrospective recasting of a more gradual

69
"The Economy of Afghanistan" (1959): 322.
70
Robinson, op. cit.
71
M. Habibi 1959: 111-112.
 50

and less uniform process, it is telling nonetheless.

Thus, Muhammad 'Usman's life in Chaman and Bombay; his command over new

international idioms of commerce bridging Pashto, Persian, Hindustani, Gujarati, and

English; and his post-1919 positions in customs offices are not a series of coincidences.

Neither is the shift from an elite class of traditional cosmopolitan gentry (made up of

large landowners, lineage heads, and scholars) to a composite elite class made up of

multiple traditional and new sectors.

As we saw from the cases of Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' and Mawlawi Salih

Muhammad Hotak, patriarchal principles of family descent and strategic intermarriage

remained powerful tools of cementing this class; as did the more diffuse personalized

realm of homosocial bonds of masculine friendship.72 To an even greater extent than in

the Iranian constitutional moment, the constitutional movement in Afghanistan (at least in

Kabul and Kandahar) had its center of gravity in similar personalized networks, as well

as in the quasi-patriarchal atmosphere of schooling.73 As elites took on more and more

bourgeois characteristics over the early twentieth century, though, the increasingly public

activities of these social networks also began fostering a nascent civil society in

Kandahar as mentioned above. Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun was one of the rising stars in

these civil society circles. Immediately after 1930, he would go on to lead the Pashto

72
As David Edwards 1996 notes in various places, the forming of strong personal homosocial bonds in
many sectors of Afghan society historically relied on metaphors of kinship; even, in some cases, until
such time as an actual kinship tie could be solidified through an arranged marriage of families. We
should stress the strategic contingency of these trends, however, in contrast to Edwards' abstract
statements.
73
Refer to Ghowsi/UNESCO op. cit. It should be noted that the setting within which all the major
scholars of the period were trained generally was hereditary, within families; and that it was an integral
part of something larger: the creation of a man from a boy. Moreover, the Pashto nomenclature for the
Ministry of Education - Da Xowane aw Rozane Wizarat - more closely translates as the Ministry of
Guiding and Nurturing/Raising/Training.
 51

Maraka, and was placed in charge of publishing the journal Pashto.

As an example of the sorts of participation fostered by the new civil society and

print culture, Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun's efforts in the Maraka are credited with

popularizing the cultivated literary custom of the musha'ira [poetic exchange] in

Pashto.74 In doing so he helped transform an exercise that had been variously a courtly

intellectual activity; a pastime restricted to circles of friends; or a village competition

between professional poet-musician entourages. It developed, in 1930s and 1940s

Afghanistan, into an open, public salon activity, where participation was limited not

formally but rather by class belonging. And, as a byproduct of the means the Maraka

used to publicize the participatory custom (and the social standing of the people who

participated in it), the musha 'ira became a serially printed exercise as well.75 The social

depth of this reinvention is striking: when I conducted my research in 2007, the cultivated

public musha'ira and the village competition musha'ira were viewed as completely

separate phenomena, one formal and the other informal, with completely separate

genealogies.76 The activities of this civil society interfaced with the activities of the

early, more solidly aristocratic circles of those such as Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi', in that

aristocrats accustomed to working in court settings also shared poetic and intellectual

fellowship with new partners in a more inclusive public space than the court was.

74
OLl: 172.
75
A musha'ira is a poetic exchange or competition. Here, though, the reference is not to the poetic festival
broadly conceived. Rather, it refers to the practice of a number of poets deciding on a certain classical
couplet to be used as a zamina, or basis. The participants of the musha 'ira then take turns in an ordered
exchange, composing poems on the zamina and pushing the limits of its semantic field while remaining
scrupulous true to its original rhyme and its original meter. Cf. Nasir, ed. (1369) for a very rare
overview of the practice, and the social context, of the cultivated Pashto musha'ira.
76
Personal conversation with Nasr Allah Nasir, Afghanistan Academy of Sciences, Languages and
Literatures Branch, Kabul, Afghanistan. March 2007. Other public manifestations of the musha 'ira
showing non-elite input are discussed in Chapter Five.
 52

III.2. Synthesis: Linking Ideologies with Communicative Practices

In the previous sections we saw something of a continuum bridging the gap

between two forms of elite communication; which was organic with a similar continuum

within their social ideologies.

One pole is represented by Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi', the champion of individual

self-sovereignty for all, irrespective of ethnicity or sex. The only prerequisite was that the

individual empower himself or herself through mature (pokh = "cooked"), and thus

ethical, masculinity - perhaps better glossed here as humanity - harmonized through

psycho-spiritual alignment with social law into refined elderhood. Mawlawi 'Abd al-

Wasi' used this theory to militate simultaneously against monarchic absolutism and (his

perception of) specifically "Pashtun" factional politics. In the process, as we saw, his

work reified a court-centric image of the "Pashtun" as isolationist, and belonging to a

social category outside of a normative individual-based cosmopolitan order (the latter

grounded in a tradition of aristocratic, personality-centric power).

Mawlawi Wasi's social practice of power was, like his ideology, grounded in the

specifics of person. His poem even refers to this fact in that it draws upon, at one point,

the traditional rhetorical opposition of the 'nobility' as biographically specified - khass -

entities, and the 'mass' as generalized, or 'arnrn, entities. True social justice, according to

the poem, would involve everyone becoming khass, a situation achievable through the

immanent wijdan of law.

Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' was a courtier; one of the monarchy's chief legislative

draftsmen; an independent military commander; a scholar, a ritual specialist and public

 53

orator; and a gentleman. His stature was linked to his genealogical biography - his

specific person and lineage, and those lineages into which his family was married. At the

same time this genealogical biography maintained its significance partly through the

Mawlawi's own current status, which was reflected and reinforced in the didactic tone of

the things he said. His public interaction was similarly personalized. It consisted of royal

edicts; first-person pronouncements and arguments inseparable from knowledge of the

person saying them; and contingent Friday congregational addresses generally in support

of the state linked to the king Aman Allah - despite the odd occasion where

'miscommunication' seems to have implied some criticism of royal actions.77

Thus, the poem discussed above actively reinforced a certain style of power

exercised by the court's aristocratic representatives, even as those representatives sought

to limit the court's power. Though the poem spoke in highly abstract terms, it argued for

order within individualized person-state relations, using a highly localized and

personalized patriarchal metaphor - the village landlord's mill. It also appears to have

been an individualized speech written in response to a particular series of events, most

likely intended for deployment in a situation of individual negotiation between Mawlawi

Wasi' as state authority, and particular provincial officials and lineage heads.

On the other pole stands Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun, an elite merchant and civil

servant from a formerly landed elite family - a family whose initial aristocratic influence

decreased markedly at the hands of monarchy. Muhammad 'Usman's major cultural

activity was in sectors linked to strength in association, rather than strength in

personality. He was known by slightly later Afghan scholars - for example, Benawa in
77
Hotak 1382 SH [2003]: 63.
 54

Osdrii Likwal - as a promoter of "Pashtun" culture.78 In terms of the Pashto language,

while other individuals suggested using it as an administrative language, it seems that

Muhammad 'Usman used it as a departmental language from the beginning of his tenure

in the Customs and Passports Directorate.79

But beyond his personal role circulating information within governmental offices

and to the citizens who interacted with his office, Muhammad ' Usman's non-

governmental public sphere consisted of print, funded in part by the government but

presided over by a nascent civil society of new cultural elites. This was a disembodied

public sphere, as opposed to the inherently personal-contextual one inhabited by

Mawlawi Wasi'. The elite public sphere of Kandahar, built on abstract assumptions of

readerships and open voluntary participation, appears to have been most inclined to favor

the promotion of regional and specifically Pashtun particularism as part of a strategy for

representation in the state structure, as we shall see presently.

Between these two poles we have Mawlawi Salih Muhammad Qandahari. Mawlawi

Salih Muhammad represents an intermediate position between a newer elite mercantile

Pashtun consciousness and an older court-centered cosmopolitan (Persianate, though not

necessarily Persian-language) cosmopolitanism. Salih Muhammad's Pashto patriotism

appears to have consisted, as mentioned before, of expanding Pashto's literary and

administrative repertoire to match that of Persian. If Mawlawi Wasi's earlier work

reflects a certain ambivalence about self-consciously Pashtun indices among elite

Pashtuns at the center, Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's work appears largely as an elite

OL1: 170-175.
OL1: 172.
 55

Pashtun's response to this ambivalence. He intended, in my own shorthand, to 'de-

provincialize' Pashto. That is, Salih Muhammad had already internalized a framing, a la

Mawlawi Wasi', of specifically "Pashtun" identity as equivalent to sectionalism or

provincialism. His response was to try and un-reify "Pashtuns" by transforming the

Pashto language - among Pashtuns at least - into as elite and potently multipurpose a

language as Persian, the primary translocal carrier in Afghanistan of a cosmopolitan

canon of dominant texts and documentary genres. This activity, in his thinking, could

transform Pashtun self-awareness from localized to translocal, from inward- to outward-

looking.

Regarding Salih Muhammad's attempts at cosmopolitanizing Pashto, and by

extension Pashtuns, one of his most ambitious intellectual legacies outside his official

duties in the Education Ministry was his first-ever loose Pashto adaptation of one of the

most classical of all texts shared by Persian-influenced literatures: the MasnawT of

Mawlana Jalal al-DIn.80 In his short preface to this work, Salih Muhammad writes that

Pashto possesses plenty of poetry, but that Pashtun audiences should not be left without

the pleasure and the spiritual depth of the masnawi form, and that they too might

participate in the genre.81

Rather than "Da Paxto MasnawT", however, another of Salih Muhammad's works

better exemplifies his place in a rapidly changing, increasingly mercantile aristocracy of

Kandahar; this class's shifting perspectives on society; and the sorts of public

relationships involved. The social assumptions are indicative of larger trends in many

80
This is the poet known in the west as Rumi, and to most Afghans as Mawlana-yi BalkhT, after his place
ofbirth.
81
Salih Muhammad Hotak 1350 SH [1971]: 1 (original date of preface, 1318 [1939]).
 56

simultaneous directions. This work, entitled "Da Jami'a KarUna [The Professions of

Society]", will be presented and discussed in the following section, while the chapter will

end by juxtaposing both Mawlawi Wasi's and Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's work with

that of Muhammad 'Usman.

III.3. Mawlawi Salih Muhammad Qandahari: a Sociological Poetics

As discussed in previous sections, Mawlawi Salih Muhammad Qandahari is among

the best exemplars of the integration of the mercantile bourgeoisie of Kandahar with both

the local aristocracy of the greater Kandahar region, and with the central court under

Aman Allah. He came of age in a period when the Pashto language was first used, in elite

literatures, to articulate a nation-state consciousness and demands for Afghanistan's

national liberation. Indeed, alongside Ghulam Muhayy al-Din Afghan, he was one of the

chief proponents of that ideological endeavor in the new print media. By the 1920s, the

early stages of a reflexively Pashtun peasant and civil society movement had started in

India's North-West Frontier and Balochistan as well.

Ideas of popular sovereignty in the most elite Afghan court circles based on face-

to-face relations, such as those of Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi', were likely reinforced by

Turkish, Persian and Indian reformist and liberalist movements. Yet the contexts of

personalized circulation affected the ideological content of his work, rendering it

different from the public-centric reformism both of Iran and of India. At the same time as

those courtly ideas moved through contingent personalized networks of circulation,

though, other actors like Mawlawi Salih Muhammad worked more extensively in the new

print media. A depersonalized public space existed dialectically with new conceptions of
 57

how the individual interlocked with society - new "imagined communities", to use the

phrase coined by Benedict Anderson.82

In contrast to Mawlawi Wasi's court-centered work, Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's

work was far more attuned to the diversified economy of a mercantile city with an

agrarian hinterland, plugged into a global import-export economy. It was also far more

attuned to the idea of the nation-state as the site of an indivisible unit of society. Indeed, a

view of nation-state boundaries as 'natural' would seem obvious for someone heavily

invested in an elite community that was driven by cross-border import-export trade.

Universalism for Mawlawi Wasi' extended to all humanity by necessity, and ethnicity or

nation were merely levels of microcosm. For Mawlawi Salih Muhammad, universalism

sat best on the pan-Afghan scale. It was contiguous with the nation-state, the container of

a variegated Afghan society; and it was articulated through public interaction.83

Illustration of these themes is best accomplished through recourse to a unique poem

first published serially in Kandahar's newspaper Tulu '-i Afghan, in 1933.

Entitled "Da Jami'a Karuna" [The Professions of Society], this long poem consists

of 396 couplets, in stanzas of three couplets each, followed by a single long stanza of 69

couplets in masnawl form. After a brief introduction outlining the author's intentions in

writing the poem, the poem presents its twenty-two sections. The final one is the

conclusion, while those preceding go on to list the characteristics of a very full range of

various professions and their benefit to the social collective that Salih Muhammad sees as

"society", or jami 'a. The word derives from a root which evokes an undifferentiated idea
82
B.Anderson 1991.
83
Salih Muhammad's elder colleague at the Siraj al-Akhbar during the Habib Allah period, Mahmud
Tarzi, used precisely this metaphor when he likened the nation to a 'content' (mazruj) contained by the
container izarf) of the homeland. Refer to Wali Ahmadi 2008: 47.
 58

of "collectivity". The aggregated effect of this poem, however, is a strongly expressed

vision of society.

The professions he discusses are, in order, as follows: the Farmer [bdzgar]; the

Construction Worker [band aw khqtgar]; the Carpenter [tarkdn aw najar]; the Textile

Weaver [field]; the Nomad [powinda]; the Elite Import Trader [sawddgar]; the Donkey

Driver and Sewage Collector [kharkdr aw parukax]; the Baker [ndnwd'T]; the Bramble-

Kindling Collector [kharkax]; the Potter [kulal]; the Sackcloth and Rug Weaver [kane

bqf]; the Doctor [tabTb]; the Respected Mulla [fanab-i mulla]; the Soldier ['askar]; the

State Official [hakim aw ma'mur]; the King [pacha]; the Respected Spiritual Guide/Sufi

Order Head [fanab-i pir aw murshid]; the Ascetic Hermit [zdhid aw goshe-nashin]; the

Teacher [mu 'alim]; the Engineer [muhandis]; and the Man of Letters [adib].

Each section of the poem describes the cyclical professional activities of each

individual enumerated above, narrated in the first person. These were released over a

series of weeks in the newspaper over the course of 1933, with each week bringing the

voice of several new "professionals". In each section, the characters describe their

functional usefulness - the benefits that society derives from them.

Also embedded in the various sections is some indication of the 'voices' of social

status. It is true that the language of the poem does not approach the exaggerated class

sociolects of a novelist like Charles Dickens, for example. The language in this poem

does not change from person to person in terms of grammar or phonology. In that regard,

it does not represent a dialogic enterprise as imagined by Bakhtin's model of the novel, in

which the realism of the form allows the interjection of the contingent, "real languages"
 59

that illustrate social difference and thus recreate real-world social conflict within the

individual work.84 Further, in his introduction, Mawlawi Salih Muhammad explicitly

states his normative program in choosing the words he did; and his career as a whole

displays an attempt to create a uniform public Pashto, to which the discussion will return.

Nonetheless, there is a dialogic component inherent in the tone of the sections, despite the

normative attempt at grammatical and phonological uniformity. We note a particular

defensiveness of self-worth - even sarcasm - in the speech of the Donkey Driver and

Sewage Collector {kharkar aw parukax), probably the most socially downtrodden of any

urban class here. While the lines appear to be in a sanitized Pashto that most likely would

have felt highly sanitized, even artificial, at the time, this is related to the poet's goal in

reforming the language as a vehicle for social integration. Salih Muhammad undeniably

dramatizes some class antagonism here. He allows the urban poor worker to "claim a role

in the public good",85 and to demand obligations of respect for it:

Because I am a donkey-driver —/--1 am very busy and needed

I am very busy --/-- And I work very hard
I am always carrying your sewage --/--1 work very diligently

I carry away dirt and ashes --/--1 carry away brushwood and scrub
I'm always carrying loaded bags --/--1 carry away contents of outhouses
I clean all the streets --/-- I clean out sheds and stables

I carry heavy loads --/-- I carry heaps of grain

I work very, very hard --/-- I carry your burdens
Even though I may be wretched --/--1 am very busy and needed

The powerful need my wretched self—/-- Even though I drive a donkey

Without me you could not live --/-- The whole city would be filthy
I clean things for a living --/--1 sweep the streets

It is I who beautifies the city —/-- It is I who protects health

I am at your service --/--1 do it cheerfully
84
Refer to Bakhtin 1981, especially p. 254.
85
I thank Suvir Kaul for an elegant turn of phrase, andfine-tuningon my reading of this poem.
 60

Without me you would not have your health --/-- You would have no pleasure...
If I didn't toil so —/-- And I didn't clean
And I didn't sweep —— / And I didn't clear away trash
Our people would really suffer —/-- Our country would be very unpleasant

The poem is interesting as a snapshot of social life circa 1933 in Kandahar, and is a very

rare document for a number of reasons. Due to Salih Muhammad's goal, stated in his

introduction, of teaching his readers the Pashto words for various daily implements and

tasks, in "The Professions of Society" we are presented with a great mass of quotidian

information on all classes of people that the author considered important to mention, even

down to the ascetic. This information provides us with a way to contextually define social

actors - to situate abstract terms like "trade" in more concrete social webs of meaning

and valuation. Thus, by 1933, in this poem the imagined powinda (nomad) speaks of

himself primarily as a producer of animal goods, and is no longer seriously considered as

a motor of interregional trade; even though the monthly listing of commodity prices in

the bazaar of Parachinar in Iqtisad magazine, for example, belies this view in practice.86

The section on the Trader (sawdagar) serves well in juxtaposition with the nomad

powinda, the section it immediately follows. Through this contrast we see a clear

definition of the two-tiered capitalist economy, by 1933 stronger in self-perception even

than in practice; the overwhelming import-driven character of elite material life; and the

general political-economic role of the mercantile classes as they saw themselves. In fact

by 1933, the global depression of 1929-1930 may have impacted this class's political
86
I was able to access some as yet uncatalogued holdings of Iqtisad in the Library of Congress during the
summer of 2006, and I greatly thank the Middle East reading room bibliographers for this rare privilege.
As for Parachinar, that town was located in the extreme western portion of India's tribal areas; the
bazaar was largely informal, supplied almost entirely through nomad traffic. The practice of listing
Parachinar prices for Afghan investors dropped off over the 1930s until only Peshawar and Chaman
03alochistan) remained, showing the gradual consolidation of the two-tiered economy into state control
that this writer already perceived in 1933.
 61

power, but this did not seem to change elite merchants' self-image as national actors. In

Salih Muhammad's poem, we see a self-perception of mercantile elites as actors with a

national-level awareness and scope of agency, unlike his stereotypical nomad who does

little more than list all the various rural animal products that he brings to the city.87 The

Trader, in contrast, speaks of his role thus:

I work by trading —/-- I am always traveling

I do a service --/— I work for the nation (millai)
When am I ever at home? —/-- Am I not always off in every direction?

I bring you goods (sdmdn) —I— Such nice things I bring you!
I bring you muslin fabric and watch-springs --/-- 1 bring Chinese tableware
The nation (millat) is happy because of me --/-- The state {dawlat) is bountiful...

I am your entire wealth --/-- I am your entire prestige/honor ('izzat)

I am all your beautiful adornments --/-- I am all your pomp and splendor
You sit comfortably at home --/--1 am exhausted, here and there

If I didn't engage in trade --/-- And if I didn't travel like this

If I didn't serve you this way —/-- And bring myself so much trouble
Who would bring in the customs revenue? --/-- Who would run the market?

Indeed, through the poem's presentation of all the social categories Mawlawi Salih

Muhammad considered important, we are presented with a picture of social class itself in

Kandahar's urban society, at a time and place for which we have very scant records

besides literary representation. And invoking representation brings us to another

important point. Even more interesting (and reliable) than the factual data presented in

the poem is the fact of the poem itself: the assumptions about human collectivities built

into its composition. Here is a perspective on society - as heterogeneous and admitting of

87
Interestingly the scholar Mahmoud Habibi, in his 1959 doctoral thesis from the Sorbonne, makes the
point that the division between the two types of international traders was not one of wealth either: he
claims the Ghilji nomads who traded across the border were among the most wealthy and powerful
individual Pashtuns in the country. Refer to M. Habibi 1959: 174-175. The difference is the degree to
which both sets of elite traders had a stake in the idea of the Afghan nation-state as opposed to their
lineage or faction solidarity; and the degree of legitimacy that the nation-state conferred to them.
 62

variety and professional interdependence - that vastly differed from that of Mawlawi

Wasi', even despite the latter's status as Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's teacher (and

father-in-law).

The idea of consensus or cooperation - ta 'awun - clearly shines through in both.

However, Mawlawi Wasi' conceived of cooperation as necessarily being an ethical

exercise beginning in the internal self-harmonization of the individual, which would

radiate through society in macrocosm. In contrast, in Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's work

the individual derives his self-worth from his social worth, his labor that helps build

society.

To put the difference another way: Mawlawi Wasi's vision of a Utopian society is

of sameness, of self-realized and self-sovereign subjects each as complete microcosms of

a fully harmonized social totality. Divinely-bestowed sovereignty is not monopolized by

the state, but distributed through all persons via the refraction of the divine light of

natural law. And there is not any public-private distinction - indeed, for Mawlawi Wasi',

the sovereign household/village and the state are two macrocosmic elaborations of

individual sovereignty; and the typological affinity of these spheres is what drives his

ethico-political theory. In contrast to the layered sovereignty that informed Mawlawi

Wasi's work and his brand of constitutionalism, Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's work is

disciplined by the claim of Aman Allah's state to be the only locus of sovereignty. For

those outside the centers of state policymaking, and removed from the practice of landed

power, it was less natural to conceptualize their own subjectivities as having such a stake

in the "subjectivity" of the realm.

 63

Even more importantly, parallel to Habermas' discussion in The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere, Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's work is both

disciplined by and contributes to a nascent bourgeois civil society and public sphere in

Kandahar City that separated a man's economic, public face from his domestic, private

one.88 A man in his house might be metaphorically akin to the monarch of the state. But a

microcosmic patriarchal metaphor like Mawlawi Wasi's could not hold up on multiple

levels in a variegated urban economy as well as it did in a landed estate.89 A

compartmentalized and interdependent view of public society and state politics was far

more comfortable for the Kandahari intellectuals of the 1920s and beyond. And face-to-

face, network-driven constitutionalism - like the 1905 Kabul-based movement Mawlawi

Wasi' participated in - was less natural to this allied mercantile and aristocratic class than

was a mitigation of monarchic authority through a critical public sphere of civic

associations, clubs, and print. As the following section illustrates, just such a public

sphere was in fact the setting of Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's poem presented here.

III.4. Public Institutions

The rapid development of a bourgeois public sphere in Kandahar is related to the

rapid rise of mercantile capital discussed in this chapters. In some respects, the case here

is rather similar to Habermas' account.90 That is, through such institutions as reformist

newspapers and salons, a composite of lower aristocracy and mercantile elites in

88
Refer especially to Habermas 1991: 55-56.
89
Clearly this public-private distinction would rigidity gendered ideals of self-realization in urban areas as
well; though because of the public-domestic split present in all available sources from the period,
constructions of the domestic realm in early 20* century Kandahar is a very much harder subject to
research.
90
Habermas 1991.
 64

Kandahar "[sought to replace] a public sphere in which the ruler's power was merely

represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly

monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people".91 Indeed, the closing

sections of Salih Muhammad's poem voice a desire for exactly this sort of check, where

debate between individuals, bearing a common interest irrespective of status, maintains a

balance of civility amongst themselves and between state and citizen:

If you think about it a little --/-- And if you admit the truth
Even if you sit on a throne --/-- You still have needs
If you are dependent --/-- Do you really have such a lofty nature?
So remain continuously humble --/-- And be continually just
Don't nag at people —/-- Don't force or compel them
Every man has a heart --/— And every man has a mouth [...]
Our people are all the same --/-- Our destiny is one

At the same time the poem points out the irrelevance of the largest division between

Pashtun solidarities of Afghanistan (namely, that between the royal Durrani lineages and

the GhilzT confederacy) and thus seeks to integrate other sectional interests than social

class into a consensus theory of abstract national citizenship for all:

Since they are all human beings --/-- And they are all Muslims
They are all Afghans, khan). --/-- They are all like us, khan\
Recognize them in your deepest heart —/-- See them as the light of your eyes!
This is your brother --/— It is also your household
Whether GhilzT, brother —/-- Or Durrani, brother
Call him your brother; call him "sir" --/-- Call him your uncle or father
Call him yours and mine --/— Call him higher than yourself

The harmonization of Durrani and Ghilzi would take place on a national scale. On such a

scale, social harmony would by extension also imply a harmonization of Pashtun with

non-Pashtun; which is something also implied in Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's other

work in creating a new Pashto canon modeled on that of Persian. Yet the existence of a

91
Habermas op. cit.: xi.
 65

rational-critical public sphere knitting together diverse class and other sectional interests

was not an actual fact in the Afghanistan of 1933. As mentioned above, it is the poem's

imagination of the social landscape that is more useful than any attempts at reading it as a

reflection of social reality. The imagination and propagation of "common interest" across

differential social status, as Habermas points out, is key to a bourgeois-democratic public

sphere; but as Michael Warner states, another of the key aspects of a modern public

sphere is its "subjunctive project" - it seeks to create the world it represents.92

Although access to the printed poem assumed a certain eliteness, this poem

assumes no particular reader by design, and in light of the pedagogical goals that

Mawlawi Salih Muhammad built into it, the poem seeks to widen the scope of potential

readers to "everybody". In his introduction to the poem, as mentioned before, Mawlawi

Salih Muhammad argued that learning Pashto words from across society would further

the exposure of the written Pashto language and enhance social cohesion - presumably

by creating a universal language unfettered by restrictions of social domain. Mawlawi

Salih Muhammad was involved in efforts to teach Pashto to non-native speakers.

However, I suspect that part of his goal with this poem was also to teach Pashto speakers

the Pashto names of implements and activities they would rarely encounter in their social

circles, in an effort to reduce differentiation of language registers across class and tribe,

and to foster a universal speech suitable for a public dialog. This publicly-printed poem

seeks to performatively create the world of inter-class and inter-tribe public dialog that it

dramatizes as already existing, along with explicitly striving to create the conditions that

would make such a thing possible.

92
Warner 2002, especially p. 82
 66

Numerous commentators on Habermas have argued that the representation of an

absolute, disembodied and abstract common concern, marked by potentially equal

participation by all members of society, both masks and rigidities inequalities.93 Of

course some of the explicit statements ("Every man is important --/— Every man in

equal") as well as the structural logic of this poem both involve a strong sense of

leveling. The progression of the poem establishes the foundations of society in its basic

material "builders", only later moving on to society's ideological and spiritual regulators;

while the conclusion stresses the equality of all men repeatedly in as many different

formulations as possible. Yet, egalitarian strains in the poem are at odds with a more

consistent argument that even the "wretchedness" of some members serves a functional

societal purpose, thereby naturalizing inequality - with the poem at one point even

exclaiming "Look at the Lord's order!".

Also notable here is the establishment of a conceptual boundary between masculine

public and feminine private domains, as mentioned above. The recurrent repetition of the

word "man" [sara/] in the final stanzas drives home a sense that "society", for the

purposes of this poem, refers only to the public work of men - relegating women to a

tacit 'unspeakable other' zone of agency in contradistinction to the one imagined here.

Finally, the dialogic adoption of the voice of subaltern members of society

performs the idea that they have subjectivity of their own, and grievances of their own.

Asserting the dialogism of subject positions at the heart of a public sphere, Salih

Muhammad writes, toward the end of the poem, "Every man has a mouth...Every man

93
Calhoun, ed. (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere contains a number of articles featuring early and
influential versions of this critique.
 67

has a mind--/--Every man has scars upon his heart." As Fraser notes, an increased

representation in elite public discourse of non-dominant subjectivities involves an

increased effacement of non-elite self-representation: "[a] discourse of publicity touting

accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a

strategy of distinction".94

That is, establishing print and disembodied publics as more culturally important

than face-to-face communicative relationships involves restricting the importance of

instances where the "subaltern speaks" for itself. Concrete, biographically specific, face-

to-face relationships were a feature characteristic of the contact between a khan and his

dependent clients, as well as between state officials and local power. 'Disembodied

publics', where the poet speaks for all sections of society, were part of a newer socio-

cultural system that differentiated urban Kandahar from rural Pashtun areas. As Fraser

also notes in relation to Habermas's model of the bourgeois public sphere, "the official

public sphere [became] the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that

defines the new hegemonic mode of domination."95 Unlike Fraser's view, in Afghanistan

this public sphere did not achieve anything near hegemonic status in rural areas, certainly

not during the period studied in this dissertation. Chapter Three discusses the rural areas

in more detail.

My juxtaposition of Mawlawi Wasi' and Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's texts, then,

is not merely a point in a narrative illustrating a generational gap in intellectual history, or

a difference in perception between individuals on two different levels of authority in the

Fraser 1992: 115.

Fraser op. cit, p. 117.
 68

state. It also shows the contiguous relationships between communicative practice and

ideological form. The contrast between Mawlawi Wasi's royal edicts, Friday sermons,

and self-sovereign individuals on one hand; and Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's

newspapers, public dialog, and nation-state society on the other, marks a more profound

difference. It marks the difference between (1) a constitutional-monarchic exercise of

power that asks obedience and internalization of law as a route to holistic self-sovereign

realization; and (2) a nascent system of liberalist hegemony over a consenting subject,

presumed to be already constituted. This hegemony assumes consensual internalization of

a conception of national sovereignty that splits the individual self into private (self-

realization) and public (functional definition) parts, quite unlike Mawlawi Wasi's

immanent political theory of individual constitution.

The hegemonic scope of "The Professions of Society" extends to the point of

representing consensus even in the voices of those whose social existence resists co-

option and conformity, who would not be expected to internalize the ideas in this sort of

text since their "occupation" is withdrawal from societal interaction. Specifically, even

the ascetic (here, zahid), does not escape a functional definition in this poem. The zahid-

character may claim, "I have no business with anyone --/-- Nor any disdain for anyone";

"Nor do I have home or hearth --/-- I have a cave in the hills." Even so, the dialogic

public performed here still forces that character to define himself in relation to his useful

service of providing prayers, thereby filling the function of reassuring and calming

society, regardless of what an actual zahid might say.96

96
The zahid was also known as a malctng. For a reading of the Pashtun malang's practice of ascetic self-
effacement and withdrawal from society as an opposition to all forms of social patterning, see Majrouh
1977b, especially pp. 94-96. It is not difficult to discover what "actual zahids" might have said, in a
period only slightly later than this. We have some of their poems preserved in biographical dictionaries
 69

As noted above, Salih Muhammad's vision of a public sphere of many interlocking

voices, in both Pashto and Persian, was mirrored in his sphere of activity. This poem was

serially published in the bilingual newspaper that he founded, the Tulu'-i Afghan, in

which open public participation was (theoretically) limited only by literacy and interest.

The column "Poxtdne - Garwegdne [Questions and Inquiries]" in that paper functioned as

a public forum in which topics about identity were discussed. Ostensibly about Pashto

philology, the public column was created after the immense popularity of an article that

inquired about a number of lexical items in a newly-discovered classical Pashto poetry

collection. Intellectuals from various parts of the country weighed in with their dialect-

based opinions in subsequent issues.97 When the column was instituted as a regular

feature in 1937, it is emblematic that the first lexical item to be discussed was the Pashto

word hawad / hewad - which appears to have been variably construed as home, home

region [watan], and nation-state.98 In a context where literacy and print circulation were

both quite low, the theoretically open participation of this print forum masked its own

eliteness; just as the appropriation in Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's poem of non-elite

voices represented a dialogic inclusiveness even while it subordinated those voices to its

own program informed by a theory of social consensus.

Salih Muhammad's vision of a rational public sphere of harmoniously interlocking

parts was not entirely shared by all even in his restricted social circles. Neither, for that

matter, was the more basic ideal of social consensus. It should be pointed out that despite

and folklore compilations, and malang intellectuals will appear in Chapter 5 of this dissertation.
97
The poetry collection in question was the dlwan of Miya Na'Im Matlzai. Participants included HajT
Wall Muhammad Khan Mukhlis and 'Abd al-Latlf Hotak of Kandahar, and Qiyam al-Din Khadim of
Nangrahar. Refer to M. M. Hotak 1995: 160-164.
98
See Tulu'-/ Afghan 14/7, 1316 SH (1937).
 70

the substantive differences between the thought of Mawlawi Wasi' and Mawlawi Salih

Muhammad, both shared ideas of popular sovereignty achieved through some kind of

harmonization. That is, both shared a consensus theory for their Utopia, and both argued

in a vocabulary that pivoted on the concept of ta'awun - harmonious cooperation;

alignment of goals and interests.

But Mawlawi Salih Muhammad's influence gradually waned over the remainder of

the 1930s and the rest of his career. In 1935, he moved to Kabul when Kandahar's

Pashto Society was brought to Kabul and merged with the primarily Persian-language

Literary Society {Anjuman-i AdabT). He was placed in charge of the Pashto portion of the

new Society, and served as editor of the biweekly periodical Zerai. However, after

serving only one year in these capacities, he was summoned to the Clerical Pool (Dar al-

Tahnr) at the Royal Citadel (Shah! Arg), and served out most of the rest of his life as a

Pashto instructor to civil servants under a 1930s program requiring state officials to be

bilingual in Pashto and Persian."

Consensus theory, and a holistic-structural view of "society" rather than a

particularistic, genealogical view of individual actors, represented more and more what I

might call a counter-modality of hegemony even in urban areas - a vision seeking

universal legitimacy, yet itself politically marginalized. What we see replacing it is

hegemony based on sectional interest and competition, even in the midst of calls for

technical development and a rise in material standards of living. The difference, at this

point in the argument, might best be seen through the introduction of two short poems by

Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun.

99
OLII: 846-847
 71

III.5. Muhammad Usman Pashtun: Sociological Poetics and Social Competition

While the poems that follow are not dated in Osani Llkwal, the source from which I

have drawn them, it seems likely that they date from the 1930s or early 1940s since

Muhammad 'Usman's chief period of intellectual relevance was tied to the period when

the Pashto Anjuman remained in Kandahar. Without further delay, the poems follow:

1. Untitled (Ghazal format)

The sun emerged onto the whole world and brightened

And worries about livelihood were born in every mind
Squeezing out the shining drops of dew
The black bee has again returned in search of perfume
Every animate being has stretched its fingers in life
The world's bazaar has started anew
The ants have left their home to look for food
Birds flap their wings and head aloft
Souls refreshed, farmers wake up to their work
They are busied in the work of their plantings and fields
The masons refreshed themselves in sleep
And then steeled themselves to construct the world
Salesmen spread out their wares and sit at them
Traders and weavers are busied in their work
The student opens up his book before the mulla
And clerks get down to their writing
Blacksmiths strike hammer to anvil strongly
Showing that work separates virile man from dog
In short, everyone is busy in some form of work
And it is through their work that the world prospers
Whoever does work contains greatness
Those who rest themselves remain gripped by weariness
Idleness is akin to an engine of decay
Idle people have become the next era's beggars
So, Pashtun brother, steel yourself for work
Everyone's lot in life is improved through efforts

2. Untitled (Ghazal format)

I don't know when Afghans will open their closed eyes

When will they seize their destiny from the heavens
That nation which taught the world learning and science
When will they unite east and west through their name?
That spirit in the Pashtuns' heart, sunk low in the world
When will it be gathered up into a movement in the name of "Pashto"?
 72

Whether west or east, north or south

It's all ours; when will be discover this obvious secret?
They need a set goal if the Pashtun race is to get on track
When will those of the pen unite upon their Pashto?
The Pashtuns need to reclaim their flooded land
Since when do fish the fish of the sea walk the dry land?
In their cloisters, monks have seized the whole world from us
When did Muslims sell their thought at such a loss?
What are the living doing, that our dead lord should turn over in his grave?
When will lofty-thinking youth wake up from this shame?
Hey Pashtun! You say, "Even if the mill is my father's, I wait my turn"

So then would you sell off your self, aiming for the sky?

I have included these two poems here in part because the first recalls Mawlawi

Salih Muhammad's poem on occupations in society; while the second recalls that portion

of Mawlawi Wasi's ethical poem which hinges on the Pashto proverb "kd daplar zranda

wa ham pa war da", or "Even if the [village water]mill belongs to my father, I still have

to wait my turn."

Besides the narrative value these resonances bring in bookending the chapter, they

also serve to throw into sharp relief some profound disjunctures between the work of the

two earlier scholars of the Hotak Akhundzada family, and that of Muhammad 'Usman.

We should recall that Muhammad 'Usman's family was at one point aristocratic - his

broad Barakzai tribe also included the Amirs - but Muhammad 'Usman himself rewrote

his family's destiny in the twentieth century language of global commerce, directed

through the British empire. Besides that, however, he was positioned as a gatekeeper in

that portion of the state bureaucracy which controlled access to the global economy.

Mawlawi Salih Muhammad worked from a perspective somewhere between the

court and the elite bazaar in Kandahar. With respect to social ideology, he appears to

have been concerned with humanizing the members of the aristocratic and mercantile
 73

elite class of Kandahar within a generally liberalist framework. In contrast to Mawlawi

Salih Muhammad's liberal democratic impulse inherent in concern for the voices of the

public being heard, we see no attempt at plurality of voices in Muhammad 'Usman's first

poem here, the one about work in society. There is thus a more overt sense of monologic

authoritarianism with respect to this poem that contrasts with Mawlawi Salih

Muhammad's more subtle hegemonic dialogism, even though formally speaking, both

share a list-making form of professions. The liberalist values of individual labor are

important, in Muhammad 'Usman's poem, not as a way to create a harmonious pluralistic

nation-state. Rather, the value of individualized labor here seems to be twofold. First, it

serves to naturalize the idea of moral value as derived from tangible work, as opposed to

a tacit opposite form of political-economic activity: aristocratic management of land, for

example. It is therefore readable as representing one urbanized pole in a form of class

conflict, but it could represent the moral position of an authoritarian state executive class

as easily as it could a private mercantile one. Second, the aggregated activity of busy

individuals would seem to result in a vital and virile social collective, as suggested in the

final lines.

Mawlawi Wasi's normative poetics subordinated ethnic or language community to

individual personality, an effect O'Hanlon and Balabanlilar both independently note in

relation to the role of akhlaq texts in stitching together multiethnic empires in Khurasan,

Central Asia and India.100 This transcendence of solidarity is less plausible in a poetics of

external, sociological definition such as Salih Muhammad's, and he is forced to comment

on the pitfalls of too much ethnic consciousness. Muhammad 'Usman does not do so;
100
See O'Hanlon 2007; Balabanlilar 2007
 74

instead he reinforces that awareness.

While there is little attention given to questions of nation or state in his sociological

poem, the final lines serve to tie in the success of the active individual with the success of

all Pashtuns in the world at large. There is also a sense of urgency; and a sense that a

people's success is not measured in terms of an absolute scale, but against others. A

hardening of external boundaries appears also to come at the expense, ideologically

speaking, of internal dialogism as a value.

In much early twentieth century Afghan print-sphere Pashto literature, there was a

sense that compromise through vertical ethnic solidarity with personalistic monarchs and

state aristocrats was important to defend the Pashtun communal interest in the world at

large. This is certainly the way that Afghan intellectuals viewed the situation in the

princely states of Balochistan, where Muhammad 'Usman spent his formative years -

might the address "Pashtun Brother" in Muhammad 'Usman's poem be a reference to the

pro-democratic Wror Paxtun ("Brother Pashtun") Party working in Balochistan at the

time? Afghan quasi-hagiographical texts of Pashtun solidarity in the 1950s, like the Dd

Khpdlwafoy Tarun [The Bonds of Self-Determination] series, set into print already-

existing perceptions to this effect. Such narratives cast the Khan of Qalat and the Wror

Pashtun Party as being at odds with each other, but also as sharing a natural Pashtun-

Baloch bond of common interest in the face of British (and then Pakistani) colonialism.

This solidarity, according to the narrative, always manifested when given the (rare)

political space to do so.101 There was, thus, a strong undercurrent of vertical, cross-class
101
Refer to Nangrahari, ed., 1333 SH [1954] Da Khpalwaksy Tarun vol 3, especially pp. 22-29. This
volume takes an interesting format: part travelogue, part documentary-history, and part ethno-
mythological propaganda. In this telling, Baloch are "probably" Pashtun lineages in origin; and there is
even a Pashtun lineage called Bares which is etymologically linked here to the word ethnonym
 75

alignment underlying the definitions both of public sphere activity and of ethnic/national

identity in this setting.

The first poem by Muhammad 'Usman addresses the layered themes of urban vs.

rural political-economic action, or active worker vs. aristocratic ruler only suggestively. It

speaks in terms of some form of reflexive collective consciousness - what would

probably be described by Muhammad 'Usman himself as Pashtun national identity - only

slightly more explicitly. In contrast, the second poem here speaks about identity quite

directly, and quite explicitly through the idiom of agonism. Its use of the mill proverb

constitutes a direct undermining of Mawlawi Wasi's poem, whether it consciously

references that poem or not. And, as stated toward the end of the section on Mawlawi

Salih Muhammad, this is the primary difference between these two poems and those of

both Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' and Mawlawi Salih Muhammad: the rise to prominence of

a zero-sum political calculation in elite public discourse.

Where Mawlawi 'Abd al-Wasi' deployed his grist-mill proverb sympathetically,

arguing cooperation and consensus to be the only route to social success, Muhammad

'Usman saw things differently - he employs the proverb in order to demean it. For him,

in the zero-sum world outside the normative perspective of court intellectuals who just

want subjects to behave, advancement is measured against others and must be seized

proactively or else forfeited. As noted above, this competition-based political idiom of

belonging had strong links to the struggle with imperial political economy - one couplet

in the second poem explicitly employs the juxtaposition of (Christian) Monk vs. Muslim

in conjunction with "selling". Yet, as one segment of that poem alludes to, an agonistic

"Baloch" through regular sound shifts.

 76

definition of Pashtun national identity was also directed domestically within the region,

in something of a Pashtun supremacist direction, at least for Muhammad 'Usman:

That spirit in the Pashtuns' heart, sunk low in the world

When will it be gathered up into a movement in the name of "Pashto"?
Whether west or east, north or south
It's all ours; when will be discover this obvious secret?

From one direction, this expression of Pashtun right to rule could be the fallout of certain

events of 1919. During the Afghan war of independence from British India, Kandahar

witnessed something approaching a pogrom of non-Pashtun elites, particularly Shi'i

Qizilbash. A restricted and personalized incident, the unsolved murder of a boy found in

a Shi'i neighborhood, aggravated already-existing feelings of Pashtun noble

exceptionalism that were brought back from British India with formerly exiled

aristocrats.102 In the already nationalized - and militarized - context of the so-called Third

Anglo-Afghan War, it was an easy step for many to regard the Shi'a as a sort of fifth

column.

While their accounts differ, both Fayz Muhammad Katib and Ghobar mention a

pogrom of sorts against the Shi'i residents of Kandahar by the lineages of the surrounding

areas, led by a member of the returnee Loynab family of aristocrats. It was only through

the intercession of forces loyal to the Kabul-based Sardar 'Abd al-Quddus, including

Mawlawi Wasi's own local militia, that the pogrom was averted.103 While 1919 may have

driven home the need for trans-identity cooperation and rule of law to Mawlawi Wasi', as

evidenced in his work reproduced above, might it not have further solidified ideas of
102
Indeed, in India, British officials in search of an Indian Muslim analog to the varna 'caste system'
considered all Pashtuns to be one among four classes of nobility, besides "Mughals", "Shaykhs", and
"Sayyids". This was no doubt related to Pashtun dynastic consolidation over other ethnicities of India
during the eighteenth and, in part, the nineteenth centuries.
103
Refer to McChesney and Katib 1999: 50-51; and to Ghobar 1359 SH[1980]: 761-762.
 77

ethnic difference, even antagonism, among less court-centered figures in Kandahar?

The above is likely part of the issue, but there is more. While firm evidence is not

forthcoming, and conscious motivation is probably impossible to establish anyway in this

case, it seems at least plausible that an ideological emphasis on indigeneity in social

reflexivity - Pashtun identity as Afghan nationalism - would favor or at least argue for a

preference toward elite Pashtun business in Kandahar. As a way to fund its state, the

monarchy under Aman Allah and especially under the new post-1929 Musahiban dynasty

granted preferential rights to monopoly trading companies, which became powerful

political and social forces in their regions. By the mid 1930s, certain businessmen in

Kabul such as ' Abd al-MajId-i ZabulT were beginning to build up centralized capital. The

state, bankrupt from massive political upheavals of 1928-1930, relied on these Kabuli

capitalists for operations; and Zabuli in particular began to exercise a disproportionate

amount of power over economic policy in the late 1930s and 1940s. For many Pashtun

business families of the south and southeast, a reflexive Pashtun-centric patriotism in

state machinery might form a defense against competitors in the southern trade - whether

those competitors be foreign (i.e. Indian traders), or Persian-speaking Afghan subjects

from Kabul who possessed more capital resources than the weaker mercantile

bourgeoisie of Kandahar.104

Institutionally, this form of reflexive Pashtun consciousness was made possible

largely through pioneering efforts of voluntary civil society - exemplified by the earliest
104
Historical portions of Mahmoud Habibi's 1959 thesis illustrate the vast disparity between the state
investments in the Kandahar-based, Pashtun-run companies, and state investments in the mostly Tajik-
run ones based in Kabul and the north. The Kandahari companies in general seem to have relied, of
necessity, on a strategy of diversification - thus the Kandahari "cotton" monopoly was unable to
compete on cotton alone, and had interests in wool, dried fruit, ice manufacturing for domestic
consumption, and even opium. Refer to M. Habibi 1959: 117-125 passim.
 78

merchant-funded stages of public education in Kandahar; by the Maraka, the literary-

cultural salon in which anyone, in theory, could participate; and by print culture, which

anyone in theory could read. This was, initially, very much the same public sphere of

Kandahar that Mawlawi Salih Muhammad worked in. In fact, while Mawlawi Salih

Muhammad worked in this public sphere, Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun helped to manage

it on behalf of the monarchic state. In effect, while he helped to further public culture,

Muhammad 'Usman also helped to channel it, reign it in, and subordinate it to the state. It

is this aspect of his career which I suspect left the greatest imprint of authoritarianism, at

the expense of dialogism, on his work, no matter how important the influence of his

experience in executive bureaucracy and his stake in vertical ethnic bonds may have also

been. The interface between Kandahar's nascent public sphere and certain other, more

dominant modes of power in the monarchic state will form the basis of the first portion of

the following chapter.

 79

Chapter Three

The Rise of "Political Pashto": Lineage; Elders; and Face-to-Face Public

Interactions, 1930-1950

I. Introduction

An unusual feature appeared in the Afghanistan Historical Society's journal

Afghanistan Revue Trimestrelle 4(3): 1949, published under direction of the

government's Press Department. I refer to a report by the head of the newly-established

Bakhtar News Agency, M. M. Firoz, on a multilateral fact-finding mission following the

bombardment by a Pakistani military aircraft of Moghulgay village near the Pakistani

border in Khost.1 This region had somewhat limited contact with the state in normal

circumstances, and was never directly subdued by force, but rather brokered non-

interference and military cooperation deals with the administration. It was the same

region that staged the 1924 uprising described in the previous chapter.

Locals had historically been very much opposed to the expansion of formal state

offices. Radio was not very accessible there; and publications were viewed more or less

ambivalently, although there is little doubt that at least someone was handy who could

read them. The inhabitants of Moghulgay were also probably well-enough acquainted

with current events local, national, and international through personalized channels of

information. As for the report, it illustrates one case of interaction between self-

representation of Pashtunness by locally influential rural men, and intellectuals of print-

1
I wish to make no claims of intent here, even though the report's author does. Only bare factual outlines
of the incident were commonly accepted by all sides - the fact that a village was bombarded by a
Pakistani aircraft, and the number of bodies that the commission saw. For citation on Muhammad
Mustafa Feroz as the head of the Bakhtar News Agency, see Kabul Kalanai 1949.
 80

sphere Afghanistan.

The report is all the more interesting due to Firoz's inclusion of some quotes from

speeches that the village elders made to the commission. The elders stated that they were

grateful to the mission for taking the trouble to come and investigate, but that the truth of

what occurred was so self-evident that all the mission was really bound to do was to tell

the world what happened, and gain them some redress. In many ways their discourse

mirrors Firoz's: in the analysis of the elders, it was perpetrated by the 'raw and

inexperienced Government officials of Pakistan,' but it was done to make the 'nation

which in the past has always taught bitter lessons to their masters, the slaves of slaves.'

Furthermore, if the mission failed to gain them redress 'on an intergovernmental level,

the situation would then oblige us to take to the field with all our might to claim revenge

and enforce the rights of our racial brethren.'2 Continuing:

The Afghan nation is well able to take revenge, and had it not been for His
Majesty's moderating hand, for every slain Afghan one hundred Pakistanis
would have been killed by now. But the brave Afghan nation love their King's
regard his person [sic] as more precious than anything else in the world and in
his behalf stand ever ready to sacrifice their lives and children, owing to this
profound regard we restrained ourselves to await the arrival of just and
impartial advisors such as you, we ask not that you plead our cause, but only
that you look at this aggressive act in the light of morality and justice, so that
the world may know that the peace-loving Afghan nation has fully lived up to
its obligations arising under the UN charter and International Law.3

The various layers of this reported speech are not clear. Were the elders fully aware of all

the provisions of the UN Charter, or did someone coach them on this? But regardless of

where and when that information was inserted into this text, what is interesting is that this

selection represents the intermingling of two different conceptual ways of relating oneself

2
Firoz 1949: 27.
3
Firoz 1949: op. cit.
 81

to the world.

When an American citizen reads the Preamble to the US Constitution, especially

aloud in school, they are performing their inclusion, and their audience's inclusion, in a

social category: "We, [you and I,] the people of the United States of America." This is an

abstract imagined community which places citizens in relation to each other and to the

president, the chief elected executive official of the nation-state.

Standing in contrast is a popular American game, "Six Degrees of Separation."

This game highlights the fact that individuals' inter-meshed circles of acquaintances,

even in very large polities, can also serve as a mental frame of reference linking any and

all individuals to each other and to an entire social collective.4 Many American citizens

might have a fairly short chain radiating from personal acquaintances, then the

acquaintances of those initial acquaintances, and so on, that leads all the way to the

president in a fairly small number of "degrees of separation", even if they are not aware

of all the intermediate steps.

One can envision one's relations to others in abstract terms or in concrete ones.

Could not all Americans also conceive of their relationship to the President, or any other

individual, in terms of an estimated, relative personal closeness through concrete, though

not fully worked out, middle steps? Would not the relative (estimated) degree of

closeness also engender a sort of ranking in prestige and hypothetical access to power and

4
This game originally was conducted in the following way: one participant would name two actors, one
of whom was always Kevin Bacon; and then the other participants would have to construct a chain of
movies linking the two actors like the following: "X and Y actor were in Film 1; Y and Z actor were in
Film 2; Z and N actor were in Film 3; and N actor and Kevin Bacon were in Film 4." Since then the
social networking site Facebook has also popularized a game which seeks to link chains of
acquaintances in a similar but less specific way, through mutual acquaintances rather than through
mutual films.
 82

honor, even while the factor of personalized relationships inculcated a sort of feeling of

anti-hierarchical intimacy? This is no more or no less natural of a way to perceive polities

than is a nationhood performed through the reading of the texts of citizenship. Which

way is more culturally prevalent depends on the social dominance of specific institutions

of communications, and relations of power in society.

Let us return to the anecdote from Moghulgay, Khost. On one hand, there is the

invocation of institutions: governments and the UN are the filter through which tribesmen

are related to the people of other nations. But domestically, the elders related themselves

to the government and to their fellow brothers in the Pashtun nation through personalized

affective ties to the monarch, not as either subjects or citizens in a nation-state.5 These

intimate ties were perceived and performed by the elders even though they did not know

the king except through a series of intermediary steps. The elders claimed that it was only

out of respect for the king and the government of Afghanistan that they had not already

crossed over the border in force. Of course they must have also been ever-conscious that

the government had a good deal of coercive military power, but that did not affect their

perception or their self-presentation in this account. Their view of this power relationship

was asymmetrical influence, not authority; and it was a personalized relationship.

In this chapter I will explore several manifestations of this dichotomy on varying

social scales: state expansion under the monarchy developed a nested structure of various

levels. Within any given level people's interactions with authority were personalized and

couched within the metaphor of elderhood and kinship, giving authority the illusion of

5
In this passage, the use of the word 'Afghan' is almost certainly in its older historical sense, in which it
was synonymous with "Pashtun".
 83

mere, uncoerced 'influence'; while horizontal relations with the outside of that level

came to be filtered through reference to state institutions, on scales above the village

level. Shifting scales of saliency in any given social interaction determined the social

'inside' and 'outside' in that particular encounter.6 This view injects a measure of state

hierarchy into the old cliche of supposedly egalitarian, supposedly extra-, anti-, or pre-

state rural Pashtun politics: "me against my brother; me and my brother against my

cousins; me and my brother and my cousins against the world".

Where might this personalized mode of relation to the state and to others come

from? What were the social settings of performance which helped solidify and maintain it

out of older, non-state processes? Can this process even be traced historically?

My answer is that it can, though perhaps mostly through suggestive anecdotes that

must serve as tokens for larger processes in the face of a pervasive lack of documents for

the 1930s in particular. In this chapter I describe a national-scale Pashtun public sphere

built on face-to-face relationships and reinforced by hybrid state-lineage ideologies. On

the national scale after 1930, this zone of public participation came to overrule

depersonalized urban public spheres such as the one I describe in Chapter 2. It was

culturally dominant, or hegemonic, because it was bound up in the power structures that

reinforced the royal family's rule in the form of a state; and because it sought to block

other routes for the performative circulation of social identity.

Throughout the chapter I present cases of negotiation between hierarchical and

egalitarian ideologies of lineage. Rather than taking the state as a given, I point out the

6
This analysis shares a great deal with Susan Gal's 2005 and 2002 arguments regarding the semiotics of
fractal recursion. See also Lukinbeal and Aitken 1998 on what they have called 'fractal geographies' of
'patriarchal' masculinity.
 84

way that the state itself, post-1929, was constituted by these negotiations.

The linchpin of this negotiation was personal, face to face interaction. I describe

the development of pyramidal and individualized 'chain-of-command' executive

structures; monarchic ideological patterns of family and lineage authority; and face-to-

face circulation structures - especially the hujra, or men's lodge - based on an

assumption of paternalistic hierarchy. I argue that these formed a mutually reinforcing

social space, in which people placed themselves in relation to others that they did not

necessarily know. These links rested on chains of known individuals reaching up to the

king; and then down again on other presumed, yet not necessarily experienced,

personalized links. The fact of personalization here means this is a very different sort of

public than the more familiar type described in Chapter Two, and it shows a strong

degree of elite restriction in trying to monopolize the terms on which social narratives

circulated. Should it be analyzed as a 'public' as defined in this dissertation's

introduction? Here I argue that it involved key components of the idea of a public in

social sciences literature: reflexive circulation of narratives among strangers, who view

themselves as a social entity by virtue of this shared circulation. A particularly monarchic

form of "patriarchal" ideology - metaphorical 'rule by the father', or of elders more

broadly - came to pervade local rural elite, and national, narratives and embodied

manifestations of Pashtunness. In its broadest sense, it was based on all Pashtuns'

belonging in an elaborate hierarchical family tree; and on the common ideology of a

performed code of 'Pashto' conduct related to locally elite masculine honor.

In the period of 1930 to 1950, centrally elite narratives which backed up monarchy
 85

show negotiation, as indeed the structures of the state did. Pashtunness also meant things

like freedom of Pashtun men from domination, a dialectic of power built into the

continued struggle for sovereignty on all layers of society. I note traces of negotiation by

the less powerful, which show up in supposedly elite narratives that don't always

consistently argue for total state sovereignty. I note how this was mirrored by traces of

negotiation in the actions of state officials that undermined the power relations on which

the official's eliteness depended.

1.1. A Curtailing of Urban Public Pashto by Chivalrous, Personalized Pashto

HabTbl, Ulfat, Khadim, Benawa, and I [intellectuals who first came to

degrees of cultural prominence in the early days of Pashto Anjuman
print activity] brought about literary Pashto in Afghanistan, and
Muhammad Gul Khan Momand brought about political Pashto. His
work was far more substantial than ours. He was the shadow over our
heads. If he had not had so much force, we would not have been able to
do so much work. If we ever needed anything, we would resort to him.
He'd solve our problems. His Pashto [in this usage, the word does not
refer only to language but rather is roughly equivalent to "chivalry" with
additional connotations of identity] was loftier than ours.

- Siddlq Allah RixtTn, interview with Sabir Shah Sabir, 1998, my

translation7

The rise of a print-centric public sphere in Kandahar, as described at length in the

previous chapter, had lasting repercussions that shall be seen later in this dissertation. As

may be gathered from remarks in the foregoing chapter, though, Muhammad 'Usman's

participation in print publics was also part of a new process of restriction which

7
Pa Afghanistan kxe adabi Paxto ma, Habibi, Ulfat, Khadim, aw Benawa rawoste da aw siyasi Paxto
Muhammad Gul Khan Momand rawoste da. Da hagha kar zmung na der drund dai; hagha zmung da
sar syure 'o, ka da haghd zor na wai mung heskdla dumra kar na shu kawdlai, zmung ba che sa ta
zarurat sho haghd ta ba muraji 'a kawala. Hagha zmung mas 'ale hal kawale, da haghd Paxto zmung na
Iwdrawa. Sabir 1998:39
 86

constrained that public sphere almost as soon as it arose. The Maraka, as noted above,

was a voluntary, self-constituted organization. However, on 3 November, 1932, the

Maraka was transformed into a different body, the Da Paxto Adabi Anjuman, which fell

under direct governmental supervision. Muhammad 'Usman was appointed president of

that body by the new governor of Kandahar province, Muhammad Gul Khan Momand,

who was simultaneously also the Interior Minister of Afghanistan since 1930.8 Citing

his own original interview research, Sayyid Sabir Shah Sabir writes that when

Muhammad Gul Khan arrived in Kandahar, he gathered up the literary intellectuals

(adlbari) of Kandahar together with the "elders" or "leaders" of the "various peoples of

the province" (da muhktalifo qawmuno mdshdran), and asked a question: "What should

be done for the sake of Pashto?"9

The narrative Sabir received indicates that the lineage leaders and literary

intellectuals responded by invoking the national importance of their own region.

Claiming that "Kandahar is the soil of the Pashtuns' honor and memory, and is the heart

of all Afghanistan", members of the delegation to Muhammad Gul requested

governmental financial aid and authority, in the form of bureaucratic streamlining of the

Kandahari Pashto cultural organizations under an executive body (idara). Sabir's work is

highly impressionistic and heavily informed by the Afghan identity politics of the late

twentieth century, but there may be some truth in this account. Print technology was both

highly restricted and very costly in Afghanistan. Might some Kandahari intellectuals

have reasoned that accepting some surveillance and discipline by the monarchy was a

Sabir 1998: 50.

Sabir 1998: 50.
 87

necessary concession to make, in order to bolster any sort of print public at all? Might

some have also decided that they could use such an executive body, based in Kandahar

yet responsible for Pashto on the national scale, as an inroad into the state itself; and, in

doing so, work to liberalize all Afghan intellectual activity in the future? Both scenarios

are familiar in Afghan history. The first is more or less confirmed by certain scholars, as

shall be illustrated presently; while many members of the underground Wex Zalmiyan

movement, a primary subject of Chapter 4, would serve as examples of the second

trend.10

Pashtun ethnic nationalism in these elite urban registers emerged from the tensions,

and sometimes the collusive negotiations, between middle classes and the aristocratic

managers of the monarchy's rule. Still, it is undeniable that the monarchic state, through

its trusted governor Muhammad Gul Khan Momand, had the upper hand in this

arrangement as early as 1932. Benawa states in no uncertain terms that Muhammad Gul's

corralling of the civic organizations promoting Pashtun identity into the government-

managed Anjuman was directed by none other than the king Nadir Shah himself.11 Later

in the decade, Muhammad Gul transplanted the newly officialized Anjuman to Kabul, the

better for the monarchy to directly supervise it. In 1937, it was merged with the capital's

Persian literary society to form the Pashto Tobna, the national Pashto language academy.

The Tobna in turn fell under an independent directorate headed by the Minister for

Higher Education, the king's introspective cousin, Sardar Muhammad Na'Im.12 Even

10
I thank Suvir Kaul for reminding me that neither possibility should rule out a third: that some
intellectuals might have sought out aristocratic patronage as a route for personal preferment
" Benawa even lists a precise day in for the establishment of the Anjuman in his annotations on the
"Muhammad Gul Momand" entry in Os3nILikwal: 9 Qaws, 1311 SH. OLIII:. 1252.
12
PTLT.vm.
 88

after many changes to both its place in the government and its internal composition, the

institution still exists in 2009, in the much expanded form of the Afghanistan Academy of

Sciences.

Referring back to the early days at issue in this chapter, the prominent grammarian

and literary scholar Siddiq Allah Rixtin neatly summed up all the conflicted relationships

of power discussed above in a 1998 interview with Sabir. A pride in ethnic activism

combined with a sense that the cultural public sphere was politically marginalized; a

sense that Momand was both a facilitator of publicness and a personalized patron

dominating it - all come through in the quote at the outset of this section, along with a

personal admiration of Momand which, given Rixtin's subsequent reformist and activist

commitments (as discussed in Chapter Four), is simultaneously readable as ironic and

frustrated sarcasm. Momand brought about the Pashto that was truly significant; all work

was carried out under his shadow; "his Pashto was loftier than ours."

1.2. "Political Pashto" Between Egalitarianism and Hierarchy

Pashto is nobility/pure breeding (aslltob). Pashto is competition of worthy

rivals (siyalwalai). Pashto is salvation. Pashto is dignified stature ('alT-janabT).
Pashto is honor/respect/prestige ('izzat). In Pashto there is no dishonor or
degradation, because Pashtuns cannot accept these. Pashto is being noble and
free-born; and Pashto is lordship.

— Muhammad Gul Khan Momand, On Pashto and Pashtunness, 1948,

my translation13

[A] few days after my arrival in the [remote village of Balabluk, in the remote
province of Farah] ... the Farah governor, Sardar Abdol Razaq, came to the
village. The local khans welcomed him and prepared an evening meal for
him... A sturdy man, wearing dark glasses, was sitting at the head of the
guests. He was making a speech before the local khans. His subject was

13
OLII1: 1262.
 89

etymology, explaining the roots of certain words in the Farah Pashtu dialect
while drawing their attention to his Nangarhari Pashtu dialect. First addressing
the khans of Nurzai, Alizai, and Barakzai tribes, he said, "You know very well
the the lord and crown (sar-5-sardar) of all Afghan tribes is the noble tribe of
Muhammadzai, of which I am a member. Is it not true?" The local khans,
looking at each other meaningfully, preferred to remain silent

— As recounted by Ghobar and posthumously edited by Sherief Fayyez

in 1999, translation by Fayyez M

As evidenced in the ways that individuals spoke who mediated Aman Allah's state -

individuals like Mawlawi' Abd al-Wasi' - the Aman Allah period was one in which elite

Pashtuns discursively and legally sought to distance and transform the rural hinterland. In

contrast, after 1930, both elite state ideology and elite local institutions sought to remove

the perception of political distance, through metaphors of consensual elderhood and

influence. The new dynasty was itself profoundly distanced both culturally and politically

from most rural Pashtuns. Thus, they relied on the intermediation of people like

Muhammad Gul Khan Momand. Muhammad Gul's own elite branches of the Momand

lineages had long been accustomed to negotiating contingent levels of authority and

influence, kinship and coercion.

As before, I use biography in order to give narrative focus to the trends of which I

speak, and to draw links between ideological text and communicative strategy. Indeed,

biography, with specific anecdotes, seems like the only suitable way to analyze a

communicative practice rooted in face-to-face action. It provides a link between the

stable, repeatable texts we can read; the prior, disjointed circulation of the narratives they

contain; and the origin of narratives in struggles for sovereignty on all (elite) levels of

14
Ghobar 2001: 156-157 (translation by Sherief Fayyez). For the "sar-o-sardar" quote, refer to the
original Persian in Ghobar 1999, p. 187.
 90

society, whether urban print publics or powerful rural lineages.15 Unlike before, this

chapter focuses overwhelmingly on the context surrounding a single individual, the

polymath and career military officer Muhammad Gul Khan Momand, often referred to by

later intellectuals by the paternalistic sobriquet Da Paxto Baba (Father of Pashto).

Despite the fact that he has rarely appeared in western sources, the figure of

Muhammad Gul Khan Momand towered over much of Afghanistan in the 1930s; and

continues long after his death to provoke strong feelings among supporters and detractors

alike. The topic of Muhammad Gul and the things he did (or didn't do) enjoyed an

upsurge in interest in the late 1990s in Afghan scholarship. In the context of the intensely

rigid ethnic politics surrounding the Afghan civil war and the rise of the Taliban,

expatriate Pashtun intellectuals in Peshawar lionized Momand as a true servant of Pashto

and the nation; while non-Pashtun intellectuals cast him as a retrograde ethnic

supremacist.16 He is worthy of our attention because more than any other, he represents

the nexus between a patriarchal dynastic rule and state hegemony in Pashtun regions

outside the urban centers.

1.3. Socio-political and Economic Context

The 1920s under the Shah Aman Allah exhibited a sharp upswing in the integration

15
Here I have been influenced by Silverstein and Urban's concept of 'entextualization': semiotic
processes of language abstract certain portions of ongoing action as objectified phenomena, to the point
where these processes create a "seemingly shareable, transmittable culture" in textual (not necessarily
written) form. Silverstein and Urban 1996: 1-2. The case here can only be informed by this method,
though, since I have far less access to systematic, reliable data on the semiotic processes involved in
many social negotiations.
16
See especially Farhang 1992; and also Ghobar 1999 for depictions of Momand as an ethnic chauvinist
who wielded state coercive machinery against other ethnic communities. For the pro-Momand side,
which has sometimes tended to cast doubt on the authorship of Ghobar 1999, the reader may refer to M.
Alif Nigargar 1379 SH [2000], Naqdwa Tabsara barjild-i dowwom-i Afghanistan dar MasTr-i Tarikh .
 91

of Afghanistan's elite trading classes into the global economy. This upswing, as

discussed in the previous chapter, came at the expense of something else: it involved a

sharp marginalization of traditional, informal nomadic trade in eastern, southeastern, and

especially southern Afghanistan - a marginalization which had already been in progress

since the reign of the Amir 'Abd al-Rahman.

The state of affairs in the last years of the 1920s changed matters significantly. The

global economic crisis known in the west as the Great Depression impacted

Afghanistan's trade with India. As the Indian economy became more inwardly focused,

elite traders in Afghanistan found themselves in a difficult, declining position. While the

boom years of the early and mid 1920s had a lasting impact on their self-image, the

trading aristocracy of Kandahar (as opposed to bankers in Kabul) became less financially

indispensable to the monarchy. They came to occupy a role mostly as ideological

support to Aman Allah late in that king's reign.

Economic stresses seem to have exacerbated a great deal of local state corruption

and factionalism. In addition to the central state's increasingly heavy-handed interference

with local power politics and the general economic downturn, these trends led to a series

of individual flare-ups which culminated in the fall of the capital, and all-out civil war.

In 1928, the centralizing king Aman Allah was deposed by a series of peasant

insurrections which led to the establishment of rule by a Tajik commoner of the Kabul

exurbs, Hablb Allah KalakanT, more commonly referred to in scholarship by the

pejorative epithet "Bachcha Saqqa'o" ("son of a watercarrier"). Almost immediately after

the fall of Kabul, Pashtun dynasts near the center began campaigns of reconquest. But
 92

they could not accomplish this reconquest alone. Led by the trio of Muhammad Nadir

the king-to-be; and his brothers Shah Mahmud and Muhammad Hashim (each of whom

would come to serve as Prime Minister, beginning with Hashim); the aspiring new

dynasty relied very heavily on the military force of tribesmen from the densely-populated

but comparatively resource-poor eastern and southeastern provinces which now make up

Nangrahar and, especially, Paktia. The new regime was too weak to project themselves

as being transcendently sovereign, as earlier monarchs did. No longer iamTrs\ or

commanders of the believers, the rulers of the Yahya Khel dynasty of the Musahiban

lineage were shahs, or kings.

Afghanistan thus faced two crises in 1929 - political and economic - which were

related in a broad sense. They were resolved simultaneously through military action

reconquering the capital, and the reinstitution of domestic land management as a

politically dominant economic strategy.

A further truncating and downscaling of even the informal traditional commerce in

the east meant an increasingly local subsistence order in agrarian regions; an increased

emphasis on an Afghanistan-internal, land-based economy rather than a commercial one;

and a concomitant rise in land speculation by local nouveau-riche - composed of loyal

individuals and families, facilitated by allocation of favors from the royal family via

patron-client networks.17 Through preferential state-bank loans to such clients, which

were re-lent to peasants, urban credit monopolies and ultimately the state were able to

achieve a deflected surplus extraction from Pashtun populations. Nonetheless, for those

" Cf. Ghobar 2001, esp. pp. 73-74 for general details; also Daoud 1982, esp. 151-153 and Part 3, chs. 1-2,
passim.
 93

who had money but not access to the social networks and culture of urban elites, land was

a good investment. Landownership as a khan brought honor and political influence. In

contemporary (1934) intelligence reports for the British Indian government, Captain J. A.

Robinson notes a rapid 1930s shift in nomads' economic strategies, away from trade and

moneylending in India and toward land speculation in the southeastern Afghan uplands.18

A rapid shift in land ownership patterns no doubt led to demographic pressures in the

densely populated southeast, which were eased by another set of state policies.

For domestic military purposes, the state relied on a different type of allocation

which at the same time eased demographic pressures in the east and southeast. The new

monarch Nadir Khan (by this time, Nadir Shah) had entered into voluntary alliances with

Pashtun lineages, allowing them to settle in primarily non-Pashtun peasantry in areas like

Kabul province where the Musahiban monarchic state initially faced small-scale peasant

revolts. This practice of allocating, in effect, the right to domestically conquer

populations and extract their surplus, was also a safety valve for certain populations'

discontent, especially those in the border uplands. These populations exchanged it, in the

short term, for payment; as the new monarchs found that the entire state treasury was

depleted. And, in the long run, border populations accepted this parceling of state

sovereignty in exchange for their rooting within the state. It was compensation for the

gradual loss of their traditionally exercised right to be mobile, to avoid an existence

overly tied to any single discipline and surveillance regime, and engage in long-distance

cross-border trade and moneylending deep inside India.

Therefore, the political economy in Pashtun areas of the east and southeast became
18
See Robinson 1980 [1934]: pp. 27 and 31
 94

a more localized affair than previously, with a rapidly self-rooting, domestic-oriented

subsistence order replacing a more varied landed and mercantile order. This system of

rule, integrating political and economic superiority in specific local allies of the

government, meant that the priority of lineages and their sovereign male heads became an

even more important feature of life than it had immediately previously. The 1930s, in

short, are characterized by the increasing rise to importance of a quasi-feudal Pashtun

lineage politics in many areas, investing that politics with far more significance than it

had earlier at the same time as it became more hierarchized. People's places in social

space were more and more related to the way they fit into a nesting series of layers of

greater and greater authority and influence, layers which were also tied to local and

regional administrative geography. While ruling structures in other countries responded

to the crisis of 1930 with a backpedaling away from liberalism and a shift to corporatism,

the new Afghan monarchy responded - at least in most Pashtun areas - by insulating

Pashtun populations from the world political economy, and re-focusing them inwards

through a great deal of both administrative and ideological effort.

The following sections describe these process in much deeper detail, as introduced

before, through the lens of the career of Muhammad Gul Khan Momand, the new state's

Minister of the Interior.

//. Lineage Politics and Personal Negotiation

Muhammad Gul, over his lifetime, repeatedly formed something of an individual

locus of social debate. That is, through his example I intend to illustrate that even a
 95

personally-mediated, face-to-face public sphere can show the traces of dialogic action.

Over Section II of this chapter, I describe the way that Muhammad Gul Khan served as

an intermediary between various forms of political practice that might all be glossed as

patriarchal in some way. Of course, as Christine Noelle argues, rural Pashtun politics

varied so greatly across periods and regions that it is difficult to pigeonhole it into any

particular genre in an absolute, ethnographic present.19

Some of the vast variety in rural Pashtun politics can be appreciated from a look at

Muhammad Gul Khan's own Momand lineage over time. Noelle has explored

nineteenth-century Momand history in Afghanistan extensively.20 Therefore, the

following digression only emphasizes aspects of negotiation between modes of lineage

power that range from highly pyramidal and coercive use of force to highly egalitarian

and contestatory negotiation. The emphasis is on contingent practice and negotiation,

rather than structure. After a look at these trends in Momand history generally, the

discussion shifts to Muhammad Gul's own career.

ILL Momand Negotiations of Power

In terms of local stratification, certain tribes of the upper Momands of present-day

Afghanistan preserved a fairly aristocratic sense of self-distinction until very recently.21

19
Noelle nonetheless also rehashes an ethnographic literature preoccupied with pinning down the precise
nature of "Pashtun society" before stating that empirical practice creates great problems for such
structuralist endeavors.
20
Refer to Noelle 1997, Chapter 3 (pp. 123-227), "The Position of the Pashtun Tribes in the
Muhammadzai State", especially 180-194.
21
Thus, Rose 2008 [1919] has, on p. 125: "The Mohmand tribal constitution is more aristocratic than is
the case of the tribes of the Sufed Koh and Tirah, and the power of the Khans is well developed." A
sense of social difference in the Momand khan families of eastern Nangrahar still obtains today.
However, shifting market conditions; the militarization of society and sponsoring of new armed factions
during the anti-communist war; and the populist upwelling of the Taliban, have stripped those families
of most of their material difference and most of their disproportionate influence. Personal
 96

The Morcha Khel of Lalpura kept order on behalf of the Mughal (and Durrani Afghan)

hierarchy: order among most other Momand lineages, and order over other non-Momand

tribes which were not similarly patronized by Mughal authority. They were granted

hereditary command over the fort at Dakka guarding the western marches of the Khyber

Pass and the transport routes to India; where they levied imperial tolls (to which they also

possessed hereditary rights) while providing safe passage.22 Remunerated by the

Mughals and Durranis through wealth, honors, and armaments, the Morcha Khels were

unique in the eastern province in that they had the wherewithal to regularly deploy

cavalry against other tribes (this was particularly true of their relationship with the

ShTnwarl who inhabited the poorer hills of eastern Nangrahar, and who did not accept any

clientship with the Momands).

The hierarchical character of the Momand tribes, heavily integrated into pyramidal

imperial structures, was nonetheless mitigated by a number of factors. First, the

hierarchical ranking of lineages was balanced by various lineages within the Momand

tribes being recognized as sarishtawal clans.23 That is, they were recognized as guardians

of the Momand customary law, a holdover from the days of egalitarian segmental warrior

patriarchy, and could form something of a Momand-internal court of appeals against the

excesses of any given section including the Morcha Khel.

Second, the Morcha Khel's relationships with other clans of the hills around the

Khyber region required adapting to other, more highly egalitarian, modes of patriarchal

correspondence with Bashir Gwakh, journalist from Goshta District, 29 October, 2008.
22
Elphinstone's (1839: 41) often-repeated comment that "a single Momund will pass a whole caravan" is
testimony to this role
23
For example, an Isa Khel family at Pindiali claimed this status among the Tarakzai, which also enabled
them to claim khan-hood in their external dealings. Refer to Merk 1984 [1898]: 67.
 97

alliance. The Momands' relationship of dominance with tribes such as the Saff and

Mullagorl is described by many colonial observers, at any rate, as vassalage. At the turn

of the twentieth century, those "clans" "acknowledge [d] their inferiority and [were]

bound to pay the Khan of Lalpura occasional tribute and to hospitably entertain

Momands passing through their villages."24 The Khan's influence among the other less

powerful tribes of the region, though, was probably less a result of hierarchical honors

accruing from his patronage by the center. Nor was the Morcha Khel's and the

Momand's superior coercive force as strong a factor in their dealings with the tribes in

the eastern Khyber region, in what is now Pakistan, due to those areas' distance from the

Morcha Khel center of gravity.

While his interactions further west were strongly textured with hierarchy, the Khan

of Lalpura operated according to a different logic in his relations with tribes further east

in the ambiguous zone between monarchic Afghan and British imperial power (excepting

the aforementioned Mullagori). That area had been only tenuously held even by Mughal

power at its height. The Khan of Lalpura conducted or instigated numerous raids into

British territory, most likely for booty to redistribute in the style of a non-imperialized

khan of the hills.25 As Jon W. Anderson writes, among many self-consciously egalitarian

tribes, any man with land considered himself a khan of one degree or another. In such

regions the khan generally represented collective interests to the outside, and organized

collective action to obtain, channel, and redistribute resources. He was a sort of self-

funded public servant; and any suggestion of wealth expended solely for the khan's own

24
Merk, op. cit.: S5
25
Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. XVII: 386 According to the Gazetteer, "[d]uring the early period of
British rule the Momands gave more trouble than any otherfrontiertribe".
 98

benefit among this sort of society, such as occurred with shifts in political economy in

Anderson's ethnographic setting, would lead to charges of dishonor and a loss of

legitimacy.26

Finally, the Khan of Lalpura even entered into marriage ties with the Zakha Khel

AfrTdT, a far less "noble" tribe by the measurement of the time. Warburton and Warburton

recount an incident wherein a "band of Mullagori raiders", a tribe with long-standing

enmity toward the Zakha Khels, happened upon the Khan of Lalpura's wife (probably

unknowingly). She was gathering water at her natal home with her sister, wife to Khawas

Khan of the Zakha Khels. As the Warburtons relate, "It took the utmost influence of the

Khan of Lalpura, who had then control over the Mullagoris, to secure the release of these

two ladies."27 In the absence of more detailed sources we can only guess at the full range

of gendered power relations involved in this incident, but at least it indicates that the

Khan of Lalpura's "control" over eastern tribes was very a different relationship than his

relationship with the crown, or with western tribes like the Nangrahar Shinwari. This

abduction cut straight to the heart of Lalpura namus, or masculine honor tied to the

control and protection of women. The fact that even the Khan of Lalpura's wife was

vulnerable to potential attacks, in the Afridi regions, shows the tenuous nature of

hierarchy in such a relative and shifting system of power.

Still, unlike the rest of these lineages, the Khan of Lalpura was also well-integrated

into the more elite society of dynastic politics on a geopolitical, not merely local, scale.

Despite attempts at circumscribing Lalpura's power by the Amir 'Abd al-Rahman in the

26
Jon W. Anderson 1978 passim.
27
Warburton and Warburton 1900: 158-159.
 99

1880s, and despite the truncation of Lalpura's influence by border consolidation and

British administration, traditional (now informal) cross-border links provided the Khan

with some independence and made him indispensable to the Amir. As Hasan Kakar

notes, Muhammad Akbar Khan, the Khan of Lalpura at the turn of the century, was the

only "head of a tribe [in eastern Afghanistan] with feudal privileges...who retained his

position throughout the reign of Amir ' Abd al-Rahman."28 Indeed, the visibility of the

Khan of Lalpura is evidenced by a curious note in the back pages of the New York Times

of September 14*, 1902. Explicitly comparing the politics of Afghanistan and the

neighboring Pashtun elites in British India to the "consanguineous marriages" of the

"reigning houses of Europe", a society gossip column in the Times noted the marriage of

the crown prince Habib Allah (by then, succeeded to the Amirate) to the daughter of

Akbar Khan of Lalpura (which took place over a decade previously).29

On such a level, where New York and Paris were aware of Lalpura's marriage

relation to the crown, it was natural for Morcha Khel elites to think of themselves in

relation to the new geopolitical reality of "Afghanistan" - a bounded territory externally

constituted as something of a national state in the interests of imperial powers. That was

no less natural for them was than the intricacy of negotiating multiple, very local lineage

relationships, of varying degrees of egalitarianism and with varying constructions of how

the 'father' metaphor fit into local life. Morcha Khel and other Momand elites must have

been adept at negotiating a diverse heteroglossia of political and moral voices, to use a

Bakhtinian term, involved in Pashtun political life from the hill country to the court.30

28
Kakar 2006: 66.
29
New York Times, "News NotesfromParis". 14 September, 1902.
30
I draw on Jane Hill's 1995 reading of Bakhtin here.
 100

This is a skill that Muhammad Gul Khan's family, and Muhammad Gul himself, shared.

11.2. Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's Biography

Muhammad Gul was born in Kabul to a (Nangrahari) Dawezai Momand family.

According to Merk, that branch of the Dawezai Momands were traditionally nomads, but

were integrated into the strong hierarchy of lineages pledging allegiance to the Morcha

Khel; and members of that lineage served as the Dawezai's khans?x They thus fit into the

post-imperial lineage hierarchies of the eastern province which, at their head, were tied

through marriage directly up to the patriarchal monarchy during the Habib Allah era.

Muhammad Gul's family made a point of maintaining close ties to their ancestral regions

and the political families in Nangrahar. Despite a life spent largely outside Nangrahar,

Muhammad Gul married a woman from his family's ancestral village; and he married his

only child, a daughter, into the family of the Khan of Lalpura.32

Alongside this deep integration with the lineage politics in the far east, the political

genealogy of Muhammad Gul's family operated according to another register of eliteness

as well. Like the Hotak Akhundzadas, the family was tied for generations to the court.

While tracing the Hotak Akhundazada family sheds light on the historical trajectory of

gentleman scholars and their links to urban middle classes, a narrative following

Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's family offers a window onto long-term ideological and

material links between the national military and various populations in the rural Pashtun

hinterland.

31
Rose 2008 [1919]: 125.
32
Rixtlh 1988: n.p.; refer to the entry on Momand
 101

Muhammad Gul's family belonged more specifically to the Hasan Khel branch of

the Dawezai. The Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes on the North-West Frontier of India

lists two different "Hassan Khel" sections of the Dawezai, one of which is listed as

nomadic and belonging to "Ningrahar and Upper Helmand"; and one of which is not

given a geographic location. Among the former, the Dictionary lists one "Abdul Karim"

as one of five headmen of the Hasan Khel, alongside "Haji Islam", "Abdul Wahab",

"Ghulam", and "Lalagai".33 Due to his family's position, it seems plausible that

Muhammad Gul was descended from that very ' Abd al-Karlm Khan.34

According to Sabir Shah Sabir, whose research contains the most detailed

biographical data on Muhammad Gul that I have seen, Muhammad Gul's grandfather or

great-grandfather 'Abd al-Karim Khan had traveled to Balkh from Nangrahar in military

support of the king Dost Muhammad Khan. He remained in the north, eventually being

killed by rebels in Samangan during the reign of Amir 'Abd al-Rahman.35

Muhammad Gul's father Khurshld Khan followed this path of military service to

the crown. He held some positions of relatively high importance administering districts

recently conquered by 'Abd al-Rahman from the Khanates of Asmar and Barlkot (in

present-day Kunar). Might the monarchy have found it useful to install such an official,

one with links to the last remaining eastern aristocratic hierarchy, between itself and the

population of a newly-subordinated eastern territory? That is, might the expansion of the

monarchic state, in eastern Afghanistan, have also involved an expansion of Lalpura-

33
Dictionary, p. 77.
34
Although the dictionary was published around the time of Muhammad Gul Khan's birth, such colonial
texts were in general collected over time, with new information being added to - rather than replacing -
old information. Refer to Anderson 1992, especially 92-97
35
Sabir 1998: 32. Unless otherwise cited, biographical details about Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's
ancestors in these three paragraphs are drawnfromSabir.
 102

related patrimonial influence - using preexisting structures of dominance to rule areas

beyond their original purview? Whatever the case, by 1919 Khurshid Khan and his

professional troops were fighting alongside the local power broker MTr Zaman Khan and

his irregulars on the Kunar front in the war for independence from British influence.36

Khurshid Khan's subsequent position was a little more politically complex: he

served as a prominent military official in Shinwari territory. He thus provided support to

ruling lineages that the Morcha Khel Momands and their other allied Momand lineages

such as the Dawezai had traditionally kept in check through deterrent force, on behalf of

the state, since the Mughal era. Might this have been a way to pit restive Shinwari tribes

and ambitious officials against each other, thus canceling out the potential of either to

threaten the crown? A threat of Shinwari action was certainly worrisome to Kabul.

Indeed, a Shinwari uprising set into motion the series of events that led to the fall of the

ruling dynasty in 1928. The Shinwari uprising of 1928 included an attack on the

government's Lalpura stronghold of Dakka; while the majority of Momands allied with

the crown against the Shinwaris throughout the course of the latters' uprising.37 Of

course, Lalpura and its allies, when strong, were not always a model of loyalty to the

crown either. Eventually, Khurshid Khan was transferred to Mazar-i Sharif on the Turkic

northern steppes, and reached the considerable position of Firqa Mdshsr, or Division

Leader, in Dih Dad! of that region.

At this time Muhammad Gul Khan was a young man. He had received a traditional

Perso-Islamic liberal arts education at home, but also had graduated in 1332 HQ (1914)

36
Nariwal 1384 SH [2005]: 209.
37
Refer to Ghobar 1359 SH [1980]: 818-820
 103

with the second class of Harbiya, the War College, newly established under the Amir

Habib Allah.38 As Rohi states, the student atmosphere in Harbiya was every bit as

politicized as in the constitutionalist political hotspot that was the Habibiya Lycee.39 This

environment, combined with the national-scale service of Khurshid Khan, must have

fostered a particular state-level scale of awareness in the young Muhammad Gul. At the

same time, by the early twentieth century the military operated on a system of ranking

and command based on Pashto terminology rather than Persian, drawing upon local and

British colonial ideologies of Pashtuns as a martial society. Looking back, Muhammad

Gul notes in 1938 that he never learned to speak Pashto in the home and had to acquire it

in adulthood.40 Military narratives of Pashtuns; an elite Momand national-aristocratic

scale of awareness; the defensive political nationalism and anti-imperialism of the

constitutional period; and the further objectification of Pashtunness embedded in a desire

to learn Pashto - all appear to have combined to foster in young officers like Muhammad

Gul a particular desire for promotion of Pashto in Afghan life, to which the discussion

will return.

Upon graduation, Muhammad Gul was placed in command of a segment of the

royal guard.41 Once his father Khurshid Khan retired from his post as Division

Commander in Dih Dadi, it was proposed that Muhammad Gul take over the post, a

promotion which he accepted. Despite the military's professionalization, which had

steadily increased in some measure since the Sher Ali period of the mid-nineteenth

century, it seems that the military's role in disciplining social life continued to draw
38
PSIV: 1260.
39
Rohi 2005: 52.
40
M. G. Momand 1317 SH [1938], n.p.
41
Shams Momand 2005: 82.
 104

upon traditions of lineage inheritance to be effective. That is, the military command

preserved personalized relationships with local populations over generations, as indeed

Khurshid Khan's career also shows. At the same time the military structure maintained

the rigid social hierarchies embedded in chains of command and inculcated this

hierarchical thought in its officers. And, through maintenance of personal relationships

between military leaders and the elites of local populations, these relationships provided a

route for monarchic hierarchies to be internalized by local populations. It is in part for

this reason that Zemaray Daoud speaks at length of a "tribal-aristocratic" structure to the

military, and speaks of two simultaneous hierarchies. A hierarchy based on a strict

professional ranking system coexisted with another informal one based, due to the nature

of recruitment, on pre-existing lineage hierarchies.42 A mutually-reinforcing influence

between military hierarchy and rural lineage patterns was furthered by the civil war of

1928-1929.

III. Monarchic Military Authoritarianism and Lineage in the 1930s

III.l. Reinforcing Hierarchy

In their conquest of the Afghan throne in 1929, the sardars (princes) of the Yahya

Khel family of the Musahiban dynasty relied heavily on the intercession of Pashtuns such

as Muhammad Gul Momand, with his aristocratic ideology drawn both from military and

Momand hierarchical traditions. Although he does not appear to have been a very

successful tactician in a traditional sense - his roles in the 1919 war of independence and

the 1924 Khost uprising were particularly undistinguished - Muhammad Gul was a
42
Refer especially to Daoud 1982:188-198 on L 'aspect tribalo-aristocratique de I 'armee.
 105

brilliant negotiator between court and local power, and a highly successful mobilizer of

irregular forces.43 He brokered his loyalty and his influence to great advantage in the

1928-29 civil war, becoming Interior Minister afterwards.

Time and again, examples of which shall be seen, Momand successfully translated

the monarchy's case into a social vocabulary of masculine Pashtun chivalry (as well as

holding out material rewards), for the benefit of tribes which had always viewed the

hierarchy of the state's ruling elites with suspicion. Perhaps building on his family

connections to Momand hierarchy in Nangrahar, Muhammad Gul's intermediation was

critical in preparing the groundwork for Muhammad Hashim Khan to gain the support of

the eastern tribes in particular during the civil war.44

Muhammad Gul also played a major role in channeling, on behalf of the monarchy,

the action of the Paktiya tribes which eventually conquered Kabul for the Musahiban

dynasty.45 Having been mobilized to national-level action through a mobilization of

reflexive Pashtun identity, largely through the actions of Muhammad Gul in the first

place, the mdshdrs (elders/leaders) of the Paktiya tribes jointly decided to take revenge on

Persian-speakers' insult to Pashtun honor and atrocities conducted during the reign of

Bachcha Saqqa'o. The specific outlet was to be a looting of the Shi'a-majority Chandol

neighborhood in Kabul. The new king Nadir Shah heard of this decision, but was unable

to dissuade the tribes. As Sabir tells it, only the intercession of Muhammad Gul,

specifically conducted in the metaphor of father or elder-hood (babatob), arrested this

action. Muhammad Gul gathered up the mdshdrs in an impromptu jirga (tribal meeting)

43
Refer to Nariwal 1384 SH [2005]: 208; Ghobar 1346: 807.
44
Khaybari 1383a SH [2004]: 52.
45
Ghobar2001:5,9, 12.
 106

and convinced them that their Pashtun revenge had been satisfied with the elimination of

the contemptible Bachcha Saqqao, who was personally responsible for everything.46

On a more practical level, retaining the support both of the tribes and their

aristocratic intermediaries such as Muhammad Gul Khan Momand required considerable

outward devolution of power. In addition to his duties as the Interior Minister,

Muhammad Gul served simultaneously as the Ra ls-i Tanzlm - a sort of super-governor

between the crown and the governors of individual provinces and districts - in territory

after territory, starting with the greater Kandahar region. Muhammad Gul was charged

by the monarchy with quelling unrest in province after province in the wake of the civil

war. He achieved success through various unclear and highly personalized means,

though some (generally non-Pashtun) authors suggest that it was through a policy of

using Pashtun migrants as an unofficial military force to suppress (non-Pashtun) peasant

unrest.47 Through its intermediary Muhammad Gul, the new monarchy under Nadir Shah

selectively ceded not only resources but the right of domestic conquest and overlordship

to select Pashtun lineages, and forged personal ties of monarchic influence over them.

Like older imperial ways of parceling out sovereignty, this would serve to reinforce the

primacy of lineage-oriented hierarchy among at least these Pashtuns, even as Gul Khan

relied on lineages' local dominance as a social institution for purposes of mobilizing

military labor. This social history of ethnic relations in the early 1930s is under-

documented and is unlikely to be elaborated anytime soon. We have only the word of

near-contemporary historians who cite particular documents very sporadically; and the
46
Sabir 1998: 66-67.
47
Ghobar 2001: 56-58. Ghobar {op. cit:. 35) also notes the way that non-Pashtun forces were used in
Pashtun regions such as Paktiya, though these forces rarely took the form of settler mercenaries, as was
the case in the northern exurbs of Kabul.
 107

fact of Wazir Pashtuns as relatively recent agricultural owners presiding over

communities of Tajik dependents and tenants in the Kabul exurbs.

The national military eventually became a route for rationalizing powerful

southeastern actors' claims to a share in sovereignty, just as it had for certain Momand

military lineages long before. A look at the early issues of the state almanac Dd Kabul

Kaldnai suggests the formalization of southeastern Pashtun military rights after the 1929

civil war. In 1933, the War Ministry's organization included a special tribal division, the

Riyasat-i Qabayil. The southeast appears to have had a separate recruitment system, in

that it lists quite a few more regional commanders than other regions. And more

generally, in the First Standing Rank {Saff-i Awwal-i htada - the active duty portion),

eight out of ten commanders were Pashtun, and seven of those are from southeastern

regions; while of the First Sitting Rank {Saff-i Awwal-i Nishasta - the reserves), nine out

of fifteen are Pashtun, of whom six are southeastern and two are Barakzai (the royal

lineage).48

Other, more sympathetic authors emphasize Momand's sponsored migrations of

Pashtuns, out of overpopulated and resource-poor mountains of the southeast toward

fertile yet underpopulated regions of the far north, as the migrations of intrepid pioneer

settlers.49 Daoud mentions that the Musahiban dynasty also increased the cultivable area

in the north by thousands of hectares through extensive irrigation projects in the Kunduz

basin, and then parceled out that land to the leaders of those tribes which had helped

bring it to power.50 Could this also have been an attempt to fragment their political

48
Refer to DB Kabul Kahnai 1933: 88-94 (excluding photo plates)
49
Rishad 1383 SH [2004]: 30; Fa'iz 1383 SH [2004]: 151-163.
50
Daoud 1982: 130
 108

networks, at the same time it represented a reward? David Edwards speaks of the

monarchy transplanting populations precisely to fragment them in the wake of the Safi

uprising in the late 1940s.51 At the same time, though, 'Abd al-Shukur Rishad notes that

one of Muhammad Gul's motivations was to prevent people from the ignominy of having

to work as landless wage laborers in the agrarian economies of the southeast and east. As

is evident in the quote that opened Section LB. of this chapter, Momand considered this

to be beneath Pashtuns, in implicit contrast to self-(or family) cultivation of one's own

land.52 A final reason given by the same author for Momand's sponsorship of migrations

to the north was military: Momand's conviction of the martial superiority of Pashtun

cultivators. Transplanted to the north, they would firm up the border and create an initial

line of defense against the USSR (and Uzbek bandits operating out of that territory), just

as the roots of transplanted sedges firmed up the raised mud banks of irrigation ditches.53

Muhammad Gul Khan's actions sought to integrate even mobile populations into

the evolving layered political hierarchy, fitting nomads into a settled patron-client

lifestyle. Both Rishad and Samlm Allah Kamawal remark upon Muhammad Gul's

attempts at settling nomads onto land and making both the land and the nomads

"productive".54 In Kandahar, Muhammad Gul once used his personal influence with the

then governor 'Abd al-Ahad Malikyar to settle a sizable and wealthy kuchi lineage,

relying on a vocabulary of civilization versus squalor to accomplish the goal.55

51
Edwards 2002: 132-166
52
Rishad op. cit: 31
53
Rishad, op. cit.
54
Rishad, op. cit., has "...ch Hindu Kush da shomali barkho dere be khawinda aw be hasila miake
hasilkheze krale aw cb watan bekardnyepa kar wachawal ([He] rendered many ownerless and non-
productive lands to the north of the Hindu Kush productive, and put the country's unemployed to
work.)"
55
Kamawal 1383 SH [2004]: 44.
 109

Regardless of interpretations, all historians agree that Muhammad Gul Khan

oversaw the mass migration of numerous tribes from the over-populated mountains of the

south-east to the non-Pashtun northern provinces, where they made their way as both

settler-farmers with land grants, and, in some cases, moneylenders too. Gul Khan also set

up a number of monopoly trading companies in the north, which went some way toward

creating a concentration of Pashtun capital in that region, and which helped Gul Khan

build his own estate as well.

In sum, Muhammad Gul Khan Momand played a crucial role in instituting a

pyramidal power structure of monarchic rule. Through his actions, and those of similar

though less prominent actors, civil administration took on the hybrid lineage and

aristocratic flavor of the Afghan military. The Interior Minister was directly in charge of

the various Ru 'asa-i TanzTm of each geographic quadrant of the country (unless he was

serving in both posts simultaneously, as Momand did in series). Serving under each

Ra'is-i Tanzim might be provincial governors, or super-district administrators. This

nested executive structure, from Interior Minister Muhammad Gul Khan Momand on

down, descended through several other layers to stop at the 'alaqa or local level. Local

ruling councils were supposedly elected by the lineage or the villages in question; and

represented one primary location for interface between lineage politics and state

politics.56 The conception of the wdhswali, a slightly later administrative sub-division,

was interesting in that it institutionalized the already-existing conception of

administration tied to personalized clientage within territory. Many wdhswalis - for

56
Refer to Daoud 1982, especially 182-184, for a ideal-typological description of the governmental
structure.
 110

example, Shlnwarai or Khugiyanai, in Nangrahar - were named for the primary lineage

community or "people" (wdhs) in a given region, thus reinforcing the primacy of very

extended kinship and its placeability within administrative hierarchy. Collective

administration often serves very well to reinforce and underscore self-images of

collectivity in particular ways, even if it does not create those images from nothing.

Most importantly, the term wdhswali derives from a middle step between tribe and

administration: the wdhswal, or 'master of the wahs\ a linguistic clue emblematic of the

intensely personalized character of administration. Ties of direct clientage were assured

by a prohibition on horizontal coordination and even communication.57 That latter

prohibition moreover reduced the potential for horizontal-factional politics among khans

that could threaten the structure as a whole - locally elite politics of the type described

analytically by Barth and narratively by Ghobar.58 This was important. As shall be noted

below, even elite actors like Muhammad Gul Khan conceived of lower levels almost as

nested sovereign areas, rather than state posts first and foremost. This was another aspect

of the schema introduced through the Moghulgsy anecdote: "inside" = channels of

informal influence; "outside" = filtered through official institutional channels.

I call these structures "patriarchal" in the word's strict sense as Julia Adams defines

it: rule bound up in the father-hood of a father or a father-like figure - a lineage elder, a

village headman, an 'alaqadar or wdhswal. Those governmental structures drew much

ideological weight from metaphors of family that privilege hegemonic masculinity as

father-hood or elder-hood; and these metaphors were related to the actual patriarchy of

57
Daoud 1982: op. cit.
58
Barth 1959; Ghobar 800. Ghobar brings up the example of the rise and fall of a very destructive
conflict between pro-state and anti-state khans in Kandahar in the early Aman Allah period.
 Ill

the royal family, both within itself and in its metaphor of the king (or his regent uncles)

as family or lineage elders to the nation.59

The processes described above do not fit into a simple narrative of top-down state

expansion, and progressive monopolization of sovereignty. Of course it is important to

note, as M. J. Hanifi does, that an increasing level of state power, ideological as well as

coercive, subordinated Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns alike under putatively "Pashtun"

symbols.60 That is, it is not adequate to speak glibly of "Pashtun domination" of

Afghanistan.61 The monarchic state, as Zemaray Daoud's work makes extremely clear,

was very much an umbrella organization of domination over all populations.62

Nonetheless, the state after 1930 was not homogeneous, and was very much forged in

dialectic synthesis with other power structures in society. Aman Allah learned to his

extreme detriment that rule was not a matter of one-sided administrative reform alone.

Moreover, rulers learned that the ideological system of imperial religio-political ethics as

cogently articulated by Mawlawi Wasi', which attempted to internalize state hierarchy in

provincial Pashtun officials, village elders, and tribal leaders, would not by itself suffice

given the weakness of the Afghan state. The post-1930 state would have to compromise

itself ideologically to other, more provincial forms of politics.

59
I especially refer to Julia Adams 2005 here.
60
M. J. Hanifi 2004, especially 297. Hanifi's point is most directly made in relation to the concept of the
"Loya Jirga" but, as this chapter argues, his point is also good for other, more localized ideas and
practices as well.
61
For example, as in Poullada's (1970: 40) characterization of the Afghan government as""a government
of, by, and for Pashtun"
62
Daoudl982.
 112

III.2. New Ideological Directions, and Momand's role

The resistance and negotiations of populations that were politically marginalized

under Aman Allah's state led to ideological traces in elite discourse. This input also led

to an unsettled and locally-pragmatic fusion of ideologies of lineage egalitarianism and

military hierarchy both in the military and in local politics.

In the 1930s, a politics of divide and rule was well-established on the ground level

in Pashtun provinces of Afghanistan, accentuating lineage competitions dating from the

Mughal period in some cases, but not reducible to that dynamic. And, a tacit politics of

zero-sum conflict built into Muhammad Usman's vision in the previous chapter is far

more explicit in the writings of Muhammad Gul. Quite unlike the consensus-based ideals

of actors such as Mawlawi Wasi' or Mawlawi Salih Muhammad, an eternal conflict of

interests between fundamentally different ethnicities or nations (qamuna) is simply taken

for granted in the written works of Muhammad Gul, as well as in his strategies of rule.

The particular dynamics of the civil wars of 1928-29 accentuated inter-lineage

tensions among Pashtuns and resulted in a Tajik commoner taking the crown for slightly

under a year. This turbulent period undoubtedly played a major role in a shift toward

competition as an overriding theme in elite political discourse. This is true not only of

elite Pashtun actors such as Muhammad Gul Khan who mobilized Pashtun activity to

retake Kabul, but of court scholars belonging to other communities such as Fayz

Muhammad Katib Hazara as well.63 Could it be that after the mass upheavals and social

breakdown of 1929-1930, many elite actors found a view of consensus-based society less

and less persuasive? Might events have led them to think of society in terms of
63
Refer to McChesney 1999: 3.
 113

irreducible conflict, with stability resulting not from consensus but from economic

growth within a balance of power?

Regardless of their reasons, the primary balance that elite Pashtun actors such as

Muhammad Gul imagined after the war was certainly not class negotiation, but a zero-

sum balance between, especially, language communities. This might have led to his

closer relationship of patronage with those like Muhammad 'Usman who apparently

shared this viewpoint for their own reasons, as opposed to those like Mawlawi Salih

Muhammad who drew on courtly ideologies and formulated social discourses around

terms of consensus. There is more, however.

The previous section noted Muhammad Gul's Momand role in translation between

the state and eastern lineage power brokers. In individuals such as Muhammad Gul we

see not a top-down expansion of state authority, but the embodied linchpin of

negotiations between an aspiring centralization and peripheral modes of power. In an

interview with Sabir, the Senator Ghulam NabI Chaknorl, who knew Muhammad Gul

well, singles out the latter's skill at shifting between performing different social registers

of persuasion - from patron-client dealings with the washer-man, to the debates of the

jirga (tribal council), to the statesmanship of court.64 Or, as Kamawal has it,

To his juniors (kasharano ta) he was a nurturing father; to youths he was a

kindly teacher; to elders (mashdrano ta) he was a respectable tribal/national
white-beard (yaw makhwar qami spin-girai '6). On the pulpit of the mosque he
was a fine orator and preacher; while during his periods of government posting
he was a just, experienced, pure-souled official in high state positions.65

While Momand was a career military officer loyal to the Musahiban triumvirate and to

64
For a discussion of Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's socio-linguistic competences, refer to Sabir's
interview with Chaknori in Sabir 1998: 57-58.
65
Kamawal 1383 SH [2004]: 44.
 114

the king, he was also a paternalistic administrator who dealt with his Pashtun clients in a

competition and honor-based vocabulary of rural lineage politics and lower-ranking

provincial government posts, as the incident following the conquest of Kabul attests. No

doubt this intensified the relevance of that political vocabulary on the local level.

On the national level, Muhammad Gul channeled the discontent of certain rural

Pashtun populations, in their cultural marginalization by what looked like an alien urban

elite (even when the elites were Pashtun by genealogy), into the center of elite national

discourse for the first time in contemporary Afghan history. In this central setting, where

the resources of the state itself were at stake in a zero-sum perspective, the chief genre of

competition was not between individual men or families, but between linguistically

defined communities.

Fortunately for those who would search for examples of his work, Muhammad Gul

Khan was also a prolific intellectual in writing as well as in contingent speech, and we

have numerous examples of his writing. He edited the War College journal for a period of

time in the 1920s; and during the civil wars of 1929, he established and edited a

newspaper called Dd Kor Gham (Concern about Home) in the Eastern Province where

his division was stationed, which made the case for the Musahiban conquest.66 After the

war, he played a very active role in cultural activities in Kandahar, as mentioned above.

Over the course of the 1930s, he produced a small amount of poetry but a great deal of

prose, as well as a major dictionary.

Looking from the international level, despite the fact that Pashtuns constituted only
66
Sabir 1998: 87. I have been unable to locate any copies of this periodical even in private collections
that otherwise hold fine amounts of rare periodicals. It appears that it was not successful as Nadir
Khan's comparable Islah, which Nadir started in Paktiya at the same time for similar reasons, and
which survived as one of the country's primary newspapers for decades.
 115

a plurality of Afghanistan's population, Momand viewed Afghanistan as a nation with an

essentially Pashtun identity, since he believed that Pashtuns constituted the vast majority

of Afghanistan's subjects and were the ones that laid its transcendent historical

foundations. In an important and very lengthy piece from 1948 entitled "Pashto and

Pashtunness", Muhammad Gul attacks a "blind", "monkey-like" imitation of European

civilization (madaniyat) and calls for a return to the "Pashto of old", that virile ethos

which enabled Afghans to conquer as far as "the borders of Burma". This ethos would

then be blended with facility in modern technology to create a uniquely Pashto

civilization, an alternate modernity, in Afghanistan. For Muhammad Gul, this was a

possibility rooted in biology - although Pashtuns may have fallen to a pitiable state in the

modern world, they have not diluted their pure Arya bloodlines overly much, "excepting

a few dispersed and fallen" families and people. They thus retained that same "ancient

talent and ability".67

This rare instance of an international scale of analysis notwithstanding, Muhammad

Gul's primary focus was domestic. He wrote the first indigenous grammar of Pashto in

1938, inventing his own idiosyncratic orthography to do so. Most importantly for this
67
Momand 1948, in OLIII: 1270. There is undoubtedly more than a trace of racial ideology here.
Admirers of Muhammad Gul Khan particularly take issue with the historian Muhammad SiddTq
Farhang, complaining that Farhang unidimensionally labels Pashtunist ideology of this and subsequent
periods as "supremacist" (bartan-khwaht) and Fascistic (Jashistt), and as being drawn from German
National-Socialist ideology. Refer to Khaybari 1383b SH [2004]: 64-65. Robert Byron the travel
writer, who met Muhammad Gul while the latter was Governor of Mazar-i Sharif, all but claims that
Momand was under the influence of 1930s German engineers stationed in that province, and that
Momand's expulsion of Bukharan Jewish traders from northern Afghanistan was a result of an
"eastern" inferiority complex finding pride in wholly imported nationalisms. Refer to Byron's 1934
article "Changing Ideals in the Middle East - Jews Expelled from Afghanistan - "Fount of Aryan
Race"" (The Statesman, Calcutta, 14 Oct. 1934). In truth Byron was a singularly unperceptive author
and probably goes too far. While Momand did harbor ideas about the racial superiority of Pashtuns, he
was also a pragmatist; and his expulsion of bankers with firms based in other countries - whether Jews
or Indians - was most likely due to a desire to build local capital in various regions of Afghanistan to
counterbalance the Tajik banking oligarchy then forming in Kabul. Refer to the beginning of the next
chapter for Muhammad Gul's uneasy relationship with Afghan capitalism.
 116

narrative, in its very influential preface Muhammad Gul explained his reasons for writing

the grammar. In the process he put forth one of the earliest, and to this day one of the

most explicit, arguments for Pashtun material and cultural hegemony in Afghanistan.

Resurrecting the ghosts of 1928 and the temporary fall of Pashtun monarchic power, it is

an argument built on preemptively defensive foundations, and is worth quoting at length:

It is a known fact that one nationality (millat) is distinguished from the other on
the basis of language...All the particulars and special characteristics, and all the
remaining distinguishing features and criteria of discrimination, are secondary
to this; and they may all be subsumed under the shadow of the official national/
indigenous (milli) language. So, if any nationality's language is
distorted/damaged, that nationality's distinctiveness and national/indigenous
character is distorted/damaged to the same degree. And however much that
nationality's language is penetrated/influenced by that of another, the same
degree of penetration will occur in the former's politics; economy; social
system; national/indigenous ethics; national/indigenous etiquette;
national/indigenous habits, customs, and traditions; and all of the rest of its
distinctiveness and special character, extending as far as its thought processes,
ideas, lifeways, and civilization. And the degree of penetration is the same
degree by which the first language's people are rendered invisible, and the
same degree by which the predominance of the other language's people is
assured. If the language of one nationality is overwhelmed in the face of that
of another nationality, then one may as well consider that the former
nationality has turned its back on all the aforementioned distinctive
characteristics. Even if the people of that other language are minorities in the
midst of the nationality, the nation's politics, education, prominence, profitable
economic activity, and the greater part of the nation's resources will all fall into
the hands of that very minority, and in the process the few will gain an easy
lifestyle, power, prestige, and distinction, while all sorts of hardships will be
imposed upon that poor, helpless, powerless nationality.

The much larger nationality 'A' will be used for the benefit of those few in
category ' B ' . 'A' will forever eat only sdkr3l£s and they will carry heavy
burdens while the minority will be enveloped in luxury and ease... 'A' won't
even have villages, while 'B' will live in cities... 'A' will be powerless within
the power structure; they will be left without a country in the nationalist
construction. 'A' will become poor foreigners in their own country. The green
forests and blue ponds will belong to others, while these will get the black
mountains and stony badlands, the parched plains, and the gray, cursed

68
Sokrdk is the usual name in Momand Pashto and other nearby dialects for a type of dense polenta cake
cooked on a griddle, or even directly on embers, with very minimal (or no) oil. Considered to be a food
of necessity rather than one of any pleasure, it is indexical here of extreme poverty and misery.
 117

deserts...69

In his grammar's foreword, Momand moves on from these matters of national distinction

to speak of matters such as honor, self-respect, and masculine self-sufficiency, even self-

sovereignty. Building his argument on the firm foundations of masculinity, as did

Mawlawi Wasi' to greatly differing ends, Muhammad Gul states that a real man is

content with what is his, and does not seek out anyone else's goods - in this case,

language.70 Further, a real man defends his language, and thus his political space, from

outside intrusion (i.e. from 'foreign' lexical items). All this is embedded, for Momand, in

ideologies of firmly exercised, highly masculinized Pashtun ethos:

If someone causes damage to an honorless (Jbe-ghayrat) man's property, or if he

takes it [or her] openly or secretly, that man will not go after him due to lack of
honor and initiative (himmat)...Even if someone debases his wife, that man
won't say anything. Rather he will just leave the path clear, and through some
kind of subterfuge or diversion the other man will gradually appropriate the
room and, ultimately, the house, and the first will go off and be someone else's
dependent sharecropper {hamsayd), or build a sad little hovel...Honor (ghqyrat),
initiative, sound judgment: he accepts none of these and ignores them, such that
someone will take his property, that it will be ruined and he will be harmed, that
someone will carry off his property clandestinely or openly and debase his wife,
who will begin cooking the bread of outsiders and lighting the fire under
someone else's cooking pot, and he will be left patiently waiting to eat the burnt
leftovers, or licking the broken cookery like a [blank space in original].71

If all this is a discussion in the negative, Muhammad Gul did have very clear ideas as to

the positive content of Pashto. Beyond simply this, Momand's work creates an easily

replicable objectification of Pashtun culture - the content of that which he wished to

make culturally dominant in the country; which he desired that all Pashtuns should

internalize and externally perform; and which, according to popular language ideologies,
69
Momand 1317 SH [1938]: pp. alif-pe
70
Elsewhere, Muhammad Gul speaks of a slavish adherence to "stagnant, decaying" European civilization
as well, and the need for one's own civilization regardless of material comforts. See Momand 1948 in
OL11I, p. 1270.
71
Momand 1317 SH [193S]: jim-che
 118

was often viewed as being synonymous with the Pashto language. In doing so,

Muhammad Gul co-opted pre-existing reflexive social awarenesses into a more elite

program.

As the common cliche goes, one does not (only) speak Pashto. One performs it,

with one's whole social bearing as much as with one's tongue. 72 The following passage

illustrates some of Momand's ideas on the subject from the aforementioned text, "Pashto

and Pashtunness". Along with its call for a "Pashto" civilization, that very lengthy text

communicates a litany of elite desires for Pashto:

Pashto is nobility/pure breeding (asiltob). Pashto is competition of worthy rivals

(siyal walai). Pashto is salvation. Pashto is dignified stature ('ali-janabi). Pashto
is honor/respect/prestige ('izzai). In Pashto there is no dishonor or degradation,
because Pashtuns cannot accept these. Pashto is being noble and free-born; and
Pashto is lordship. In Pashto there is no triviality; therefore a trivial person is no
Pashtun. In Pashto there is no vainglory; Pashto beats the vainglorious man's
head with a stone. There is no oppression in Pashto; confronting the weak or the
powerless with power is not Pashto. In Pashto there is no tolerance of being
oppressed either. ... Pashto is being free from want/wealthy/self-sufficient
(ghana). Pashto is self-reliance. In Pashto there is no petitioning; and petitions
and supplications are not Pashto. Pashto is contentment.73

Even these highly abbreviated selections communicate an ideology, elite on the local

village scale, that constructed the masculine subject both as self-sovereign and as willing

to accept his place in the world's hierarchy, as long as the authority over him is

beneficent and legitimate. The selection makes the most sense in a decentered authority
72
Refer to Rukhsana Iqbal 1995: 131: "It is important to note that when a Pakhtun says "You have no
Pctkhto in you", he is almost certainly not talking about the language but about the code of conduct that
goes by the same name and on which the entire edifice of his existence rests, or when he refers to "a
matter of the tongue", he probably talks of"honour" not language, so that in his mind his language and
the ancient tribal code of conduct with its law of revenge, asylum, and hospitality—on which rests
"pakhtunwali" also referred to as "Pakhto" are synonymous. "Pakhto wayal" speaking the language is
of equal importance as "Pakhto kaval" doing it. See also Mackenzie 1987:547: "The name of the
language, properly Paxto, also denotes the strong code of customs, morals, and manners of the Pashtun
(Paxtun, Indianised as Pathari) nation, also called Paxtunwalay - whence the saying Paxtun haya m
day ce Paxto wayi lekin haya ce Paxto lari 'A Pashtun is not he who speaks Pashto, but he who has
Pashto."'
73
Momand, in OLIII: 1262-1263.
 119

structure of layered sovereignty, in which only ethnicity (Pashtunness), and of course

gender, seem to be a defining mark of absolute dominance. A far cry from state

absolutism, this is an ideology bearing the unmistakable imprint of prior negotiations

with mobilized cultivator-lineage power. Other forms of inequality (i.e. economic

disparity) are rationalized away as contingent and temporary natural features of life, not

structural ones; while demonstrable social disparities (such as the caste-like division

between Pashto-speaking artisans and landowners) is denied outright.

On the national, multi-communal level, even marginalized Pashtuns could have a

stake in an ideology that would benefit powerful Pashtuns simply for the fact of being

Pashtun, which moreover reinforced the household authority of all men. Much like the

case during the Mughal period, this ideology uses geographically and lineage-segmented

ethnicity to reinforce a vertical chain of command-type political economy, within a

framework of sovereign, patriarch-centric metaphor:

[I]n Pashtun regions, everyone's life, property, and namus [the sanctity of the
honor of a family's women] is safeguarded by Pashto, and anyone who brings
harm to the fellow countrymen of Pashtuns shall bear the enmity of those
Pashtuns. Pashto requires that the master of a region defend his people's
property from aggressors, or else take their losses upon himself. In Pashtun
regions, aggression is in itself an offense, which moreover carries a [social;
customary-legal] penalty (jarlma awjaza). In Pashtun regions, if there should be
an attack on the locals or their namus, and if the attacker successfully escapes,
the master (khawand; [same word as husband]) of the [other?] region will exact
vengeance and retribution (badala aw kasat) according to Pashto. This is the
custom of Pashto; Pashtuns believe in it with sacred solemnity as the national
law, and revere it. But some people [willfully] forget Pashto, are bent on
denigrating it, and attempt to use it as a bargaining chip. Pashtuns, following the
teachings of their mother Pashto, must guard themselves against these sorts of
opportunistic users of Pashto, and heap scorn upon them.74

Momand, in OLIII: 1265.

 120

This differs from Persianate post-imperial ideologies of rule as layered sovereignty. We

see here an ideological commitment to the value of egalitarianism rooted in a political

language of honor and chivalry, strongly informed by the self-assertion of those non-elite

tribes which had always been cast as the other of empire (whether the empire in question

was Mughal, Safavid, or British). It is a self-determination forged in masculine

competitive worthiness, rather than in internalized harmony with law. It is the very

political language that was devalued by Mawlawi Wasi's court-centric egalitarianism

under Aman Allah, objectified by its external marginalization as "Pashtun".

IV. Muhammad Gul Khan Momand and Face-to-Face Public Interaction

The section above drew out explicit ideological links in the work of one highly

influential ideologue between a sort of eliteness framed as "Pashtun", and an easy

equivalence between family rule and state rule. This is in marked contrast to aspiring

political ideologies developed in and disseminated by the de-personalized print publics of

urban Kandahar discussed in the previous chapter, which took for granted a separation of

public society; political authority; and a tacit private sphere.

In many writings of Muhammad Gul Khan Momand, it seems that family rule and

state rule are inseparable even on the practical level, to say nothing of the metaphoric

one. Momand's hypothetical example in the quote only works in a situation where

lineage/family and the wdfoswali and 'alaqadari administrative structure are conceptually

bound together. In the example provided above, a case of the "attack on locals or their

namus." the husband's Pashtun honor in relation to his wife is satisfied by the pyramidal
 121

state structure; since the husband, who is master of a region, has no jurisdiction in

another master's region. Growing ideological congruences between the patriarchal

authority of the royal family, the state official, and the local heads of villages or

households meant that each sphere simultaneously reinforced the others. And, a

metaphorical universe linking family as rule; the microcosm of the royal family as the

state; and the values of vigorous masculinity upheld by that family is replicated in many

sources. Of course, generations of monarchs had sought to cast themselves as a sort of

stern father to the country, as discussed extensively by David Edwards in his discussion

on the Amir ' Abd al-Rahman.75

In the 1930s, the Kabul Almanac, published by the Kabul Literary society

(Anjuman-i Adabi) began many issues with lavish photograph plates of the royal families,

in order of seniority, before radiating outward into discussions of the various ministries;

thus visually enacting a "familial state" focused on the young king Zahir Shah (r. 1933-

1973).76 The Almanac's 1933 discussion of the Prime Minister's office opens with a

picture of the Prime Minister, the king's uncle Sardar Hashim Khan. It describes his

personal, heroically manly and jihad-like struggle for peace and prosperity, especially in

the early 1930s when the after-effects of the uprisings of "our khans''' were still being felt.

In this narrative Sardar Hashim Khan was able to restore order presumably through the

75
My discussion differs from Edwards' in that I do not see "tribal" politics as "morally incoherent" with
monarchy. Such a view is only possible when one privileges kinship as egalitarianism, and
egalitarianism as the only authentic form of secular rural Pashtun politics; when one imagines that the
state had little ideological penetration into rural society and ruled only through what coercion it could
muster; or alternatively, when one allows ideal/typological models such as the dichotomy of "nang" and
"qalang" societies to overpower agentive narrative.
76
The quote is from the title of Julia Adams 1994; though the circumstances differ substantially from her
argument related to the early modern Netherlands.
 122

strength of his personality, rather than through the Interior Minister's blend of personal

negotiations, military coercion, and zero-sum divide-and-rule tactics.77 Also addressing

the subject of Pashtun agency, the first experimental Pashto article that the Almanac

published, in its 1935 issue, consisted of a history of Afghanistan with the rise of the

current dynasty as the teleological fulfillment of history, instead of the modern nation-

state. In this view, the family and the nation-state were synonymous.78

The links between a pyramidal state administration, the politics of royal patriarchal

personality, and military domination can be seen quite clearly in the person of Sardar

Muhammad Da'ud Khan over the 1930s, though this sardar will be slightly more

prominent in the next chapter. Cousin to the king, Muhammad Da'ud simultaneously

served as hakim-i a 'la (akin to a governor) of Mashriqi, the eastern provinces, while also

serving as the military commandant for that region. The politics of personality are

notable in that he is the only person I have ever seen listed in the post of Mulki aw

'Askarl Nazim (vaguely, and ominously, translatable as "Civil and Military

Orderer/Arranger") suggesting that the person was fundamentally prior to the post.

Crucially, the way this ideology was circulated also followed a lineage-patronage

logic, inasmuch as it generally circulated in a fashion that privileged chains of individual

relationships. Texts like the above were consumed by literate people at the center, who

belonged to elite circles; but outside the center these ideologies were repeated orally

down the line in local settings in meetings between various levels of state officials and

77
Dd Kabul Kahnai 1933, p. 85.
78
The article by Amlh Allah Zmariyalai of the Kabul Literary Society was entitled, simply, "Paxtun". It
appears on pp. 392-419 of Da Kabul Kalanai 1935.
 123

local lineage heads.

What were some sites of mediation of elite discourse? The inauguration of public

works projects provided an excellent opportunity to perform personally-ranked

hierarchies in public, somewhat in the same fashion as Mughal, or perhaps colonial

Indian, darbars. The opening of a major canal project in Mashriqi early in the Zahir Shah

period, under the governorship of Muhammad Da'ud, was characterized by a major

attendance of local landed power - lineage and village heads who potentially stood to

benefit from allocation of the newly-irrigated land. The event was characterized by a

great deal of obsequiousness toward the "Qomandan Sahib" [Commandant Sir],79 as

Da'ud was referred to at the time. It was almost certainly characterized by subtle

performative negotiations of mutual ranking between the local lineage heads and state

officials as well. Similar events were held, of course, by Muhammad Gul Khan Momand

in the north.80

Another site of elite mediation was the custom of local gatherings of all

landowning (that is, non-client, non-laboring) men, meetings generally called jirgas.

Such meetings were contingent and called for specific purposes, to address specific issues

- as when the leaders of the Paktia tribes decided to loot the Chandol neighborhood in

Kabul in revenge for the rise of Bachcha Saqqa'o, and when Muhammad Gul persuaded

them to withdraw that decision. The meeting between the fact-finding mission at

Moghulgay and the local village elders might also be classified under this category. In

Dd Kabul Katenai 1933: 332.

Dd Kabul Katenai 1933: op. cit.
 124

general ajirga was a place to bring a semblance of local consensus over divisive issues

and events. That is, decisions in ajirga were not voted upon, but decided unanimously.

Thus, the process favored those powerful enough in daily life to collect many supporters

during deliberation, but rested on the rhetorical legitimacy of the assent of weaker parties.

Aside from the jirga, there was another local institution of mediation, the hujra.

At its most basic, it refers to a multi-use semi-public space: a building in villages where

men socialize, eat, and sleep. It was a sort of lodge that also housed travelers to the

village, and seasonal migrant laborers (when/wherever this category was relevant). It

could be attached to a mosque, but it was usually linked to particular families. In

defining for the reader what a hujra was, the physician and missionary T. L. Pennel, who

was stationed in Bannu in the early twentieth century and worked extensively in the

Tribal Areas of British India, provides a poetic description that we can use as a token

example:

There is usually some malik, or head man, who possesses that great institution
of Afghanistan, a hujra, or guest-house. We are shown to this house, usually a
mud building with a low door and a few small apertures in the walls in the place
of windows, and a clean-swept earthen floor, which may be covered by a few
palm-mats...[0]n one occasion I came rather late to one such guest-house. The
host had already retired, but rose from his bed to receive me. I inquired if that
was his hujra. He answered : "No, it is God's, but I am in charge of it." Such
expressions are not mere form, as was shown by the cheerfulness and
unostentatious way in which the owner put himself out in order to insure my
comfort...

The head man will at once call for some of his attendants, who, except at the
busy time of sowing and harvest, are probably lounging about the chauk, and
they at once bring a number of the plain wooden bedsteads of the country,
which are universally used, even by the richer classes, in preference to chairs.
Rugs and pillows are brought, and perhaps a carpet may be spread on the floor.
Tea is then ordered, and an attendant brings in a tray...By this time the news of
 125

our arrival has spread through the village.81

The institution of the hujra in certain Pashtun societies has been well-studied in

ethnographic literatures - Barth includes an entire chapter on the subject - but it has been

conceptualized mainly synchronically.82 Additionally, most authors have regarded the

hujra only in the context of bounded communities, ignoring communities' locations in

trans-local power relationships.

As Willi Steul emphasizes in his study of Khost, and Akbar S. Ahmed does

regarding Swat, at the same time as the hujra allowed khans the ability to perform

redistributive beneficence, habitual attendance at a hujra performed and solidified

relationships of dominance and clientship, or at least asymmetrical influence, on the local

level. Jon Anderson says much the same regarding Paktia; clearly these dynamics were

common across territories and this literature represents more than ethnographic

ephemera.83 As a pre-existing public space in villages, the hujra was also the place where

visiting officials from various governments visited. On such occasions, the hujra and

hospitality was adapted to perform submission to outside political arrangements. It is this

performance of trans-local submission in the hujra that PennePs colonial reminiscence

replicates; a factor which makes that example especially relevant. In a more recent work,

Akbar S. Ahmed provides a visually powerful symbolic example of the performance of

local submission to trans-local power in the Momand Agency of Pakistan, along with a

complementary rise in status for the patron of the hujra:

81
Pennel 1909: 99-100.
82
I refer to Barth 1959.
83
Steul 1981, especially 116; Ahmed 1976; J. Anderson 1979.
 126

Shahzada, no doubt aware of the impression that such shibboleths make upon
visiting officials, has inscribed the following legend in multi-coloured
calligraphy in cement on the ceiling of his hujra: "Pakistan zindabad, ya
Allah, Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahem, ya Muhammad, Haza min Fazal Rabi...
(Long Live Pakistan; O Allah!; In the Name of God, the Compassionate and
Merciful; O Muhammad!; This comes from the Bounty of My Lord)" The date
of the completion of the hujra and Shahzada's self-elevation as Nawab is also
indicated in the calligraphy. The Pakistan flag is engraved on the roof of the
hujra correctly coloured green. Shahzada repeated ... several times that he
worked not for officials but for the flag, pointing to it each time he said this.84

While this repeated insistence on allegiance not to persons but to a flag (by extension a

nation-state) was plausible in the Momand Agency of the early 1970s, this was not the

case across the border in the monarchic period of Afghanistan. The hujra in monarchic

Afghanistan had great potential to provide a setting for inculcating a conception of

personal and local relationships to the world that was mediated by lineage or

individualized patronage, as evidenced by the following 1935 incident related by Ghobar.

I reproduce the quote introduced at the beginning of Section LB of this chapter:

[A] few days after my arrival in the [remote village of Balabluk, in the remote
province of Farah] ... the Farah governor, Sardar Abdol Razaq, came to the
village. The local khans welcomed him and prepared an evening meal for
him... A sturdy man, wearing dark glasses, was sitting at the head of the
guests. He was making a speech before the local khans. His subject was
etymology, explaining the roots of certain words in the Farah Pashtu dialect
while drawing their attention to his Nangarhari Pashtu dialect. First addressing
the khans of Nurzai, Alizai, and Barakzai tribes, he said, "You know very well
the the lord and crown (sar-o-sardar) of all Afghan tribes is the noble tribe of
Muhammadzai, of which I am a member. Is it not true?" The local khans,
looking at each other meaningfully, preferred to remain silent.85

The official in question was drawing upon a new flurry of philological activity

surrounding Pashto that had grown up in the print public of Kandahar. At its point of

Ahmed 1980: 226. The gloss of the hujra calligraphy is my own.

Ghobar 2001: 156-157 (translation by Sherief Fayyez). For the "sar-o-sardar" quote, refer to the
original Persian in Ghobar 1999, p. 187. It is worth mentioning that Ghobar, a historian, journalist, and
as vocal a leftist as was possible at the time, was in Balabluk as an exile. Banishment to the province for
a troublesome intellectual was the Afghan equivalent of Siberia.
 127

origin, this activity articulated a nation-state, as the controversy discussed in the previous

chapter over the obscure dialect word hawad / hewad (which subsequently became

popularized in everyday speech to mean "homeland", even "nation-state") showed. Yet,

in Ghobar's anecdote, the governor of Farah - a member of Afghanistan's ruling house86

- employed this knowledge not to articulate inclusiveness, but as distinction. It was

context which dictated the application of philological knowledge, and discourses on

Pashtun identity. A text's first introduction to the world might take the form of print, but

its primary circulation is mediated through the very institution it seeks to create: in this

case, the patriarchal monarchic state, negotiated in tensions between courtly hierarchy

and provincial lineage and competition-based egalitarianism.87

In other words, hierarchical channels of state influence commandeered,

transformed, and inserted themselves into a self-constituting ideological-circulation

structure - what I have described as a "public" in the introduction to this dissertation.

This description may seem counterintuitive given Warner's assertion that a public needs

to be based on texts circulating in an impersonal fashion, which serve to create a public

based on the act of consuming the text as a sort of indexical icon of the community.88 It

also seems counterintuitive given Warner's assertion that publics must be self-organizing

- this situation was clearly related to state power. However, we must note two things.

First, the state attempted to co-opt circulation structures, altering them in the

process - as the remainder of this chapter will demonstrate. But those structures already
86
D3 Kabul Kahnai 1935: 39 lists the Hakim-i A 'la of Farah at the time as Sardar ' Abd al-Razzaq Khan
87
Though we should note that the local receivers of this ideology appeared quite ambivalent about it.
88
Warner 2002 contains a concise enumeration of the things he considers essential for a public sphere to
be.
 128

existed, and were part of local elites' own influence over public space. The process of

negotiating relationships of power between local elites and the monarchic state was both

ideological and institutional; and as ideologies changed through negotiation, so did the

social meaning of institutions like the hujra. Second, drawing on the work of other

theorists such as Gustafson who question Warner's privileging of print, I would argue

that the act of performing metaphorical patriarchy in ceremonies, as well as in the guest

houses of local notables, is every bit as much an indexical icon as is the reading of a

national newspaper or novel.89

In other words, performing lineage hierarchies locally enacts the very sort of

public in microcosm which it presumes in macrocosm, if we assume "feudal" patriarchy

to be a fundamentally dyadic, or face-to-face, relationship as Ahmed does.90 Certainly the

elders of Moghulgay quoted at the beginning of this chapter articulated their place in the

political universe of monarchic Afghanistan in personal, one-on-one terms. Both

cooperation or rebellion were phrased in terms of their tribe's and village's relationship

to the king, as was their concept of belonging in an Afghan nation, sovereign within the

world system. It mattered little that they were, in actual fact, strangers to the king (and,

in varying degrees, to other government officials ruling them). This is all to say that an

imagined community can just as easily be imagined as one where everyone has a

genealogical place and an individual name - a historical biography - even if all members

are not individually known to everyone else in actuality.

89
This is among the major arguments of Gustafson's Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in
Early America.
90
Ahmed 1976:34.
 129

We saw that the post-1930 political-economic scenario caused a decline in the

fortunes of the Kandahari bourgeoisie; and that the monarchy deliberately took steps to

reign in and ultimately appropriate a disembodied public sphere in Kandahar through the

governor, Muhammad Gul Khan Momand. But what about the converse? Was an

increased "feudalism" in Afghanistan's political economy, post 1930, accompanied by a

rise in the importance of the hujra - that is, personal mediation of geographically rooted,

and aristocratic, power relations - in the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan? It would be

quite impossible to locate systematic data on such a subject; especially given the the time

distance involved; current adverse research conditions in rural areas; and the oral and

contingent nature of the circulation structure, which produced few records even though it

produced cultural change. However, even if hujras did not objectively change in their

number or importance, one thing is certain: Muhammad Gul Khan Momand heavily

promoted their existence and new construction. Thus, we note that hujras did indeed

change in their qualitative importance, at least in some locations.

Sabir relates: "Whenever Wazir Baba would travel to a part of the country, he

would build a hujra for the people of that area. In the northern regions, particularly

Balkh and Khanabad, there are still hujras that were established through Baba's actions

and, in some cases, through his personal expenditures."91 What were some reasons for

this activity? One reason was undoubtedly that the hujra provided a way for government

officials to perform political influence, as Ghobar's anecdote about Balabluk, Farah

illustrates. Summoning local elders to listen to a lecture was in itself a powerful act,

91
Sabir 1998: 85.
 130

regardless of the content of that lecture. Alongside this, we can note that a local hujra

could provide to a visiting official the opportunity to act as a patron in a redistributive

political-economic role, even in regions where this might not have been a prevalent mode

of politics - thereby extending monarchic-patriarchal hegemony in at least a contingent

fashion, and probably transforming local power relations for the future. Muhammad Gul

even attempted to do this on a state visit to the USSR, when he co-opted a state guest

house for the day as his personal hujra, and paid for a massive gathering of locals to

share his hospitality.92

That latter case, taking place as it did in a territory outside Afghan sovereign

control, is perhaps better representative of another effect of Momand's career. He could

not have had any serious desire to cultivate the Soviet Uzbek peasantry as clients, the

way that he might have in a domestic setting. Indeed, Sabir's recounting of the event

assigns quite a different motivation: Momand wished to demonstrate to the Soviet

government the power of the Afghan (for Momand, "Pashtun") civilization he

represented, which notwithstanding a relative lack of material technology and scientific

capacity, had a claim on civility and strong individual ties between concrete people built

into its technology of rule.93

Thus, in the case of Momand we see mediation between several different

conceptual worlds. On one level, he mediated between the court and local power. He

represented one nexus by which groups who were marginalized on the national stage,

Sabir 1998: 77-78.

Sabir op. cit.:
 131

such as Paktia lineage leaders, asserted their anti-absolutist politics vis-a-vis the

monarchy. At the same time, from the side of the monarchy, his action was one route

through which the monarchy was able to integrate the leaders of those tribes into the

dyadic monarchic network of sovereignty, thus achieving indirect rule over vast and

diverse populations. That is, on one level, Muhammad Gul's extension of hujras to new

areas (even to non-Pashtun populations) reflected the extension of a technology of rule

that he knew particularly well through past experience. It gave local power a stake in the

system, allowing for contingent negotiation in a nevertheless controlled environment.

On another level, many of Muhammad Gul Khan's actions show a degree of

reflexivity in this mediation. Due to his biography, he was a part of all (elite) worlds,

which is the reason he was useful. Because of this same fact, his ease of mobility

between social and political-linguistic-pragmatic registers, Muhammad Gul and other

such governmental influence brokers also existed outside all of those worlds in some

measure as well. That is, constantly serving as a conduit for the negotiation of numerous

ideologies must have fostered some level of externalized objectification of 'Pashtun

tradition' as 'identity' in Muhammad Gul Khan, beyond the ethnic boundaries that social

conflict would have engendered. That is, Muhammad Gul, already possessing a

perspective of homogeneity in true Pashtunness, set up a temporary hujra in the USSR as

a token enaction of that Pashtunness.

The same is true of his reasons for another action: setting up an entire village of

hujras in his family's native Nangrahari village of Gulayi.94 On one level, the motivation
94
The following anecdote was related by Arbab Zahir KhalTl, from one of the prominent families of the
 132

for the latter action could have been political. We are told by one of the arbabs (a local

term for a landowning elite head-man akin to a large malik or khan) of Gulayi that once,

Muhammad Gul Khan visited the village. Presumably traveling with a large entourage,

he asked where the villagers generally hosted visitors. He was aghast when someone

informed him that they usually put up visitors in the mosque. For one thing, this

completely impartial location (from the standpoint of landowners) for hospitality and

redistribution would undermine paternalistic hierarchy in this village of two thousand

households - not an insignificant number of people. For another thing, the mosque as

guest-house might run the risk of giving political influence to another institution -

religious authority - that had often been independent from the monarchy, and was

frequently troubling to monarchic power in Pashtun regions of Afghanistan. However,

neither of these reasons are the ones that appear to have been most operative.

Instead Muhammad Gul appears to have disapproved mostly because lack of a

hujra was completely non-Pashtun in his eyes. As Arbab Zahir Khalil put it, Muhammad

Gul Khan said that "mosques are only for guests of God" and that "without a hujra, a

Pashtun seems incomplete."95 His act of redress in this case was probably counter-

productive politically, and served only to make a point about identity and tradition.

Rather than settling for one or two hujras tied to large landowners, which might have

restored a suitable inroad for hierarchy through performance of patriarchal ceremony in

the village, Muhammad Gul set out planning a hujra for every single mahala (ward,

which tended to be composed of extended families). He subsidized them all, and in cases

village, in interview with Sabir, and published in Sabir 1998: 85-86.

95
Sabir 1998: 86.
 133

where the mahala family did not have money to build a hujra, Muhammad Gul paid for

one in full. The masons' daily food, for months at a time, was paid for entirely from

Muhammad Gul's household, and in true patron fashion, he did not allow any external

gifts for the masons.96 Once done, though, in effect each head of family became his own

patron, secure in his self-sufficient Pashtunness and thus not patronized by anyone once

Muhammad Gul left.

Here, then, hujra construction seems to fill a different role comparable to that

which Akbar S. Ahmed assigns it in one of his ethnographic settings: what he calls a

"cultural" role, one which aspects of Pashtun identity and the objectified value of

melmastiya (hospitality) as much as it upholds a monarchic political order.97 Momand in

this case was the agent of disseminating an elite consciousness of reified "popular"

culture back down to the actual mass populace. In Momand's view, Pashtumvalai

('Pashtunness') decreed that all mature Pashtun men could or should be patrons - their

own lords (badaran). In this case, locally elite values of lordship and freedom for all

(Pashtun men) from domination outweighed, for Muhammad Gul, his nationally elite role

as a cog in the machine of monarchic state power in this case.98 Of course, in the end,

this uneasy ideological tension was built into the state's strategies of rule. The tension

between absolute state domination and the state's insistence on the autonomy of local

patriarchs - that is, its insistence on their willing obedience to an elder king through

affective ties of personal influence, rather than "rule" - emerges in the speech of the

96
Sabir op. cit.
97
Ahmed 1976.
98
Refer to Talal Asad 1972 for still the most powerful comparative argument as to how these locally
elite ideals, which rested on certain ideologies of egalitarianism, could in fact be elite.
 134

elders of Moghulgsy, Khost cited at the beginning of this chapter. That instance

illustrates the compelling power that this form of state ideology eventually came to

exercise even in the most far-flung of Pashtun regions, so close to the Pakistani border

that one of two things must have happened: either the airmen flying the mission thought

the village was in their own country's territory of Waziristan, or the Pakistani military

thought that the Afghan government would not care if it were bombarded. That same

anecdote, in another layer of its transmission, shows the way that personalized discourses

came to be mediated back through the same channels, from dyadic to print publics - an

international, Anglophone one in this case.

V. Conclusion

There is a reason why this chapter has been presented largely through anecdotes,

intended as tokens of larger processes. We should certainly prefer more solid

documentary evidence than has been possible to present here. Of course, such

documentary evidence related to the early 1930s is understandably sparse due to political

upheavals and due to the continued inaccessibility of most of the files relating to the post-

1930 period that are held in Afghanistan's National Archives. Yet, this chapter suggests

that a pervasive lack of documentary evidence is also a feature of the specifically

individualized, contingent form of publicness that was politically and culturally dominant

over the 1930s. Politics, especially elite rural politics, was conducted orally and

contingently, and was bound up in the social power of specific individuals and

solidarities rather than fixed documents. While institutions supporting a depersonalized,

 135

mass public sphere and especially print were tolerated by the monarchy, over the 1930s

they were more and more subjected to extremely high levels of discipline, forced

coordination of activities, and social isolation, as the above discussion shows.

We can understand this subordination, along with numerous accounts of

Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's personalized role in managing the intellectuals and

institutions of print publics, by looking at the bigger picture. That subordination as one

aspect of the maintenance of a very different form of publicness that forged direct

affective links between the court and the majority of Pashtuns: rural populations. Rather

than print publics, which created stable, reproducible texts, it was contingent speech

which enjoyed the king's share of political power in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding the individualized, contingent mediation of publicness in this

dominant public, it still allowed for some measure of transregional negotiation

surrounding social ideologies. Actors described their own actions of resistance and

negotiation in the vocabulary of this public, which sometimes changed the terms of

debate. An increased amount of explicitly 'Pashtun' egalitarianism in Momand's elite

print discourses, which coexisted with hierarchy expressed through patriarchal metaphor,

seems to result from Momand negotiations between tribe and court.

Here was can see the difference between this and the work of traditionally trained

court scholars such as Mawlawi Wasi'. That scholar also maintained and privileged a

face-to-face communicative strategy. In contrast, though, the complex of communicative

strategies discussed in this chapter served as the vehicle for forms of transregional

Pashtun collective awareness, packaged as prestigious and authentically "Afghan". It

 136

represents the interjected power of (certain of) those on the outside of earlier court ethics.

This collective identity was oriented toward a set of ideological positions exemplified in

Muhammad Gul's writings. His work reinforced intra-lineage hierarchies, Pashtun

competitive supremacy over other language communities (a form of divide and rule

building on ideologies of martial brotherhood), and male dominance (a form of indirect

rule over half the population); while at the same time it undermined many other forms of

hierarchy.

By studying the case of Muhammad Gul we can illustrate a fourfold process

emerging over the 1930s. First, new face-to-face administrative structures of aristocratic

rule, forged in negotiation with rural modes of lineage politics, were formalized in state

machinery through the actions of people like Muhammad Gul. They existed in a mutually

reinforcing dialectic with lineage, and with individualized elderhood.

Second, political actors like Muhammad Gul encouraged forms of local, non-state

publicness that bore resemblances to these newly emerging state structures.

Third, and related, the ideologies that circulated through these new public channels

themselves bore the stamp of the structures they circulated through. These two trends

were discussed in reverse order in this chapter: that is, after a discussion of governmental

structures, the discussion will shift to ideology before moving on to mediations.

The fourth process is the one already discussed above. That is, forms of sociability

such as the bourgeois public sphere in Kandahar that had the potential to undermine these
 137

newly-emerging face-to-face structures were discouraged through isolation, surveillance,

and supervisory control by the monarchic state's agents like Muhammad Gul.

This line of argument can disrupt the tacit modernist teleology inherent in much

of the available theoretical literature on the making of varieties of the public sphere,

which Chapter Two of this dissertation might seem to reinforce. Authors as diverse as

Shir Muhammad Rawan and Walter Benjamin analyze face-to-face interaction as a

"traditional" feature of life, which has historically been displaced by modern forms of

'mass' publicness through technical advancements such as print and especially radio." In

contrast to such a teleological view, I argue in this chapter that face-to-face forms of

public interaction, especially in rural areas, were in fact charged with enabling specific

political goals in Afghanistan as against print publics; and that this process is traceable

historically in relation to political-economic changes.

As mentioned above, the political-economic and cultural order that emerged in

many rural Pashtun areas relied on a discourse of authentic Pashtunness, promoted by

actors such as Muhammad Gul; which in turn interfaced with the reflexively Pashtun

self-awareness articulated by literate urban cultural and mercantile elites. And, on the

national level, actors such as Muhammad Gul equated the preservation of an

authentically Pashtun cultural heritage with the maintenance of a legitimate right of

Pashtun political hegemony, and by extension cultural dominance, in Afghanistan by

virtue of the monarchy's roots.

I refer to Rawan 2002: "Modern Mass Media and Traditional Communications in Afghanistan"
Political Communication 19: 155-170; Benjamin 1968, especially "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Storyteller".
 138

Was this ideological and political order internalized by everyone in rural areas?

Was there no resistance to it? While this elite practice sought to wed kinship,

administrative geography, and political hierarchy within a nation-state, there were many

alternative social channels in Pashtun society as well. The next chapter illustrates ways

that less powerful individuals both confronted and eluded a geographical and hierarchical

rooting through other trans-local, horizontal publics that disregarded borders and

extended far into India - publics that were as mobile as those in this chapter were rooted.
 139

Chapter Four

From Educational Publics to Social Movements, Mashriqi to Kabul: Enlightened

Youth and Anti-Patriarchy, 1920-1950

7. Introduction

In this chapter I illustrate some roles played by educational learning in the rural

areas of Mashriqi: present-day Nangrahar, Kunar, and Laghman provinces. Via an

analysis of personal narratives, I argue that a trans-local public based on personalized

interaction with shared canonical texts allowed young men from less-privileged

backgrounds the opportunity to imagine a shared relationship with other Pashtuns that

was quite outside a face-to-face and patriarchal, state-managed public. I argue that the

fact of this horizontal, non-state public's existence, along with the specific forms of

knowledge it transmitted, produced a strong grassroots ideology of liberalism and anti-

paternalism.

Intellectuals formed in these eastern educational networks interacted with many

others too, including various pro-democratic and anti-colonial movements in India.

Working in a time of great economic and political upheavals related to the Second World

War, some of them came to exercise great influence in Afghanistan. In tandem with

powerful actors in the government who wished to force a centralized Turkish republican

model of governance in the country, liberalist Pashtun intellectuals were able to re-brand

what it meant to be a proper Pashtun in some rural social domains. Through their creation

of a unique form of public participation, which they called the 'enlightened young-men',

they were able to erode some of the cultural supremacy of monarchic patriarchy.
 140

LI. A Republican Challenge to Decentered Politics

The fall of Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's influence is a good window onto the

changes that passed through Afghanistan in the late 1930s and especially the mid 1940s.

By the time Muhammad Gul Khan Momand wrote his manifesto Pashto and Pashtunness

in 1948, there is a distinct feeling of defensiveness in his claims of the inherent

superiority of Pashtun chivalry as identity, and the masculinized nobility built into it.

Where did this defensiveness come from?

Muhammad Gul Momand had enjoyed a very close relationship with the royal

family, especially the late Nadir Shah and his younger brother, the Prime Minister

Muhammad Hashim Khan, uncle of the young king Zahir Shah. Momand pushed them

hard and often to promote the Pashto language and cultural values as a personal favor.'

Initially, Hashim Khan agreed with Momand in decreeing that all state officials should

learn Pashto within three years, so that national "legends and poems will be understood

by everyone, and pride in the culture of the past will unite us."2 The royal family

sponsored pedagogical books, and even placed Mawlawi Salih Muhammad in charge of a

program to teach the "Pashto Courses" to all civil servants, as noted in Chapter 2.

A decade later, however, in the face of various oppositional forces, this plan had

still not been systematically implemented. Ethnicized virtues of masculinity and self-

contained lordliness served the purposes of state consolidation, and brought diverse

populations under the umbrella of the personal rule of the monarch. However, from the

point of view of the royal family, these were not ideal attributes for bureaucrats in state

1
Sabir 1998:48.
2
Quoted in Marwat 1995: 45.
 141

ministries. As Gregorian notes, from the mid-1930s on the Musahiban dynasty

increasingly relied on a professionalized cadre of non-aristocratic managers to staff the

central institutions of its state.3 Unlike Gregorian, I do not view this as part of the logic of

any theory of socio-political modernization, but as a fragmentation of potential opposition

- splitting further the central urban and (various diverse) rural political economies from

each other, and insulating the ruling dynasty's bureaucracy from both.

1.2. Elite Cultural Politics

The rise of an oligarchic political economy at the center, suffused with ideologies

of modernism and technicalism, was achieved by recruiting an educated urban

bureaucracy staffed by educated Persian-speaking urbanites of Kabul. The replacement of

aristocrats by technocrats may be exemplified here by a sidelining of Momand's ideas on

Pashtun hegemony in the Education Ministry in 1946.

The king's cousin Muhammad Na'im had been replaced by NajTb Allah Torwayana

as Minister of Education, at the same that the repressive Prime Minister Hashim Khan

was replaced by his relatively more liberal brother Shah Mahmud Khan. According to the

Persian-language memoirs of the civil servant Sayyid Qasim Rishtiya, bureaucrats at the

center were disquieted by their sense that Momand wished to extend the hegemony of

Pashtunism outside an appropriation of aristocratic court symbols, and into the realms of

education, the bazaar and even the home.4 Rishtiya and Torwayana decided to stop the

trend at the source, in the educational sphere. The Prime Minister Shah Mahmud called a

3
Gregorian 1969
4
Rishtiya 1997: 263
 142

conference between Rishtiya, Torwayana, Momand, and himself. Rishtiya and

Torwayana claimed that an ideology of Pashtun supremacism would not be politically

advantageous in a country where Pashtuns were at most only half of the total population.

They were able to persuade Shah Mahmud to their point of view;5 by that point, Momand

had been retired from formal government service for some time. After 1946, Pashto and

Pashtun culture was, by official policy, to be promoted by the state solely in the realm of

publication activities, filtered through a number of periodicals and through the activities

of the Pashto Totana. The Tolsna was still the premier official cultural organization in the

country, but of course, reading was not a mandatory state activity. This was quite a bit

less than Momand had worked for.

This is the context in which we must read Momand's most dogmatic championing

of objectified Pashtun culture, his Summary of Pashto and Pashtunness. It was a context

where Momand's preferred repertoire of political practices had been marginalized as

politically dangerous in the middle-higher levels of the state. It was a deeply emotional,

defensive reiteration of Muhammad Gul's firm belief in a personalized political world, in

a world where this was becoming less true in central, professionalized elite spheres.

Indeed, in a 1945 speech at the grave of Sayyid Jamal al-Din Afghani, Torwayana

himself leveled exactly this criticism of monarchism as a system by placing it in

Afghani's mouth - he argued that personalized politics privileged the monarch's

subjectivity as equivalent with the subjectivity of the nation, and thus constrained the

development of a progressive mass consciousness.6

5
Rishtiya, op. cit.
6
This argument is in large part the central thrust of Torwayana 1324 SH [1945].
 143

1.3. Personal Marginalization

We must not overstate the foregoing as representing the case on all levels of society

nationwide. Maintaining the rural power networks and individualized mediation, as

described in the previous chapter, was still something that the royal family benefited

from. The monarchy did not desire, however, to entrust too much of its power to any

single intermediary who was not part of the family itself. So, in another sense,

Muhammad Gul Khan's decline is in some measure related to the rise of Sardar

Muhammad Da'ud Khan, cousin to the king Zahir Shah. Muhammad Da'ud had been in

France for purposes of education during the civil wars of 1928-29.7 Upon his return he

moved through the military and War Ministry ranks. He served first in 1933 as military

and civil commander in Mashriqi, the eastern provinces where Muhammad Gul Khan

first forged ties of military and civil patronage with the population. He moved on to the

governorship of Kandahar after Momand vacated that post, which perhaps represents

attempts by the royal family to co-opt the channels of patronage that Momand

established, in the same series as Momand had established them.8

Momand's replacement by Da'ud and the state was not only genealogical. As

Da'ud's influence increased, he increasingly came to share republican ideologies held by

other influential actors at the center. Economic stresses extending far beyond any single

individual combined with Da'ud's considerable political skill to create a technicalist

oligarchic bureaucracy in the central circles of the state, out of an earlier aristocratic one.

7
Akram2001:22.
8
Kabul Kalanai 1935:35
 144

1.4. Economic Centrism

An outward devolution in political power allowed the royal family, its small coterie

of associates, and select partners in the urban credit markets to engage in an elite

consumerist approach to integration with world capitalism. This approach generally

locked out much of the subsistence-based, rural Pashtun political economic networks, as

discussed earlier. The main source of revenue, foreign trade, was channeled through a

number of monopoly trading companies {shirkats) in various cities. They were dominated

to varying degrees through supervision, management, or financing, by a single institution.

This "National Bank", the Bank-i MillJ, was run by the Tajik merchant capitalist and

financier 'Abd al-MajId Khan Zabuli, who was the richest man in the country and by far

the largest single source of indigenous capital.9 In the wake of the 1928 civil war, the

bank that Zabuli started (with an Af. 7 million loan of his own capital and that of some

other merchants in Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul) was the single most important thing

keeping the state bureaucracy afloat. The bank operated from 1933 to 1942 without any

foreign capital at all, a great source of pride for Zabuli.10 This gave Zabuli a remarkable

degree of political influence over the economy, which he also maintained as a result of a

close association with the like-minded Muhammad Da'ud.

With no real stake in rural political economy as it stood at the time, Zabuli firmly

believed in the need to apply a heavily urban-centric, top-down, Turkish republican

model to Afghanistan. Alongside Muhammad Da'ud, he patronized and financed an

underground Republican Party consisting of a cadre of students, army officers,

9
Zabuli had made a fortune just before the 1920s, buying assets from Russia during the revolution and
reselling them in the markets of Zabul, Iran at an immense profit. See Adamec 1991: 281.
10
Refer to Zabuli's memoirs for this account: Zabuli and Muzhda 1380: 8-9.
 145

bureaucrats, and elite traders. The party faltered in 1935 or so, but was resuscitated in

1939 as Zabuli's and Da'ud's influence grew.11 By 1938 Zabuli was Minister of Trade; by

1940 his centralist ideals were influential enough that he ascended to a post of his own

design: Minister of the National Economy.12

Zabuli's importance increased in the early days of the Second World War, as

industrialized countries exported less manufactured goods and India exported less

foodstuffs and commodities such as tea and sugar. Afghanistan's reliance on these

imports was high, and shortages in most commodities as well as hoarding and massive

inflation racked the country. As Zabuli relates in his memoirs, "there was not enough

cloth to make burial shrouds, and the streets of Kabul and other cities were filled with

beggars."13 There had been some measure of foresight, though - seeing an impending

global crisis looming, the state had been stockpiling certain commodities, and was able to

establish assistance bureaus for women and children in the cities. This appears to have

increased Zabuli's faith in centrism, and the government's faith in him, even as the crisis

dragged on through the entirety of thel940s.14 Moreover, Zabuli makes it a point to note,

in his papers, that Afghanistan was for the first time buying textiles from countries such

as Mexico.15 This may have inspired in Zabuli the value of directed economy as a route to

developing productive capability in non-industrialized countries.16

11
Marwat 1995: 46
12
'A. H. Habibi 1353 SH [1974] : 281 for the 1938 citation; and Da Kabul Kalanai 1940: 16 for a listing
of Zabuli in the post of "Wazlr-i Iqtisad-i Millf'
13
Zabuli 1380 SH [2001]: 15.
14
Refer to Zabuli 1949 for a very strong defense of the state's role in those areas where it intervened.
15
Zabuli 1380 SH [2001]: 15
16
By the late 1940s Zabuli had crafted an elaborate twelve-year plan with the state bank at its center to
gradually build Afghanistan's production capabilities to the point of self-sufficiency (see Zabuli 1949);
which seems quite similar to policies that the Mexican state implemented post 1930. See Bennet and
Sharpe 1980 on "The [Mexican] State as Banker and Entrepreneur"
 146

A conflict with Zabuli's drive toward oligarchic centrism was the proximate reason

why Muhammad Gul Khan Momand resigned from the Interior Ministry in 1940. After a

decade of enjoying considerable power through personalized patronage and rural

mobilization, Momand discovered in the end that the state was more dependent on

Zabuli's procurement of revenue than the royal family was on his own mediation with

rural power. In 1940 Zabuli's bank founded a sugar factory in Baghlan. Like other such

institutions, an entire complex was to be built which would cater to all the needs of the

workers and administrators; and the financing and the profits were to be centrally

controlled from Kabul. Muhammad Gul Khan Momand, who was the governor of that

region at the time, objected. Not only did it involve proletarianization where Muhammad

Gul put such a premium on masculine self-sufficiency as virtue; but the ownership was

impervious to local intermediation, linked as it was straight to Kabul.

The incident that accompanied this factory is a manifestation of a much larger trend

toward centralization; the near total segregation of business from rural political economy;

and the eventual political subordination of the latter to the former, a process discussed by

Gregorian in some detail from a different angle. At the meeting where the factory plan

was described, and over which Zabuli presided, Muhammad Gul loudly protested that the

factory should be built with the capital of local people, to give them a stake in it.

Muhammad Gul's khan style of influence-brokering did not impress Zabuli, however,

who dismissively replied that "capitalism has its own special considerations (tajarat wa

sarmaya guzari mushakhasat bi-khusus darad)."11 Losing his temper but powerless to do

17
The account and the quote are from MomandT 2004: 160 The quote is my translation from Persian;
though the reported speech may be Momandi's paraphrase.
 147

anything, Muhammad Gul stormed out, and resigned from the Interior Ministry

immediately thereafter. A letter arrived from the king Zahir Shah, stating that Muhammad

Gul Khan Momand was reappointed as Minister of State (WazTr-i Dawlai). Rejecting this

position as a primarily symbolic one, Muhammad Gul retired from formal public

service.18 He served as an elder statesman cultural advisor for Pashto-related affairs until

his death, with varying degrees of success. As the 1940s progressed, even Muhammad

Gul's proteges from the early days of the Pashto Anjuman began to take Pashto cultural

promotion in a different, rather more more liberalist and reformist and even anti-

monarchic, direction. This trend will be discussed presently in the current chapter.

II. Non-elite Challenges to Monarchic Power

Up to this point, the dissertation has been concerned primarily with a top-down

view of power. The narrative in the previous two chapters, while moving forward in time,

progressively radiated outward from the court and urban centers to the countryside; and

downward socially to move outside the government in some cases. Regardless, the view

up to this point has been one of the agency and structures of the powerful.

We have already explored features of local political economy in Pashtun regions,

which presumably were observable to most participants even if the emotional response

differed according to participants' class and lineage, distance from major cities, and of

course their gender. The eastern regions - mostly present-day Laghman, Nangrahar, and

parts of Kunar provinces - will feature in the bulk of the discussion in this chapter.

In Mashriqi, much as in other areas, an agrarian surplus was extracted through

18
Refer to Momandi op. cit: 159-161 for thefoilaccount of Momand's resignationfromthe government.
 148

urban-based credit monopolies, and the sale of imported commodities and manufactured

goods. Politically, since the 1930s villages and lineages negotiated with state power

through personalized channels of influence, which were concentrated on the urban center

of Jalalabad in their highest registers, at the confluence of the Kabul and Kunar river

valleys. This political and economic arena gave rise to complex, interpenetrating

hierarchies of rural social class, lineage, and ethnicity.

However, analyzing only the patrimonial order glosses over the subjecthood of

those on the outside of it. Talal Asad's classic critique of Barth's Political Leadership

among the Swat Pathans argued that the centralized state of Swat as seen from a "khan's-

eye view" glosses over very real issues of inequality.19 A khan might emphasize an

honor-centric view of society as composed of self-sovereign, competitive individuals,

even while allowing that their economic fortunes might vary. But, this is probably not the

way his clients and sharecroppers viewed their place in the world, even if they lived with

the contradiction of internalized elitist forms of masculine honor as a virtue.

Leaving aside tenants and sharecroppers for the next chapter, how was inequality

experienced and mediated by the middle ranks of rural society, no matter how much

inequality may have been deproblematized by chivalrous ideologies? Let us first ask, how

did the world look from the perspective of non-privileged lineages? We may look at both

the actions and the textual production of populations for answers.

//. 1. Insurgencies

In contradistinction to many prevailing narratives of the Zahir Shah period as an

19
Refer to Talal Asad 1972; and Ahmed 1976: 131 for the specific phrase "khan's-eye view".
 149

age of social consensus (one of the reasons this period is often glossed over in historical

narratives of Afghan social conflict), it is important to note that not all people submitted

quietly to rule. As one central critic of the rural political economy, 'Abd al-Majid Zabuli,

noted, from 1929 to the start of the Second World War Afghanistan as a whole saw no

fewer than seventeen armed uprisings against the state among Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns

alike.20

Many of these uprisings were direct or indirect responses to continuous subtle

adjustments of the two-tiered structure of economy described in previous chapters. Thus,

in 1939, there was a major uprising in the Southeastern provinces which was linked to

new trade restrictions. The Afghan government's major sources of export revenues,

luxury wool and skins, were not selling in their European markets during wartime despite

the Afghan government's studious neutrality in the conflict. To make up the shortfall, the

government tried to rigidity monopolies in another commodity sector, the fruit trade with

India; and it tried to monopolize every step of the chain all the way from Afghan

production straight up to the initial point of retail inside India.21 The protests of Indian

buyers paled in comparison to a domestic uprising by middlemen and transporters of the

Sulayman Khel tribe. Relatively quickly, the uprising took on ideological ramifications

far beyond the particulars of the fruit trade. It gained strength from and merged with the

resistance of the Sham! Plr ("the Holy Man of Damascus"), a religious leader on the

Afghan-British border region who contested the monarchy's right to rule. A foreigner

lately of Syria (whence the title), the Shami Pir claimed his own legitimacy to the throne

20
Zabuli 1380: 9.
21
IAA 890H.00/176
 150

as a relative to the former king Aman Allah (who was currently residing in the Axis

power of Italy). This uprising probably also found inspiration in Kabul-based

underground groups working in favor of the exiled king, described by Marwat.22 The

Shami Pir uprising, in turn, bled into another one led by the Faqlr of IpT in Waziristan,

which aimed to establish an Emirate in the British-controlled Tribal Areas. Dark rumors

abounded, some of them true, of German support for these movements. The latter

diverted over 40,000 British troops, and that too during the Second World War.23

In the eastern Afghan province of Nangrahar, there were persistent troubles

stemming from preferential top-down allocation of both political and economic power or

land (and usually none of these factors were completely separate in the village setting).

With the officialization of both elite trucking and caravan trade through the Khyber Pass,

traditional casual trade had come to be stigmatized as "smuggling" over the early

twentieth century. For some powerful zamindar (landowning/cultivating) families in the

fertile river basin of Jalalabad and Kama, this was not such a major issue. Their political

position, both in their lineages and with the government, assured good, irrigated land; and

they easily made the transition to a more firmly agrarian economy. Powerful men

belonging to the less-favored tribes in the lowlands, though, faced a choice; as did most

upland tribes in the east. Not all men could own land. The rest could either make ends

meet through smuggling, or accept a subordinate socioeconomic position as clients - that

is, sharecroppers, menial laborers, or government servants. None of the above were

pleasant choices for Pashtun men, either materially or ideologically, given the historically

22
Marwat 1997 (Chapters 3 and 4 passim) provides a discussion, as thorough as can be possible in the
absence offirmsources, of underground pro-Aman Allah elements in the Afghan capital.
23
IAA 890H.00/176; 890H.00.186. Refer also to Hauner 1981: 192-194 for a discussion of the Shami Pir.
 151

prestigious ideologies of masculinity described throughout the previous chapter.

Wartime stresses on the government, and uprisings elsewhere, emboldened a

number of tribes. Some Shinwari were widely rumored to have conspired in uprisings

with Afridi across the border, and with the Shami Pir or Faqir of Ipi in uprisings based on

a blend of pan-Pashtunism and pan-Islamism, to carve out more local authority for

themselves. Meanwhile, poorer upland Momands of the "Usman Khel" and "Mita Khel"

lineages in Kama District tested their luck against both the government and the

government's lowland Momand zamindar allies of the "Khoza Khel" lineage, in two

separate uprisings that were caused by government crackdowns on smuggling. These

were far more than cases of tribal competition, though contradictions of lineage

egalitarianism and governmental hierarchy complicated them. The anti-governmental

dimension was there from the beginning; and the second uprising in 1944 resulted in

Kama district's wdhswal fleeing to the neighboring province of Laghman.24

Does a recourse to armed action mean a breakdown in the types of mediation

described in the previous chapter? Surely, armed action against more powerful tribes or

governments is a drastic step, and negotiations through personalized channels would be

preferable to the weaker parties. These tribes must have been too far outside the channels

of allocation and patronage to be able to negotiate a better place in the world. The

linkages of the Sulayman Khels and the Shinwaris with trans-regional resistance figures

such as the Shami Pir and the Faqir of Ipi represent opposing hierarchies of personal

mediation, as much as they represent alternative ideological complexes. The Emirate that

the Faqir of Ipi attempted to establish was similar to the Afghan monarchy, insofar as it
24
IAA 890H.00/186; 890H.00/9-1344
 152

retained hierarchical, personalistic aspects (albeit with different forms of legitimacy).25

However, resistance was not restricted to violent insurrection against the

government, and along lineages' fault lines. Intellectuals of the hinterland leveled

ideological challenges and critiques of the prevailing order, even more so than did critics

at the center such as 'Abd al-Majid Zabuli and Muhammad Da'ud Khan who were

partisans of a Turkish-style top-down republican system. In answering the question posed

above - "What did the world look like to those on the outside?" - we have some direct

textual sources, in addition to the indirect evidence above which can be gleaned from a

vicarious "prose of counterinsurgency".26 This is possible because of the fact that an elite,

person-centered form of public negotiation channeled through the hujra was not the only

public sphere available to rural actors. Alternative circulation structures evolved and

flourished, along with alternative ideologies. In some cases they complicated the domain

of the hujra from within. In other cases they undermined it.

II. 2. Alternative Ideologies

In many cases, even very subordinated populations internalized the ideological

dimensions of Man-centric honor as advocated by Momand. For others, though, self-

sufficiency and honor as a folklorized ideal of "Pashtun" identity, and the reinforcement

of elite rural ideals regarding the family as the essence of 'the people,' were a

smokescreen. An emphasis on masculine self-sovereignty, for these critics, was

25
This is a criticism of the Faqir raised by Gur Charan Singh, a delegate to the Faqir from the Punjab
Communist Party in 1941-1942, as related in Salim 1990: 150-155.
26
The phrase refers to Guha 1988; I label it "vicarious" here because the American dispatches cited above
largely replicate the Afghan state's view of the proceedings, having drawn the accounts in many cases
from direct translations or summaries from the Afghan state paper Islah.
 153

contradicted by ideologies of lineage hierarchy; and also masked the plight of the small

self-cultivator, for example, who was sometimes little better off than the tenant farmer or

the landless laborer. The tenant was almost entirely dependent on the landowner, and was

very much was subject to "authority" of the khan, rather than "influence," as political

practice, and his family could only be a pale imitation of the ideal in this construction.

Similarly utterly dependent were women and children, the unspoken (universally agreed-

upon) locus of honor and prestige as well as its Achilles heel. Young men were also left

out. How could these individuals be incorporated into the rhetoric of Pashtun identity?

Often times, through a marriage of ethnic identity with reformism.

77. 3. Rural Democratic and Anti-Elite Movements in British India

Among the most powerful sources of ideological resistance in eastern Afghanistan

were various discourses of anti-hierarchy resulting from the decolonization struggle in

India. This cross-border sharing of anti-governmental critique was especially true of

ideologies which took root in Pashtun areas that evidenced rural power networks similar

to, and even interlinked with, ones existing in Afghanistan. One source was the

resistance tradition of holy men and spiritual lineage, which Sana Haroon treats in great

detail.27 As time went on, this loosely-definable political tendency gained a stronger and

stronger component of reflexive Pashtun identity and anti-hierarchism.28

Part of the reason for this increase in ethnic-oriented nationalism among spiritual

networks was their on-again, off-again alliance, political and to some extent ideological,
27
See especially Haroon 2007.
28
Haroon (2007: 187) claims that this injection of Pashtun identity politics was primarily a result of
Afghan discourse in relation to the Faqir of Ipi, post-1947; though this in not the case with other
spiritual leaders with more extensive links to Islamic revivalist movements.
 154

with a Pashtun-centric version of Gandhian nationalism that stood against strong central

government. This latter ideology was particularly well-received among almost all

echelons within the border tribes, to say nothing of the populations of the settled districts.

The ideology was adopted from the political practice of 'Abd al-Ghaffar Khan, a

medium-scale landlord of the Charsadda region in the Peshawar plain and an ally of the

Indian National Congress. Stephen Alan Rittenberg and Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah note the

self-conscious ethnic particularism of 'Abd al-Ghaffar Khan's Da Khuda'e Khidmatgar

(Servants of God) movement.29 Peshawar-based academics have found fault in Mukulika

Banerjee's study of subaltern discipline in the movement for overemphasizing the

Gandhian aspects of the movement, seeking instead an account centering Pakhtun social

organization, Islamic values, and local creative agency.30

Regardless of such debates, much of the current thought on the Khudae Khidmatgar

movement listed above points to inter-khan and inter-class rivalry as a driving force for

an intensified, reflexive codification and valorization of Pashtunwalai (the "Pashtun

ethos" also invoked by Muhammad Gul Momand), and its 1930s fusion with pro-

democratic mass politics. Charging larger khans with not upholding moral standards of

Pashtunness was an effective critique that smaller khans, less favored by the colonial

administration, could level against larger ones (who were generally used as

intermediaries by that administration). This was a critique that was highly egalitarian,

and easily acceptable to small, self-cultivating holders and sharecroppers. It therefore

fostered a sense of solidarity between these ranks and those of small-to-medium

29
Rittenberg, Stephen Alan. 1988. Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Pakhtuns: The Independence
Movement in India's North-West Frontier Province. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, and Shah,
Sayed Wiqar Ali. Ethnicity, Islam, and Nationalism. Karachi: Oxford University Press 1999.
30
Banerjee2000
 155

landlords; larger but disfavored landlords; and religious specialists; against the British

and the large landed interests that allied with colonialism. Critical discourses of

Pashtunness represented an iron-clad discursive space from within which women could

criticize and motivate men to certain actions, in exchange for colluding with structures of

gendered domination, though for several reasons this aspect is less researched as yet.31

Thus, with the rise of region-centric parliamentary politics in British India as a

whole during the period of civil disobedience and constitutional devolution, the NWFP

participated in most of the various new forms of publics that were arising (especially after

the 1931 Gandhi-Irwin Pact and the 1935 Government of India Act). Of all available

sources, the Pashto memoirs of individuals like Ajmal Khattak or Waris Khan describe

the processes of urban and rural public-formation in the most intimate detail, as well as

the ways in which these various frontier publics interfaced with each other.32 The hujras

of small-scale Pashtun landowners in NWFP formed a place where peasants mingled with

locally-elite rural youth. Waris Khan describes this process in detail in relation to his

own family's hujra, where local youth of mid-ranking families were, in turn, increasingly

sensitized to stridently political print publications emanating from Peshawar City and

Punjab. Waris Khan mentions the Pakhtun Risala, the print organ of 'Abd al-Ghaffar

Khan's movement, as being a formative journal involving nationalist poetry and article

features - for the first time, in the Pashto language. The Punjab-based periodicals Milap

and Pratap were other influences. Related to these latter two, Waris Khan mentions

active local participation in cosmopolitan, underground anarcho-socialist activism of the

31
The memoirs of Waris Khan (1988) provide some window into the dynamics of gender in this
movement.
32
Refer to Khattak 2005; Waris Khan 1988. I am currently in the process of translating Waris Khan's
memoirs.
 156

variety Bhagat Singh espoused, as well as the frontier revolutionary trend exemplified by

KakajT Sanobar Husayn.33

During the various waves of Gandhian activism and electoral campaigns,

individuals like Waris Khan organized public events and secured the participation of

agricultural laborers in the movement. They formed one link in a process stitching

together the realms of small-patrons' hujra; critical print of translocal urban centers;

cosmopolitan underground networks; and subaltern sociality, into a mass movement that

conglomerated around the figure of 'Abd al-Ghaffar Khan - in a way similar to the

processes that Shahid Amin describes in his article "Gandhi as Mahatma".34

The Afghan government saw pro-democratic literature as highly threatening, and

worked extremely hard to control the spread of social movements to its own territory.

The British government also appears to have cooperated with the requests of the Afghan

government to limit the cross-border movement of much of this literature, especially

when transported by some holdout pro-Aman Allah factions residing in British territory.

However, homegrown Afghan liberal, pro-democracy and free-speech activists presented

a different sort of threat than did the eclectic Aman Allah supporters, especially when

they allied with elite republicans. By the 1940s, Aman Allah's supporters tended to use

the persona of the deposed king as a way to further their own individualized or sectional

interests, as described above in relation to the Shami Pir among others. They were (in

Afghanistan) purged through prison terms of indefinite lengths or through execution.35

33
Waris Khan's village neighbor Hari Kishan, who was hanged for his attack on the Governor of Punjab
in 1930, was in part motivated in his actions by the case against Bhagat Singh, Dutt, Rajguru, and
Sukhdev. See Waris Khan 1988: 84-86.
34
See Amin 1984.
35
Marwat 1995: 38.
 157

The liberals and the republicans were more of a force to be reckoned with, in that

their influence eventually extended into the heart of the state bureaucracy and ministries

themselves. Unlike the lineage- and person-based threats that the government was well-

practiced in countering, these activists created new forms of communication and channels

for public opinion. The case of Qiyam al-DIn Khadim is useful as a token in examining

the rise of critical middle class eastern Pashtun intellectuals from provincial rural

backgrounds, in 1930s and especially 1940s Afghanistan.

///. Rural Intellectuals in Eastern Afghanistan

Qiyam al-Din "Khadim" - the takhallus, or nickname, means 'servant' and shares a

root with the name of the Khuda'e Khidmatgar movement - relates his own life story in

the biographical dictionary OsdnT Likwal. The information in the following paragraphs is

derived mostly from that source.36 Khadim was born in Kama District "around 1325 HQ",

or 1907, to a family of well-educated local 'ulama originally of Shigai, further up the

Kunar Valley in Nangrahar. On the basis of this geographic location, Khadim believed

that the family was of Zakhel Momand Pashtun descent; though there were also persistent

family histories of what Swat-based ethnography calls a "saintly" background.37

The family must have owned and cultivated land like other low- to mid-level

Pashtun scholarly gentry (in distinction to the ritual specialist mulla demographic, who

36
OLI: 291-300
37
The (misleadingly glossed) "saints" or miyagan were, in the northern Pashtun regionsfromLaghman to
Swat, usually landowners descended from spiritual leaders or scholars of past generations. Thoroughly
Pashtunized though not "Pashtun" in a strict sense, they fell outside the factional politics of lineages;
and they often were able to use this intermediate position between factions to their political and
economic advantage. Refer to Edwards 1986: 274-277; Ahmed 1984 (who calls them mians in the
Tribal Agencies of Pakistan); Lindholm 1979, who writes about the case in Swat (where they are called
stanadar).
 158

were often little more than landless clients in many regions). Nonetheless, despite the

family's status as low-level gentry, Khadim's account privileges the mastery of texts as

the narrative center to his life. He casually mentions at least a dozen texts, by name, at

various points, a device which helps structure the temporal movement of his narrative.

Learning Persian and Arabic at a young age from his father, Khadim quickly mastered

classical didactic texts like Gulistan and Bustan alongside his brothers, and studied more

advanced texts with other local teachers.

The young Khadim received a good deal of positive reinforcement from local

scholars. After his father passed away early on, Khadim elected to proceed beyond the

level of learning that would secure him a place merely as a local mulla or even a

government elementary school teacher in a larger town. He traveled to the mountainous

region of Kunar, memorizing classical texts on linguistics, poetics, and semiotics

alongside other boys from a respected teacher there. By his teenage years, he had traveled

quite widely in search of teachers with mastery over various branches of knowledge -

spending time in "Lara More, Kundl Bagh, Agam, Arghach, Kflgho, Kabul, Peshawar,

and other places."38 He worked as a teacher in an elementary school in Kama for some

time; but he did not consider this an ideal position. Desiring to learn further on the

subject of logic, he memorized the Isaghuji, the introductory text in the neo-Platonic

tradition of Islamic rationalism.39 He then traveled for "fifteen years" in India learning

more, spending most of his time in Makhad (near Attock), Ludhiana, and Delhi.40
38
Khadim, in OLI: 294
39
The text that Khadim mentions is probably not Porphyry's Isagoge (the "Introduction" to Aristotle's
Categories), though its name places it in a tradition of Arabic glosses on that work.
40
Khadim, op. cit. Fifteen years seems like an excessive estimation, given his 1907 date of birth, and the
end date of travels in the very early 1930s (during the reign of Nadir Shah). Of course, Khadim
estimates his date of birth in the absence of documentary records; and he does so in the lunar calendar,
 159

At this point, it is useful to note that private educational networks were more

widespread and still possessed more cultural capital than the relatively new state system.

More than that, we should note the highly individualistic nature of instruction. Becoming

an 'alim, or learned scholar, involved for most [eastern] Pashtuns a highly itinerant

lifestyle, traveling from teacher to teacher, as noted by David Edwards among others.41

Despite this emphasis on personal transmission of knowledge, though, the self-

construction of at least some advanced students like Khadim, as evidenced in his own

narrative, could easily be centered around an interaction with a textual canon - with

discourse, not people.

These canonical texts included extensive selections on socio-political values, or

akhlaq; as well as various branches of logic. Besides this, they included highly elaborate

texts on literary semiotics, centered around composition practice as well as analysis. This

extremely deep engagement with poetics in most scholars' curriculum encouraged the

composition of didactic poetry for lay people and non-students, often in Pashto "folk"

meters, performed in local hujras.42 This secondary literature from the early twentieth

century, only a comparatively small proportion of which is preserved, exists in some case

almost as commentary on the canonical texts at the same time as individual poems

existed intertextually with each other - responding, reiterating, debating. Poems had

idiosyncratic concerns in local areas, which marks the introduction of non-scholarly

whereas after 1919 Afghanistan shifted to the solar calendar. There are many possible reasons for time
discrepancies.
41
Refer to David Edwards 1996, Chapter 4 passim
42
Refer to Wafa 1377 SH [1998], Chapters 4 and 5 passim. See also Rafi' 1349 SH [1970]: 221-225 for
information on the didactic genre maqam, performed to a slow and dignified musical arrangement at the
start of all poetic gatherings, even those intended primary for celebration. Educated people were not the
only ones to compose these didactic poems, which signals one route that this educational public
interfaced with other sectors of local society. I discuss non-educated poets in the next chapter.
 160

participation at the point of the lay consumers. This was, in short, a specifically Pashtun

(at least, Pashto language) zone of translocal interaction, configured in good measure by

shared interaction in discourse. It was a public, with literate individuals such as Khadim,

his teachers, and his colleagues serving as the locus for a primarily non-print mediation.

Khadim came to suffer from various unspecified maladies while in India. He

traveled to Peshawar for treatment, ending up in the village of Lwaragai in the rugged

region of Kohat (in present-day Pakistan's NWFP). The year was 1929. He stayed there

for two years, teaching literacy to large numbers of children.

Khadim was present in the NWFP during the reformist period described above,

when a highly diverse urban media culture was beginning to articulate in numerous ways

with the rural. Khadim had practiced literacy in the Pashto language since childhood, and

by his own description, his itinerant lifestyle and his inherent temperament both led him

to be constantly reflective on his surroundings since childhood. He describes his early

desire to grasp the functioning of machines; and discusses how the presence of various

discursive and media influences sent this basic desire into less tangible directions.

During his period of Perso-Islamic rationalist-philosophical education, he writes, "I used

to wonder this way about the universe and its order, too." He then discusses how the

material and ideational aspects of this inquiry into process and structure came to be

dialectically synthesized in his mind via social philosophy; and he describes his

interaction with a print public as a form of spiritual liberation as well as social-moral

awakening:

I then began thinking about life and social institutions when I became aware of
newspapers. I became aware of the meaning of qawmiyat, milliyat, and
eventually, insaniyat (roughly, social solidarity; nationality; and humanity). That
 161

freedom and independence which was lying concealed in me was now

accompanied by bittersweet pain. This pain was new and I didn't have the ability
to express it, but when I read (Indian philosopher-poet) IqbaPs works, they
helped me give voice to some of this overwhelming pain in my heart.43

Khadim's thoughts returned to Afghanistan, followed shortly by Khadim himself.

Although he likely intended to stay in Kohat - he was engaged to be married there - he

began publishing his early poetic work in Afghanistan. His first published poem, printed

early in the 1930s by the semi-governmental Jalalabad-based newspaper Ittihad-i

Mashriqi, conveyed the spirit of the time in the NWFP, if the title is any indication:

Bedar Sha Paxtuna!, or "Wake up, Pashtun!"44 Khadim was not alone in this regard. In

the early to mid 1930s, the weekly Ittihad-i Mashriqi would generally print one page of

news followed by a page of poems with "social" {ijtima 1) or "nationalist" (millt) themes.

These poems were "generally copied from publications of Peshawar [in India], or sent in

by their colleagues or supporters".45

Afghan publications were both externally and self-censored, and did not print direct

criticism of monarchy or its supporters in the form of news or prose. Still, Peshawari

poems about struggles for freedom and democracy - which would have implied anti-

monarchism to local readers in Jalalabad - might not have been seen as too dangerous if

they restricted their explicit address to Pashtuns against British India. Indeed, as an aside,

propaganda in support of cross-border struggles, and a reminiscence of external struggle

43
Khadim, OLI: 296
44
I have not seen this poem; I have no idea whether the poem was addressed to Afghan Pashtuns or was
written in support of the anti-colonial movement in India.
45
"Pa dwayam makh ke ye ijtima7 aw milll shi'runa khparedal che ma'mulan ba ye yd da Pexawar la
khparawano Sakha akhistal aw yd ba ye hamkdran war-ta rd-astawal." Wafa 1377 SH [1998]: 43,
quoting Habib Allah Rafi' 1356 SH [1977], Paxto Khparawane (Kabul: Pashto Development and
Reinforcement Directorate). In the Pashto it is unclear whether the author refers to the "colleagues" or
"supporters" of the anti-colonial movement in India, or to those of the editorial staff of the Ittihad-i
Mashriqi - though the phrasing seems more likely to indicate the latter.
 162

as a source of consensus, was one plausible reading of the Ittihad-i Mashriqfs mission.

The newspaper had its start in the war of independence of 1919, when a group of

powerful lineage elders, religious scholars, and other prominent rural figures in the

Eastern Provinces met at the grave of the renowned Sahib of Hadda, the leader of a Sufi

brotherhood who led a major anti-colonial uprising in the Momand and surrounding

regions in the 1890s. The delegates in 1919 signed a mutual pact to liberate the Afghan

crown from the British empire, and the newspaper Ittihad-i Mashriqi ("The Eastern

Alliance") was originally started in 1920 to remind the participants and the larger

solidarity groups' of their mutual pact and their allegiance to the independent, legitimate

Afghan crown. The first issue, on the first anniversary of that event, replicated afarman

by the king Aman Allah declaring jihad and authorizing the leaders' battle standards, and

described token gifts that Aman Allah sent, such as decorative rifles engraved with the

tribes' name, the leader's name, and the jihad front where they fought.46 The paper was,

then, an index of vertical social consensus and monarchic legitimacy forged through

struggle, a feature explicit in its title and in the news it printed (or didn't print). Rafi'

notes that the news component gradually dwindled in the mid-1930s, replaced by essay-

articles that backed up dominant ideologies of patriarchal rule described in the previous

chapter. Pashto articles arguing for a print public, such as "Benefits Derived from

Weekly and Monthly Periodicals" and "No Sword can Compete with or Emulate a

Tongue" coexisted with texts of patriarchal hegemony such as "Lordly Munificence

{sakhawaf) and Beneficent Masculinity {jawan-mardt) are a Means to the Prosperity and

46
Wafa op civ. 38-39. I thank Professor Marwat of Peshawar University for allowing me access to a
private copy of this farman.
 163

Unity/Consensus {ittijaq) of Society".47

This trend was the case even as poetic discourses in the paper gradually forged a

more radical direction. Pro-democratic anthems against colonial hierarchies in British

India could easily be read as pro-democratic anthems against Afghan monarchic power

relations on the local level. Ideas of freedom from the domination of patrimonial khans

and maliks resonated as well with men of smaller means and low political access in the

Jalalabad plains of eastern Afghanistan as they did in the Peshawar plains. Here, then, the

abstract universalism of Pashto didactic poetry may have been more effective in raising a

general critical consciousness than the specificity of news would have been.

Based in the regional center of Jalalabad, the Ittihad-i Mashriqi soon grew into the

only major news and culture weekly in the Eastern Provinces. Although a few

independent journals sprouted in more rural areas such as Kama district during the anti-

Saqqao war of 1929, they all fell off again just as quickly, with no known copies

surviving. By the time Qiyam al-Din Khadim was sending in socio-political poetry to the

Ittihad-i Mashriqi in the 1930s, it was the only print publication outlet located within the

eastern provinces of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in Kohat, by 1930 Khadim had received letters inviting him to return to

Afghanistan to work in cultural spheres. Before long, Khadim was appointed, by long-

distance, as a standing member in the Kandahar Adabi Anjuman [Literary Society],

which was then being run by Muhammad 'Usman Pashtun under the patronage of

Muhammad Gul Khan Momand; and at that point he left India permanently. He arrived

47
Rafi', in Wafa op. cit.
 164

in Kandahar in early 1933, and took an active part in the salon life of that city.48 Khadim

moved with the Anjuman to Kabul in 1935. When it was merged with the Persian literary

society to form the Pashto Tolsna in the following year, Khadim was entrusted with the

publication of the Pashto literary and cultural studies journal Zerai, as part of his duties in

the Publications Branch.49

Over the course of the 1930s, Khadim worked his way up through the various

shifting departments of the Kabul-based Totana; which was in turn placed under different

governmental ministries and directorates over the course of the decade as the state

bureaucracy evolved.50 Despite the institutional instability, though, over the course of the

1930s a small circle of cultural figures gradually solidified as monopolistic voices in the

centralized print culture of Afghanistan, on topics related to Pashtun culture.

Emerging as dominant mediators of Pashto and Pashtun cultural studies in this

period were a number of still-famous names. 'Abd al-Hayy Habibl, the first general

director of the Tobna, was a literary historian from the Akhundzada family in Kandahar

City. Under his tenure in the mid-to-late 1930s, researchers sought out old texts in

mosques and private archives throughout the countryside; and lexicographical research

was carried out in order to standardize a written Pashto. The Kandahari Hotak scholar

Benawa also emerged as notable during this time, and would go on to be a major

promoter of class consciousness in Pashto-language political discourse.

Apart from those notable names, though, many of the other prominent rising

scholars were from traditionally-educated lower gentry of the Eastern Provinces, locked
48
Khadim, OL1297.
49
Khadim, OLI op. cit; PTLT: 10.
so
Refer to PTLT for an institutional-genealogical account of the various bodies within the Tobna, and the
varying places it held within the government.
 165

out of advancement in landed patronage structures. Aside from Khadim, in the first ranks

of the new governmentally-supervised Pashto cultural studies arena was Gul Pacha Ulfat

from Laghman, of the sayyid Pachat. They were originally a "saintly" family descended

from Sayyid 'AIT TermezI, better known as Plr Baba (buried in Buner, Pakistan). In the

lower Kunar Valley of Laghman they "gradually became secular", as Kakar describes it;

though they preserved a high level of Perso-Islamic education in their family down to the

twentieth century. The Pachas controlled considerable amounts of territory and took one-

third of the production from it, even challenging the crown on occasion in league with the

British empire. As described by Hasan Kakar, the Amir ' Abd al-Rahman crushed them in

the 1880s, exiling their head and reducing the lineage to local landlords not enjoying

major royal patronage.51 Author of the first literary monograph published by the Tobna,52

Gul Pacha Ulfat worked as a journalist in the Kabuli daily Anis by 1935. Shifting to the

Persian Literary Society, he worked in the translations department. He transferred to the

directorship of the Pashto Tolana's journal Zerai shortly after Khadim, and rose to head

the prestigious lexicography department by 1940. Some of Ulfat's contributions will be

discussed sporadically throughout this chapter.

The leading grammarian of the generation, Siddlq Allah "Rixtln", hailed from a

Momand family in Ghazlabad, Nangrahar. His lack of any extended family at all, usually

a source of hardship on local levels, was counterbalanced by his father's considerable

trans-local erudition gained in the North-west Frontier of India. His father also

maintained close personal ties to the powerful saint, scholar, and anti-colonial resistance

51
Kakar 2006: 69-72.
52
The work was a collection of short stories called Bala Dewd [The Burning Lamp], published in 1941.
Refer to PTLT for a complete tabulated list of publications, including their category.
 166

figure of the British North-west Frontier, the Haji Sahib of Turangzai; who was famous

as a pan-Pashtun reformist and nationalist ideologue as well.53 After his father died while

in the company of the Haji Sahib of Turangzai, trying to settle the 1924 Khost uprising,

Rixtin enrolled in the Najm al-Madaris. That school had been founded by the Haji of

Turangzai's own spiritual guide, the Sahib of Hadda, in the arid southern hinterland of

Jalalabad City. Rixtin completed his studies in the seminary in Kabul.54

To a far greater extent than the urban Kandahari scholars, it appears, these scholars

from the low- to mid-level landed gentry of the Eastern Provinces maintained some

degree of integration with rural channels of information circulation. These channels were

sometimes perceived and narrated in terms that privileged personality and social

networks as Rixtin's autobiographical sketch shows; but also sometimes in terms that

privileged discourse itself, as Khadim's case shows. The latter may have been more true

in the case of people like Khadim, whose individual teachers were less prestigious than

Rixtin's. In any case, while these channels were "religious" in some sense, that was true

of nearly all learning in Afghanistan at the time outside Kabul. It may be more neutral,

given the main concerns of many of these intellectuals - logic, linguistics, poetics,

semiotics - to understand these particular networks as "educational". This disparity

between east and south is one result of the greater rural social mobility (both upwards and

downwards) and lineage fluidity in the east, as opposed to the Durrani heartland of the

south, centered on greater Kandahar. The south was strongly hierarchized around the

large estates of aristocratic landowners linked to the government, and provided very little

53
Refer to Sana Haroon 2007, especially 53-55 and throughout the remainder of the book.
54
Rixtin, autobiography, in OLII: 473-493. For accounts of the Sahib of Hadda and his networks, refer to
Edwards 1996, especially Chapters 4 and 5.
 167

avenue for discursive or institutional "lines of flight" in the rural setting.55 There, the

urban-rural split was far greater; and the new class of Kandahari intellectuals were often

from the urbane families outlined in previous chapters.

As was the case with links between Kabul and Kandahar City, the central activities

of dominant eastern intellectuals based in Kabul also tied into provincial urban

publication culture. Thus, Khadim was deputed to run the Ittihad-i Mashriqi in 1941,

once it was converted to Pashto in its entirety; while Ulfat was appointed to the same post

in 1946.56 The point is that this eastern urban provincial publication culture was tied in a

rather more direct way to the concerns of the agrarian hinterland than was the case in

urban Kandahar. Within Mashriqi, the rural social networks of Nangrahar alone,

sketched out above in a biographical fashion, produced dozens, perhaps hundreds of less

prominent, literate rural intellectuals, interacting in various ways with print on either side

of the Afghan-India border.57 The majority produced output as poets with a social

consciousness, working in the classical Persianate tradition in the Pashto language, as

indicated in the above discussion of the Ittihad-i Mashriqi. The interaction of such poetry

with non-print publics will be addressed in the next chapter.

IV. Constraints

IV. 1. Constraining Publics through Patronage of Cultural Studies

What has been described here so far? The picture largely affirms a figure of speech
55
Refer to M. Habibi 1959: 191; Giustozzi and Noor Ullah 2006. The only major revolt in the south
during this period was in the remote region of Zamindawar among the most marginalized of the Durrani
tribes; and was moreover related to forced attendance of schools.
56
Wafa 1377 SH [ 1998]: 41; OLI: 90
57
Refer to Wafa 1377 SH [1998], especially Chapter 5, for lists enumerating scores of Nangrahari
intellectuals in the monarchic period.
 168

that Muhammad Siddlq Rohl uses in relation to the policy of the royal family toward

mildly subversive intellectuals in this period: "sara tol ye ka, kontrol ye ka [round them

up in one place and control them]."58

The ruling dynasty did its best to hinder public formation by disciplining

intellectuals, absorbing them into intellectual bodies such as the Pashto Tolana and

newspapers, both falling under the auspices of the government. Through this means, pro-

democracy intellectuals were diverted into tightly supervised, sequestered cultural

studies. Their output fell into intellectual programs largely dictated by the elite demands

of Muhammad Gul Khan Momand or, later on, bureaucrats in the Education Ministry or

Publications Directorate. From 1936 to 1939, the Academy published the Almanac and a

number of magazines and journals, but all the monograph publications of the Pashto

Totana were narrowly linguistically oriented - they included works of Pashto pedagogy,

grammar, lexicography, and a single collection of proverbs by the folklorist Muhammad

Gul Nun.59 In 1940 the Tolana published its first historical monograph, a narrative history

by 'A. H. Habibi about the ancestral founder of the Durrani monarchy, Ahmad Shah.

Besides this, the royal family since the early 1930s had taken steps to integrate

religious scholars into its state as well; it created a body called the Jarrii'at-i 'Ulama

[Society of Religious Scholars] and supervised the religious curriculum for state officials.

The court propagated a very explicit pamphlet, in rather more copies than was usual for

such documents, outlining the goals of this body and the curricula to which religious

officials should adhere.60 Those specializing in jurisprudence staffed various courts and

58
Rohi2005:84.
59
Refer to PTLT for a list of the academy's monographs published from 1936-1977
60
A copy of "The Afghan Law Relating to the Moslem Hierarchy" is preserved in IAA 890H.404.
 169

other legal functions throughout the country. This ended up being a domain largely

separate from that of intellectuals like Khadim, Rixtin, or Ulfat, even though the two

groups shared much in terms of the bodies of knowledge they commanded.

Why sequester intellectuals in government? What was at stake? The royal family

sought to limit the spread of dangerous ideas, especially Islamic leftism and reformism

propagated by certain pro-Aman Allah members of the Deobandi school. This was

among the most potentially subversive discourses emerging from India. It had the

potential to create mass movements around educational channels that existed in

Afghanistan; could co-opt more personalistic and localized actions into horizontal

organization; and could subvert the pyramidal power upon which government rule relied.

The work of Barbara Metcalf, Usha Sanyal, and others has outlined a North Indian

urban public-sphere Islamic print reformism rooted in the middle and lower-middle

classes.61 In the North-west Frontier Province, as in Bengal, this public realm intersected

with other subaltern, agrarian forms of sociability. It adapted to peasant unrest and anti-

colonial uprisings uncommonly well.62 The austere, homespun-clad mufti [legal

authority] of Peshawar in the 1930s, Mawlana 'Abd al-Rahlm Popalzai, was jailed

numerous times for fomenting peasant expropriations of land in Hazara District and the

Peshawar plains. He had personal links to Mawlana Mahmud Hasan "Shaykh al-Hind" at

Deoband, who was a staunch, though usually covert, anti-colonial force. In a single

degree of separation from our young Afghan grammarian Rixtin, Mawlana Popalzai also

had ties to the Haji of Turangzai in the Momand Agency; and to the Sahib of Hadda
61
Metcalf 1982; Sanyal 1996. Metcalf (p. 201) points out that literacy was not a major barrier to
circulation of print, as the literature would be read aloud in public squares and private homes.
62
See Haroon 2008 on the NWFP, though 'Umar Khan 1991 is much more detailed in terms of peasant
activism; and Sumit Sarkar 2002 for Deobandi texts and contexts of peasant reformism in Bengal.
 170

headquarters near Jalalabad in Afghanistan.63 During 1928, he worked in the Tribal

Agencies to limit anti-Aman Allah propaganda that was emanating from Kabul.

Mawlana Popalzai also had links in less personality-oriented directions: he was an

activist during the Khilafat Movement; was a member of the Progressive Bloc of the

Indian National Congress; and helped publish the newspaper Sarfarosh from Peshawar,

which was a direct contributing factor to the establishment of the Socialist Party in the

NWFP.64 Over the early 1930s, Mawlana Popalzai led numerous movements that raised a

corporate peasant consciousness against khans and maliks as a class, drawing upon

"modern European sociology."65 A hands-on social activist, he was instrumental in

helping articulate a peasant critique that tenants with hereditary rights should be

subjected to transcendent, impartial Islamic law rather than the customary law mediated

by personalized aristocratic landlords.

In Afghanistan, this would have been a devastating critique if allowed to proceed

unchecked; and if the careers of those such as Khadim or Rixtin had not led in the

direction of government employment, perhaps it would have done so. Some of their

training was not so different from Mawlana Popalzai's in terms of the texts they

mastered, despite the latter's more prestigious education in the Deoband university. The

royal family was likely not concerned only with a genealogical spread of ideas through

borrowing. Class critiques from the NWFP with roots in translocal religious educational

publics resonated well in the Eastern Provinces. In both regions, the population was

fairly dense and the land was fertile. High-labor produce like fruit, rice, and cane sugar

63
'Umar Faruq Khan 1991: 139
64
'Umar Faruq Khan op cit.: 140-142
65
'Umar Faruq Khan op cit.: 146
 171

produced similar kinds of stratification between landlords and a growing landless class,

especially around Jalalabad. This was supplemented by migrations of people from other,

less fertile regions to the Jalalabad region. Just as in the NWFP, some young men unable

to succeed as khans within rural patronage channels tapped into an alternative source of

value through the horizontal domain of education. There would be no need to analyze

similar critiques only as "borrowing", just as urban, mercantile-tinged critiques of the

centralized and aristocratic court of Qalat, Balochistan appear to have resonated well in

Kandahar during the 1920s and early 1930s. In both cases, similar power relations might

lead to similar types of protest from analogous quarters, even without cases of direct

"borrowing" of ideas.

But also arguments for or against "borrowing" at this juncture would obscure the

fact that there was a critical public awareness that flowed both ways, in addition to the

mobility of individuals. Borrowing implies separation where we instead see great

continuum. A shared interaction in canons of Perso-Islamic learning linked some

strangers, among small landowners and rural intellectuals, just as much as extensive

lineage narratives or shared newspaper reading did in other domains. This mobility of

ideas and intellectuals was one major factor that undermined the land-and lineage-rooted,

nested political structure in Afghanistan as well as the elite activist republican model of

statism favored by Da'ud and Zabuli. For elite actors exercising either the neo-feudal

mode or the republican mode of state power, or even some blend of both (as was

probably the norm), there was an attempt to make state and society converge territorially

- to conform to the modernist ideal of the bounded nation-state as described by Barnett

 172

Rubin, drawing on Giddens.66 This convergence was still not the reality for all individuals

on the outside of those elite structures. The biographies presented above are a powerful

testament to the fact that a critical extra-state public sphere, composed of myriad

interlinked local and translocal publics, was quite transcendent of borders.

This public sphere linked with print publics, where there was an infrastructure

supporting print. It existed external to print, in educational publics where print enjoyed

less reach. It often interfaced with local hujra-based publics through poetic performance,

as shall be seen in greater detail in the next chapter. As the cases of Khadim, Rixtin, and

others can show, print and non-print publics of the urban-cosmopolitan, rural religious-

educational, and personalized religious-brotherhood types all fed into each other, shared

concerns, and sustained each other in the areas between Kabul and Punjab.

Could this fact of a separation between states on one side, and a variety of

interlinked, informal, horizontal locations of collective identity on the other side, itself

be partly responsible for a grassroots liberalist outlook? For Afghan Pashtun intellectuals,

especially eastern ones, the Afghan monarchic state was separate from their perceived

reality of a transnational public Pashtun society, despite all attempts by monarchic power

to fuse local discourse into a patriarchal "state public" as per Muhammad Gul Khan

Momand's efforts. We will recall his attempt to make all travelers pass through hujras

linked to landowners, not mosques. The implicit fact of a separation between state and

informal public was surely as important as explicitly liberal discourse was. A self-image

of belonging as an "enlightened Pashtun man" provided a perspective from the outside

onto highly inegalitarian monarchic power relations, whether on the local level or on the
66
Refer to Rubin 1994: 189; drawing on Giddens 1987.
 173

national level. Khadim's account provides a view into an alternative type of narrative

construction of self, along social channels that escape local patriarchy.

IV.2. Discipline, and Cautious 'Culturalist' Critiques

If all that was the case, then from the perspective of the royal family, why not just

rely on coercion? Why bother to sponsor potentially troublesome intellectuals? This

translocal public version of Pashtun self-awareness might threaten to undermine the

ruling dynasty and its local power relations, if it proceeded unchecked in the reformist

and revolutionary modalities it had taken on in the 1930s. However, it could also be

useful. This "window from outside" was another factor in maintaining a reflexive

awareness of Pashtunness as a salient identity. The ruling house made limited

concessions by allowing liberals to buy into the elite consumerism of one-class rule, by

integration into a highly supervised segment of the government. Supporting Pashto

studies at the center redirected the energies of talented intellectuals into a competitive

arena, split between Persian and Pashto language communities. The patronage given to

Pashtun-specific cultural studies, and the surveillance and dominance of Muhammad Gul

Khan (formally and informally) made it self-limiting, in that it made it hard for Pashtun

critics of monarchic hierarchy and the Persian-language critics centered in Kabul to trust

each other. In the writings of historians such as Muhammad Siddiq Farhang, we have

ample evidence that many Persian-speaking bureaucrats thought that this sort of cultural

program was racist, designed to perpetuate a Pashtun-centric historiography of Afghan

society and culture.67 In this regard, then, on the central level Muhammad Gul Khan
67
Refer to Farhang's 1992 Afghanistan dar Panj Qarn-i Akhir, especially vol. 2, passim. In English,
 174

Momand and the supporters of Pashto expansion in public life were one side in a larger

game, with the ruling family playing them off against its Persian-speaking Kabuli

bureaucrats. Other Pashtun intellectuals were affected by these perceptions when writing

about Pashtun cultural history, even if their conclusions were pro-democratic.

Besides this, critical intellectuals were still subjected to direct forms of discipline as

well. What of those who did not toe the government line? Some were imprisoned until

death - as, for example, the career military officer and literary poet Sayyid Hasan Khan

Hasan, who died in prison in Kabul in 1941.68 Hasan was from a Sayyid Pacha family of

Lower Kunar in Nangrahar. Unlike Gul Pacha Ulfat, Hasan made his way through the

military ranks. Traditionally educated and a fine poet, he initially fell under the influence

of Muhammad Gul Khan Momand, and worked with the latter in publishing pro-Nadir

Shah propaganda in Nangrahar in 1929. As time progressed, though, Muhammad Gul

Khan's influence in cultural circles fell off at the expense of a reformism exemplified by

Khadim and Ulfat, to be discussed presently. Hasan appears to have grown into a close

associate of Qiyam al-Din Khadim in particular. Unlike some other intellectuals of the

time, his strident satirical poetry attacking elite consumerism preserved in the

biographical directory Osdm Likwal may be among his least inflammatory work. As a

military officer, he may have thought that he had more independence than professional

intellectuals to speak out in favor of nationalist reformism. Might he have attempted to

organize under other, more subversive directions too? By 1940, Da'ud Khan and the

Minister of the National Economy, 'Abd al-Majid Zabuli, were presenting a serious

Saikal 2004 also reproduces this idea throughout.

68
Wafa 1377 SH [1998]: 50
 175

republican challenge to the established dynastic order. The global events of 1939 raised

many questions of policy in Afghanistan. Zabuli's Republican Party was reinvigorated,

as was the shadowy, more militant 'Young Afghan' party (about whom little is known

except for their goal of overthrowing the dynasty).69

Although successful liberalist intellectuals at the center were careful to avoid

offending the royal family's sensitivities, they did still find ways to raise critiques within

the boundaries set for them. In 1939, lexicography was not a politically neutral science.

Gul Pacha Ulfat built upon Muhammad Gul Momand's ideas on lexicography as a

necessity for the defense of an essentialized Pashtun identity against 'outside' knowledge

systems. At the same time, Ulfat exploited the contradictions of hierarchy and

egalitarianism contained in Momand's ideology. Opting to concentrate on egalitarianism,

no discourse of aristocratic nobility is visible in Ulfat's ideas on essentialized Pashtun

identity. Ulfat published the following short note in the Tobna's Kabul Kalanai

(almanac) in 1939 - the year after Muhammad Gul argued in his grammar's preface for a

"revival" of aristocratic dominance by Pashtuns over other language communities:

In the language of every people (qawm), some words are present which are not
found in other languages; because words are created under the influence of needs
and requirements, and the requirements of each people are different. For this
reason, plants and animals that do not exist in a country do not have a referent in
the language of that country. In the same way, there are no words for traits, good
or bad, that are not found in a people. Look! The Pashtuns, which are a free /
self-sufficient (sahu) and equality-loving (musawat-khwah) people have no
words equivalent to nawkar [servant], mazdur [wage laborer], badar
[lord/patron], aqa [sir], chakar [servant-boy], haqir [humble/lowly servant],
ghulamzada [slave], or khidmatgar [servant]. For big people, there is the word
'master' [elder] in place of ra'Is [president] which they give to their authoritative
people as a title, and which indicates their respect...70

Marwat 1997: 226

Replicated in Khadim, ed., 1331 SH [1951].
 176

When Ulfat became head of the lexicography department of the Pashto Tolana the

following year, and published an award-winning book on lexicographical methodology,

he omitted any mention of this. From the case of Ulfat in particular - and other examples

will be forthcoming - it seems that one way the Afghan royal family disciplined mildly

troublesome internal critics was to promote them, thereby keeping closer tabs on them.

'Abd al-Hayy Habibi's 1944 publication of the Pdta Khazana [The Hidden

Treasure] and especially his annotations on it, are interesting in this context. This

manuscript was purportedly written in the court Shah Husayn Hotak (r. 1722-1737).71

Widely believed by western scholars to be a forgery, it takes the form of a tazkira, or

biographical directory, of Pashto poets and exemplary poems by them - the earliest of

which claim to stretch back to the year 130 QH [748].72 What is interesting is not the

question of whether or not it is a forgery, but the uses to which it was put. Some Persian-

speaking scholars claim that it was forged in order to compensate for an inferiority

complex on the part of Pashtun scholars that the literary history of their language was not

as old and as distinguished as that of Persian.73

However, the discourses in Habibi's annotations regarding the Pdta Khazana are

worth distinguishing from those of his cousin Mawlawi Salih Muhammad Qandahari

Hotak. Salih Muhammad, it will be remembered, wrote a Pashto version of the classical

Persian text, Rumi's MasnawT, out of his perception of just such a lack. By the early

71
Shah Husayn was the son of the Hotak hero Mirwais Khan, who threw off Safavid rule in Kandahar a
generation before Ahmad Shah Durrani and established a short-lived empire.
72
Some, especially Mackenzie (1997) and (privately) many non-Pashtun Afghan scholars, believe that
Habibi or an associate forged the manuscript in the late 1930s. Qalandar Momand, of the Pakistani
Pashto Academy, has laid out the most comprehensive argument to this effect in his Pashto work Pata
Khazana fi'l-Mizan (1988). Lucia Serena Loi (1987), on the other hand, asserts it to be a late 19th
century forgery with some genuine older portions.
73
I should note that no one I spoke to was willing to go on the record with this.
 177

1940s, though, dominant ideology within the Pashto Academy was something fairly

different. Under the influence of low-to-mid ranking rural intellectuals, courtly literature

no longer possessed the prestige it once did. Early folklore studies had helped establish

"the common people" as a category of analysis separate from individual patriarchy. Prior

to the poet Muhammad Gul Nuri's 1944 publication of Milli Sanddre

[National/Indigenous Songs], a compilation of folk poems, all poetry studies were

conducted through the lens of the individual poet; and anonymous subaltern poetry was

considered beneath the purview of literary interest. Habibi's preface to Nuri's

compilation argued that anonymous poetry reflected the collective talent and soul of the

Pashtun nation, and was no less valuable an object of study.74 This marked one of the first

discursive articulations of a Pashtun 'mass'^n the form of national folklore.

Habibi's annotations to the Pdta Khazana built on this discursive foundation, even

though the latter text addressed named poets. Habibi's presentation ofPdta Khazana built

on discourses of essentialist indigenousness championed by Muhammad Gul Khan

Momand, but it subverted both hierarchy and monarchy. It championed Pashtun folk

wisdom as exemplified by the poems composed by various lineage ancestors such as

Kharxbun; and so reinforced the prestige of patriarchy and genealogical memory.75 Also

like Momand's ideology, it articulated an ancient competitive ethos rooted in martial

masculinity. However, while family ideology provided a microcosm for national pride as

in Afghan royalism, and martialism was certainly a virtue in Habibi's vision of ancient

Arya society, the constitutionalist in Habibi pointedly noted that "urban civilization" and

74
MiS:p. alif.
75
According to Caroe 1958: 13, "Kharshbun" or "Krishyun" was the apical ancestor of the "eastern"
Pashtun lineages. These include, inter alia, the Momands, the Yusufzai, the Shinwari.
 178

"royal courts" historically emerged as a "tainted" aspect of "foreign influence".76

V. Articulation of Structures as Critique; Creation of Structures as Activism

V. 1. Ideologies

By the middle of the 1940s, though, Habibi was himself a little behind the times in

terms of progressive critique. The cautious ethnic-essentialist argument for egalitarianism

was quickly being replaced with a newer essentialism - that of class - in the work of

young scholars like Benawa, Ulfat, and Khadim. Earlier forms of essentialism in relation

to Pashtun identity as exemplified by Muhammad Gul Khan Momand relied on a

personalized and dyadic understanding of the political subject that reaffirmed a

hierarchical social order. In contrast, this new activist project took the form of critical

structuralist analysis of society.

A structural critique of power relations, on the national scale, was first leveled in

print by the Persian-speaking Kabuli historian Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghobar, in a

1946 article series in the state paper Islah. Intellectuals appear to have been unsure how

open they could be under the new Prime Minister Shah Mahmud, who was relatively

more open than his repressive brother Muhammad Hashim. Ghobar's article series went

over whatever implicit line there was. Entitled "Iqtisad-i Ma (Our Economy)", the series

resulted in the sacking of blah's editor. Individualized criticism of state officials was

76
A. H. Habibi 1997, notes to P3ta Khazana : 10. Of course, the dig at "court culture" might very easily
be taken as a dig at the Persian language, re-branded in Afghanistan as the dan, or darbari (courtly)
language, and a statement that Persian was foreign and less legitimately "national" than Pashto. Refer to
Saikal 2004: 112 for an unsympathetic characterization of the "Pashtunist" cultural studies of the time.
Saikal charges Habibi and others ('A. R. Pazhwak, M. D. Zhwak, S. A. Rixtin, Ghulam Muhammad
[sic] Safi, and F. M. Angar) with being pliable mouthpieces for "dedicated racists"; that is, southern
leaders cultivated by Muhammad Da'ud to further his own political ends, and aiming for the use of
Pashto as the sole medium of communication in Afghanistan.
 179

tolerated under Shah Mahmud. That sort of critique remained within the hegemonic

construction of political agency, which was personally mediated power relations; and it

affected only individuals. Describing power relations in Afghanistan as a unified system

of despotic inequality, implicitly articulating a new sort of public reader who was

immune to the effects of that system and who operated in a different realm of awareness,

was beyond the pale for the time being.

By 1948, many actors were able to go further. The Minister of the National

Economy, 'Abd al-Majid Zabuli, was better positioned to level this sort of critique.

Responding to Ghobar's article, at least implicitly, Zabuli the elite banker claimed that all

Afghanistan's economic problems were the result of a crisis in foreign exchange, not

systematic inequality as Ghobar described. Nonetheless, probably due to the fact that the

royal family could not survive without him, Zabuli was able to attack the hegemony of

dyadic power more directly than even Ghobar was able to do. He stopped short of rooting

a political genealogy of the phenomenon in monarchic power relations. Nonetheless,

Zabuli claimed that the public imagination engendered by personal politics served to

fragment horizontal thought processes, and that this intellectual "deficiency" was one

cause of Afghanistan's inability to climb out of the wartime economic crisis:

There are unfortunately a few harmful shortcomings which make reform of social
matters difficult, [including, inter alia]...: Our spirit of reliance on one's own
thinking and our impulse of self-directed consciousness [which have] found a
root in bigoted solidarities (ta'assubat). Great and small, elders and youth - in
other words, everyone - is full of desires for the prosperity of the country.
Nonetheless, because of this impulse there is never a chance for these noble
wishes and desires to be gathered in the direction of a national goal. [There is no
chance] for jointly-held desires to become the basis for unity of action and
thought; [no chance] for the creation of synchronicity in the domains of
knowledge, administration, experience, capital, or writing and narrative (qalam
wa bayan); which might drive everyone toward a common goal - the country's
 180

good fortune - without any difference between me and you, this one or that one...

[Thus] we generally have made a habit of researching each event only at the time
it occurs, and that too in a isolated and abstracted fashion, completely separately
and independently. As a result, events are understood as coincidental or
tangential, and unfortunately we make the reasons for the occurrence of events
fall far from our sight, or else refuse to see them.77

This was a modified articulation, surrounded by the more staid arguments of a treatise on

economic science, of something that other critics at the center were saying. And, this

was true of Pashtun and non-Pashtun intellectuals alike. A 1948 collection of articles

entitled Wex Zalmiyan [Enlightened/Awake Youth], listed in the Pashto Tolana's catalog

of publications as that body's first "societal" [ijtima'T] stand-alone publication, is a case

in point.78 It contains works by over forty of the most prominent print intellectuals of the

country, including all of those introduced in this chapter so far (even Zabuli). The

concerns of highly urbanized Persian-speaking intellectuals were, if not exactly

congruent with the writings of the Pashtun intellectuals, then at least morally aligned with

them in the desire for a new form of public consciousness. Thus, an article by the

Minister of Education, Torwayana, described how the "tribal youth" (jawan-i qaba 'it)

exhibited a social consciousness constrained by structures of overtly masculinized,

individualist, tribal competition. According to Torwayana, this social consciousness

prevented the "tribal youth" from seeing over the horizon just as surely as his mountains

did; and caused a disunity which prevented him from building "civilization" [tamaduri].19

Those intellectuals who actually hailed from Pashtun areas projected a similar

77
Zabuli. 1949. Mushkilat-i Iqtisadl-yi Ma wa Mujadila ba Anha. (Kabul: General Printing Directorate):
pp. 2-3. The articles were first published over the previous year in the journal of the Ministry of the
National Economy, Iqtisad.
78
I was extremely fortunate to access one of two known surviving copies of this anthology in the Library
of the Area Study Centre, Peshawar University.
79
Torwayana (1948), in WZ: 32-36.
 181

critique. At the same time, however, they were altogether more hesitant to label this

phenomenon "tribalism" - structural words like qablla or 'ashira not being emic Pashto

terms in any case.80 Indeed, the reified idea of "tribalism" was itself a structural critique

of a certain type of power relations - relations that in actual fact built on the biographical

specificity and a perception of the uncompromised agency of the masculine, self-

sovereign patriarchal individual. "Tribalism", as opposed to particular lineages and

lineage leaders, was an idea generally not narrated by the very people participating in it,

at least not in sources I have seen (and this is true of the subaltern sources I discuss in the

following chapter as well). I posit that this is because it rested on a form of public defined

by specifiable, if not always specific, dyadic relationships, whatever the degree of

stratification in a given location. It rested on personality. In contrast to a critique relying

on abstract structural concepts, intellectuals from rurally-educated eastern backgrounds

wrote in terms that would be more familiar to the audiences that they spoke about -

especially shakhs-parasti, "the following of or devotion to a personality".

In his contribution to the volume, the first head of a new government body, the

Independent Directorate for Tribal Affairs [Dd Qaba'ilo Mustaqil Riyasai], Sayyid

Shams al-Dln Majruh of Kunar, speaks in the traditional Persianate political vocabulary

of akhlaq, or ethics, not "tribalism". The intellectual discipline of akhlaq texts was well

dispersed within the grassroots educational and clerical networks described above; and

therefore was a familiar part of the grassroots religious vocabulary of rural culture at least

in some measure.81 Like Mawlawi Salih Muhammad Kandahari (whose ideas were
80
Both these words derive from Arabic, via Persian. Even the Pashto word khel was usually only used in
the specific, e.g. Morcha-khel; while words like qam or uhs appear so non-specific or contextual in
meaning that it is best to simply gloss them as "a people"; or "nation" in the biblical sense.
81
Shams al-Din Majruh (1948), in WZ: 37-41
 182

explored in Chapter 2 of this dissertation), Majruh's vision of society is of

complementary parts. For him, society is divided into age-set categories: children, youth,

and elders. In Majruh's reading, the youth were the embodiment of physical action in the

present, while the elderly served only as a social conscience, or wijdan. Majruh even

used a different word for "old" in place of the word usually glossed as "elder": he

described them as zard, a basic indication of biological temporality as opposed to mdsher

(which might often better be glossed as "leader" at the same time as "elder").

The above categorization indicates how a call for youth activism cut to the heart of

monarchic ideology. The aristocratic metaphor of face-to-face rule was bound up with

the specificity of ruling lineages and father-like individuals as a microcosm for the

paternalistic state. It depended on the mythology of certain heroic royal individuals; and

it existed in a mutually reinforcing dialectic with known patriarchal lineage and village

elders. A reanalysis of this social distinction in terms of the abstract category of age-sef,

of generational homogeneity, removed the hegemony of personalization from aristocratic

lineage patriarchy, and implicitly relegated the latter to nothing more than a structure.82 It

'un-nobled' the nobility, to coin a phrase.

We may employ a metaphor to describe a metaphor. Majruh's idea, shared by

nearly all the contributors to the Wex Zalmiyan publication, replaced 'rule of the

(specific) father' with 'rule of brothers belonging the (abstracted) young generation'. The

ideal of the activist wex zalmai, an enlightened young-man in the prime of life, is a clear

repudiation of monarchic patriarchal rule, even while reinforcing less specific forms of

male dominance. By this point, urban women were helpful allies in this critique. A
82
I thank Luke Fleming for helping me hone this point.
 183

certain Ms. Rahmani argued that mothers and wives were responsible for shaping the

social consciousness of their families, and by extension the awareness of society.

Educated wives and mothers would be necessary if young-men were to develop a

corporate civic and national consciousness. Even her point about the purity of family life

seems like a calculated concession to gender conservatism among progressives; since

before her statement that "the greatest and most sacred responsibility of women is the

raising of children", we find Ms. Rahmani opening her article on the following note:

In olden times women were viewed somewhere between animals and men.
Masculinity was a sign of strength, and weak men were likened to women.
However, in these past few years, especially after the First World War and during
the Second, women proved that not only are they the equals of men in intellect,
but they can do any job that men can do.83

The foregoing serves to illustrate the strong rhetorical use of the word "youth" in a wider

assault on monarchic articulations of patriarchy; but what of the power attached to the

idea "enlightened"? In his opening manifesto for the anthology, Khadim drew on his

educational training in neo-Platonic philosophy and introduced the term of the

"Enlightened Youth", someone who was exposed to Platonic ideal forms of reality from

beyond the realm of human life:

The One who sent this essence (ma'nfi)fromthe transcendent realm (la-makari)
to the earthly hearts, and then introduced it to ears in the form of words - may
He come to protect and keep them
From all baseness
From all lowness and
From all self-interest.84

Khadim's introductory prayer moved on to a fervent plea that this ideal of a Platonically

informed youth would "not become polluted by greedy expectations, fear, or the

Rahmani (1948), in WZ: 81-82. My trans, from Persian.

Khadim (1948), in WZ: 1. My trans.
 184

prioritization of personalities {dd shakhsiyato pa awaltiya)". He prayed for the creation

of institutional public consciousness as a form of liberation:

On the road by which we will arrive at rights Qiaqq), freedom (hurriyai), and
justice ('adalai);
On the road by which we will free our society (folena) of ignorance (jahl),
misery, and disunity (be-ittifaqT);
On the road by which peoples and nations (aqwam aw malal) arrive at true

prosperity and humanity (insaniyat); may there be blessing!85

The neo-Platonic epistemologies built into rural eastern educational publics resonated

extremely well, in a broader regional context informed by Marxian theory, with ideas of

false consciousness. An example by Ulfat serves well as an example of this overlap. By

this point, Ulfat was one of the most outspoken champions, in short stories and poetry, of

a class consciousness replacing a face-to-face social awareness. He was assigned to serve

as Director of Tribal Affairs for Nangrahar in 1948;861 suspect as a way to discipline him.

Might posting him as a personalized liaison between the Interior Ministry and lineage

heads have been an attempt at reinforcing a patrimonial political consciousness in Ulfat;

of 'reminding' him how the political world operated? If so, Ulfat responded by phrasing

subsequent critiques even more explicitly in terms of false consciousness, of lifting the

veil off of the social reality. The following extracts are from a poem Ulfat composed, it

is widely believed, in response to his first day on the job at the Tribal Affairs Directorate:

I have not eaten anyone's wealth; I have not killed anyone

Nor have I ever told anyone to "Disappear [from existence]"
I don't have any other sins; don't arrest me for the fact
That hidden in my heart, I look at oppressors a little badly [...]
I was unaware, and when I lifted up the veil just a little
What I saw was unspeakable/not worth speaking
I've become a sinner by seeing it and repeating it
While the ones who actually did it are still "Gentlemen" [ xaghali] [...]
Those hunchbacks standing before you with heads bowed ever more
85
Khadim (1948), in WZ: op. cit.
86
OLI:9\
 185

If they didn't stand up straight before you, how could they ever act straight?
Don't expect anything from someone who considers himself your slave
I've recognized/called attention to these slave-like thought processes 87

Meanwhile, Khadim synthesized many of the prevalent strands of the time in the

following poem, roughly contemporary to the Wex Zalmiyan anthology. Nancy Dupree's

characterization of the dominant elite literary trend of the time as "sentimental socialism"

does not entirely do justice to the range of concerns of the age. 88 But it does point to the

valorization of an abstract social entity along the lines of 'the common people' or 'the

masses' of the nation, as opposed to the wealthy - something which should not be taken

for granted. It was a fairly new concept in political discourse.

The morning we want will carry off the darkness of ignorance

We want the homeland to be shining in the light of knowledge
However many pumpkin-like heads there may be
We want the sort of heads that ache for the homeland
If he speaks words of well-wishing in the homeland
That administrator, that commander, that soldier is the one we want
We don't want it if it makes our nation yellow-faced in shame
We want gold in order to fill the bellies of our poor people
If you take their bribes while sowing division
Hey khan; malikl We want you to wrap up this source of income
Don't pursue fashions and futilities, look!
Young-man of the college! We want you to achieve advanced skills
If someone should be genuine, and become a "Khadim" (servant) in good faith
We want that kind of literary author, that kind of poet, that kind of leader89

The performative aspect of this poem bears closer attention, of course. Who is the "we"

that the poem invokes? The act of (sympathetically) consuming this poem includes the

reader or listener into awareness of a social movement which aimed at creating new

forms of public interaction. The phrase wex zalmiyan was more than just the title of an
87
Poem reproduced in OLI: 100; my translation. I was told the provenance of this poem in personal
conversation [30 March, 2007, at the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies in Kabul] with an
official in the Interior Ministry of Afghanistan with roots in Kunar who wishes to remain nameless.
88
N. Dupree 1985, especially 76-79.
89
OLI: 206. My translation here does not faithfully reproduce the original wording of certain idioms. I
thank Bashir Gwakh, Aman Khan, and Ayaz Mohammadzai for helping me negotiate the fourth and
fifth couplets of this poem.
 186

anthology of essays and critical poetry. It was also the name of an underground cultural

and political group that aimed at creating a new form of social subjectivity through

national belonging - a belonging which crossed state borders to include the Pashtuns in

Pakistan. The Pashto-language intellectuals of eastern rural and Kandahari urban

backgrounds who controlled the state's cultural apparatus attempted to spread the Wex

Zalmiyan onto a more broad-based social level through the networks that those eastern

intellectuals knew best. Print discourse at the center worked in tandem with social

activism that was explicitly designed to create new forms of public ideologies out of pre-

existing networks.

V. 2. Public Aspects of the Wex Zalmiyan

V. 2. A. National Context

How can we contextualize this intervention? By the late 1940s, it is clear that there

was an increased boldness on the part of liberals and radicals. This boldness, as well as

the state's surprising docility to it, was due in large part to the Second World War, and

the political stresses caused by extreme economic shocks. Republicans at the center were

able to use the crisis to persuade the royal family to engage in Turkish or Iranian-style

centrist and statist reforms, and thanks to Da'ud Khan's adept political skills, they

outmaneuvered critics. Also important was the sense of a rising threat from Soviet-

Marxian discourse in Asia in general; and a number of decolonization struggles in India.

These included the North-west Frontier Province, where a variety of Islamic-reformist

and ethno-nationalist discourses were cross-fertilized with more explicitly leftist

 187

struggles. A powerful example lies in the founding of the Haqqaniyya Madrasa in Akora

Khattak by Ajmal Khattak and his associates.90 Also notable was the struggle in Kashmir,

which pitted a critical-Marxist, Muslim peasantry against personalistic monarchic rule

backed up by imperial authority.91 We must assume that the royal family was aware of

these events, happening only a few hundred miles from their capital.

The creation of the new state of Pakistan in 1947, in which Pashtuns were a

marginalized and often unwilling minority, led to newly emboldened ideas about

democratic politics in the immediate region.92 Meanwhile, the heavy-handed suppression

of Pashtun social movements and parties by the new Pakistani state quite likely led to

some sympathetic rapprochement between Persian- and Pashto-speaking intellectuals.

At the same time, despite their discontent with the status quo, new anti-monarchist

Afghan intellectuals at the center were shocked by those armed uprisings of the late '30s

and '40s that tied together local discontent and trans-local spiritual authority. Especially

when linked to Axis powers such as Germany, these alternate political structures

threatened to tear apart Afghanistan and end its neutrality - and potentially its

independence - at the same time they would have introduced retrogressive social

relations. Elite intellectuals decided the time was inopportune to contest monarchism

altogether. They allied with the government for the above reasons, hoping to try and

change Afghan political culture from within, and force a true parliamentary democracy.

By 1946, the king and the new Prime Minister began using the rhetoric of democracy,
90
Ajmal Khattak 2005: 139-144. The same institution was throughly purged of its leftist roots over the
course of the Cold War, and became notorious as the intellectual training center for the majority of
those who would go on to make up the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan.
91
Refer to Dhar 1989 for an overview.
92
Refer to Jansson's 1981 India, Pakistan, or Pakhtunistan? for an account of the politics surrounding the
accession of the North-west Frontier Province to Pakistan.
 188

promising the people reforms and a parliament which was more than a rubber-stamping

body.93 The royal family opened up executive municipal administration to election; and

in 1949 the elections to the Seventh Shura [Parliamentary Assembly] were completely

free and without government blacklisting of candidates, despite the persistence of a

prohibition on political parties. Many intellectuals who took part in critical activities

found themselves with some degree of political power. Ulfat, contesting from

Nangrahar, was elected to the post of Assistant Deputy of the Assembly, behind 'Abd al-

HadiDawT.94

The late 1940s, then, represent sizable concessions by the royal family to

intermediate classes, as a way of dealing with the economic and political crisis. No longer

semi-tolerated junior partners in elite consumerism, intellectuals like Ulfat were now part

of governance because, for the first time, the royal family gave the Shura some actual

power to legislate independently.

V. 2. B. The Movement

The period of this postwar political settlement between intermediary classes

(central and regional) and the royal family extended from approximately 1946-7 to 1952.

Young participants of the previous two decades' cultural studies had matured into serious

poets, journalists, and politicians (often, all at once). In Professor Marwat's words, the

Wex Zalmiyan as a movement was "intended to create a balance [initially in the freely-

elected Parliament] between two extremes, progressive and conservative thoughts, and to

Wakman2005:45
Oil: 90; Farhang 1992: 662.
 189

provide protection to the radical, progressive elements from the expected attacks of

conservative-religious establishments and the government."95 The group began in 1947 or

so, soon after the rise of Shah Mahmud, as a progressive cultural salon in Kabul focused

on Pashtun identity.96 The historian AmTn Wakman makes the point, though, that:

there was no organized force that could give shape to people's demands on the
political stage; which could act as an intermediary link between the state and the
people [fifes], or could present programs for change in the country's
administrative, political, economic, and cultural affairs. Therefore, the Wex
Zalmiyan took this role upon itself and emerged onto the field as a political
organization.97

One major reason why there was no intermediary linked between the state and "the

people" is because of the vertically-organized state structure which sought to organize

people's social awareness around itself and its own rooted specificity. As noted in

Chapter 3, the word uhs 'tribe' was used as a tool of administrative particularism. By the

1970s, though, the word most commonly could be better glossed in a general way - not

as 'the people of a particular lineage or district' but as ''the [common] people', with

overtones of rootedness in an indigenous national culture. The activism of the Wex

Zalmiyan in expanding the scope and the content of horizontal discursive spaces was one

of the primary forces behind generalizing the idea of 'the people' (as opposed to specific

peoples) in Pashtun society. How was this achieved? A narrative can be located in the

pragmatic shift of the Wex Zalmiyan from an aspiring political party to something quite

different.

Marwat 1995: 54.

This stage of its development is (apparently) best described in a work I was unable to find: BaSarkay
(2000) Wex Zalmiyan: Da Afghanistan yaw Siyasi Tahrik. I was also unable to access 'Abd Allah
Bakhtani's account of the movement, which was not published by the time I began fieldwork and is still
unpublished to the best of my knowledge. The latter author, however, did describe to me some of the
contents of his manuscript in progress.
Wakman 2005: 62.
 190

The Wex Zalmiyan initially thrived under clandestine funding by 'Abd al-Majid

Zabuli. This patronage, delivered to individuals, financed the group's operations at the

same time as it protected its members. The editor of Zabuli's papers, Wahid Muzhda,

notes that all details on the movement were excised from the papers by the time he was

able to access them during the communist era. He wonders aloud if the reason for this

redaction is that such details might cast Zabuli as a "capitalist out to increase his political

authority by means of a party" - something Marwat claims more affirmatively.98

The eclipse of Momand's decentered style of rural authority by Zabuli's (and

Da'ud's) Kabul-based centrism was primarily still a feature of the urban centers. This

centrism percolated out to other smaller urban centers too. But also, Zabuli's funding of

individuals, rather than institutions, lent the movement a very decentered character from

the beginning." The gray areas between centrist bureaucratic professionalism and

decentralized bureaucratic personalization gave intellectuals such as Khadim and Ulfat

room to work, in conjunction with prominent reformist intellectuals from Kandahari

intellectual society such as Benawa. Meanwhile, excerpts from the mostly unpublished

notes of Muhammad Rasul Pashtun recount that Pashtun and another young firebrand,

Ghulam Hasan Safi, decided, in a meeting in Peshawar in 1947, to work to coalesce a

political party in Kandahar, and Nangrahar and Kabul, respectively.100 National

98
Muzhda 1380 SH [2001]: p. he.; Marwat 1997: 239. The communist regime lionized the Wex
Zalmiyan's nationalism and celebrated, quite out of proportion to historical fact, the role in that
movement of the communist premier, Nur Muhammad Taraki. This may be another reason that Zabuli's
narrative might have been suppressed - it probably would have contradicted the contemporary (1980s)
hagiography.
99
In the absence of Zabuli's notes on the subject, I can only speculate that the reason for individualized
patronage would have been to prevent suspicion by the royal family that the Wex Zalmiyan was a
formal (and thus illegal) political party.
100
M. R. Pashtun, reproduced in Gharibyar, ed. 2004: 244-251, especially 247-248.
 191

membership in a formal sense is believed to have reached around 5000 once the

movement adopted, late in its development, a charter. However, numbers are impossible

to pin down since the majority of participation seems never to have been as formal as that

in a political party.101

Participation was more akin to what Jane Hill calls, in relation to her research on

Mexicano narrative, "moral orientation" with any number of loosely affiliated "moral

axes;"102 expressed in this Afghan case through literature as political discourse.103

Performative moral alignment allowed sympathetic consumers (and composers) of poetry

to inhabit the very recognizable "voice" of a self-consciously new social character-type: a

wex zalmai or jawan-i bedar (the Persian equivalent of 'enlightened' or 'awake'

youth).104 At the same time, much literature reiterated that being a 'youth' was more a

state of mind than a physical attribute. The moral axis incorporating youth as 'newness,'

'activism' [ 'amal; kar], and egalitarianism recurs time and again in the literature of the

period. Take, for example, Khadim's selection of the title Ndwai Zhwandun [New

Lifetime] for an early book of collected literary prose in 1941, which contained essays on

the cosmological ethics of activeness; on freedom, leadership, and consensual rule; and

on the essence of Pashtun identity.105 A late 1940s or early 1950s poem by Ulfat about

rural class relations also frames itself according to the axis of newness, while making a
101
The statistic is quoted in Marwat 1998: 234, citing a 1979 Afghan government source.
102
See especially Jane Hill 1995
103
For this characterization of casual participation, I cite personal conversation with 'Abd Allah Bakhtani
'Khidmatgar' (Peshawar, May 1, 2007) and another, more junior member of the vanguard group in
Jalalabad, who is also currently based in Peshawar and who wishes not to be listed by name (Peshawar,
January 2007). Also, personal conversation (Peshawar, Nov. 2006) with the historian and political
scientist Prof. Fazal-ur-Rahim Marwat, who cautioned me against overestimating the Zalmiyan 's actual
membership while also pointing to the phenomenon of'sympathizers'.
104
I use "voice" here, as Jane Hill (1995) does, in the Bakhtinian sense: where a narrator or speaker has to
choose between social "languages" embedded in ideological frameworks whenever one uses language.
105
Khadim 1320 SH [1941].
 192

claim that face-to-face patronage will never be a suitable form of redistribution. The

poem from which the following lines are taken is called "Bada'I" ["Lordship"]; by this

time Ulfat was perfectly able to find a pure Pashto word for this form of inequality:

He has lots of wheat; lots of animal wealth [mal\, lots of everything at his place
The laborers are hungry for the sake of one overly sated wife [...]
His house is new; his clothes are new; his automobile is new
His concerns are old; his ideas are old; his ideals are very old [...]
Whatever goes out of his house as alms and charity food
Are just the scraps that he dropped accidentally in the oven 106

What was the reach of discourses that linked youth and newness, and good governance,

as compatible with true Pashtunness? Even non-literate eastern rural poets of the 1940s

and early 1950s championed this ideology - for example, in Malang Jan's poem "Zma

zawani dswal kawT pa Paxtunwala sara", or "My youth manifests itself through

Pashtunness".107

Out of a well-deserved suspicion as to the limits of the ruling family's newfound

liberalism, and because the king continued to forbid the leaders of the initial intellectual

movement to form an actual political party, the organizers of the intial salon were

unwilling to write down anything about the movement.108 Instead of coalescing as a top-

down political party, then, the Wex Zalmiyan was forced onto the horizontal level.

Finally rejecting any analysis of the Wex Zalmiyan as a "modern" or "organized,

ideological political party,"109 Wakman arrived at the following insight by trying to

reconcile multiple contradictory reports about the founding of the Zalmiyan:

in a society where free expression and exchange of ideas is not possible, many

106
My translation, excerpted from OLI: 101
107
This realm of oral poetry intertwined with liberalist activism, and the career of Malang Jan in particular,
will form the majority of the next chapter.
108
Wakman 2005: 68-69 describes this dynamic extremely well.
109
Wakman 2005: 76; 78
 193

people simultaneously develop ideas about important topics based on the needs
of the society; but due to the lack of possibilities for public discussion, small
debates on these topics take place in many small, isolated circles. Separate from
an awareness of each other, similar steps and actions arise from diverse
numerous groups toward a single goal.110

In other words, despite being tied together with funding from Zabuli in many cases, it

was an awareness of common interests and goals, and a gradual integration of social

networks and smaller circles, that gave birth to the "Wex Zalmiyan". It was not an

organization, as such. It was a discursively constituted public with such strong

ideological alignment that it was possible to put a name on it - a movement in some

ways, but not others. From roots in politicians and cultural figures, there developed an

awareness of common brotherhood and sisterhood in a progressive outlook and access to

common ideological discourses (whether written or performed). This awareness

recirculated back along the various publics in which those intellectuals interacted. So did

new, originally composed literature from other participants.

Was this recirculation passive? Conversations with the few surviving members of

the organized section of the Wex Zalmiyan suggest that sometimes it was passive, but not

exclusively, and not in all situations. One of these members, 'Abd Allah Bakhtanai

Khidmatgar, had been placed in charge (in the Jalalabad area) of the group's

publicization, in the most active sense of the word: creating a public consciousness in

order to further a progressive political program.111

How did organized intellectuals pursue their outreach? Strategies appear to have

been as multivariate as self-identification as a zalmai was. One mode of publicity was

through increasing access to, and confidence of people in, print media. Of course, mass
110
Wakman 2005: 70-71
111
We should await Khidmatgar's memoirs, in this connection, for much more detailed information.
 194

mediation by its nature would be a powerful means of reform, in that it articulated an

impersonal, abstracted public. That would not be in itself radical, except for its position

in a political setting which depended on a personalized (dyadic) ideological filter of the

social world to maintain its status as hegemonic. Marwat points out that under the

repressive Hashim administration, there were a mere thirteen newspapers in the country,

all subjected to governmental funding, supervision, and editorial control.112 This number

shot up in 1951, after the Parliament forced through some relatively liberal press laws.113

This was a short-lived experiment, however. Up to this point, newspapers were slowly

growing more critical of governmental policy. When they started publishing political

goals and demands for organization, individual papers were shut down even after 1951.

Kabul Radio was another route of outreach, which signals government participation

since it controlled the only transmitter in the country. The government tried to fragment

support for the ideal of the wex zalmai by patronizing vertical ties of ethnic particularism.

It began sponsoring radio programs aimed at popularizing the plight of Pashtuns in what

it called "Pashtunistan," the Pashtun-majority regions of Pakistan. This was likely in

hopes that the movement's leadership would be perceived as Pashtun chauvinist, or at the

very least Pashtun-centric - minimizing its appeal to critical Perso-phone intellectuals.

All the same, a 1949 broadcast on Kabul Radio on the occasion of Afghanistan's

own independence day celebrations (in which many of this chapter's intellectuals

participated), highlights the piecemeal control that the government had over what went

out over the radio once it enlisted critical intellectuals to run its programming.114 Some of
112
Marwat 1997: 227. This number seems a bit small, in that it leaves out certain journals such as Kabul.
Of course Marwat may be excluding fully governmental journals such as those.
1,3
Farhang 1992: 443.
114
Da Paxto Tolana 1949, Da Paxto Munasira, is a transcript of the broadcast. The contributors to this
 195

the intellectuals involved gave addresses that, indeed, focused only on ethnic

brotherhood. However, many chose to use an abstract international, universalist liberalist

vocabulary of human rights, deployed in relation to Pashtun democratic self-

determination.115 Some of the rhetoric in this Pashto broadcast, in retrospect, seems

equally applicable to Afghanistan as it was to Pakistan, despite (or perhaps because of)

the program's framing as part of the Afghan Independence Day celebration.

However, mass media was not the only route. 'Abd Allah Bakhtani Khidmatgar

informed me that late in the 1940s, leadership in the formalized Jalalabad section of the

cultural movement - of which he was a junior member - assessed the situation and

decided that other forms of circulation were necessary in order to raise mass

consciousness.116 Despite the liberal media laws, papers were still being closed; literacy

was very low in any case; and the radio, even leaving aside the total governmental

control, did not have much reach due to weak transmission capacity, scarcity of receivers,

and the mountainous terrain. Having himself trained in the traditional educational milieu

like so many of his more senior colleagues, the young Khidmatgar agreed with them in

seeing that space as a major alternative route to spread the zalmiyan 's message. That is,

he looked for ways to piggyback on the non-state, non-print public he grew up with. This

may be one of the primary reasons the movement took on characteristics of a public, as

opposed to a network.

broadcast included S. A. Rixtin; 'A. H. Habibi; 'A. R. Benawa; A. A. Zmariyalai; M. A. Saltan; P. M.

Zahlr; P. M. RohelT; M. G. Nangraharai; Khadim; Ulfat; M. M. Shafiq; L. M. AhmadI; N. M.
Paktiyanai; S. M. Miliya; G. R. Jarar; and M. Sad. Saff
115
The text of the 1948 International Declaration of Human Rights was already known in the diplomatic
and academic circles of Kabul. Only a few years later, the editors of A'ina (10 Dec. 1953) use the
language of that text to great effect against the US in what they perceived as its support for colonial and
neo-colonial regimes throughout the world.
116
Personal conversation, May 1,2007, in Hayatabad, Peshawar.
 196

A major focus of Zalmiyan activity, according to Khidmatgar, was the mosque:

orators and preachers. Many members of the movement - in the east, at any rate - were

as well-versed in an educational tradition shared by less-educated mosque officials. The

same was true, albeit to a lesser extent, of the state's own religious officials, who most

likely sensed that the state-mandated curriculum, heavy on jurisprudence, left gaps in the

transmission of a wider tradition.117

The essay in the original Wex Zalmiyan anthology entitled "What Does Religion

Say to the Awakened Youth" by Muhammad Sharif, a qazi (Islamic legal judge) in the

Jalalabad court of appeals, reads like the work of a true believer.118 Most pointedly, Sharif

preaches reform of socially unjust religious custom, in a rhetoric drawing heavily on the

reformist Deobandi orators and activists of the NWFP (in places he even introduces Indie

words such as bat, used in the sense of'concept' or 'point', which are almost never found

in Pashto of the period - indexically representing his familiarity with translocal reformist

erudition). Furthermore, Sharif s essay quite directly undermines the politically elite,

patriarchal rhetoric of elder as leader, which backed up the monarchic system in

macrocosm. Before going on to provide a litany of unacceptable social customs, he

informs his audience:

Even though everyone has their own duty [in society], those who understand
collective/social suffering and have deep emotional perception have a special
duty enjoined by religion and society. We should call those people wex zalmiyan
if they are awakened from their merely animal sleep, and feel the pain of their
religion (din), society (jami'a), and nation (qawm). It matters not if they are
elders or juniors (nidshdr; kashsr). If their boat of religion and society is not sunk
in the ocean of egregious corrosive (fasid) customs, they are leaders...they should
117
At the very least, a 1949 essay by Muhammad Sharif, to be discussed at length in the immediately
subsequent paragraphs of this chapter, explicitly points out the disjunctures between the state 'ulama
and the private ones.
118
Sharif (1948), in WZ
 197

try and heal their country so that it becomes praiseworthy [on the world stage]."9

Sharif also speaks very directly in the language of abstract (non-personalized) social

categorization, even as he points out that "in our society,...mixture and interaction

between categories [tabaqe] of people is very limited". Drawing on the vocabulary of

akhlaq, he proclaims the need for educated peoples of all backgrounds to sit down in

dialog, to further the cause of social activism. Finally, he opens his essay with a remark

on reform as fundamentally being an activity of 'propagation' or 'communications'

(tablighaf) that creates an awareness of collective life for a nation (qawm).uo

The essay from the anthology following Sharif s serves best as the exception that

proves the rule. It was penned by Muhammad Hashim Mujaddidl, a scion of the

conservative, very hierarchical Sufi order clustered around the Mujaddidi family. The

author reproduced a purported dream-dialog between himself and the pan-Islamic

political reformist of the nineteenth century, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Dreams, as

David Edwards describes, were divinely-inspired and could be used to "legitimate

[people's] efforts as well as give them a sense of inevitability"; and were also strongly

associated with Sufi spiritual power.121 More generally, authority in the devotional mode

of religion that the Mujaddidi and the Gaylanl families exemplified, in Afghanistan, was

transmitted in direct chains of chosen succession. Did Mujaddidi recognize the total

threat that a religious public posed to his family's fundamentally dyadic, devotion-

centered religious authority? The spread of the Wex Zalmiyan threatened to undermine

all face-to-face political-ideological formations that resonated with patriarchy and

119
Sharif (1948), inWZ:165.
120
Sharif (1948), in WZ: op. cit.
121
Edwards 1996: 96; and Chapter 4 passim
 198

genealogy, notjustmonarchism.

We can, in the final analysis, judge the success of the Wex Zalmiyan as a locus of

public opinion in the eastern regions by its interaction with the Mujaddidi hierarchy.

Mujaddidi reinserted a vision of dyadic politics into the original Wex Zalmiyan

anthology, an extremely incongruous move which probably represents an attempt to

insert himself and his genealogy into the prevailing discourse on reformism in the only

way he could. Its person-centrism is exactly what makes it jarring in this setting.

More significantly, the Mujaddidi family was involved in direct attacks on the

movement. Ghulam Hasan Khan Safi, one of the major forces behind the formal part of

the Wex Zalmiyan movement in Nangrahar, happened to criticize as superstitious the

construction of a shrine to one of the Prophet's hairs in Jalalabad in the paper Nida-yi

Khalq [Voice of the People]. In reaction, in June of 1951, severe protests snowballed

among followers of the head of the Mujaddidi family, the Nur al-Masha'ikh.

The protests resulted in a delegation of the Mujaddidi's spiritual deputies

denouncing the Pashtunistan issue as, in Fazal-ur-Rahim Marwat's words, a "smoke-

screen" for leftist activities, and presenting a list of demands to Zahir Shah the king

which aimed at curbing the power of liberals in Parliament.122 Among these demands was

that Safi and many of his supporters be brought before a tribunal of religious scholars not

from Afghanistan, but from "Egypt, Iraq, and Hidjaz". The royal family made a number

of arrests as a precaution, and this was the proximate cause of the government's

crackdown on a number of individual papers.123 Among the Wex Zalmiyan's membership,

Marwat 1995: 64
Marwat 1995: 65
 199

many of the formal activists were arrested, and a number of the rest formally renounced

activism even if they did not cease all public outreach activities in practice.
 200

Chapter Five

Oral Poetry, Social Change, and Rural Publics: From Countercultural Passion to
Subaltern Political Science, 1900-1960

/. Introduction

Through religious networks, reformist Wex Zalmiyan activists in the late 1940s and

1950s tapped into one route through which information was circulated in rural areas.

However, this too had the potential to be self-limiting. Relying on religious scholars and

orators meant reliance on a social context that created distinction between authority and

laity.

Religious networks were not the only route through which the Wex Zalmiyan

movement sought to increase its public of reception. As described to me by ' Abd Allah

Bakhtani Khidmatgar, intellectuals working in literary and cultural bodies of the state

(including Khidmatgar himself) were also deputed to conduct outreach through subaltern

poets and professional musicians, who already existed as rural grassroots intellectuals.

What were some of the settings of poetry? Poetry could be casual or formal, but it was

nearly always public. Professor Ziyar describes poetry's place in hujras :

[Throughout the last four hundred years] countless literate and semi-literate, or
to put it another way, semi-wfos/ and fully uhsi poets found their way shoulder
to shoulder into Nangrahar's every pass, valley, and eventually, every village
and hamlet, enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame one after another, and it was
they who preserved the singing tradition in every hujra and dera [another word
for hujra]. However,fromtime to time, one of these 'half-poets' would become
celebrated to such an extent that every area fell under his influence, and his
name and reputation spread quickly throughout all of Pashtunkhwa [the entire
Pashtun region].1

The historian Hassan Kakar also speaks of the role of these performers from his own
1
Ziyar 1377 SH [1998], p.vi. My translation.
 201

experience in mid-twentieth century Laghman, singling out weddings and other such

events as notable. Eickelman and Anderson also mention such events as crucial sites of a

politicized public sphere in other parts of the world as well, which warrant greater

ethnographic attention than they have thus far received.2 In Afghanistan these sorts of

events were public, in that they usually involved nearly all the people from at least one

village, and more in the frequent case of village-exogamous marriages. Kakar explicitly

describes their role in creating rural public awareness:

The people of Laghman were very keen on hearing and composing songs. In
Laghman, as in other parts of the country, there was the custom that at
weddings, the participating families would invite singers [sandarghari\ , whom
they called 'poets' [sha'iran]. On the nights and days of the wedding, they
would perform poems in some common space of the village. The women too,
including the bride, would also view the proceedings, wrapped from head to toe
in fabric, sitting lined up like cranes on the rooftops, listening to the poetry [...]
Through music, in heart-wrenching voices, [singers] presented historical
stories; religious narratives; and societal, romantic/passionate, and war-related
sentiments, all in the poems of local poets, which existed in a variety of formal
genres. In this way they, and in reality, the local poet-composers, had an
influence on the stitching together of the common [uhsT] people's minds,
thoughts, and perspectives. The reverberations of the songs inspired poets to
sing even more poems, and in this way an organic ['azawi\ and unbreakable
connection was formed.3

Oral poetry was rooted in contingency and in participative recirculation, to varying

degrees depending on the setting. This complicated the separation between authoritative

speaker and audience that was built into religious education as a route of public outreach.

By incorporating religious educational ideas into a participant setting, poetic performance

forged a link between (1) the religious discourses of liberalist intellectuals described in

the previous chapter, and (2) more diffuse participant audiences who could recirculate

reformist ideas very widely.

2
Eickelman and Anderson 2003 address this point only in passing; outside the introduction to their edited
volume, there is little mention of such forums.
3
Kakar 1995: 14-15. My translation.
 202

In this chapter I first present information on different types of rural poetic practice,

and how poetic practices articulated a realm of everyday, low-level criticism of dominant

power. I argue that much rural poetry of resistance relied on a rhetoric of anonymity to

performatively project itself as universal. In this type of poetry, anonymity did not always

imply "nobody"; it often implied "everybody". Further, poetic performance utilized the

didactic poetry of rural educational publics to open doors for other ideas - to inject this

realm of the non-elite and the everyday into sites of elite power like the hujra.

Having described a variety of rural poetic ideas and practices common to eastern

Afghanistan in the early twentieth century, I go on to narrate the biography of a particular

non-literate poet, Malang Jan, as he rose from a local intellectual to a national figure.

Through this I intend to illustrate several things.

First is that this poetry, when contextualized, can be used to give a fuller and more

animated picture of the historical record. Malang Jan's biography is useful as a token, to

tell us more about the lives of the rural poor in eastern Afghanistan than we might

otherwise know. Meanwhile, his poetry tells us much about how such individuals viewed

their experiences. It is a picture quite unlike narratives than would portray only a picture

of tribal egalitarianism in rural areas. Malang Jan's poetry, and that of many of his

contemporaries among the rural poor of the eastern provinces, describes strong feelings

of domination and alienation at the hands of khans and state officials alike.

But also, his detailed biography allows us to contextualize his literature. I present

his literature not only for the things it says explicitly. Malang Jan's biography is detailed

enough that we can trace how ideology was affected by the channels in which it was
 203

presented. The cultural intervention of the Wex Zalmiyan introduced new ideas into local

poetry, but more importantly it provided institutional routes for local poets to articulate

perceptions of local oppression in safer, non-local public forums. Over Malang Jan's

career, he and poets like him created entirely new genres of rhetoric. Local articulations

of suffering in formal public speech - poetry - were, prior to the 1940s, most often

described through lyric imagery. Demands of the rural poor were frequently cast in the

idiom of suffering devotees, petitioning an indifferent lover for favor. By the late 1940s,

articulations of local suffering were expressed in regional and national forums, in very

direct, even analytical language that demanded good and just governance. Shifts in the

nature of what can be said, and to whom, signal changes in the self-identification of

polities. Malang Jan's career is a good way to study the interplay of ideology, institution,

and public identity in the rise of Pashtun populist nationalism. Understanding that is, in

turn, key to understanding the pull of later political ideologies, from communism to the

Taliban movement. The first of those movements is not addressed here; but information

on early taliban social dynamics will play a role.

//. Oral Poetry: Mediation Between Authoritative and Everyday Speech

Didactic and ethical poetry such as that mentioned in the previous chapter, and

discussed in further depth below, interacted with other forms of oral poetry. Didactic

poetry did not necessarily reference canonical educational texts. However, didactic poetry

often spoke of themes that were linked to cultivated philosophical traditions in those

canonical texts, especially ethics and wisdom (akhlaq and hikmaf) but also law. This was

especially true of the genre known as the maqam or ruba 7

 204

In his foundational 1970 work on indigenous poetic traditions, Da Khalko Sanddre,

Habib Allah Rafi' describes the maqam in terms of two types of criteria: thematic and

performative. The maqam was metrically similar to other genres and was distinguished

by the fact that it was performed, its context and mode of performance, and its topic:

If the poet composed the poem in the popular meters [based on the sound of
Pashto syllables], then it is a maqam; and if the poet composed it in 'uruz [the
Perso- Arabic system of meter which relies on graphemes] then it should be called
a ghazal. Sometimes maqams are nearly identical with some forms of badal in
popular meters...[But] since the topic of a maqam is always advice and guidance,
then if the poem is didactic we should call it a maqam and if it is
romantic/passionate, we should call it a badal. Second, the maqam is performed
in a slow, calm tone, while the badal is performed in a fast, flirtatiously witty
way.4

Rafi' gives the following example of a maqam. An entry on its poet appears in Zalmai

Hewadmal's dictionary of all things Pashto, the Farhang-i Zabdn wa Adabiydt-i Paxto,

and places his life in the 1300s of the lunar hijri calendar [i.e. the late nineteenth to the

mid-late twentieth century]:

You, who call yourself intelligent, are not intelligent

Since you do not know of life and the ways of the world
You constantly speak of customary law and sharl'at
You are not the slightest bit aware of the shar'J path
May you be cured of every ailment in your life
After your death you won't be of use to anyone
If you do good or evil, now is the time to do it
You won't be in this place again in the future
You've spent your whole life in vain, 'Ramazan!'
You still have not had your fill of this world's bazaar.5

Such poems, then, referenced, responded to, and debated ideas from learned texts,

packaged in a specific form for local Pashtun audiences. But also, as is implied in Rafi's

quote above, performance was intrinsic to these works as well. A maqam was defined

through performance. They could be, and have often been, transcribed; but their principal
4
Rafi' 1349 SH [1970]: 222
5
Rafi' 1349 SH [1970]: 223, my translation; FZAPI: 197
 205

identity had a built-in opposition to writing. Rafi' gives more information on twentieth

century maqam performance:

'Maqam' itself has the meaning of 'position'; and in Pashto literary gatherings
the maqam is performed before anything else. Only later come the charbaytas,
badalas, bugatays, and other genres. For this reason the maqam sets the
foundation for the gathering, and prepares the gathering for the other genres of
popular poetry. It awakens people and lets them know to take their places. The
gathering listens to it calmly. In other words, it clears a space for the other poems
and displays the prowess of the reciters' voices, etc. Second, the maqam consists
of moral advice and guidance; and for this reason, if a person implements the
topic of the maqam and acts upon it, he can adopt a lofty, harmonious-ethical
position [akhlaqi maqam]. [...] Maqams form a delightful part of popular poetry,
and as we noted earlier, they are performed before all the other poems in a
gathering, in a gentle and slow tone, in order to bring the people's attention to the
gathering itself. In other words, they strike the bell to begin the gathering.6

In other words, the didactic nature of the maqam went hand in hand with the fact that it

was in part an illocution, or words that claimed to do something more than just convey

information. The performance of a maqam marked the establishment of a new, temporary

social space. It transformed the rural hujra where it was performed into a zone for a

different type of discourse. 7 As it was discussed in Chapter Three, we can conceive of the

hujra as the physical setting for performing what Deleuze and Guattari called 'striated

space': "where identity has become stabilized with territorial roots based in tree-like

hierarchies". 8 It was a place for performing local elite and monarchic state power.

Didactic poetry provided a potential inroad to temporarily colonize and reformat that

vertical, patriarchally-defined space through an appeal to transcendent truth. The prior

6
Rafi' 1349 SH [ 1970]: 221 -222, my translation.
7
The word used here for 'gathering', majlis, has often been inextricably linked with hujra when used in
Pashto to describe a poetic gathering. In that context it refers specifically to semi-casual rural practice,
with boisterous audience participation. A popular televised Pashto folk music program of the 1980s and
1990s, some shows of which are preserved in the archives of Radio - Television Afghanistan, bore the
title Hujra 7 Majlis (although in GZ, for example on p. 278, this program is referred to as Da Dere
Majlis); and reproduced the hujra atmosphere in a studio with well-respected musicians in what might
be called a 'newly-composed folk music' genre.
8
Dovey, Fitzgerald, and Choi 2001: 328.
 206

colonization of the hujra by monarchic state authority unraveled when confronted with

the power of the afterlife and the ordinances of God.

Some maqams reinforced locally dominant metaphors of authority through their

content - Rafi' reproduces one from early twentieth century Laghman that warns about

the dangers of mixing with people of lesser breeding, and thus lesser morals. Despite this,

no matter a specific maqam's content, the genre still cordoned off social space as

belonging to another zone of discourse for the duration of the gathering, rendering it

colonizable. Although we should not read too much into the example of a single poem, I

think it is notable that the maqam translated above ends in this way:

You've spent your whole life in vain, 'Ramazan!'

You still have not had your fill of this world's bazaar.

Beginning with didacticism about shari'a, the end of the poem signals a discursive

transition: the realm of the larger public sphere, "the world's bazaar", being interjected

into the hujra. One can imagine the tabla picking up speed after the stately ending strains

of the maqam above, as the poems merged into more worldly concerns. After the maqam,

all manner of different genres were performed. These included, among others, romantic-

passionate {'ishqT) lyrics; historical narratives; and eventually in the 1940s and 1950s, as

we shall see, genres that I call 'subaltern political science'.

Comedic routines were common, though I have never seen any transcribed; and so

were folk stories that preserved snippets of completely anonymous, completely collective

oral patrimony in the form of micro-genres. Much like an aria punctuating an operatic

recitative, or the songs in a Bollywood film, strings of two-line misra 'as, landays, and
 207

tappas served to elucidate the affective state of the narrative.9 At the same time, they

could stand alone as works in their own right. Unlike an aria, these were individually

very short poems that existed prior to the narrative in many cases; were used by people in

everyday circumstances; and formed part of the collective public patrimony of the Pashto

language across geographic boundaries. Oral performance of poetry thus bound together

several spheres of participation when it commandeered a hujra. It adapted discourse from

trans-local literacy-dependent, educational publics, and injected it into the world of the

hujra. It responded to and interacted with that tradition at the same time as it interacted

with the quotidian, informal public world of the locality. That was a domain that usually

existed outside of a hierarchically political socio-cultural space and an educational one.

The sense of 'place' in the maqam rooted the participants in poetic gatherings,

temporarily, in a number of social and discursive interstices.

The following section will explore the poetry of everyday life in greater depth;

followed by poems that bridge the gap between everyday and more formalized domains

of poetic discourse. To continue in the metaphor of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that

oral poetry provided a 'line of flight' outside the ideological striated space that aligned

local lineage and family politics with monarchic rule. Given the mutually-reinforcing

power of monarchic politics, family politics, and dominant masculinity outlined in

Chapter 3, I argue that subversive gender discourses in oral poetry afforded non-elite

men, and women, the discursive avenue to inject political critiques into the public sphere.
9
The genre is one and the same; the names for the genre differ according to region. Incidentally, the
form is very specific. One of the lines always consists of nine syllables and the other always consists of
thirteen. The second line always ends with the syllables -Jna, -una, or -9ma; and there is a very specific
stress pattern as well; and the poems are recited according to a number of specific melodies which
mostly differ according to geographical distribution. MiS provides sheet music in western notation
transcribing some of these melodies, though no geographic identification is provided.
 208

It should not be labeled 'subaltern' poetry, inasmuch as I demonstrate that elite men also

engaged in similar discourses to different ends. I therefore use the more inclusive term of

'counterculturaP poetry.

I attempt to define social and historical contexts for poetry in the following sections

to the greatest extent possible, given source materials which tend to obscure their original

context. I then move on to a discussion of non-elite social and cultural history through the

biographical case study of Malang Jan. In that portion of the chapter I describe how rural

poetic practice among professionals was transformed through alliance in politicized

public formation with liberalist intellectuals; but I also discuss how and why subaltern

intellectuals attempted to maintain some of their own ideological commitments.

///. Various Discourses and Modes of Authority in Oral Poetry

III. 1. Everyday Social Critique and Anonymity

Appearing in the annotations to the earliest collections of Pashto folklore (Pashtun-

edited ones, in any event) is a separation between genres that specify their 'authors', and

genres which do not. This division seems to be built into local understandings of Pashto

poetry and does not merely represent a later scholarly innovation.10 All students of

popular language arts in Pashto, whether in Pakistan or Afghanistan, appear to enforce

this separation.11 However, even among Afghan or Pakistani scholars, not much work has

10
Refer especially to Habibi's preface to Nuri's compilation Mill! Sandare (1944)., henceforth
abbreviated as MiS
11
Early in myfieldresearch, when I tried to elide the interplay between public and author, I was corrected
several times on both sides of the Durand Line as to the conceptual difference between 'popular' [uhsi]
and 'folk' \folklorik] poetry - the former was attributable to specific authors, and the latter was not.
Among others, I heard this critique most vocally from the late Sahib Shah Sabir of the Peshawar Pashto
Academy and Baacha Khan Research Centre (in personal conversation, December 2006); and Nasr
Allah Nasir of the Afghanistan Academy of Sciences, Languages and Literatures Branch (in personal
 209

been done to analyze major implications of this break. Of course, one implication

appeared in the previous chapter of this dissertation, and had to do the realm of

scholarship itself. That is, the act of calling attention to the public awareness engendered

by anonymous poetry, and of transcribing performed poems, was historically part of a

critical articulation of 'the mass' on the part of scholars in the Pashto Tobna. This

activity of articulating a mass was a precursor to liberalist activism, at the same time as it

created a form of elite distinction for intellectuals.

At the same time, the split does run deeper than the external uses of it. To the

extent that it is possible given the sources, let us focus on that poetic domain itself, not its

co-option by intellectuals in the Pashto Tobna. I suggest in this section that negotiating

modalities of 'authority' - negotiating literary ideologies that either support or undermine

the idea of an apparent definable 'author' to a work - could be a political act. Nowhere is

this more visible than in two very different realms of anonymous poetry: that of the genre

known as landdy or tappa; and that of poetry belonging to the quasi-religious personae of

talibs and malangs.

The landdy is a short poem of two lines. It is among the best known genres of

anonymous Pashto poetry attested from all Pashtun regions, as far back as the late

nineteenth century.12 It is so ubiquitous that generations of Afghan scholars, from the

1940s to present, have used it as a window into everyday Pashtun society.13 An

conversation, March 2007).

12
Darmesteter 1888 contains the earliest reliable examples, although Habibi claims to have identified one
that references a particular historical event, and further claims that this places the poem as being 1000
years old. Quoted in La'iq, ed. 1363 SH [1984]: i. Some skepticism is no doubt prudent.
13
FZAPIII: 177 lists compilations by seven Afghan authors and three Pakistani authors. Of those, La'iq
1363 SH [1984] is most extensive by far. It also contains a sixty page analysis of the genre, drawing
heavily on Lorca and on historical materialist criticism from the Soviet bloc. As Nasir 1383 SH [2004]
states, La'iq is the first to attempt to address the process of "dynamic change" in the landdy, though in
 210

alphabetized compilation of three thousand landdy formed the greater portion of the first

collection of anonymous poetry in Afghan cultural studies, the previously-cited Mill!

Sanddre of 1944. Since then, compilations have included tens of thousands of individual

tokens. 14

Landdy bear striking resemblances to the Bedouin ghinnawa discussed by Lila

Abu-Lughod in theme, form, and social context - vivid with concrete imagery, often

dysphoric, and often in relation to romantic love, though not necessarily. Much like Abu-

Lughod's individual ghinnawa poems, landdys were sometimes composed on the spur of

the moment, but that was not necessary or even usual. Many transcribed in the earliest

Afghan compilations I have seen are also reproduced in more recent Pakistani

collections, gathered through separate rounds of independent field research.15 Quite

evidently, landdy formed part of a collective oral patrimony that people used in concrete

situations, but which transcended many differences of geography and political economy.

There was a dialectic of universality, context, and meaning in the use of a landdy.

People used them in the midst of day-to-day conversation, among other contexts, to voice

their emotional state through allusive reference.16 Deployment of a common landdy

recalled previous usages; and sometimes, perhaps, the folk narratives in which they might

once have been embedded. But given the vagueness of many landdy that I have seen, a

full meaning often appears to require a contextual use, just as Abu-Lughod describes

the absence of original fieldwork his conclusions are only speculative. Majrouh 2003, which postdates
the list in FZAPIII, is much more satisfying in that regard though translation from Pashto through
French to English has substantially changed the poetry, based on comparison between certain landdy in
that collection and their Pashto originals that I have seen elsewhere.
14
La'iq op. cit. alone contains 11,158.
15
I refer to the efforts by Nawaz Ta'ir and Salma Shaheen, among others.
16
J. Anderson 1985: 207
 211

being the case with ghinnawa.11

More often than not, the landdy 's "discourse on sentiment [was] also a discourse of

defiance" or transgression, as both La'iq and Majrouh argue.18 The Pashto landdy very

regularly satirized gender contradictions, often using the trope of the contemptible

husband, the mdzi or mozigai}9 Although landdy have come to be associated with women,

there are numerous examples in most collections which appear in masculine voice as

well. They were, and have remained, one major location in which masculine voices,

whether composed by men or by women, criticized dominant ideologies of masculinity -

ideologies which only the powerful could fully perform. This line of argument would

apply Carrigan et. al. and Connell and Messerschmidt's ideas on the power of

'hegemonic masculinity' - a gender ideology which most men internalize, even while

only the powerful are able to fully appropriate and perform it.20

What made these poems especially effective was the interplay between their

individual, everyday contingency; and their anonymous, universal, quality that allowed

for personal distancing. There are many ways this was true. Several from the 1944
17
Abu-Lughod 1999: 175-177.
18
The quote is in reference to ghinnawwa, from Abu-Lughod 1999: 185; La'iq 1363 SH [1984], especially
p. 39 and Majrouh, passim.
19
La'iq (pp.cit.: 39) explains the trope in detail: "One [semantic convention in the landdy] is the word
'mozV or 'mozigaV (lit. 'base, mean'; 'harmful'). In the landdy this is used to refer to a man who is
bullying/cowardly, backbiting, enjoys causing trouble, is stingy, and lacks honor, status, manhood,
shame, etiquette, a sense of justice, a Pashtun conscience. It is mostly used in feminine landdy, and
very occasionally in masculine ones. In feminine landdy the above qualities contained in the word mozi
are applied to those husbands who have absolutely no spiritual compatibility with their wives... [It
articulates] the one-sided despotism of a Pashto and Pashtunness, which means that women must be
engaged to such a person and sacrifice all their natural and unreleasable hopes at his feet. So the
women's hatred and contempt comes through quite well in these, and shows the baseness of 'male rule'
(narina-salari; quotes in original)." My translation.
20
Carrigan et al 1985; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005. Extending the argument: "Men who received
the benefits of patriarchy without enacting a strong version of masculine dominance could be regarded
as showing a complicit masculinity. It was in relation to this group, and to compliance among
heterosexual women, that the concept of hegemony was most powerful." (Connell and Messerschmidt
ibidem).
 212

collection Mill! Sanddre speak directly of performing Pashtunness, thus piggybacking on

the language ideology of Pashto that itself articulated a large-scale cultural unity every

time one consciously performed it:

Go ahead and do Pashto, if you are Pashtun

Because of Pashto I have suffered many sorrows 2I

One or two attempted to refashion what feminine Pashtunness meant:

I'll come to see you right out in plain public view (pa spin medari)

I am a Pashtun woman and I don't flee from blackening (i.e. gossip), O Lover22

Within the minor subset of those that explicitly address performance of Pashto or other

community identity, however, most are aimed at shaming men, pointing out their

hypocrisy in frequently not upholding dominant values when doing so might be

disadvantageous.23 In contrast, the vast majority do not speak of named identity at all,

even though its shadow may be present.

How can we place the landdy in terms of how it was used, and the specific way that the

things it said were subversive? The category of the "everyday" can be useful here, if taken

in the sense that Michel de Certeau uses it. It is the space where people creatively and

improvizationally adapt pre-existing building blocks of culture in novel ways, more often

than not in ways that elude or dig away at power rather than seek to tear it down.24

Landdy sometimes talked about culture in the positive: 'Pashtunness' as this; 'Islam' as

that. But circulation and recirculation of landdy far more often implied a shared collective
21
MiS: 14
22
MiS: 13
23
See Majrouh 2003: 12: "[SJince the life of the tribe is basically regulated by the honor code, the
provocation that the landays contain functions like a dreadful trap. Since the main sanction of the code
is that it cannot change, woman will strive to exacerbate its logic...These tough and severe men seem
like kids to her. It is almost as if she were., .saying, "Since you are so proud of your virility and so much
love to play the game of honor, well then, I'll participate in your game and I'm going to make you
shoulder the extreme consequences of your own principles."
24
Refer to De Certeau, Jameson, and Lovitt 1980 for this argument.
 213

narrative that was negative - one defined by passive resistance against a shared culture

that was positively constituted elsewhere. In this way, it was everyday, "tactical", in the

sense that De Certeau uses that word. Unlike his idea of social "strategy", which creates

and maintains hegemonic structures, "tactics has no place except in that of the other...it

must play with the terrain imposed on it".25 At the same time, this quality made landdy

discourse more universally public. It claimed to evoke the default condition of everyone

under the blue sky {shin asman, a common addressee in such poems) in tension with

something external - an inconsistently-performed "Pashto".

These are the same micro-poems that filtered into formalized discourse through

poetic gatherings, in the interstitial spaces of longer, more elaborate genres. Thus, poetic

gatherings in village hujras themselves represented an interstitial space: the mixing

ground of everyday tactical critique with more restricted publics, as described above.

///. 2. Authored Poetry and Idioms of Power

If the previous section has been de-historicized and decontextualized, that is a result

of the method of presentation of all the collections I have accessed, beyond simply being

part of the nature of an "everyday" genre itself.26 The original ethnographic researchers

sanitized any dialectal features out of the poems, and alphabetized them without any

contextual information. All the researcher has to go on is the year of publication, without

any indication of how widespread any particular landdy might have been; or when,

where, or why it was composed or deployed at various points.

25
De Certeau, Jameson, and Lovitt op. cit. : 6
26
It would be difficult and hazardous at this point in time to conduct even contemporary ethnographic
research on landdy in most rural Pashtun regions; and doubly so for me as a foreign male researcher.
 214

That is not the case with all oral poetry, though, especially not with "authored"

genres which usually bear their poet's name in their body. Some, as with the maqams

above, are cautiously dated by their authors' known biographies. Others are dated by

author and by content, for which a genre called the charbayta is one of the best cases in

point. The communications scholar Asad Allah Sho'ur argues that in certain instances,

charbaytas fulfilled all the roles that mid-1980s communications theory assigned to

'mass media'.27 He goes on to present and analyze a number of charbaytas that narrate

the Second Anglo-Afghan war, showing how they not only described events but also

provided commentary that differed according to time of composition and the individual

poet. In narrative charbaytas the strategic deployment of a repeated refrain often

developed a direct commentary on the events described, in a way that another narrative

genre, the qisa, did not.28 Narrative charbaytas can be characterized as a local form of

reflexive historiography, in distinction to the "chronicling" of certain other narrative

genres.29

Unlike authorless genres (in general), heroic charbaytas such as those that Sho'ur

discusses frequently uphold aspects of hegemonic masculinity, at specific points in time.

Of course, the poems which Sho'ur cites were composed at times of conflict. Multiple

discourses of monarchy, egalitarianism, and religious organization were in flux, with

populations jostling against each other and against British imperialism in struggles over

sovereignty. In such a period of political and economic upheaval, it would be hard to

27
See Sho'ur 1367 SH [1988], Chapter 3.1
28
Edwards 1993 contains a good illustration of a narrative charbayta; while Heston 1996 addresses the
question of repetition in the charbayta.
29
The qisa would generally be an example of a "chronicle" genre, though a lack of inbuilt metalinguistic
reflexivity is probably not always true for all individual examples of qisa either. I draw on Benjamin
1968, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," for my distinction of chronicling and historiography.
 215

label these discourses 'hegemonic' in any decisive sense except for in a gendered one.

The same is true of cassette charbaytas that David Edwards collected, in the context of

the Afghan war of the 1980s.30 In the absence of strong, mutually recognized, and

centralized political authority, we see an even stronger iteration of hegemonic

masculinity. This often appears to have been the case during periods when khans and

peasants jointly resisted central power, as in the 1980s. Also, even in periods without

prolonged upheaval which did not produce heroic poetry, in many maqams (especially

those predating the Wex Zalmiyan cultural intervention) there is strong support for things

like the virtues of good breeding and the intellectual superiority of elders, as noted above.

However, in the case of authored poetry too we find quite a lot of contestation. A

correlation with hegemonic masculinity and authority is by no means true of all poems

with named authors. Romantic love, or 'ishq, was a prestigious axis of ideologies about

male action that complicated, and morally transcended, values of patriarchal honor and

propriety. This is true of poems presenting individual poets' new spin on true (it is

claimed) love stories grounded in specific Pashtun localities - narratives such as Adam

Khan Durkhanzy, or Sher 'Alam Memundy?x

As Anderson notes in "Sentimental Ambivalence and the Exegesis of "Self in

Afghanistan" Pashto romantic lyrics could often operate along a different axis of morality
30
Some published material is included in Edwards 1993; though some of Edwards' unpublished materials
are even more exemplary of the above point. In this connection I might also cite a late 1980s or 1990s
recording by the singer 'Abd Allah Muqurai (no poet is listed in the song) entitled "I am their
Homeland; I am their Mother" [Accessed from afghanan.net, 2003. My translation]. Citing some lyrics
and leaving them to speak for themselves might be suitable in this case:
/ am their homeland; I am their mother —/— They sell me every day
Look at my unworthy man-children —/— They are ashamed of my love
One has sold me to the Russians --/-- In exchange for servants and a job
One has sold me to the Westerners --/-- In exchange for some rupees
31
Refer to Wilma Heston and Mumtaz Nasir (n.d.), The Bazaar of the Storytellers for English translations
of Pashto chapbook versions of these stories collected in Peshawar during the 1980s.
 216

from the propriety of family honor and hierarchy - a moral axis of what he calls

"vitality".32 Like the classical Persianate stories of literary heroes such as Majnun or

Farhad, 'ishqi poems, authored or not, privileged a performance of masculinity centered

on obsessive and passionate, reckless love - often characterized as insanity and abjection

in the face of an indifferent addressee.33 The image of the malang is interesting in this

connection - an ascetic whose singular devotion to God leads him to forsake all else,

including the material world. Malangs lived apart from society and subsisted on alms.34

The image of the malang was one of the most commonly-expressed and polysemic

metaphors within romantic/passionate lyrics. The following excerpt from a bawdy hujra

song (of a folk genre I have not been able to identify but which is still often used for such

thematic content), was composed by a young malik, Na'Im Jan. He lived in Shewa, the

district center of Lower Kunar, Nangrahar; and died in his early forties in 1321 SH

[1942].35 This poem illustrates some very common discursive links between romantic

transgression, obsession, and the abjection of beggary before an indifferent, self-absorbed

object of desire:

Always swinging your lashing braids --/-- Whipping with the flourish of poetry-images
You have such pride in your gait —/-- Never sparing a glance for anyone
I am a malang for your love --/-- Please find out about my state!
I beg that you bestow your patronage --/--1 stand before you pleading 3 6

32
J. Anderson 1985: 206.
33
Majnun (lit. 'insane') wandered the desert in search of his beloved Layla; while Farhad sliced through a
mountain to win the hand of his beloved Shirin. The story of Layla and Majnun is of Arabic origin,
though the version recounted by the early medieval Persian poet Nizami is the best remembered.
34
Majruh 1977b.; see also Sidky 1990 for ethnographic discussion on supernatural practices, particularly
healing but other powers as well, attributed to malangs. Sidky's argument linking Afghan malangi
practice to pre-Islamic Central Asian shamanism is only slightly less speculative than Majruh's
attempts to link it to pre-Islamic Buddhist renunciation, although both articles are valuable on a topic
that has received little other attention.
35
PSIV: 229.
36
Dar-na ghwarama qalang —/— Pa zaro walqr yam ta-la
 217

Come join with me on my bed --/-- Just stop with all the fuss from now on! "
On the bangs of your hair --/-- You have placed a line of roses
* * *

I have powerful, dangerous eyesight --/--1 am milky-faced like a flower

I have eyelashes of lapis lazuli --/--1 carry away hearts in my talons
I have a delicate dimpled chin --/--1 am a red apple of Kabul
My golden armbands --/-- Raise a tumult through the villages too
Just to see me, the poor wretches --/-- Raise a plaint like nightingales
On my cheeks, moths --/-- Are always burning their own selves in sacrifice38

Invoking the refrain of a popular wedding song, "Step slowly, Layla", the following

poem by Na'im Jan speaks explicitly of reckless passion overcoming the controlled

sexuality of marriage, and masculine honor as well. It shares a common vocabulary of

transgression with many landdy, even to the point of using the female-voiced blow

against masculine propriety, the invocation of the 'contemptible husband' mozi. Also

instructive is the use of the green tattoo-spot, considered sexually attractive in poetry,

with the word abru. In addition to 'brow', abru refers to the honor and public

respectability of a man and his family, especially as manifest in the behavior of his

women relatives:

Come, O Groom; Layla-bride, place a red nose-ring pendant over your red lips
Step slowly
Put yourself together, place a small green tattoo-spot above your abru
Step slowly
I am coming to spend time with you - 1 will tie up the mozi on the road 39
Go down to the ziyarat; place your hennaed hands in the milk 40
Step slowly [...]
I am your lover, Layla - Look, I am coming to you tonight
Just once, tie me up in your black hair
Step slowly
[Even] if you kill me right away - 1 will be happy with my life
K(r)a sharlk me papalang —/— zyati bas k(r)a lajanjala
PSIV: 232
'Tie up...': mozi k(r)am band pa lara, in the double physical and metaphorical sense that expression
entails in English as well
Ziyarat: a local shrine. This may be a reference to milk brought to the ziyarat, blessed, shared, and
consumed as part of a supplication ritual.
 218

Plunge a sharp dagger into Na'Im's carcass

Step slowly41

Na'im Jan was the malik, or predominant landowner and political authority, of his entire

region ('alaqa), in addition to being a gifted local poet and artist, sportsman, and bon

vivant.42 These examples were taken from a collection compiled in the 1970s, Paxtand

Shu 'ara [Pashtun Poets] vol. 4, edited by the meticulous researcher ' Abd Allah Bakhtani

Khidmatgar. They supplement far more sober examples of Nairn's work presented in an

earlier biographical directory aimed at describing literate authors, Osdrii Likwal

[Contemporary Writers]. Bakhtani's inclusion of these songs, and the earlier omission of

this genre from other directories, provides us with an implicit value judgment. Clearly

these were somehow less 'respectable' than poetry should be when intended for a volume

devoted to literary writers; in addition to their status as non-representative of written

poetry.

From Bakhtani's edition, we find that even powerful landed men engaged the

image of abjection as a source of literary pleasure; with the above examples substituting

passion and romantic prowess in the place of honor as an alternative locus of masculine

prestige. Unlike the status accruing from good breeding, this was an ideology of

masculinity accessible to anyone regardless of wealth or social standing; though clearly

the powerful were best positioned to actually carry out such extramarital conquests in real

life. We will recall from Chapter Three that this was one of the dominant metaphors

employed by Muhammad Gul Khan Momand to illustrate illegitimate, rapacious political

power. Though viewed by perhaps most men as intrinsic to identity, gendered honor too

41
PSIV-.230
42
OLIII: 1298
 219

could often be a luxury commodity; and overriding it in this way was an act that was

easiest to poetically value when it referred to someone else's. The most competitive

competitor can jokingly devalue it because his own honor is secure.

///. 3. Poetry by Egoless Authors, and Subaltern Critiques: 1930s -1950s

The trope of reckless or insane devotion and malangi was used in somewhat

different ways by the non-powerful, on the rural local scale. When used as an analog for

devotion to God, this discourse even claimed moral supremacy over the world of khan-

hood. The malang, in real life, was a person supposedly so absorbed in love for God that

he lost his own ego and name, and subsisted on voluntarily-offered charity. The psycho-

social philosopher S. B. Majrouh argues that the deployment of this form of anonymity

was itself a mode of resistance, against the pressures of a world which privileged

aggressive competition between individuals and between lineages.43

The same was true of the poetry of non-elite religious students, or taliban, who

were similarly romanticized in popular poetry. These "named" poets downplayed

authorship in a collective fashion, to be described presently. The literary ethnohistorian

Zikriya Mlatar introduces some interesting information regarding the role of the talib in

stitching together poetic publics; the commingling of anonymous speech and

transcendent, mystical religious authority; ideologies linked to itinerancy; and alternative

constructions of masculinity as romanticism:

Poems from the classical age of Pashto poetry were disseminated and
preserved/cultivated by the mulla and the talib, theplr and murid.44 [...] Talibs
43
This is one of the major arguments in Majrouh 1977b.
44
In these bands, the mulla served as a leader of sorts for the taliban. The pir is a personalized spiritual
guide; and the murid is his devotee.
 220

used to have one part in each year devoted to travel and relaxation, which they
spent in poetic gatherings and dancing, and they gathered up money to support
themselves which they called sobat. [...] Talibs were...heavily praised in landdys
[because] they would spend many years in obscurity and estranged from their
own land [wrak awjula watan]. Pashtun girls would depict these long travels of
theirs in the form of landdys. And sometimes, from among them, true love
would find the form it takes in the folkloric legend of Talib Jan and Gulbashra.
The internal feelings/perceptions of talibs would be capsized under the sensuous
waves of poetry, under a series of unique conditions, and undergo
transformation. Talibs would never tell anyone their name, nor would they use
their names amongst themselves; rather, if they got famous it would be under the
name 'Mulla' or 'Talib'. When one of them would become a poet, they would
use the takhallus [composition-name] 'Talib'.45

Although the above account feels a bit fanciful, this ideological description is not entirely

a literary conceit. The memoirs of Ajmal Khattak, of Nowshera in the NWFP, speak of

bands of taliban in the 1920s and 1930s. Numbering between ten and twenty, these

students were from far-flung regions, and were largely students "in name only." Their

real occupation, says Khattak, was the romantic lifestyle itself : traveling from place to

place; dancing and performing poetry and insult comedy; eating whatever people gave

them. They collected money from hujras and would defame throughout the region any

village - and especially the village's patron - who did not support them as they passed

through. In Khattak's description, they were not in it for the money, but rather for the

lifestyle.46 This version of the taliban lifestyle existed as a line of flight outside rooted

masculine propriety; and it had the potential to disrupt that propriety in a trans-local

public setting.

While I have not seen any memoirs from the period in Afghanistan, this pattern is

also discernible from Afghan biographical directories (especially Mlatar's work, which

collates all available accounts of poets with the takhallus 'Talib'); and in any case we

45
Mlatar 1365 SH [1986]: pp. jim - he. My translation.
46
Khattak 2005: 103-105
 221

have already seen the long-distance integration of educational networks in their more

elite registers. It seems that this was the case on the more countercultural end of the

spectrum as well. Some religious students of the east such as Khadim and Rixtin obtained

a national-level respectability and had political-ideological influence in rural regions of

Afghanistan. Simultaneously, individuals from among roving bands of students also

became influential shapers of public discourse on the grassroots level in their own right,

though the relative anonymity that they practiced has preserved their discourses in a very

different fashion.

Alternative masculine discourses rooted in passionate obsession and religious

transcendence also offered options for those too marginal to be able to uphold any Man-

like ideals of masculine self-sufficiency or competitiveness. The 'malang' was a literary

trope, but it was a trope with roots in real people just as the talib was. For instance, we

might cite a poet by the name of Talib' Muhammad Rasul who, despite his sobriquet,

adopted the more individualized route of the malang.41

A Saff Pashtun from Lower Kunar, Nangrahar, the same district as our malik

Muhammad Na'im, Talib Muhammad Rasul was born in 1922 and died in 1963, in the

same village of Budiyalay. According to local histories about him, Muhammad Rasul did

not attend school "due to poverty", but attended Qur'anic recitation classes at the mosque

as a child. He worked as a menial servant in a school in the Darra-i Nur district center,

and used to look at the Pashto books there in his free time. In that way, building on his

basic Qur'anic recitation literacy, he eventually taught himself to read Pashto. In the

47
Muhammad ' Arif Tasal published information about this poet, whose poems were recited by the singers
of his part of Nangrahar, in Zerai magazine in 1974. That feature was then reproduced in Bakhtani's
edition ofPashtand Shu'ara vol. 4. This information comes from that source, PS1V: 348-349.
 222

years toward the end of his short life he had taken to living at the local shrine as a

malang, even briefly becoming the primary caretaker. Some of his poetry has been

transcribed by local researchers, who heard it (and this short biography) from local

musicians. The following excerpt is from the end of a hujra-style song that addresses a

girl in rather more delicate terms than other romantic poems of his milieu did. Unlike

Na'im Jan's poetry, it bears no concept of actual union with the object of desire, and no

masculine competitiveness at all:

Your firelight bangs, girl --/-- Are scattered across your forehead
They have sacrificed me as a satl --/-- On the fire of love
They have heaped --/-- Piles of grief upon me,
Your Muhammad Rasul, --/-- Black of color

Muhammad Rasul's poetics of malang-hood were, on the whole, more closely linked

with religious devotion as well. These following excerpts are the beginning refrain and

final stanzas from a poem he composed about the Prophet's (o 3 ) mystical night journey:

I recite the salawat at all times --/-- It brings me reassurance48

0 Prophet, radiance emanatesfromyour face! [...]

I have been made a mad devotee {mqjnuri) out of love for you
My blood drips from the inside
1 shall never have the good fortune to befriend you

If anyone should ask me on Judgment Day

If I leave the world today or tomorrow
[I can say] Muhammad Rasul spoke of you a few nights49

The case of Muhammad Rasul Talib is only one of multiple other poets that took up

malangi, and whose biographies were preserved in biographical directories during years

when Kabuli academic culture privileged the voice of the rural poor. From such sources,

it often seems that some of the least powerful men in society took up both the discursive

48
Salawat: a formula phrase of greeting and blessing upon the Prophet and his family
49
PSIV: 350
 223

and the biographical path of the malang - the abnegation of self - as one of the only

possible sources of self-worth where they had absolutely no socio-economic options.

The best-known poet referencing discourses of the "malang", however, was

undoubtedly "Malang Jan".50 He was born in 1914 as Muhammad Amin, into a small

landholding family in Behsuda district, Nangrahar, near the regional center of Jalalabad.

Muhammad Amin lost his inheritance of land at an early age when both his father and his

uncle died. Into young adulthood, he bounced back and forth between temporary

sharecropping arrangements; casual labor; fishing; a short stint in the Jalalabad police

force as an office servant; and periods in the military, taking more influential men's

places in the draft.51 He also served jail time for certain acts of hired brigandage. At one

point, he did actually live as a malang.

More than others, though, our highly detailed information about Malang Jan's

biography illustrates how a subaltern man was transformed into a subaltern intellectual -

a professional poet who used the facelessness of the malang persona to inhabit the realm

of "everyone," and leveled serious social critiques with a clear conception of his action as

a public one. Drawing from some later, more socially explicit poetry of his that will be

presented further in this chapter, one of his memorable lines was the following:

I am the beggar mingling on every door in every hamlet

If only this world's bazaar didn't mix things up so!

His early poetry shows us something of how the rural poor, casual laborers and landless

Pashtun men, might voice their discontent in the world where they lived. The next

paragraphs will conclude the portion on subaltern poetic discourses through the early
50
Unless specifically cited, the biographical information presented here comes from Wajid 2004,
especially pp. 5-10.
51
Zirakyar 1995: 2-3
 224

1940s. The section following that will take a step back to situate Malang Jan in the rural

political economy of the Jalalabad region.

Initially Malang Jan composed the bulk of his verse according to the popular

formula of tropes in the Indian style, or sabk-i Hindi. In this style, an array of concrete

images such as the nightingale and the rose, or the moth and the flame, were deployed in

original combinations building on their basic intrinsic relationship, in order to create new

thought-forms, or khiyal. The poetry might aim to metaphorically express many things,

including relationships to the divine, although the creation of khiyal generally was its

own object.

Despite its strongly hermeneutic character, however, it would be a mistake to argue

that this style of lyric poetry is beyond social analysis. 'Abd Allah Bakhtani argued that

lyric poetry was not less responsive to social pressures than other genres; it merely used a

locally accessible idiom. Noting that Malang Jan's "folkloric tropes of love" display the

same poetics of indignant powerlessness as the ones which he would address to the nation

later in his career, Bakhtani says that these sorts of lyrics display a preoccupation with:

unsuccessful love between a fictitious Layla and Majnun; the beloved's

indifference or cruelty; the "dog-hood" of the rival; [and] themes like separation,
fire, thorns, pain, and ultimately failure [are the] symbolic folkloric form of the
songs. In reality this is an expression of the pain, worries, and hardships of the
eastern masses [uhsuna], through the vehicle of the poet's ostensibly individual
pain dressed in the garb of khiyal and mysticism [tasawwuf]; and it expresses a
long-term/deep historical strangulation.52

Of course, this focus on the unsuccessful, impossible, and unrequited is true of much

lyric literature in the Perso-Indian ghazal style. Still, Malang Jan's ghazal work is often

particularly bleak, with a poetics of singularly static and immutable suffering. We see

52
Bakhtani 2004: 25.
 225

little of the playfulness, masculine romantic rivalry, or pleasure of romantic pursuit that is

present Na'im Jan's ribald work. And the inversion of Bakhtani's observation is also

valid. When Malang Jan began writing poetry that was explicitly social in subject matter,

he often deployed the same multivalent sabk-i Hindi motifs, focusing on the same themes

of powerlessness, and of addressees indifferent to the suffering of the poetic subject and

of unrealized desire, which were present in his lyric work.

Although not a textbook example of sabk-i Hindi, the following poem is composed

in an oral Pashto version of the ghazal, a classical Perso-Indian form usually exploring

obsessive love or passion.53 It might be productive to read this particular ghazal in the

doubled context of both a pining lover and, following Bakhtani's suggestion, as a

commentary on the experience of social class from the margins, addressed in hopeless

supplication to the charity of those above. The two meanings can reinforce each other,

each providing the other with analogy.

You were sleeping in a self-absorbed sleep; I cried

You were without worry, comfortable and content; I cried
Your face rivaled the full moon itself
You'd already had experience of it; I cried
I begged you for one single kiss
It looked like that bothered you; I cried
The dry pillow became wet from my tears
You were doted on in your upbringing; I cried
This is my, Malang Jan's, lot in life: to be withered by heat
You were laughing and playful; I cried54

Malang Jan's use of the pen-name malang reflects a poetics of alienation more directly

than in the case of some other poets. Elsewhere, he referred to himself as 'khwar gharlb

53
It is 'oral' in the sense that it was probably performed by Malang Jan before he knew how to read; and,
relatedly, because it does not follow the literate rules of 'uruz meter but rather adheres to the indigenous
Pashto aural-syllabic system.
54
Malang Jan (1998): 390.
 226

faqlr,'' a plain self-characterization as a pitiable, miserable beggar with few religious

connotations. The trope of the marginal figure (often also 'insane') as a commentator on

society bears a long genealogy in Persianate literature. Nonetheless, Malang Jan seems

to have intended it to refer to his position as a socio-economically marginal figure with

aspirations of integration, unlike the traditional malang or faqir archetype-trope who

views his marginality as transcendent of society.

Malang Jan was different from the foregoing poets, whether malik or malang, in

that he eventually took up the career of a professional oral poet, not a casual one. The

career of a professional poet, more than anything else, traces the interplay between

semiotic and institutional processes involved in using poetic publics as a line of flight

outside personalized state and local power. While romantic masculinity provided one

commonly-shared public idiom of subaltern critique, a discursive line of flight, the

Afghanistan of the 1940s increasingly offered institutional lines of flight for subaltern

intellectuals as well. There was a trade-off, of course. New institutional possibilities

transformed discursive possibilities, which transformed expressed ideologies as well.

When I initially began studying Pashto poetry, it was with a video produced in the

1990s of Malang Jan's later, critical-nationalist poetry, performed in Peshawar by an

Afghan refugee musician. By that point, in the wake of years of severe ethnic conflict in

Afghanistan, Malang Jan was remembered as an index of transcendent consensus: the

voice of ethnic nationalism from among the poorest, non-literate sections of the Pashtun

people. Elite Pashtun nationalists saw him as a symbol of cohesiveness; Persian-speakers

viewed him as a frightening confirmation of the pervasive power of chauvinism on all

 227

levels of Pashtun society.55

Certainly, Malang Jan's poetry did speak of Pashtun identity quite a bit, and in a

way that sometimes privileged khan-hood and local hegemonic masculinity as indexical

of Pashtunness. I wondered why someone from such a background as Malang Jan would

come to vocalize such a stake in a value system that probably made his life hard to begin

with. Why would Malang Jan marginalize himself and people like him in discourse? As I

read more, I discovered more nuance, more contestation, in the things that Malang Jan

said. But also, even in places where his work resonates with more dominant ideologies,

his career suggests that this is not just a case of co-option. There are various layers of

sediment discernible on Malang Jan's poetry which come from the discipline of

interaction in many different publics.

IV. Malang Jan and the Rise of a Critical, Reflexively Subaltern Public

IV. 1. Rural 1940s Jalalabad, as Experienced by Non-Elites

Earlier chapters have discussed changes on the national, elite levels of political

economy from roughly 1919 to 1950; and the last chapter focused on the perspectives of

those in the middle ranks of eastern society in particular. Malang Jan's biography is

useful in representing the underside of this shifting order, in a state growing increasingly

impoverished over the 1940s. Malang Jan's early biography is accessible mostly due to

55
This point was driven home to me upon presenting a lecture at the American Institute of Afghanistan
Studies in Kabul, April 2007. Some non-Pashtun colleagues listened politely, in the midst of an
audience composed mostly of Pashtuns and non-Afghans, to a lecture I gave on semiotic processes in an
angry charbayta that Malang Jan addressed to Richard Nixon. One of these colleagues later told me in
private that while he found the talk interesting, he had trouble getting past the visceral reaction he had
to Malang Jan's poetry as racist. He went on to cite a couplet that I had always interpreted as directed
against British colonialism, but explaining to me that its true meaning was directed at delegitimating the
claim of non-Pashtun ethnicities to Afghan citizenship.
 228

his appreciation among segments of the national-scale Pashtun intelligentsia, particularly

Khadim and 'Abd Allah Bakhtani, and its subsequent narration has been filtered through

Bakhtani's sensibilities in particular.56 Be that as it may, Malang Jan's early biography is

very valuable in that it presents what may be a fairly ordinary early-mid twentieth century

life in the rural poor of the Eastern Provinces.

Malang Jan's biography presents one token of burgeoning rural unemployment, and

the casual laborer on the outside of a rapidly stratifying rural order without any sufficient

market to support such laborers. It was not only traders who customarily migrated to

British India. Seasonal laborers went for massive public works construction projects and

remitted money, then returned to their families for the rest of the year. With Pakistan's

creation in 1947 and the virtual halt of such projects, these laborers would have swelled

the ranks of tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers in Afghanistan, and increased

competition would have meant an erosion of those farmers' customary rights - which

were often tenuous to begin with.57 This must have made life more difficult for small

holders as well, who made up a sizable percentage of the eastern provinces. The loss of

an inheritance was devastating to the infant Malang Jan's future. No menial laborer by

blood, his hamlet had been named after his father, Chamyar Khan, which indicated a

certain status at one time. Nor does it appear that Malang Jan's was an isolated case.

A ballooning in the population of Jalalabad city through the 1930s and especially

the 1940s must surely involve, at least in part, a more systemic downward mobility
56
Thus, Bakhtani compiled, edited, and wrote the foreword to the first edition of Malang Jan's collected
works, published in 1335 SH [1956]; he worked extensively with Malang Jan in his lifetime; Malang
Jan reportedly trusted only Bakhtani to edit his work; and Bakhtani has continued to publish on Malang
Jan as recently as Bakhtani 2004. Refer to that work, entitled Malang Jan, his Sweet Songs, and Me, for
details on the above.
57
Gankovsky et al. 1985 provides a formulaic discussion of historic land tenure patterns in the country.
 229

within the surrounding countryside, with former small holders' lands becoming

concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.58 There appears to have been, in effect, something

like a marketless proletariat taking shape in heavily populated, heavily cultivated eastern

Afghanistan. This is consistent with Mahmoud Habibi's characterization of the poorest

stratum of itinerant Pashtuns, in his 1959 Sorbonne thesis on economic geography,

though Habibi does not historicize or geographically specify his information. Unlike

wealthy nomads, such vulnerable people traveled in groups no larger than a nuclear

family at most, with no possessions beyond their ragged clothing.59 The vivid imagery of

Habibi's description of these individuals feels far more like the novelist John Steinbeck's

narratives of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, than James Michener's romantic

novelization of the Pashtun powinda.60 Concurrent with increasing levels of agrarian

marginalization was increasing discontent on the part of rural lower classes. There is an

anger in the poetry of Malang Jan that is hard to locate in the poetry of other "malangs"

or "talibs", an anger which is not likely reducible to his personal history alone.

It is here that we can locate Malang Jan as an intellectual, but only in part. Beyond

his early biography as a casual laborer, his later biography as a poet reflects the way his

voice was gradually transformed through its appropriation by more powerful sectors of

society. It went from an expression of status as a total outsider, to a tension-filled

mediation between various discourses vying for dominant status and Malang Jan's own

58
The issues of the Kabul Kalanai provide vague statistics; while an unpublished 1976 Kabul University
thesis entitled Da Nangrahar Xarwall Tashkilat [Administrative Bodies of the Nangrahar Urban
District], supervised by M. Bashrr Wahhabzada, provides excellent collated information charting urban
growth. Unfortunately my copied extracts of this thesis do not contain the title page, while the name of
that thesis's author is illegible in my copy of the University's handwritten thesis catalog.
59
M. Habibi 1959: 193
60
See Steinbeck 1939; Michener 1963.
 230

earlier expressions of marginality and desires for personal dignity. In the process, certain

of his poems in fact provide some of the most direct expressions we have of the ruling

political and economic structures discussed in previous chapters, which have most often

been obscured by more "academic" historiographical genres. We shall see an example of

such poetry in the next section. It rose as a genre along with Malang Jan's career.

IV. 2. Malang Jan as a Professional Poet

Malang Jan grew up speaking the Persian dialect of the Jalalabad region.

Nonetheless, in the mid-1930s he began composing poetry in Pashto, the ideologically

more prestigious (though not more dominant) language on the provincial level even at

that time. It is then he took the poet-name Malang Jan. Early on, Malang Jan composed

rhymes with education and service-oriented themes for Jalalabad elementary school

children.61 He also composed versified folk narratives. In 1935 or so, the Ittihad-i

Mashriqi printed a song of his for the first time, at a time when his poetry was already

being performed across several districts by musicians.62 That is, he had already attracted

followers, or shagirdan (lit. 'students').

By the mid-1940s, Malang Jan was quite famous in the Eastern Provinces as a

songwriter. Building on reformist-nationalist Pashto poetry of his time - produced by

liberalist intellectuals, and circulated by some of the same itinerant singers who

circulated Malang Jan's poems - Malang Jan had adapted his poetics of devotion to

themes of the Pashtun nation. He spoke of being "a moth to the flame of the nation"; a

Zirakyar 1995:4
Malang Jan 1998: Hi.
 231

malang devoted to the freedom from bondage of all Pashtuns.

Also around that time, he began composing explicitly critical work. This won him

the approval of sections of the Pashto-phone liberalist intelligentsia, including Qiyam al-

Din Khadim and Gul Pacha Ulfat, who had both served as editor of the Ittihad-i Mashriqi

by the mid 1940s. From another direction, Malang Jan's work also gained the attention

of Muhammad Da'ud, cousin of the king, Defense Minister, and later Prime Minister,

who was a staunch republican in his leanings. Da'ud first heard Malang Jan's work on an

official visit to Jalalabad in 1945.

By that time Malang Jan had shifted his emphasis outside his earlier genre

repertoire to include particularly Pashto oral genres, privileging these over his earlier

ghazal lyrics. This may be due to encouragement from liberalist intellectuals aligned

with the wex zalmai cultural tendency, who tended toward an ideology seeking

authenticity in "the mass". We may reiterate how that social category was, for such

people, a category deliberately opposed to other forms of politics. In particular, they

viewed the mass as a category that stood in conscious opposition to the particularistic

forms of Marc-based political power that reinforced monarchism and aristocracy in

macrocosm at the expense of the middle and lower ranks of rural society. Ownership of

"Pashtun honor" as youthful vigor and the performance of egalitarianism became a mode

of critique.

The next section presents a discussion of how an uneven ideological alliance was

forged between Wex Zalmiyan and grassroots intellectuals such as Malang Jan, and

illustrates this with an example of Malang Jan's explicitly social-critical work. It shows
 232

how this new explicitness of critique, and certain features of the critique itself, were both

a result of the shifting institutional possibilities afforded by Wex Zalmai activism. The

section following that explores the subsequent appropriation of Malang Jan's work by

anti-liberalist forces close to the royal family, especially Muhammad Da'ud Khan.

IV. 3. Explicitly Social-Critical Discourse

In his early work, Malang Jan - like other rural subaltern poets - focused on a

complete indifference of the lyrical addressee to the suffering of the lyrical subject. To

do so, he used local oral genres in addition to genres that drew upon classical pan-

Persianate forms, most notably the ghazal.

Malang Jan's explicitly social work, by contrast, showed both (1) a directly argued

critique of social conditions, informed by his earlier strategy of affective commentary on

powerlessness, and (2) an assertion of the primacy of indigenous and Pashtun-particular

genres as rhetorically superior for this critical task. The transformation is attested by the

fact that scholars of subsequent generations have singled out Malang Jan as the first

critical/realist popular-mass [utesi] poet in Pashto.63

Of course, Malang Jan also continued with his devotional poetics throughout his

career, but even there he refined the metaphor over time. In one memorable line from

1953, he (rhetorically inhabiting the voice of "all Pashtuns") referred to himself a talib

for his own human rights: che talib zd da khpdl haqq yam ('being that I am a talib,

seeking haqq'). The word haqq in Persian and Afghan Pashto encompasses 'law' or

'legal rights', and simultaneously refers to the ultimate reality of the universe, even God.
63
Ziyar 1998: vi.
 233

The talib in that phrase builds a triple meaning: a seeker of objective truth and wisdom; a

devotee in search of union with God; and a person demanding human rights and good

governance.64 Each meaning reinforces the others with added weight.

In his most critical works, though, Malang Jan presented meticulously structured

arguments, building on yet broadening the scope of the traditional genre known as

charbayta mentioned above. In the hands of Malang Jan and his contemporaries, the

charbayta was reincarnated as a vehicle for synchronic political-economic analytical

argumentation: that is, poetic "political science" rather than poetic "history" or "lyric".

The importance of this intervention should not be under-emphasized; it is not often in the

cultural history of any community that entirely new rhetorical genres are created. Poetic

'political science' charbaytas have remained a powerful genre to the present day. It

implies a change in something larger, in the public through which the genres circulated.

That topic is discussed in the final sections of this chapter; while in the present section I

describe the area of discourse itself.

These new charbaytas often drew into a discussion of how the rural, local poor was

marginalized ideologically and materially. Leaving aside the matter of intense feelings of

anomie, the aspect of systemic analysis in these poems is a perspective significantly

informed by that of the struggling intermediate classes and their liberalist intellectuals

impinged upon by the state's political-economic channels of power. Malang Jan

frequently drew links between economic imperialism; its support of Afghanistan's dual-

tiered economy; that economy's implication in the patriarchal model of the dynastic state;

64
See Caron 2009-10 [forthcoming] for an extended discussion on the performative constitution of a
Pashtun nation within that poem.
 234

local profiteering exploiters; and lack of education which could enable the Pashtun mass

to progress in the world at large. The following charbayta gained some fame.

The poem begins with a sar, or introduction/refrain, which expresses the topics of

the arguments to be fleshed out later in the poem. It will be disassembled and re-woven

into the subsequent stanzas, each of which explore a discrete ramification of his links

between these topics, as a way of tying each ramification into a something of a unified

argument:

Today once more my heart aches, thin and sharp

Once again I've found pain in the mirror of my thoughts.
My eyes are all mixed up with blood
If only this world's bazaar didn't mix things up so!

The first line of the refrain uses a Pashto expression describing a physical reaction to

unexpressed rage, the emotional impact of the phenomena Malang Jan wishes to discuss.

The second invokes the principle of reflexivity, which will be redeployed in various

permutations. The third line does not reappear; and the fourth is the meat of the

explication: the world's bazaar, the totality of the affairs of men, which will be deployed

in various specific subsets to discuss how this impacts the individual. These lines have

been highlighted throughout the following translation, to draw attention to its rhetorical

structure. The body of the poem follows. Since the discursive structure is integral to its

meaning, it is reproduced uninterrupted and in its entirety:

Respected listeners, dear friends! --/-- Esteemed guests, loved ones!

There are a few things I worry about, and that I wish for --/-- Don't be frustrated
with me; I am full of pain
Please forgive any bitterness in my discourse --/-- In the harsh words of a sick
man, there's bound to be sorrow
I am in pain, I sing painful songs --/-- But now I'll explain what the pain in my
heart is.
Due to our negligence we can't open our eyes --/-- Today once more my heart
aches, thin and sharp
If you look out onto this world --/— Just look at their drive, their self-respect,
their ethics-driven motivation
They imagine inhabiting the moon —/-- Living above the land, in the air
We still just wallow in the dirt --/-- We can't escape the profiteering of exploiters
Full rivers bursting with water flow in these parts --/-- But the plains are barren
from lack of water
God gives us so much soft land --/-- Thousands and millions of acres
Unfortunately the Pashtuns lack a sense of ideals —/-- Once again I've found
pain in the mirror of my thoughts.
If Pashtuns were to all come to possess knowledge --/— These deserts of ours
would become fertile
Why should there be famine in our land? --/-- Why should our seed be so
expensive?
The reason is, there's no effort, no ideal --/-- This nation has no concept of these
things.
Every man is ever more inclined to follow his own interests --/-- They have no
interest in education or schools
If we familiarize ourselves with education --/-- And open our eyes to the secrets
of knowledge
We won't live mixed up in need and expectation —/-- If only this world's bazaar
didn 't mix things up so!

II.
There's probably not one Englishman left illiterate --/-- Left unsuccessful in his
knowledge
95 percent of us are illiterate --/-- We have to travel three villages over just to
find a corrupt accountant/tax man
No one would ever see a naive Englishman --/-- Who left school as a failure
Our tender youth fail in droves --/-- And invoking this failure they abandon
school
In truth, they have no such thing as pashto or honor --/-- The fathers of these
failures lack resolve
If a Pashtun son fails, it's nothing short of death --/-- Today once more my heart
aches, thin and sharp
Civilization itself started in Balkh --/-- The world was ignorant and gained
knowledge from us
But people advanced beyond us and became scholars --/— The students became
the teachers of the teachers
Four hundred years ago, my friends --/-- America was totally obscure, listen to
what I say!
Today their thought has climbed to the heavens --/-- It has reached Mercury and
Mars
What a shame that we, in our Pashtunness --/-- Today we have to travel to
America for education
We can't produce a single scholar in the Pashtun nation —/-- Once again I've
found pain in the mirror of my thoughts
Today if a new blade comes in from outside --/-- We somehow get the desire to
buy it
Not a desire to make it for ourselves, by ourselves --/-- That we should fill our
 236

bellies by the fruits of our own labor

We sell our cotton and wool to the rest of the world --/-- It sells for 2 or 3
[presumably Afghanis, the currency unit] per bushel
Then we buy back the cloth for 100 or 90 a yard --/-- And nobody in the bazaar
can fight with the shopkeeper over that
The money we spend on tea and cigarettes —/-- Our year's earnings go to foreign
countries in one minute
Due to my failure I am mixed up in shouting and crying --/-- If only this world's
bazaar didn 't mix things up so!

III.
God gave this homeland great mineral stores --/-- But due to our ignorance we're
carried away by flash floods
We have great oil-springs in our villages --/-- I'm not lying; it's in every vein of
this land
But we lack the knowledge to appropriate them for ourselves --/-- To make
ourselves determiners of our existence
How long will we rely on foreign-sold oil? --/-- I'm not afraid; I won't shut up
about this
I'm going to make a little inference about it all --/-- For God's sake, let's rise
above our self-interested divisiveness
The result of divisiveness is that one lowers oneself --/-- Today once more my
heart aches, thin and sharp
In any other country where people's votes are counted —/-- Whenever a ruler or
president is actually elected
He works 24 hours a day --/-- That one man takes on responsibility for the
satisfaction of the nation
[But] if we elect you to the national parliament —/-- You don't answer to me; I
answer to you
But we can't even stop fighting for a period of 5 months --/-- We slaughter sheep
by the flock
When our leaders carry on like this —/-- What other complaints should the mass
give?
A fire has lit itself in my lungs due to this sorrow --/-- Once again I've found
pain in the mirror of my thoughts
Hey Pashtun! Go and sit in a cinema --/-- So that you can get exposure to the
outside world
Other people inform themselves about affairs --/-- So cast your sight onto your
current condition
In this world there are academics --/-- Who have invited experts in every art
But our broken, defeated drums, harmoniums, and rubabs65 —/— Have they been
patronized; have they ever been free?
My Khans and Maliks only care about the bribes / pay them --/-- My Shaykh
Sahib [head of a religious brotherhood] tells me to raise an apocalypse
I've never seen a true servant among them —/-- If only this world's bazaar didn't
mix things up so!

A harmonium is a portable hand-powered reed organ; a rubab is a plucked lute with a skin face. Both
are highly emblematic, in Afghanistan, of specifically Pashtun music.
 237

IV.
If I say nothing, I'll swell up from anger --/-- If I say something, God help me,
I'm frightened
There are certain khans among our Pashtuns --/-- Who day and night pine after
young boys
Occasionally they do it at gunpoint --/-- They all belittle themselves alone!
What could the pleasure of khan-hood be for them --/-- That they should be
caught up in the love of a young boy?
When I look at this practice and these matters --/-- What hope do I have for the
relations between rich and poor?
Well, whatever their fate may be, they'll arrive at it --/-- Today once more my
heart aches, thin and sharp
So now, what should I say about certain governing officials? --/— It's OK, I'm
not upset, I consent to them
Because I'm all torn up by their green willow switches --/-- Dear God, am I a
human or an animal?
OK, my audience is chastising me; I am cowed --/-- I'll just drop the subject of
them here
Raise up your hands in sincere prayer --/-- Let's go to God with humility, seeking
pardon
Oh God, may you cool our fever of spitefulness —/— May you satisfy the hungry
bellies of these people
May you place us beyond the darkness of our ignorance --/-- Once again I've
found pain in the mirror of my thoughts
Kill this germ of divisiveness floating in our veins --/-- Oh God, through your
beneficence, give us wisdom
Make each Pashtun the master of his own factory --/-- Make all students into
teachers in the schools
Show me "Afghan-made" automobiles —/-- Display me as a miracle in front of
the whole world
Oh God, through the power of your Beloved [Prophet] --/-- Never lower the
Pashtuns' banner in the world's eyes
Sorrow's son, in this era, am I, Malang Jan --/--1 live in hope of progress for the
Pashtuns
I am the beggar mingling on every door in every hamlet --/-- If only this world's
bazaar didn 't mix things up so!66

In this poem, two simultaneous directions of progression are noticeable. The poem starts

off discussing local poverty and lack of education, and moves up to the level of Pashtuns'

lack of international competitiveness as a nation. Reaching the national scale, this

Malang Jan 1998: 99-104

 238

direction of discussion merges with the national level of political power. The political

discussion then moves downward onto the level of local ramifications of this power, the

way that social phenomena such as a zero-sum calculation of self-interest play out on the

local scale. Particularly in the final stanzas, Malang Jan explicitly broaches the subject of

personalized patrimonial political power by juxtaposing relations between rich and poor

with pedophilic sexual contact, and by characterizing punishment by state authorities as

the intensely personal, paternalistic act of disciplining with a willow switch. Further, this

comes right after he promises to "make an inference" about why the Pashtun population

has been unsuccessful in education and technological advancement, and thus why it has

been subjected to a highly unequal global economic order.

V. Shifting Publics, New Discourses, and Cross-Class Alliance:

While criticizing the patrimonial order, its deprioritization of mass education, and

restricted access to control over the economy; and while adopting features of a liberalist

argument shot through with the alienation of the marginalized, Malang Jan's critical work

laid bare societal cleavages in the act of its performance as well. In the 1949 Jalalabad

gathering of the nationwide Independence Day Celebration, bolstered by Malang Jan's

burgeoning reputation, his musician apprentices (shagirdari) presented a full morning of

musical social commentary. The event's organizer, 'Abd Allah Bakhtani, was

apprehensive as to how the program would be received by the aristocratic officials

present, including the province's governor. Due to the crowd's immense show of

approval, however, the governor felt pressured to publicly present Malang Jan's party
 239

with a substantial cash prize. The governor attempted, in turn, to pressurize Malang Jan

into publicly thanking him for it, in what Malang Jan saw as an attempt to reestablish

public symbolic dominance over the party. Through Bakhtani's intervention the attempt

at imposing patrimonial dominance was subverted, by inscribing another structure of

homogenizing otherness upon the audience and the rural poor in general. Before the

crowd, Bakhtani deftly recast the entire episode as a display of the governor's

appreciation of "the voice of the rural mass".67 This invoked a public very different from

what the patron intended, and very likely it was different from the public that Malang Jan

might have conceptualized as well, though there is no evidence of that.

This case is a manifestation of something larger. Malang Jan's ideological alliance

with the reformism of the Ittihad-e Mashriqi in particular and the burgeoning national

reformist intellectual class in Jalalabad and Kabul allowed him to begin circumventing

the traditional, local patronage structure of oral poetry communications as practiced by

professional poets and musicians.

As is apparent from the episode described above, this patronage structure in the

rural manifestation of pyramidal monarchic system came to extend upwards in scale to

the provincial and national levels. We do not have much detailed information about day-

to-day rural dynamics of poetry production, circulation, and consumption in this region of

Afghanistan, despite a wealth of preserved individual poems and poet biographies. There

is, however, some such information available in relation to the similarly agrarian Pashtun

regions on the other side of the border. The following account has been confirmed to me

as holding true for the case in rural Nangrahar by Afghan intellectuals who worked in the
67
Bakhtani 2004: 85-88
 240

1940s and 1950s, or who conducted field research with oral poets from that time (the vast

majority of whom are now deceased).68

Ajmal Khattak writes in his memoirs that in his rural area prior to the late 1930s,

each major poet moved around on a local circuit. He protected his own territory and

measured his status against other poets, challenging them to ritualized competitions

which established dominance in the area. The losers of these impromptu competitions

would often surrender the tool of their craft, their harmonium, to the winner; and usually

give up any aspiration to be a grassroots intellectual after that.

Poets did this partly out of their drive to be respected in their art. They also

competed because they were directly dependent on patronage by local power elites,

collecting cash grants or prizes, besides prestige, from the local landlord himself or from

people who congregated at the landlord's hujra.69 Professional musicians could not

survive without these payments; and depending on the livelihood of the poet (especially

if the poet was from an impoverished background) these contributions to musician

shagirdan also helped support their poet leader.70 While Khattak does not mention

reasons why powerful people would patronize poets, it seems intuitive that any powerful

interest would have a stake in channeling formal public discourse especially in very local,

and hence more personalized, situations. The khan could not control the discourse itself,

as we saw in the beginning of this chapter, but the social institutions he managed could

influence who got to speak the most.

68
Khattak 2005: 50-51 and subsequent, passim. The following description was confirmed for
Afghanistan's case in personal conversations with Habib Allah Rafi' and 'Abd Allah Bakhtani in April
and May of 2007 (in Kabul and Peshawar, respectively).
69
Khattak 2005: op. cit.
70
This was the case with Malang Jan's contemporary in Laghman, the poet Mamnur, who also achieved
considerable fame throughout the eastern region. See PSIV: 310-311.
 241

These dynamics of patronage seems to have meant in practice that local amateur

and professional poets could privately be as critical and anti-paternalistic as they liked,

but if so, their work did not receive patronage.71 Besides the lodges of local notables

(and sometimes the shops of local merchants),72 professional poets and their singers

would present their skills at weddings, circumcisions, fairs and weekly village markets,

and other large public events dependent on the largesse, or at least the tolerance, of

village authority.73 As such, the poets would have had a powerful incentive to exercise

some degree of self-censorship if they sought professional authority.

The subversiveness of romantic lyrics with their alternate constructions of

masculinity, and the line of flight afforded by religious discourses, were about as far as

they could go as long as performed poetry was concentrated territorially on district-sized

levels of patronage. That was a mode of resistance, and it was unmistakably public, as the

beginning of this chapter argued. Still, it was not political on the dominant plane of what

De Certeau would label 'strategy'. It eluded and inverted, and all that pervasive low-level

activity must have had a cumulative effect; but it did not articulate new types of dominant

social relationships in performance or in discourse. On the other side of the situation,

regardless of the range of reformist poetry in print, directly critical poems appear to have

been uncommon on the performed local level. This was, of course, less true for non-

professional poets who also had other stable social roles, such as shopkeepers, talibs,

malangs or, as Khattak singles out, herbalists. Even so, professional poets defended their
71
Of course this is not intended as an absolute rule, but as a statement of concrete historical outcome.
BG: 9 alludes to this phenomenon in a discussion of popular poetry, especially women's.
72
BG: 22 mentions an interesting case, where a Sikh merchant, Birbal, maintained multiple shops in a
cluster of Nangrahari villages in the early 20* century. His shops became a sort of local institutional
network for poets - including Birbal himself- to congregate.
73
Kakar 1995: 14-15; Ziyar 1998: vi; Khattak 2005: 31-34; 50-54.
 242

territory from other professionals and amateurs alike; and so exercised disproportionate

influence.

The rise of large state-linked poetry festivals complicated the picture. On one

hand, local and regional officials patrimonially tied to the monarchy attempted to treat

these festivals as larger versions of the local poetic infrastructure, assuming that they

could operate in the same way on the tribute and honor system, with poets competing for

honors bestowed by the individualized patron or ruling class.

On the other hand, the involvement of the liberalist cultural intellectual class and

the discursive realm of state officialdom itself acted in tension with the practice of

person-oriented rule. While both print media and festivals were designed to perform the

patriarchal state in real time, the actual managers of these events and publications were

for the most part liberalist intellectuals who desired a true constitutional political system.

They were the same intellectuals tied to the Pashto Totana who made up the core

membership of the formal portion of the Wex Zalmiyan.

Malang Jan was effectively able to formulate his critique by circumventing to some

degree the local Pashtun power structure through his support by this cosmopolitan

intellectual class. Beyond this enabling factor, a rhetoric of equality in citizenship, and

the state's enacting of this rhetoric through civic events, meant there was now a domain

opened to the possibility of more direct expressions of discontent coming from the

specific angle of civil rights vis-a-vis one's government. Moreover, liberalist and

subaltern discourses seem to have interacted in an organic way, each strengthening each

other to configure this civic discourse, and each configuring and disciplining each other.
 243

The rise of the official public festival is entirely synchronic with the rise of social-critical

poetry in subaltern genres.74 Although this rise may have strengthened the continuum

between reformist-cosmopolitan and marginalized-local poetic practice, the above

episode demonstrates that this mutual configuring was somewhat skewed in favor of the

more elite reformists.

Accordingly, the reformist-critical features of the subaltern poetic practice

mentioned here took on a number of concerns hitherto concentrated in cosmopolitan

liberalist discourse. For rather than focusing on specific local inequalities and injustices,

Malang Jan's poetry began focusing on national'-scale, systemic matters. As mentioned

before, Malang Jan's interaction with reformist, liberalist intellectuals of the rural gentry

who ran the provincial print media, as well as his interaction with the national Pashto

Academy (the two fields significantly overlapped) also spurred a sustained critique of the

entire political-economic system of the time. That critique took much of its concerns

from liberalist critiques of person-centric, hierarchical rule, and the role of global

political economy in boosting that rule.

In the case of the formal core of the Wex Zalmiyan movement in Jalalabad, which

included Bakhtani among others, this harnessing of oral poetry to publicize liberalist

critiques and "enlighten the mass" was intentional, and was aimed at circumventing tight

state censorship over print and electronic media.75 Indeed, Malang Jan was just one of

many subaltern poets linked to this party, to say nothing of the wider field of critical
74
Refer to Nasir 1983 for a very short yet unique discussion of the rise of public festivals in Kabul,
Nangrahar, and Kandahar.
75
Conversation with Abdullah Bakhtani "Khidmatgar", May 1 2007, Peshawar. In the same interview,
Bakhtani also relates that certain elite poets, himself included, composed "folkloristic" critical poems
anonymously for musicians to circulate, while publishing "cultivated" genres in their own name. See
also Bakhtani 2004: 83-85
 244

poetry; though he does appear to be the most prominent. Cultural and political activists

such as Bakhtani made it party policy to use the state allocative apparatus to project this

sort of poet onto the provincial, and even national, stage; and they also used extensive

personal networks to ensure that critical poets and the musicians who performed their

works were invited to private festivals across the Pashtun areas of the country.76

While this might seem to reinforce the individual-patronage model, the critical

discourses in Malang Jan's work, and the horizontal publicness that it articulated,

undermined it considerably. So did another factor. Like subaltern poets on the local scale,

the Wex Zalmiyan also relied on the varying modalities of authorship inherent in poetic

practice to project critical poetry further. Specifically, they capitalized on a phenomenon

of collective authorship similar to that described by John Hawley, Christian Novetzke,

AH Asani, and others in multiple South Asian poetic contexts.77 This means that the

original poet - perhaps Malang Jan or Mamnur - received authority as an independent

intellectual. And casual musicians reproduced poets' songs faithfully with little variation

across regions. But apprenticed devotee musicians, shagirdan, also exercised license to

use their poet's name in creating original, critical material all over eastern Afghanistan;

or adapted other songs with a long folk tradition, even riddles, to a famous poet's

sensibility, and then used that poet's name in the signature couplet.78 The above authors
76
Bakhtani Khidmatgar, personal conversation, 1 May 2007, Hayatabad. See also Daoud 1982, p. 152,
for allusion to the sociopolitical importance of private celebrations in rural areas.
77
Hawley 1988 is directed at this phenomenon; Novetzke 2008 calls it "corporate authorship". See also
Asani 1996.
78
I was told this by an individual who does not wish to go on record as having tampered with Malang
Jan's memory; but who pointed out one poem where the apprentices even included indication that they,
rather than the poet himself, composed the poem. In that poem the "authorship" couplet has:
Da Malang Jan da shagirdan ba pre shor wl —/— Har sok che rishwat khor wl pa ian de
weregT (Malang Jan's shagirds will loudly decry him --/-- May whoever takes bribes fear for
his life!)
Still, it seems likely, given the role of certain 'gatekeepers', that many to most of the poems that found
 245

describe corporate authorship in centuries-old traditions of devotion; which Novetzke

describes as 'publics'.79 The Pashto case allows us to see this phenomenon in formation,

around a new public of expressed devotion to the Pashtun nation and to ideals of

subaltern rights, with roots in wex zalmai ideology but extending far beyond the core

cosmopolitan membership of that group. Poetic communications articulated the Zalmiyan

proper with a public articulation of "the rural mass", filtered through the poor devotee

Malang Jan and others.

Dozens of poet-performers working on local variations of critical themes across the

country were part of a participative oral poetry public nurtured by the Wex Zalmiyan.80

Liberalist cosmopolitan intellectuals tied to the Zalmiyan would ensure that certain poets'

students, and students of students, would get local exposure, even in weddings and such

events, all over the eastern regions of Afghanistan, rather than only in a few villages like

before. Of course, state events also grew, presenting an opportunity for liberalist

organizers to frame performances in terms of "the voice of the rural mass" - in full view

of both patriarchs and subalterns. Over the period from the late '30s to the early '50s,

because of the combination of the critical impulse of poets like Malang Jan and the

organization techniques of liberalist intellectuals, the name of poets like Malang Jan

essentially became an authorial commodity indexed to "critical voice of subaltern

their way into Malang Jan's collected print works were composed by him. The same need not be said,
necessarily, of the many poems "signed" with his name that have not been included in any printed
collection as yet. These are fairly common, and some have even appeared on the internet, in old (though
newly digitized) recordings by some of Malang Jan's shagirdan.
79
See Novetzke 2007 for the distilled argument.
80
'Abd Allah Bakhtani did not use the word 'public' in personal conversation with me; there is in any
case no direct Pashto equivalent (we spoke in Pashto). He did, however, indicate that the situation was
too organized to label it 'anonymous folk culture', and nowhere near organized enough to call it an
"innovative mass communications infrastructure built on popular poets' networks" when I inquired if
that were the case (using, as I recall, the admittedly tortuous phrase "oto uhsi sha 'irano da rawabitd pa
bansat, da jam 'J mufahime yawa riBwe wasila").
 246

Pashtuns".

In the case of other poet-performers, exemplified here by the memorable jokester

and musician Hazrat Baz, it seems that Zalmiyan composed the bulk of the material

themselves in the poets' name. Hazrat Baz was a gifted comic and had an excellent

singer's voice, but in terms of poetry he began by singing other poets such as Barkat

Allah Kamln, and only later gained a reputation as a poet in his own right. The liberalist

intellectuals - in this case, 'Abd Allah Bakhtani, Qiyam al-Din Khadim, 'Abd al-Ra'uf

Qatll Khugiyanai, and others - composed original "Hazrat Baz" songs in a folk style,

shrouding the eliteness of their persons, and perhaps the eliteness of their discourses as

well.81 They were banking on the fact that the audience at any given Hazrat Baz

performance, or performance of Hazrat Baz's own students, would assume that the songs

were an authentically subaltern take on issues that may have been raised somewhere far-

off in more elite circles in Kabul or Jalalabad, which Hazrat Baz had access to as a

performer but ordinary rural people did not. Thus Hazrat Baz's name became a

commodity linking elites, who held a reformist aspiration for a horizontal public sphere,

directly to a mass heavily disciplined by state patriarchalism.

However, popular poets' critiques need not be linked only in an intellectual-

genealogical or social-network fashion to liberalist ideologues. In the political economic

setting described in these two chapters, cosmopolitan intellectuals of the Wex Zalmiyan

and the rural poor had many interests in common. The case seems, again, similar to that

81
We are on firmer ground in the case of Hazrat Baz than in the case of Malang Jan, probably because
fewer people have been as strongly investing in Hazrat Baz. The compiler of GZ mentions 'A. R. Qatil
Khugiyanai and 'Abd Allah Bakhtani by name in this connection ; while 'Abd Allah Bakhtani
mentioned Khadim as one of those who wrote for Hazrat Baz as well, in personal conversation, 1 May
2007, Hayatabad.
 247

of the North West Frontier of British India, when small-holding intellectuals interacting

with cosmopolitan public spheres, and agrarian laborers together forged joint critiques. In

eastern Afghanistan of the mid- to late 1940s and 1950s, and especially in the irrigated

lowlands of Nangrahar, much of the liberalist class was drawn from similar small gentry.

Poets from this class, together with popular and lower class poets such as Malang Jan,

often leveled the exact same critical analysis of patrimonialism, its lack of honor, and its

corrosive social effects, against the collective regional rural dominant class as was seen in

British India.

All the same, this particular cross-class alliance is not adequate to explain all the

ideological dimensions in popular political poetry as it was evolving. In Malang Jan's

work, and that of most of his popular poet contemporaries, there is a distinct tension

between layers of cosmopolitan liberalist critique, and layers inscribed by the very

political economy this critique aimed at protesting. That is, there are visible layers of

personalized authority with a specifically patriarchal tinge. This effect, in the period

before Malang Jan gained official patronage by the royal family, was at once less direct

and more immediate than the effects of liberalist support.

One way of thinking about the diffuse way the effects of patriarchal state rule

surfaced in Malang Jan's work is a factor that may have reinforced the trans-local, pan-

Pashtun scale of Malang Jan's address. This dynamic shares aspects with Flagg Miller's

argument about trends in upland Yemeni poetry showing some similar characteristics to

the case here. Miller notes that

poets, as exemplary public speakers, confront the individual's encompassment

within markets whose currencies, exchange rates, products, and potential
rewards, are heavily regulated by radically trans-local forces...[N]ew demands
 248

[were] made on the tribal poet: demands of nascent national communities,

emerging publics, unfamiliar forms of political activism; demands on the very
identity of the "tribesman".82

However, the case in Afghanistan during this period (i.e. before the mid-1960s) was

different in some other ways. With some exceptions a highly mercantile and mobile

people were encapsulated, not totally but more than they had been earlier. The trans-

localization of performance-based poetry in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan really marks a

process of forcible rooting within still newly-defined provincial and nation-state

territories. It is striking how many early landdy, those snippets of everyday criticism from

in the 1944 collection Mill! Sanddre, reflexively portray not the 'nation' [millat] invoked

in their title, but rather a dialectic of homeland and long-distance travel across the

Pashtun region.83 This collective memory, and attempts to negotiate new power relations

within a more local political rootedness, explain the strong prevalence of reformist,

Pashtun-centric nation-state discourse in the themes of the postwar Pashto poetry as

opposed to the Yemeni. In lowland Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, despite efforts by

reformists to create a different order, the primary trans-local factor confronting rural

people's identity was no longer commerce but rather the increasing penetration of patron-

client power, linked to the state on all levels. Microcosmic aspects of this included

hierarchical features of khan-hood and district administration, which were disciplinary in

a highly paternalistic way as Malang Jan expressed in his poem reproduced here.

82
Miller 2002: pp. 30 and 36
83
Some such lancbys from the first page of poems alone include:
Grandfather Indus comes down through the ravines --/-- Bringing Kashmiri shawls of poetic
thought
Eventually, O body, you will turn to earth —/— So much do I drag you across various homelands
You '11 crumble andfall eventually, Peshawar —I— The girls ofNangrahar are cursing you [for
taking their lovers away for business or labor]
Alas, alas, O Homeland! --/-- The clothes of my own homeland have fallen off my body
 249

Macrocosmic aspects included the threat of discipline through military force; but also the

patriarchical dynastic state invoking putatively "Pashtun" principles of kinship; and the

symbolic investment of the nation in the person of the monarch - both as the incarnated

state itself, and as a sort of family elder for the entire country.84

The previous sections of this chapter focused mainly on middle-class reformist

aspects to Malang Jan's nationalism, arguing that this discursive configuration arose as a

result of a trans-localized protest against the structure of local Afghan politics. It also

argued that this protest was achieved by channeling earlier expressions of inchoate

alienation through a specific and complex field of regional and national communications

production, circulation, and reception. It ended with a suggestion that beyond a

transformed subaltern alienation and liberalist critique, the dynastic state also exerted

significant effects on Malang Jan's work, in terms of translocalization and ideology. The

final section of this chapter will explore the phase of Malang Jan's life when he was

subjected to direct state patronage, and will focus further on the deep effects of

patrimonial political economy onto his work.

However, the section also reinforces attention to the stubborn expression of a

strong alienation and anomie reminiscent of his earliest work. When channeled into a

social-analysis direction, this emerged as ambivalence to a liberalist developmental order

as well as a strong distrust for state authority in general. Both liberalist intellectuals and

elites with a stake in the personalized monarchic system were forced to accept this
84
Edwards 1996 discusses most of these issues at greater length than I have seen elsewhere, though in his
discussion, certain factors (such as state and lineage) are considered to be mutually exclusive, producing
a "moral incoherence." In contrast I see these as not entirely separate domains; and even where they can
be shown to be in conflict, this dissertation implies that the modalities of their interaction must be
treated in a less schematic, more particular fashion that pays attention to both local and long-distance
inequalities as they shift over time.
 250

skepticism. It was part of the cost attached to the benefits of harnessing nationalist

popular poetry as a contestatory field of political communications. It is a trend which has

remained strong in most grassroots articulations of Pashtun nationalism since then.

VI. State Patronage and Pashtunistan:

As suggested above, the translocation of scale for poetic criticism of paternalistic,

personalized political power, deflected away from the local towards state-wide and

international stages, was paradoxically linked to patrimonialism itself. There are many

levels on which this seems to be true.

On the institutional level, a shift in scale of ideology could relate to the unintended

side-effects of the efforts of provincial administrators to extend the local patrimonial

system of poetic patronage to larger, provincial and national, scales. In effect, once poets

were forced to measure their status vis-a-vis one another on a larger regional, even in a

few cases national field, it seems plausible that the subjectivity of their poetry would also

broaden in scale. Even the partial extension to a larger territory of a principle of

patrimonial territorial poetic supremacy could in fact explain why Malang Jan is the only

poet among many contemporaries with similar concerns to achieve the stature he did: one

of the two major schools in modern Pashto music and popular poetry is named after

him.85

85
N. Majrooh 1998: 27. The "Malang Jan" school is also called the "Nangrahar School", after Malang
Jan's province. This coincidence of poet and territory in terminology adds a further degree of
plausibility to the argument. The other school is the more folkloric Logari school, named both for the
Logar province and for its initiator, the (mostly Kabul-based) poet-musician Talib Logari. Interestingly,
based on anecdotal evidence, even in Logar the act of performing critical poetry at weddings has come
to reference the Nangrahari poet specifically, as evidenced by the neologistic compound verb malang-
janT kardan.
 251

From the ideological point of view, once the poet was transported to a larger scale,

the value ascribed to the personal dignity and status of the poet could then be trans-

valued, in Flagg Miller's terminology, onto the dignity and status of a people or nation,

through the poet's performative enaction of public events designed to articulate precisely

this people or nation.86 Indeed, there are notable, frequent slippages in Malang Jan's

poetry between his own personal alienation and loss of dignity - as a marginalized figure

outside the patrimonial allocation order - and the collective dignity of the oppressed

Pashtun nation as he conceives it, outside the allocation order of "the world's bazaar".

He often used the same vocabulary for both, and as shall be seen, it is a vocabulary

paradoxically susceptible to the patrimonial order itself. This tripled discursive tension—

between an expression of completely marginalized alienation from personal status; a

structured liberalist critique of the patrimonial order; and affective ties to that very

patrimonial order itself—is complicated by the final chapter in Malang Jan's career. It is

a period when he and the poetic infrastructure, expanding over the previous few decades,

was directly patronized by the upper reaches of the patrimonial state itself.

It was mentioned previously that Sardar Muhammad Da'ud Khan had first heard

Malang Jan's poetry around 1945, when he was Defense Minister. Direct patronage

appears to have been inopportune at that time. However, in 1950 Muhammad Da'ud

personally requisitioned a private instructor to teach Malang Jan to read and write his

own poetry. The next year Malang Jan was granted an annual stipend of Af. 600 from

the government. In 1953, once Muhammad Da'ud took over as Prime Minister in a

family-internal power grab and oriented the political economy of the country toward
86
Miller 2002, passim.
 252

etatisme, Malang Jan was invited to Kabul and appointed Music Director for Kabul

Radio. This ensured a greater dissemination of his work than the medium of radio

narrowly suggests, as musicians would listen to the radio and then perform material they

thought would be appreciated by their audiences, in all the traditional and new forums

described above. Once performed live, poems and songs would be picked up by other

musicians potentially without radio access. Mumtaz Nasir (formerly of Pakistan's Folk

Heritage Institute) mentions that when he was in college in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the

1950s, Malang Jan's work was performed even by Afghan nomad musicians at their

weddings, in their temporary campsites across the road from the college.87 Thus, once the

upper levels of the traditional communications networks were reconfigured, the effects

radiated back outwards onto the most local levels.

In any case, the government built Malang Jan two houses, one for him and one for

his apprentices, in the orchard of the Independent Directorate for Tribal Affairs in Kabul.

This was a body aimed at social management within Afghanistan, as well as

disseminating the cause of the Afghan state in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of

Pakistan, and to some extent in that country's Pashtun-majority Northwest Frontier

Province. Pakistan had been pursuing a "forward policy" of "strategic depth" in

Afghanistan, carrying over from the same British practice. Pakistan manipulated Afghan

political tensions - especially between religious orders, the royal family, and reformists -

to achieve a more pliable Afghanistan. Afghanistan tried using Malang Jan as one of

many ideological weapons to do the same, and was not entirely unsuccessful. Until the
87
Mumtaz Nasir, personal correspondence. In particular, based on Nasir's information and other sources
including Bakhtani 2004, it seems that the musician 'Abd al-Rahman "Or", a student of one of Malang
Jan's apprentices and a fine poet in his own right, was one key player in long-distance grassroots
dissemination of Malang Jan's work.
 253

mid 1970s, secular and quasi-socialist Pashtun nationalism, exacerbated by Pakistan's

political structure, was one of the most persistent political challenges faced by the

Pakistani state.

Drawing from irredentist ideologies put forth by various government and

intellectual agencies, Malang Jan was placed in charge of a daily half-hour "Free

Pashtunistan" program, which was broadcast across Pakistan even to Pashtun industrial

and service sector migrant workers in the far southern industrial and port city of Karachi.

In this program he put forth his same poetics of powerlessness which were never quite

effaced by the liberalist-influenced discursive layers he accumulated, but he directed this

poetics toward an expression of impotent sorrow and outrage at political injustices visited

upon the Pashtun mass in Pakistan, and Pashtun nationalist leaders languishing in

Pakistani jails.

Besides this, once Malang Jan faced the daily pressure of composing a half-hour of

original Pashtunistan-oriented music, then teaching it to and rehearsing it with his

students, his output in other, more domestically subversive directions markedly

decreased. Even his songs not specifically addressed across the border began primarily to

feature praise of the bravery and the virtues of strong, self-sufficient, free Pashtun youth,

though up to his accidental death in 1959 he never completely ceased composing social

critique. Of course, this shift in theme may also be most strongly related to the newly

direct supervision to which he was subjected.

There were other domestic agendas at work in the state's direct patronage of

Malang Jan. Muhammad Da'ud needed Pashtun nationalism, for the time being, as
 254

integral to the continued legitimation of the dynastic-lineage structure of rule which, once

he took power, it seems he was unable or unwilling to tamper with despite his republican

outlook. It was probably a combination of both.

It seems that the most immediate and direct challenge both the republican

Muhammad Da'ud and his cousin, the king Zahir Shah, faced was the pressure from

activist cosmopolitan intellectuals. Those were the same reformists who provided Malang

Jan with an initial institutional and discursive escape route outside the rural patronage

networks - a line of flight leading to the point where Muhammad Da'ud could co-opt him

in the first place. By heavily propagating a Pashtun nationalist ideology which expressed

subaltern discontent in some form, and by doing it through a network of grassroots

communications, Muhammad Da'ud attempted to forge direct links with the Pashtun

mass through commodification of the discontent present in popular poets' voices. In

doing so, he was able to sideline the popularity of the liberalist, anti-monarchist

intellectuals, who were heavily integrated into Parliament. Such intellectuals, as civil

servants, also overwhelmingly managed the national and provincial print and electronic

media in both Pashto and Persian for the government (admittedly with considerable

editorial oversight by the royal family itself). Malang Jan lacked any such independent

base of power, however weak, and may have therefore have appeared easier to control in

Da'ud's calculation.

More importantly, the liberalist intellectuals' discourses never resonated with the

mass as strongly as Malang Jan's did. Possible reasons why they did not are linked to the

reasons why, while the specifics of Malang Jan's critiques tended to criticize and subvert
 255

dyadic patron-client politics, there are features shaped by this very model. These reasons

go beyond the specific nature of the honors and submission regime of poetic performance

noted in the previous section, important though that factor was. Reasons why Malang

Jan's poetry was such an effective vehicle for direct center-to-subaltern links relate more

to the layers of ideology deposited on Malang Jan's work by the specific structure of the

state as it ruled in the eastern provinces.

Malang Jan's repeatedly expressed a desire for total personal economic self-

determination and a desire for the radically self-sovereign male subject to be the crucial

and fundamental actor in society. This subverted his strongly expressed faith in the ideals

of industrial developmentalism and a horizontal civic culture, and reinforced valuations

of the 'tribal' male archetype inherent in this dynastic model of state. The desire in

Malang Jan's work for a radical personal self-sufficiency was, in part, such a prized and

powerfully compelling desire in subaltern registers due to the way the government ruled

patrimonially: through local powerful men who were able to control their own destiny in

an unmediated fashion. In the context of rural notables' submission to the central state,

of course, this was not an entirely accurate reading of the political field. But it was an

accurate view of the rural notable from the vantage point of rural society's margins. Even

in the highly critical poem reproduced in this essay, Malang Jan seems to have taken for

granted the order of an idealized righteous elder beneficently ruling his juniors, since

much of his critique stems on the absence of such beneficent elders in practice. This bears

strong resemblances to Ramachandra Guha's argument in The Unquiet Woods regarding

subaltern critique in the Himalayan princely state of Tehri Garhwal, building on earlier
 256

arguments by E. P. Thompson.88 That is, subaltern demands were not that the system be

reformed in a radically egalitarian direction, but that social superiors take on, and fulfill,

more paternal obligations to the masses.

This particular desire also reinforced a subaltern ambivalence to industrial and

bourgeois developmentalism notable in Malang Jan's work, as mentioned previously.

While Malang Jan championed education as well as development of industry as essential

to the betterment of the lives of the rural poor, as did both anti-monarchist republicans

and liberalists in the state structure, his work shows a persistent hope that

proletarianization can be avoided: "Make every Pashtun the owner of his own factory".

Finally, it is possible that Pashtun emigrant seasonal proletarianization in British

India contributed to the pull of the personalized monarchic model. For much of the year

emigrant laborers worked in a completely nameless and faceless environment, abstracting

them from their individualized status in a social system; while for the rest of the year,

they lived with the women in their families and had a personalized, prestigious status as a

Pashtun man in a Pashtun household. Many landsy from the 1944 collection that is cited

throughout this chapter, landdy which are most likely somewhat older than that date,

speak of the ties of love to the people and institutions of home.89 Are these the thoughts

of women patiently waiting for their lovers; or of men expressing their own anxieties and

longings through imaginations of what they left behind?

88
Ramachandra Guha 1989, especially Chapter 4.
89
Although some scholars such as Habibi (see fh. 12 of this chapter) try to date them, I believe that all we
can say is that this landdy dates to no later than 1944; but I also believe, as I argue at the beginning of
this chapter, that a certain claim to non-contextuality is built into the genre. They generally speak of
long-term socio-cultural trends that enough people experienced to exist as individually deployable yet
still collective, public memory.
 257

Beloved, go off and may your path be well

I am a Pashtun woman, and I will sit here guarding your honor {pat)90

Some speak more directly of a certain ignoble quality involved in the outside world:

O Separation, enough! Quit your violence

You've spilled my blood like a river; you've shamed me in the world91

While there may be a potential argument that poetics of separation are simply a common

literary trope in Persianate literature, the following builds on affective aspects to real

migrations without any room for doubt:

Separation has set the mountains crying

Why are you heading to Dakka (at the Khyber border), where the land begins?92

Issues of identity are featured in these poems, as seen in the first landay above; and

expressions of split consciousness are also not uncommon:

Separation is a butcher with knife in hand
He's cut me up like a collectively-bought sheep, distributed in multiple houses93
O Separation, look how you've split us apart
We used to be like the two brains of a walnut, in a single shell94

From one direction, this split and doubled experience, in which seasonal anomie in non-

Pashtun lands was followed by a season at home, may be argued to be constitutive of the

fear of domestic proletarianization noted above. But also, along with the transvaluation

of personal dignity to national dignity - a semiotic process that was linked to

patriarchical power relations, as I argue above - the same transvaluation could apply in

reverse. That is, the monarch represented at once the institution of patriarchal elderhood

MiS: 31
MiS: 9
MS: 8
Beltun qassab chars pa las ke -/- Za ye wanddy kram kor pa kor me garzawlna (MiS: 9). Rahimi and
Rohi 1979: 566 define the word wanday as : (1) share, part (2) butchering (3) a slaughtered sheep
bought collectively and shared by several persons
MiS: 10
 258

and the embodied person of the nation, and the dignity of this person and nation was

transvalued into the personal dignity of the individual. Though he sometimes criticized

the institution of unelected rule in practice, Malang Jan extolled the virtues of the abstract

righteous elder responsible for the well-being of his juniors. Even on society's margins,

and especially when proletarianized outside the borders of the Afghan state, the idea of a

specially entitled Pashtun lineage ruling other (rarely specified) ethnicities of Afghanistan

seems to be, for Malang Jan, a source of dignity in which all Pashtuns could share.95 This

is especially so in Malang Jan's later phase when he was writing propaganda intended for

a Pashtun audience, subjected to strong cultural suppression in the national public sphere

in a Pakistan ruled by non-Pashtuns.

Patronizing a shift from the local to the irredentist level, like the shift in scale of

patronage described in Section V, seems one compelling explanation for the shift in

critical content of Malang Jan's work. To put it another way, the act of giving Malang

Jan a different audience to address was another way in which the royal family protected

itself, through means other than force or surveillance, from confrontational discourses in

the powerful traditional communications circulation infrastructure. This effect would be

increased given the fact of Malang Jan's disproportionate influence in the field of popular

poetry, due to the specific way elite hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces configured

the field. It is uncertain whether this discursive reclaiming of Malang Jan for the

patriarchal state mode - through shifting his scale of address, not just through the act of

closer surveillance - was an effect calculated by Muhammad Da'ud or not. Even in the

95
I thank Radhika Singha (personal correspondence) for the highly important points developed in this
paragraph and the one preceding the landdy selections.
 259

hagiography of Malang Jan, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Muhammad

Da'ud's investment in Pashtunistan was strictly related to domestic political leverage.

 260

Chapter 6

Conclusions

At the outset, writing this dissertation was important as a way to introduce into western-

language literature a sustained analysis of the modern cultural histories of Pashto and

visions of Pashtunness in Afghanistan before 1978. The lasting cultural contributions of

early 20th century Kandahari civil society; the important figure of Muhammad Gul Khan

Momand; the rise of nationalist oral literature as a genre; and particularly the Wex

Zalmiyan movement have all been seriously under-studied. A serious monograph-length

survey of modern Afghan Persian literature has only been published in 2008; no such

survey exists for Pashto, much less one grounded in the wide social, political, and

economic history of Afghanistan and the region.1 It is hoped that this dissertation might

provide a groundwork for future study.

Besides that, though, there are two primary contributions that I seek to make

through this dissertation. The first is related to the field of Afghan historiography; and the

second is related to a growing body of literature on "Publics beyond Print".2

/. Afghanistan: Expanding the View

1.1. Institutions of Social Awareness

In this dissertation, I have traced specific reasons why print-based urban public

spheres did not enjoy much reach in the mid twentieth century, reasons which are quite
1
I refer to Wali Ahmadi 2008.
2
I draw this phrasefromthe title of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate South Asia Colloquium's
Occasional Series for 2007-2008.
 261

different from commonly-given ones. Diplomats during the Cold War seemed to have

viewed this lack as symptomatic of a "Soviet-style police state", especially under the

statist government of Muhammad Da'ud.3 More recently, since 2001, claims of this lack

have interfaced with the resurgent modernization theory driving much foreign donor

intervention in Afghanistan. This is evidenced by the truly massive amount of attention

given to normatively 'modern' forms of mediation by bodies such as, to name only two

of the largest, USAID and UNESCO. An overview of this recent activity is outside the

scope of this dissertation; suffice it to note that in many cases this activity was, and is,

explicitly intended as a way to create a modern society, a way of overcoming localized

fragmentation. There is an assumption, not at all tacit, that equates lack of bourgeois

media institutions with something more generalized: fragmented and thus non-modern

forms of social awareness; even an 'earlier' stage of social development.

This is not only true of the discourses emanating from the western side of the Cold

War ideological fence. The Afghan communist regime's Ministry for Information and

Culture, under heavy and active KGB advisement, approached radio with a perspective

that was similarly informed by a teleological modernization-oriented view.4 It was only in

the late 1980s that the Ministry began analyzing alternative routes of social

communication, especially oral poetry and musicians, as trans-local public institutions -

likely in an attempt to understand the power of the resistance.

In contrast to the sorts of views above, this dissertation began from a point not

rooted in the perspective of lack. It pointed out that a form of public participation rooted

3
See Cullather 39, citing Angus C. Ward.
4
See Skuse 2002, especially 270, for details.
 262

in Pashto print (and radio) was repeatedly constrained in its both its social range and its

social domain, and in the types of features that were permitted to be published through

those routes. But this was due to political and economic factors, not to a low stage of

social development - it relates to the relative weakness of a Kandahari bourgeoisie, only

one social sector among many.

This was not to say that other channels of large-scale translocal communication and

participation did not exist. Print was only one craggy tip of a much larger iceberg of other

ways of relating people to each other, ways that were not always linked to "powerful

groups - parties, factions and businesses - to act as mouthpieces for their own interests,"

as one token instance of the new modernization drive describes the history of Afghan

mass media (couched in the language of post-conflict reconstruction).5 Indeed, of all

routes of communication other than the direct personal negotiation among individuals

described in Chapter Three, that characterization of specific channels of communication

as "mouthpieces for various interests" is probably most true of print and radio in

Afghanistan's history. Extremely low confidence in the credibility of those forms of

media was partially a result of this trend;6 but I would suggest that it was also the result

of something else. Even in the very brief periods where print more or less free, those

types of formal media were firmly cordoned off from Afghans on the outside by sharply

defined gatekeeping mechanisms of social status, and command of standardized

languages; to say nothing of the government ownership, patronage, and censorship that

characterized them far more commonly. In contrast, most Afghans had access to a range
5
UNESCO, "Afghanistan: Media Development". Http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-
URL ID=21958&URL DODO PRINTPAGE&URL SECTION=201.html. Accessed 14 June 2009.
6
Skuse 2002 is about low media confidence since the 1970s; I have seen marginal comments in various
sources on low media confidence regarding earlier period s as well, though no sustained studies.
 263

of other, more immediate ways to interact with society beyond their locality.

There were numerous other participative channels configured in the main, or in

full, by shared participation in very large-scale zones of cultural circulation. This

participation was unequal and was disciplined by social power, but as the contributors to

Calhoun's edited volume have pointed out, that seems to be true of all public interaction.7

The reason why powerful actors such as the state or its personalized allies could attempt

to influence, co-opt, expand, or commandeer such diverse zones as village hujra

attendance or oral poetic performance is because these were already the institutional

channels of various publics.

To reiterate the point: rather than seeing a primordial lack of public participation

that never developed, the picture presented through the data in this dissertation is

repeated attempts by monarchic authority and its mid-ranking allies to fragment, to

verticalize, or to appropriate already high levels of horizontal public participation across

large territories. Print was only one, and probably the weakest one, of all the

participative spheres introduced here. And, we should note that the monarchy was

unsuccessful in executing this fragmentation. Activists such as the Wex Zalmiyan were

able to mobilize as many alternative routes of horizontal integration as the monarchy

attempted to fragment vertically. Monarchic attempts to appropriate zones of non-print

public interaction for itself were related to the monarchy's inability to fragment those

publics in the same way they could fragment the power of specific troublesome lineages,

by physically transplanting some of their branches.8 Publics of participation were at once

7
Calhoun 1992.
8
Edwards 1996 contains information about the most recent case of this in the late 1940s, when branches
of the Safi tribe were transplanted following an uprising. But all rulers from Zahir Shah back, had most
likely engaged in physical fragmentation of lineage solidarities; the Amir 'Abd al-Rahman employed it
 264

too ephemeral and too pervasive for that.

The fact that many of these participative spheres extended from rural subaltern

populations to central elites is itself an important point related to the historiography of

Afghanistan and other non-western societies. This is especially true of societies, in

contrast to many post-colonial ones, which are characterized by an enclaved central state

such as Afghanistan developed; where the upper tier of state was financed by foreign

capital obtained through elite trade or aid, while lower tiers were forcibly oriented toward

greater levels of local subsistence. This upper tier of political economy is frequently the

only one to have gained much notice in historical study. Narratives of modernization are

narratives of the expansion of this enclave; narratives of failed modernization follow its

contraction. Regarding Afghanistan, even the most sophisticated scholars have often

assumed that the enclaved state would foster an "inward-looking" "peasant-tribal" society

outside the center, concerned mainly with local affairs and traditionalist in nature.9 The

empirical case studies presented here subject this assumption to suspicion, and are one

route through which one can expand the historiographical view of mid-century Afghan

Pashtun political discourse outside urban centers and the government, where it has

overwhelmingly been concentrated thus far.

1.2. Historiography of State Rule

The above has implications for the study of Afghan history beyond an argument

about communications and social parameters of awareness. In this dissertation, I argue

many times; and in Chapter Three of this dissertation I speculated that this may have been one among
several reasons that Muhammad Gul Khan Momand as Interior Minister sent some tribes to the northern
territories of Afghanistan.
9
Rubin (1988): 1200; this is also a major shortcoming of Daoud's (1982) otherwise ambitious study.
 265

that the specific configuration of abstract public participatory spaces (that is, abstract as

opposed to physical public spaces) was an integral part of Pashtun, and Afghan, politics

in the twentieth century. In his 1996 work Beyond Eurocentrism, which is concerned with

different historical strategies through which state rule obtained consent in different

political-economic contexts, Peter Gran identifies a historiographical typology of what

he calls 'Tribal-Ethnic" states (into which Afghanistan would certainly fall). He argues

that literature on such states has tended to claim that they rule mostly through coercion or

pragmatic, ad hoc co-option of powerful individuals, who then maintain control on behalf

of the government on the basis of atavistic social ties of kinship or religious sect or

language. Study of individually-internalized hierarchies of dominance - what Gramsci

called 'hegemony' - is something that has only been seen as applicable to 'metropolitan'

societies, or to elite sections of other societies.10 Gran protests: "we are left to suppose
u
that some hegemonies use coercion, others persuasion. This can't be!"

This dissertation has pointed out multiple ways in which co-option of individuals

itself fit into a much wider hegemonic project of internalizing specifically monarchic

modes of power into the psyches of the monarchy's subjects, through the entryway of

masculinity, kinship metaphor, and the prestige of male elders. Far from being

primordial, a strong feeling of attachment to certain particular ideologies of ethnicity and

elder-centric modalities of kinship solidarity are things that received institutional support

from monarchic power and its intermediaries, as Chapter Three argued. This is not at all

to say that the state invented these ideologies and the social structures to which they were

10
This is one implication of Ranajit Guha's 1997 Dominance without Hegemony when theframeworkis
applied to the post-independence period.
" Gran 1996: 195
 266

related , but it is a claim that the state reinforced them in demonstrable ways in order to

bring a 'natural' legitimacy to its rule. Muhammad Gul Khan did not invent the hujra, but

he expanded their numbers and he told Pashtuns that they were not Pashtun without them.

This provided, among other things, increased venues for the performance both of local

village influence through select khan and elder patrons, and of translocal state influence.

And the modality of influence that it engendered also naturalized the metaphors upon

which 'Pashtun' monarchy rested.

Correspondingly, the (sometimes contradictory) range of cultural traits that people

came to attach to Pashtun ethnicity is testament to negotiations between the powerful and

the less powerful. The negotiations that resulted gave their unique texture to public space

- to the types of routes through which people mentally, and not even consciously, related

themselves to others. Even as the government sought to reorient populations into state

hierarchy through co-option of individuals, monarchic concessions that tolerated

personalized negotiation allowed the incursion of locally elite ideologies of personalized

egalitarianism, and even masculinized claims to a local share in sovereignty, into the

works of very powerful state ideologues. That undermined certain hierarchical aspects of

monarchic ideology. The fact that in many remote and semi-remote areas (at least, remote

as seen from the center), every non-dependent, non-professional man considered himself

a khan was a fact that shaped Muhammad Gul Khan's ideology on the central stage.

The case of the Wex Zalmiyan movement shows a different way that negotiations,

or more properly, contestation, determined the texture of public space. That public

movement had its roots in horizontal, transnational public space located in learning.
 267

Numerous individual activists sought to strengthen the transnationality of this public

space, fusing struggles for egalitarianism in Afghanistan with anticolonial struggles in

British India and then (after 1947) anti-centrism struggles in Pakistan. In the Afghanistan

end of this transnational public space, critiques of false consciousness were apparent

precisely because the activists conceived of phenomena like fragmented thought

processes to be the result of a particular set of power relations, not a low point on an

evolutionary scale of development. Their ideology of individual sensitization to power

relations as spiritual liberation may be part of what made the Zalmai public so easily

replicable without specific ties of network, when the movement's formal activist sections

began their outreach drives.

//. Publics Beyond Print

ILL A Transnational Public Sphere

The case of the Wex Zalmiyan's transnational social roots and development raise a

number of points that can unify several branches of scholarship on publics and public

spheres. On one hand, there is an increasingly large literature that traces the development

of local or regional publics external to print, to which I will attend shortly. On the other

hand is a growing attention to the creation of transnational publics that address issues of

common concern falling outside of, or transcending, a Westphalian framework of modern

nation-states.12 The rise of the Wex Zalmiyan is a regional example of exactly what Vikki

Bell sees Fraser as advocating: "solidarity that is built communicatively across nation-

12
See Nancy Fraser 2007, "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere", for a normative argument.
 268

states, linking various local events with the identification of a global system of

injustice".13 For Fraser, it is neo-liberal global capitalism which is the 'global system'; for

many of the actors in this dissertation, it was the absoluteness of the Westphalian nation-

state system that was at issue, as it was manifested in the governments of Afghanistan

and British India or Pakistan.

Inasmuch as this trans-border solidarity was rooted in Pashtun national identity,

this might seem to undermine its relevance to Fraser's normative argument. It could be

argued that such a solidarity was equally as restrictive as a nation that fit squarely into the

confines of a state. Nonetheless, in this case the transcendence of the monarchic state and

its structures of rootedness was itself part of the goal of public activism, a way to gain

leverage for local reform - calling to mind Archimedes' saying that he could move the

entire Earth as long as he had a long-enough lever and a place to stand. By

provincializing local structures, the Wex Zalmiyan sought to reform both from within and

from without. Their critical nationalism was more effective when separate from the state.

Also, the Pashtun-centric component was a local section of something much larger.

In the Pakistani NWFP under the One-Unit centrism of Ayub Khan in particular, it seems

that Pakistani Pashtun activists in Peshawar sought similar leverage in their contacts with

Afghan reformists such as Benawa and Khadim; and the same appears to be true,

anecdotally, of even very local reformists in the Tribal Areas.14 At the same time, the

more elite of the Pakistani Pashtun activists cultivated ties with reformist politicians of

East Bengal such as the Mawlana Bhashani, a later analog of the Peshawari Mawlana

13
Bell 2007: 2
14
I cite oral family history related by an individualfromMomand Agency in Pakistan, who does not wish
his name or any further details of specific events to appear in print.
 269

'Abd al-Rahim Popalzai in many ways who similarly wedded a peasant-centered Marxist

activism with Deobandi doctrine. The routes of exchange between Afghan zalmiyan and

Bengali peasant Awami activists were highly circuitous and quite mediated by various

intervening publics, but they existed nonetheless. Thus, Pashtun nationalism in these

critical publics was part of a larger grassroots-educational reformism spanning great

distances throughout South Asia.

Returning to the more immediate dynamics focused on the several hundred miles

on either side of the Durand Line, it is interesting that this transnational critical public

awareness was not at all fostered by 'modern' mass media, but by a variety of interlinked

publics that developed mostly outside of print. The Wex Zalmiyan activists used print but

it was neither their primary strategy of outreach nor their primary life experience. Their

own personal histories took place in a milieu of memorized canonical texts, and they

interfaced with the sometimes memorized and sometimes improvised world of performed

poetry - a realm which was dominated by the semi-literate and the non-literate.

Technical developments such as the nearly universal availability of SMS

communications have affected matters somewhat, as their translocal and even

transnational deployment in recent political events in Pakistan (2007) and Iran (2009)

have shown. Even so, the overwhelming emphasis on easily-recognizable forms of mass

communication such as print and the electronic media of television, radio, and others, has

itself injected a bias against non-industrialized regions into the normative discussion of

transnational public activism. In contrast, in this dissertation we find that critical poetry

flowed with nomads from Kabul to Peshawar, and educated gentry engaged similar ideas
 270

impersonally, but through personalized networks, from Kabul to Peshawar and from

there, as noted in the above paragraph, to regions as far as Bengal. This case, it is hoped,

can inject a wider and richer variety into comparative and theoretical discussions of

transnational public opinion.

II.2. Publics Beyond Print and Hegemonic Projects

The mobilization of non-print public awareness as activism across borders brings

the discussion to the second contribution I hope to make with this dissertation: one in

relation to the growing literature on "publics beyond print".

There is indeed a growing body of literature on the public sphere which no longer

privileges mass media as they are traditionally-conceived. If the Afghan setting (which

contains the literature I know best) is anything to go on, local researchers in their own

languages have been fairly sensitive to non-print publics. In his 1988 Mufahama-yi

ShifahT wa Sayr-i Tarikhi-yi An dar Afghanistan (Oral Communication and its Historical

Trajectory in Afghanistan), Asad Allah Sho'ur provides examples, essentially, of

transcribed texts attesting to various different publics among all major linguistic

communities of Afghanistan, inasmuch as the ability to pinpoint stable texts that can be

separated from any one definable community presumes a public - a social space defined

only by the circulation of discourse.15

Christian Novetzke's 2008 work on bhakti, among a growing number of others,

moves beyond basic identification of non-print publics to make some claims on the wider

importance of studying them. Novetzke's intervention separates the academic literature

15
Sho'ur 1367 SH [1988].
 271

on the integration of publics from any connection to a postulated 'modernity', to say

nothing of print, even while it demonstrates that face-to-face transmission routes can

create a mutually-recognized space for shared interaction in culture across great

geographical ranges.16

In another thread of literature, one explicitly related to non-print publics in the

contemporary world, authors such as Lisa Wedeen emphasize quite different aspects of

non-print publics, rooting their discussion in normative philosophical studies and arguing

that very localized settings for face-to-face publics outside of mass production can exert

large-scale political effects. On qat-chews in Yemen:

I do not argue that Yemen, in being more democratic in some ways than
other countries in the Middle East, is either the sense of possessing fair,
contested, elections or of offering adequate experiences of substantive
representation. Rather, I argue that there are different sites for enacting
democracy, and a robust democracy needs to be using them all. Thus, a
consideration of democracy also requires theorizing about aspects of
substantive representation that are evident in Yemen, namely, the
widespread, inclusive mobilization of critical, practical discourses in
which people articulate and think through their moral and material
demands in public

The cases I describe seems different from most of the literature on localized or even

regional non-print publics, and is therefore important when placed in a comparative

dialog.

The four chapters I present here each describe how a zone of public participation

was transformed from being one specific public among many, to a public in which

activists sought to establish their forms of participation as politically dominant. That is,

intellectuals from different backgrounds identified greater or lesser possibilities for their
16
Novetzke 2008, Religion and Public Memory
 272

own (or others') participation in various domains, and sought to improve representation

or access to power by increasing the importance of the particular public spheres where

they could have the most effect and best speak out in ways that would help them control

their own destiny.

And, in contrast to arguments that mechanically-reproduced media is the domain of

hegemonic power while something like 'orality' or contingency always fits into the realm

of 'everyday' tactical resistance, the cases in the latter three chapters relied on print only

marginally, yet still were aimed at the goal of political-cultural supremacy. This

hegemonic project is the reason for the high content of Pashtun nationalism in each of the

domains; and the gradual development of this project of supreme power over cultural

circulation, not just resistance or a dialogic impulse, is is what following the rise of

Pashtun nationalism in each domain can illustrate. The way this is true can be best

illustrated by looking at perhaps the location with the least obvious hegemonic potential

contained among the case studies of this dissertation: oral poetry.

Novetzke's case described how bhakti publics could link very large areas. But,

such settings made no claims to exclusivity. In contrast, when Malang Jan's public poet-

persona asked "Am I not eight million Pashtuns on the plains and mountains?" in

Tashkhls mo da rani wdka (Diagnose our affliction), he was not claiming to speak for 'A

public'. He was implicitly standing as a spokesperson for THE Pashtun public as a whole,

claiming to speak for the only public that mattered.

The case of Malang Jan calls into question a dichotomy between discourse and the

objective conditions of that discourse's production, circulation, and consumption.

 273

Through this method, one can gain insight into the mutually articulative links between a

discourse's substance, an intellectual's subjectivity, specific communications fields, and

the broader political and economic configuration of a state aspiring to be a nation-state on

highly contested terms. This method can also answer questions of participation by the

margins, by inquiring into the agentive act of valuing a discourse, and engaging in

consumption of it. And, through this method we see that the integration of oral poetry

with other trans-local publics moved it from a very oblique form of localized debate, like

the case in Wedeen's discussion, to a force for aspiring hegemony.

Before the mid 1940s, romantic passion (and quite often, romantic abjection as a

major subset) were by far the most common themes in everyday local, popular performed

poetry. Those themes were used locally by elites and non-elites alike, but to differing

ends. More sober, more uniformly abject romantic poetry served to highlight social

marginality in poetic publics on the village level - a setting where rural poor and rural

elites alike had access to participation, by virtue of the poetic colonization of the hujra as

described in Chapter Five. Such poems were reproduced across regions by mobile

performers and individuals; and through their linkages to either ego-less 'abject'

(especially malang-titled) or 'non-abject' (named) authorial personae, these local

critiques were linked to social positions. They therefore injected local readings of social

position into a trans-local social debate about local power relations. As when Afghan

activists reprinted Peshawari poetry in the Ittihad-i Mashriqi, the universal abstraction of

poetry helped it circulate and remain relevant outside contingent circumstances. Yet, the

restricted experience of local power relations remained the focus. As I argued in Chapter
 274

Five, in De Certeau's language this form of oral poetry was a public 'tactics' that spread

widely.

When Malang Jan's alienation of the marginalized was transposed to a different

scale of publicity, and channeled through more diverse patronage networks, the

ideological possibilities changed as well. Popular poetry was increasingly filtered through

a new form of non-literate mass media, with ideological input from more translocal

directions such as provincial state patronage and cosmopolitan reformism. Popular poetry

became more global in its ideological scope, and sought to integrate structural critique in

the form of what I called oral "political science" at the same time as its composers and

patrons of all stripes moved in consciously activist directions. That is, contests expressed

through attempts to control poetic performance, and the ideologies contained in it, both

simultaneously moved onto the plane of De Certeau's hegemonic 'strategy'. The effects

of disciplining oral poetry performance into an infrastructure at prominent socio-political

levels radiated back into the ideology of amateur poetic production in settings such as

weddings, hujras maintained by local notables, and others, forcing one to reconsider the

dichotomy between 'traditional' and 'modern' communications. Little about this

communications infrastructure can meaningfully be called "traditional", given the extent

to which it developed new social ranges and domains fairly rapidly.

In fact, the face-to-face aspect of reproducing stable texts actually seems to have

increased, rather than decreased, the possibilities for poetry as an active medium by

which to internalize political-cultural values in non-elite populations. Recirculation of

Malang Jan's poetry involved actively choosing to do so, and was thus an act which
 275

assimilated even casual performers into a public that defined itself discursively as THE

public. So did new improvisation of Malang Jan-style protest poetry. Political discourse

channeled through oral poetry achieved a reach seldom achieved by more commonly-

studied forms of media in Afghanistan, or many other places for that matter. In arguing

for the potential of orally-constituted publics to achieve something like hegemonic status,

to the best of my knowledge the cases here stand only with Said Samatar's curiously

undercited (outside of the Africanist literature) study of Somali nationalism and the oral

poetry of Sayyid Mahammad Abdille Hasan.17 It should be no surprise that statist elites

recognized this potential when Muhammad Da'ud patronized Malang Jan directly.

In conclusion I emphasize that Malang Jan is intended here to serve as a prominent

example of a larger phenomenon of fundamental change in Eastern Afghan cultural

history, and the same is true of Muhammad Gul Khan Momand. At the same time, each

of those individuals came to exert disproportionate influence that helped define the fields

in which they operated - Muhammad Gul Khan in administration fields; erudite cultural

studies in the governmental framework; and rural power networks; and Malang Jan in the

field of oral poetry as an infrastructure supporting his own subaltern aspirations and as an

allied mode of publicity for the Wex Zalmiyan movement. The cases of urban print in

Kandahar and of the rural publics linked to the Wex Zalmiyan are not individual case

studies, though I have clusters of biography to describe them too. Still, it is quite possible

to view these as representative only of themselves. They deal with only a small few

individuals, in half a century of the cultural history of one ethnicity of one highly diverse

region. Still, even while these case studies are extremely specific, and can be measured
17
See Samatar 1982
 276

on the basis of what they contribute to the study of Afghan Pashtun cultural history in

English, I doubt that they are typologically unique in the world; and I hope that they are

useful as a contribution to the comparative historical study of public spheres and of

nationalisms.
 277

Appendix

Transcription and Transliteration of Pashto and Persian:

Pashto transliteration is made difficult by lack of western scholarly attention to

Pashto and by the lack of a standard orthography in Pashto writing as well. Intricacies of

phonological and orthographical representation are not the main priority for this

dissertation, but consistency is desirable. I adopt a middle ground between transliteration

(grapheme for grapheme substitution) and transcription (representing speech sounds).

Thus, I write "short" vowels although they are not indicated in the original script; while I

use macrons to indicate written vowels even though Pashto generally lacks phonemic

differences in vowel length. For sake of greater accessibility, I use standard English

digraphs in cases where other systems might use diacritics - e.g., ch in place of c.

Overall I have used a highly modified version of the guidelines laid out in the

Annual of Urdu Studies "Note on Transliteration, 2007 rev." since like Urdu, Pashto

employs retroflex consonants as well as a wide variety of symbols for IzJ, and possesses a

far broader range of vowel phonemes than Arabic. Given the Afghan pronunciation of

Persian and its relative nearness to Urdu pronunciations of many Persian words, a

modified A US transcription system suffices for (Afghan) Persian as well. I employ a

variety of other diacritics for Pashto affricates and palatal consonants, affixed onto a

basic transcription of the Nangrahar dialect that I know best. Thus I use i and s for £ and

£ where Mackenzie (1987) has/ and c, and others might prefer dz.and te.

Pashto vowels even in Afghan texts are irregularly written plene or not, sometimes

according to the idiosyncracies of each author. Therefore I have used a case-by-case

 278

approach to them: vowels which are written in the original text in question appear with a

macron. Final he is transcribed here only when pronounced as a consonant; when

representing a vowel, it is omitted.

I use full transcription/transliteration only in the first major appearance of words or

names in a chapter, and in the bibliography. Proper nouns such as "Zahir Shah" or

"Jalalabad" which have a more or less standard English spelling are used in that spelling.

Subsequent mention for proper names without standard English spellings occurs without

diacritics, though in all cases the vowel d is retained if stressed. For example, Da Paxto

Totena appears elsewhere as "Pashto Tolana". The representation of 'ayn ( ' ) and hamza

( ' ) is also retained. Names employing the Arabic construct state are transliterated with

the article al-, despite (or because of) pronunciations which differ according to local use:

e.g. 'Abd al-Rahman rather than 'Abdorrahman or 'Abd-ur-Rahman; Siddlq Allah rather

than Siddlqullah. The case of the place name Qandahar/Kandahar varies. Where it is

used in reference to the place, or when citing from Pashto, I use the current standard

Pashto spelling with k. When used as part of individuals' names such as Mawlawi 'Abd

al-Wasi' QandaharT, I follow that individual's self-employed usage (if they produced

written works) even though their pronunciation might be transcribed kandarai. When

transcribing from Persian, I use the standard Persian spelling with q.

Finally, I do not refer to Muhammad Gul Khan Momand's idiosyncratic

orthography in my transliteration of his works, or to the Pashto Tobna's early

conventions which failed to distinguish the two dental affricates (voiced and unvoiced).

Instead, I convert citations from these older materials to the contemporary values of
lexical items in modern standard Pashto orthography as given in Rahimi and Rom's 1979

Paxto-IngilTsT Qamus.

Vowels and Diphthongs

Latin representation Afghan script representation

d h IS
a \

e \

i \

o f
u f
a t / i
e
*J 1^
J
4
0
J»
u
J»
aw
jl
ai ^ /tfl
W c$l 1 i$»
 Consonants

Latin representation Afghan script representation

P <—>
V

t O

t
S^

s o
J
£
ch
£
b
C
kh •
C
z
c
s
c
d i

d
3
z «

r
J
r
V
 Consonants

Latin representation Afghan script representation

z •

J
zh
J

s
U"
sh
J1
X
L*

s
o*
z
J*
t J,
z &

<

t
•
gh
t
f «J
q
(i
k S
g
JlJ
 282

Consonants

Latin representation Afghan script representation

I
J
m
r
n •

J
n

h 0

w
J

y
<$
*
f-
 283

Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila.
1999. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Adamec, Ludwig.
1991. Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan. Metuchen, NJ: the Scarecrow Press.

Adams, Julia.
2005. "The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern
Europe" pp. 237-266 in Camic, Gorski and Trubek, eds. Max Weber's 'Economy
and Society': a Critical Companion. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ahmad, Aijaz.
1973. "The National Question in Baluchistan" Pakistan Forum 3(8/9): 4-18+37

Ahmadi, S. Wali.
2008. Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and
Form. London: Routledge.

Ahmed, Akbar S.
1984. "Religious Presence and Symbolism in Pukhtun Society" pp. 310-300 in
Ahmed and Hart, eds. Islam in Tribal Societies from the Atlas to the Indus. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.

1980. Pukhtun Economy and Culture: Traditional Structure and Economic

Development in a Tribal Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

1976. Millennium and Charisma among Pathans. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.

Akhundzada, MawlawT' Abd al-Wasi' Kakar Qandahari

1305 [1926-7]. Pashto. "Wd Ta'awunu 'ild 'l-Birri wa'l-Taqwa [Help ye one
another unto righteousness and pious duty]. First printed in 1360 SH [1981] in
Habibi, ed. Da Afghan Ydd, Kabul: Da Afghanistan da 'Ultimo AkademI
[Afghanistan Academy of Sciences].

Akram, 'Asim.
2001. Persian. NigahT bi Shakhsiyat, Nazariyat, wa Siydsat-hd-yi Sardar Muhammad
Da 'ud [A Look at the Personality, Views, and Policies of Sardar Muhammad Da 'udj.
Alexandria, VA: Intisharat-i Mlzan [Mizan Publications].
 284

Alam, Muzaffar.
2004. The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200-1800. Chicago and New
Delhi: University of Chicago Press and Permanent Black.

Amin, Shahid.
1988 (1984). "Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-1922." in
R. Guha and G. Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G.

1991. Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Rev. and extend , 2nd ed. London ; New York: Verso.

Anderson, Jon W.
1985. "Sentimental Ambivalence and the Exegesis of "Self in Afghanistan."
Anthropological Quarterly 58(4): 203-211.

1978. "There are no Khans Anymore: Economic Development and Social Change in
Tribal Afghanistan." Middle East Journal 32(2): 167-183.

Asad, Talal.
1972. "Market Model, Class Structure and Consent: a Reconsideration of Swat
Political Organization" Man (New Series) 7(1): 74-94.

Asani, Ali.
1996. "The Isma'ili Ginans: Reflections on Authority and Authorship" pp. 265-280
in Farhad Daftary, ed. Mediaeval Isma'ili History and Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Asher, Catherine B.
2004. "A Ray from the Sun : Mughal Ideology and the Visual Construction of the
Divine" pp. 161-194 in Kapstein, Matthew T., ed., The Presence of Light: Divine
Radiance and Religious Experience. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

BakhtanI "Khidmatgar", 'Abd Allah.

2004. Pashto. Zd, Malang Jan aw Khwage Naghme. Peshawar: Da Danish
Khparanduye Tolsna [Danish Publishing Society]

Bakhtin, Mikhail.
1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Balabanlilar, Lisa.
2007. "Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the
 285

Subcontinent" Journal of World History 18(1): 1-39.

Banerjee, Mukulika.
2000. The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier.
Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, and Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Barth, Fredrik.
1959. Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. London: University of London.

Bell, Vikki.
2007. "The Potential of an 'Unfolding Constellation': Imagining Fraser's
Transnational Public Sphere." Theory, Culture, and Society 24(4): 1-5.

Benjamin, Walter.
1968. Illuminations. New York: Schoken Books.

Bennet, Douglas and Kenneth Sharpe

1980. "The State as Banker and Entrepreneur: The Last-Resort Character of the
Mexican State's Economic Intervention, 1917-76." Comparative Politics 12(2): 165-
189.

1362 SH [1983]. Pashto. BTdiyani Guluna: da PTnzo Sawd Tano Paxto Sha'irano
Tazkira (n.a.) 1983. Kabul: Da Afghanistan da 'Ulumo AkademI, Da Zhabo aw
Adabiyato Sanga [Afghanistan Academy of Sciences, Languages and Literatures
Branch].

Bhattacharya, S.
1981. "Capital and Labour in Bombay City, 1928-29" Economic and Political
Weekly 16(42/43) (Oct. 17-24): PE36-PE44.

Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal.

1998. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy.

Calhoun, Craig, ed.

1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Carrigan, Tim; Bob Connell; and John Lee.

1985. "Towards a new sociology of masculinity" Theory and Society 14(5): 551-
604.

Caroe, Olaf.
1958. The Pathans, 550 B.C. -A.D. 1957. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
 286

Caron, James M.
2009-10 [Forthcoming]. "Richard Nixon and Malang Jan, 1953: Reading Popular
Pashto Poetry as a Social Scientist or Historian". In press with Serrana (Journal of
the Scientific Research Center, Kabul University; in association with UNDP, CPHD)

2007. "Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's

Afterimage" History Compass 5(2): 314-329.

Caton, Steven C.
1990. "Peaks of Yemen I Summon ": Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni
Tribe. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cole, Juan R. I.
1989. Roots of North Indian Shi'ism in Iran and Iraq. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Cole, Juan R. I., and Deniz Kandiyoti.

2002. "Nationalism and the Colonial Legacy in the Middle East and Central Asia:
Introduction". InternationalJournal of Middle East Studies 34 (2): 189-203.

Connell, R. W. and James Messerschmidt.

2005. "Hegemonic Masculinity : Rethinking the Concept" Gender & Society 19(6):
829-859.

Cullather, Nick.
2003. "Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State" pp. 22-55 in Joanne
Meyerowitz, ed. History and September 11th. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Daoud, Zemaray.
1982. L'etat monarchique dans la formation sociale afghane. Bern : Peter Lang.

Da Paxto Tolana (n.a.)

1328 SH [1949]. Da Paxto Mundsira [Pashto Broadcast]. Kabul: Da Paxto Tobna

Darmesteter, James.
1888. Chantspopulaires des Afghans. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, E. Leroux.

De Certeau, Michel; Fredric Jameson; and Carl Lovitt.

1980. "On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life." Social Text 3: 3-43.

Dhar, D. N.
1989. Socio-Economic History of Kashmir Peasantry. Srinagar: Centre for Kashmir
Studies.
 287

Dirks, Nicholas.
1987. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Dovey, Kim; John Fitzgerald, and Youngju Choi.

2001. "Safety becomes danger: dilemmas of drug-use in public space" Health and
Place 7:319-331.

Dupree, Nancy.
1985. "The Conscription of Afghan Writers: an Aborted Experiment in Socialist
Realism." Central Asian Survey 4(4): 69-87.

"The Economy of Afghanistan" (no author; summarized in English from various Soviet
sources in Afganskiy Sbornik- Kratkiye Soobshcheniya Instituta Vostokovedniya
XXXIII (1959)) Central Asia Review 8 (1960) 316-331.
Edwards, David.
1996. Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

1993. "Words in the Balance: The Poetics of Political Dissent in Afghanistan"; in

Dale Eickelman, ed., Russia's Muslim Frontiers: New Directions in Cross Cultural
Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

1986. "Charismatic Leadership and Political Process in Afghanistan." Central

Asian Survey 5(3/4): 273-299.

Eickelman, Dale R, and Jon W Anderson.

2003. "Redefining Muslim Publics" pp. 1-18 in Eickelman and Anderson, eds. New
Media in the Muslim World: the Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.

Elphinstone, Mounstuart.
1839. An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and its Dependencies, in Persia,
Tartary, and India; Comprising a View of the Afghaun Nation, and a History of the
Dooraunee Monarchy. London: Richard Bentley.

Fa'iz, Fida Muhammad.

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. "Da Hewad Shomal ta da Paxtano pa Legdawdna ke da
WazTr Muhammad Gul Khan Momand Baba AsasT Ahdafaw da Hagha pa Bab da
Muta'assabino par Ta'assub Wdlar Na-'Adlana Qazdwat [The Fundamental
Reasons Wazir Muhammad Gul Khan Momand sent Pashtuns to the North of the
Country, and Unjust Judgments about this Based on the Prejudices of Prejudiced
People], pp. 151-163 in Sapai, ed. Da Momand Baba Yad [Memories of Momand
 288

BabaJ. Peshawar: Da Sapi da Paxto Sereno aw Prakhtiya Markaz [Sapai Center for
the Research and Development of Pashto].

Farhang, Muhammad Siddlq.

1992. Persian. Afghanistan dar Panj Qarn-i Akhir. 3 vols. Mashhad: Intisharat-i
Darakhshash [Darakhshash Publications].

Firoz, M. M.
1949. "Journey to Moghalgai of the Observers' Mission" Afghanistan (Journal of
the Afghan Historical Society) 4(3): 26-35.

Fraser, Nancy.
2007. "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of
Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World." Theory, Culture, and Society 24(4): 7-
30.

1992. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: a Contribution to the Critique of Actually

Existing Deomcracy." pp. 109-142 in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public
Sphere. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

FZAPI
1356 SH [1977]. Persian with Pashto. Farhang-i Zaban wa Adabiyat-i Paxto,
[Dictionary of the Language and Literature of Pashto] vol. I. Zalmai Hewadmsl,
comp. and ed. Kabul: Wizarat-i Ta'lTm wa Tarbiya, Riyasat-i Ta'lTf wa Tarjuma [Min.
of Education, Directorate of Composition and Translation].

FZAPIII
1366 SH [1987]. Persian with Pashto. Farhang-i Zaban wa Adabiyat-i Paxto,
[Dictionary of the Language and Literature of Pashto] vol. I. Zalmai Hewadmal,
comp. and ed. Kabul: Komita-i DawlatT-yi Tab' waNashr-i J. D. A.[State Committee
for Printing and Publication of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan].

Gal, Susan.
2005. "Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of Public/Private" Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 23-37.

2002. "A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction" differences: A Journal of

Feminist Cultural Studies 13(1): 77-95.

Gankovsky, Yuri; et al. Trans. V. Bashakov.

1985. A History of Afghanistan. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Gharlbyar, Sayda Gul, comp. and ed.

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. Stsr Paxtun: Muhammad Gul Momand Baba. Peshawar:
 289

Da Danish Khparanduye Totana [Danish Publishing Society]

Ghobar, Mir Ghulam Muhammad.

2001. Afghanistan in the Course of History vol. 2. English translation by Sherief
Fayez. Alexandria, VA: Hashmat Ghobar.

1999. Persian. Afghanistan dar MasTr Tarikh, jild-i Duwwum [Afghanistan in the
Course of History, vol. 2]. Alexandria, VA: Hashmat Ghobar.

1359 (orig. 1346) SH [1980 (orig. 1967)]. Persian. Afghanistan dar Masir Tarikh.
Tehran: Payam-i Muhajir [The Refugee's Message].

Ghowsi, Muhammad 'Arif.

1347 SH [1968]. Pashto. Da Afghanistan Pohdna pa Wrostiyo Panzoso Kaluno Kxe
[Education in Afghanistan over the Last Fifty Years]. Kabul: Da Pohsne Wizarat Da
Plan Riyasat aw Da Yunesko Da Plan Jorawalo Tim [Govt, of Afghanistan,
Education Ministry, Planning Dept; and UNESCO Planning Team].

Giddens, Anthony.
1987. The Nation-State and Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Giustozzi, Antonio; and Noor Ullah.

2006. " "Tribes" and Warlords in Southern Afghanistan, 1980-2005." Working Paper
no. 7, Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political
Science.

Government of Afghanistan.
1306 [1927]. Da Asasi TashkTlato Nizam Nama [Edict on Basic Administrative
Bodies. Kabul: DawlatI Matba'a [State Press]

Gregorian, Vartan.
1969. The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and
Modernization, 1880-1946. Stanford University Press.

Guha, Ramachandra.
1989. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the
Himalaya. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guha, Ranajit.
1997. Dominance without Hegemony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

1988 [1983]. "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency;" pp. 45-89 in R. Guha and G.

Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University
Press.
 290

Gustafson, Sandra.
2000. Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.

GZ
1368 SH [1989]. Pashto. Da Gulo Zotey [A Bundle of Flowers] vol. 1. Mustafa Jihad,
comp. and ed. Kabul: Da Itala'ato aw Kultur Wizarat [Ministry for Information and
Culture].

Habermas, Jurgen.
1991. (T. Burger, trans.) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Habibi, 'Abd al-Hayy.

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. Da Mashrutiyat Ghurzang pa Afghanistan Ke. Translation
from Farsi to Pashto by Abdul Qayyum Hakimzai. Cologne, Germany: Da
Afghanistan da KulturT Wade Totana [Afghanistan Cultural Development Society].

1997. Edition and commentary of Hotak, Muhammad bin Daud bin Qader Khan.
The Hidden Treasure:: Pata Khazana. English trans, by Khushal Habibi. Lanham,
MD.

1353 SH [1974]. Pashto. Da Afghanistan PexlTk, lumrdy tok: la tarlkh da mdkha

bya da 1341 tar paya da kaluno pa tartib [Chronology of Afghanistan vol. 1, from
Prehistory to the End of 1962, arranged by year]. Kabul: Da Bayhaqql Kitab
Khparawalo Mu'assasa [Bayhaqqi Book Publishing Establishment].

1350 SH [1971]. Pashto. "Foreword", pp. Alif-He in Salih Muhammad Hotak

Qandahari, Da Paxto MasnawT [The Pashto Masnavi]. Kabul: Da Paxto Totena, da
Paxto da Inkishaf aw Taqwiye Riyasat [Pashto Tolana, Pashto Progress and
Strengthening Directorate].

Habibi, Mahmoud.
1959. Evolution economique et sociale des populations de I 'Afghanistan a I 'epoque
contemporaine. Doctoral Thesis, Social Geography. University of Paris, School of
Letters and Human Sciences.

Hanifi, M. Jamil.
2004. "Editing the Past: Colonial Production of Hegemony Through the "Loya
Jerga" in Afghanistan" Iranian Studies 37(2): 295-322.

Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud.

2008. Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation
 291

on a Colonial Frontier. Columbia University Press and Gutenberg-e.

http://www.gutenberg-e.org/hanifi/

2003. Inter-Regional Trade and Colonial State Formation in Nineteenth-Century

Afghanistan. PhD Dissertation, Department of History, University of Michigan.

Haroon, Sana.
2008. "The Rise of Deobandi Islam in the North-West Frontier Province and its
Implications in Colonial India and Pakistan, 1914-1996." Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society Series 3, 18(1): 47-70.

2007. Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Islamic Borderland. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Hauner, Milan.
1981. "One Man against the Empire: the Faqir of Ippi and the British in Central Asia
on the Eve of and During the Second World War." Journal of Contemporary History
16(1): 183-212.

Hawley, John Stratton.

1988. "Author and Authority in the Bhakti Poetry of North India" The Journal of
Asian Studies 47(2): 269-290.

Heston, Wilma and Mumtaz Nasir.

N.D. The Bazaar of the Storytellers. Islamabad: Lok Virsa Publishing House.

Hewadmsl, Zalmai.
1375 SH [1996]. Pashto. Da Paxto Nasr Atd Sawa Kala [Eight Hundred Years of
Pashto Prose]. Lahore: Millat Printarz.

Hill, Jane H.
1995. "The Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano
Narrative", pp. 97-147 in Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, eds., The Dialogic
Emergence of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric J.
1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Hotak, Muhammad Ma'sum.

1382 SH [2003]. Pashto. Drana Koransy [Prominent House]. Toronto: 'Allama
Habibi Research Centre.

1995. Pashto. "Da Afghanistan pa Matbu'ato ke da 'Hawad' aw 'Hewad' par

 292

Kalamo Yawa Pakhwanai Khpara Shswe Munaqasha." Khpalwakdy II 2(1): 160-

164.

Hotak, Salih Muhammad Qandahari.

1318 [1939] (completed). Pashto. Da Paxto MasnawT [The Pashto Masnavi]. First
printed entire collection in 1350 (1971). Kabul: Da Paxto Tolana, da Paxto da
Inkishaf aw Taqwiye Riyasat [Pashto Totana, Pashto Progress and Strengthening
Directorate].

Hroch, Miroslav.
1985. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. Trans. Ben Fowkes.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

IAA:
National Archives and Records Administration. United States Department of State.
Records of the Department of State relating to Internal Affairs of Afghanistan, 1930-
1944.

Imperial Gazetteer of India.

1908. Imperial Gazetteer of India.volume XVII. Published under the authority of His
Majesty's Secretary of State for India in Council. Oxford: the Clarendon Press.

Iqbal, Rukhsana.
1995. "The Pakhto Landay/Tappa—Ultra Short Stories in Rhyme Between
Continuity and Change" Central Asia [Peshawar] 36(2): 131-139.

Jansson, Erland.
1981. India, Pakistan, or Pakhtunistan? the Nationalist Movements in the North-
West Frontier Province, 1937-1947. University of Uppsala.

Kakar, M. Hasan.
2006.^4 Political and Diplomatic History of Afghanistan, 1863-1901. Leiden: Brill.

1995. Pashto. "Da Malang Jan Sha'iri [Malang Jan's poetry]." pp. 13-18 in Dr.
Rahmat Zlrakyar, ed., Malang Jan: da be Darbara Mill! Zhdbe Mill! Sha 'ir. Santa
Barbara, CA: All Afghan, 1995.

Kamawal, Samlm Allah.

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. "Wazlr Baba yaw Manslai Insan Wa [Wazir Baba was a
Respected Human Being]" pp. 43-50 in Gharibyar, ed. Star Paxtun: Muhammad Gul
Momand Baba. Peshawar: Da Danish Khparanduye Tolsna [Danish Publishing
Society]

Kandiyoti, Deniz.
 293

1994. "The paradoxes of masculinity : some thoughts on segregated societies." pp.

197-213 in Cornwall and Lindisfarne, eds. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative
Ethnographies. London : Routledge.

Khadim, Qiyam al-DTn

1331 SH [1952]. Pashto. Paxtunwdlai [Pashtunness]. Kabul: Da Paxto Tobna

1320 SH [1940]. Pashto. Nawai Zhwandiin [New Life]. Kabul: Da Paxto Tobna

Khan, 'Umar Faruq.

1991. Urdu. "Ek IshtirakI 'Alim-i Din [A Socialist Religious Scholar]", pp. 135-
182 in Dr. 'Abd al-Jalll Popalzai, ed. Subah-i Sarhad ki Inqilabi Tehrike aur
Mawlana 'Abd al-Rahim Popalzai. Lahore: Fikshan Ha'us.

Khan, Waris.
1988. Pashto. Da Azdday Tahfik (The Freedom Movement). Peshawar: self-
published.

Khattak, Ajmal.
2005. Pashto. Qissa Zma da AdabT Zhwand, Awala Hissa [The Story of my Literary
Life, part 1]. Charsadda: RiyazT Buk EjansT.

KhaybarT, Ghows.
1383a SH [2004]. Pashto. Da Paxto Zhabe Lapara da Wazlr Muhammad Gul Khan
Momand aw Malgaro Mubariza [The Struggle of Wazir Muhammad Gul Khan
Momand and Friends for the Pashto Language], pp. 52-62 in Gharibyar, ed. Stdr
Paxtun: Muhammad Gul Momand Baba. Peshawar: Da Danish Khparanduye Tobna
[Danish Publishing Society]

1383b SH [2004]. Pashto. "Da Wazlr Muhammad Gul Khan Mubariza [The Struggle
of Wazir Muhammad Gul Khan], pp. 64-80 in Gharibyar, ed. Star Paxtun:
Muhammad Gul Momand Baba. Peshawar: Da Danish Khparanduye Tobna [Danish
Publishing Society]

La'iq, Sulayman, gen. ed.

1363 SH [1984]. Pashto. Paxto Landdy. Kabul: Da Afghanistan da 'Ulumo Akademl.

Lai, Ruby.
2005. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. Cambridge University
Press.

Lindholm, Charles.
1979. "Contemporary Politics in a Tribal Society: Swat District, NWFP, Pakistan."
Asian Survey 19(5): 485-505.
 294

Loi, Lucia Serena.

1987. 77 tesoro nascosto degli Afghani. Bologn: II Cavaliere azzuro.

Lukinbeal, Christopher and Stuart C. Aitken.

1998. "Sex, Violence and the Weather: male hysteria, scale and the fractal
geographies of patriarchy" pp. 267-284 in Nast and Pile, eds. Places Through the
Body. London: Routledge.

Mackenzie, David.
1997. "The Development of the Pashto Script." pp. 137-143 in Akiner and Sims-
Williams, eds., The Languages and Scripts of Central Asia. London: School of
Oriental and African Studies.

1987. "Pashto", pp. 547-565 in Comrie, ed. The Worlds Major Languages. New
York: Oxford University Press.

Majrooh, Nairn.
1998. "The Taliban have Banned Music in Afghanistan." pp. 27-31 in Is' World
Conference on Music and Censorship. Copenhagen: Freemuse.

Majrouh [Majruh], Sayd Bahodine [Sayyid Baha al-Din].

2003. Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager.
New York: Other Press.

1977b. "Some Vestiges of Buddhist World-Outlook in our Collective Unconscious"

Afghanistan 30(1): 89-96.

Malang Jan.
1998. Pashto. Da Malang Jan Khwage Naghme [Malang Jan's Sweet Songs].
Oxford: Da ' Allama Sayyid Jamal al-DIn Afghan FarhangI Totana [Sayyid Jamal al-
Din Afghan Cultural Society].

Marwat, Fazl-i Rahim.

1997. The Evolution and Growth of Communism in Afghanistan, 1917-1978: An
Appraisal. Karachi: Royal Book Company.

1995. "The Impact of the Wikh Zalmiyan Movement on Afghan Politics" Central
Asia 36(2): 37-75.

McChesney, Robert, ed. and trans.

1999. Kabul Under Siege: Fayz Muhammad's Account of the 1929 Uprising.
Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers.

Merk, W. R. H.
1984 [1898]. The Mohmands. Orig. pub.: Superintendent, Government Printing,
 295

Lahore. Lahore: Vanguard Books Ltd.

Metcalf, Barbara Daly.

1982. Islamic Revivalism in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900. Princeton
University Press.

Michener, James.
1963. Caravans: a Novel. New York: Random House.

Miller, W. Flagg.
2002. "Metaphors of Commerce: Trans-valuing Tribalism in Yemeni Audiocassette
Poetry". International Journal of Middle East Studies 34: 29-57.

MiS
1323 SH [1944] (date of compilation). Pashto. Milli Sanddre [National/Indigenous/
Popular Songs]. Muhammad Gul Nuri, comp. and gen. ed. Kabul: Da Paxto Tobna.

Mlatar, Zikriya.
1365 SH [1986]. Pashto. Taliban aw Paxto Adab. Peshawar: Self-published.

Momand, Muhammad Gul Khan.

1317 SH [1938]. Pashto. Da Paxto Zhdbe Lyara, lya, da Paxto Sarfaw Nahw. Balkh:
Shirkat-i Rishtiya.

Momand, Qalandar.
1988. Pashto. Pata Khazana fi'l-Mizan [Weighing [the Evidence on] the Pata
Khazana]. Peshawar: University Book Agency

Momand, Shams al-Qamar Shams.

2005. Urdu. MohmandQaba'il, Kalaur Aj. Peshawar: self-published.

Momandl, Muhammad Ayytib.

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. "Da Marhum Momand da Isti'fa 'Illat [Reason for the Late
Momand's Resignation]", pp. 159-161 in Gharibyar, ed. St3r Paxtun: Muhammad
Gul Momand Baba. Da Danish Khparanduye Tobna [Danish Publishing Society]

Murray, J. Wolfe, ed.

1899. A Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes on the North-West Frontier of India.
Calcutta: Quartermaster General, Intelligence Branch, Government of India.

Muzhda, Wahid.
1380 SH [2001]. Persian. Commentary, pp.jTm to ye in Zabuli, Ydddasht-ha-yi 'Abd
al-Majid Zabuli, sabiq Wazir-i Iqtisad-i Milli Afghanistan [Notes of 'Abd al-Majid
Zabuli, Former Minister of the National Economy of Afghanistan]. Peshawar:
Markaz-i NasharatI Maiwand.
 296

Nangraharai, M , ed.
1333 SH [1954]. Da Khpalwatey Tarun. Kabul: Da Qabayilo Charo da Mustaqil
Riyasat [Independent Directorate for Tribal Affairs].

Narlwal, RaziqI.
1384 SH [2005]. Pashto. Larghunai aw Ossnai Kundr [Ancient and Modern
KunarJ. Kabul: Da Afghanistan da 'Ulumo AkademI aw da Dafa' Wizarat
[Afghanistan Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Defense].

Nasir, Nasr Allah

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. Da Paxto Folklor da ChapT Majmu'o Sirdndod [The
Research Methodology of Printed Collections of Pashto Folklore]. Kabul: Da
Afghanistan da 'Ulumo AkademI, Da Zhsbo aw Adabiyato Sanga [Afghanistan
Academy of Sciences, Languages and Literatures Branch].

Nasir, Nasr Allah, ed. and notes; Ulfat, comp.

1369 SH [1990]. Pashto. Da Xkarandu'i Ghori par Qaside Musha'ira [A Poetic
Competition on a Qasida by Xkarandui GhoriJ. Kabul: Da Afghanistan da 'Ulumo
AkademI, Da Zhabo aw Adabiyato Markaz [Afghanistan Academy of Sciences,
Languages and Literatures Center].

Nawid, Senzil.
1997. "The State, the Clergy, and British Imperial Policy in Afghanistan during the
19th and Early 20th Centuries" International Journal of Middle East Studies 29(4):
581-605.

Nigargar, M. Alif.
1379 SH [2000]. Naqd wa Tabsara bar Jild-i Duwwom-i Afghanistan dor Maslr-i
Tarikh [Critique and Analysis of the Second Volume to Afghanistan in the Course of
History/. Peshawar: Da Danish Khparanduye Tobna [Danish Publishing Society]

Noelle, Christine.
1997. State and Tribe in Nineteenth-century Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir Dost
Muhammad Khan (1826-1863). London: Routledge.

Novetzke, Christian.
2008. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India.
New York: Columbia University Press.

2007. "Bhakti and its Public".

O'Hanlon, Rosalind.
2007. "Kingdom, Household and Body: History, Gender and Imperial Service under
Akbar." Modern Asian Studies 41(5): 889-923
 297

Olesen, Asta.
1995. Islam and Politics in Afghanistan. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press.

OLI
1340 SH [1961]. Pashto. Osdnl Likwal [Contemporary Writers] vol. 1. 'A. R.
Benawa, comp. and ed. Kabul: Da Matbu'ato Mustaqil Riyasat aw da Paxto Tobna
[Kabul: Independent Directorate of Publications and the Pashto Tobna]

OLII
1341 SH [1962]. Pashto. Osani Likwal [Contemporary Writers] vol. 2. 'A. R.
Benawa, comp. and ed. Kabul: Da Matbu'ato Mustaqil Riyasat aw da Paxto Tobna
[Kabul: Independent Directorate of Publications and the Pashto Tobna]

OLIII
1346 SH [1967]. Pashto. Osdni Likwal [Contemporary Writers] vol. 3. 'A. R.
Benawa, comp. and ed. Kabul: Da Paxto Tobna.

Pennell, T. L.
1909. Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier: a Record of Sixteen Years'
Close Intercourse with the Natives of the Indian Marches. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott Company.

Poullada, Leon B.
1973. Reform and rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919-1929: King Amanullah's failure to
modernize a tribal society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

1970. "The Search for National Unity" pp. 34-49 in Dupree and Albert, eds.
Afghanistan in the 1970s. New York: Praeger.

PSIV
1357 SH [1978]. Pashto. Paxtam Shu'ara [Pashtun Poets] vol. 4. 'A. A. Bakhtanai
"Khidmatgar", comp. and ed. Kabul: Da Afghanistan da 'Ultimo Akadlml da Zhsbo
aw Adabiyato Instltut [Afghanistan Academy of Sciences, Languages and Literatures
Institute]s.

PTLT:
1356 SH [1977]. Pashto. Da Paxto Tohne Tarikhcha. Kabul: Da Zerai Riyasat, Da
Paxto Tobna [Pashto Tobna, Directorate of the Zerai Journal].

Raff' Hablb Allah.

1349 SH [1970]. Pashto. Da Khalqo Sanddre [Songs of the People]. Kabul: Da
Afghanistan AkademI, da TarTkh aw Adab Tobna [Afghanistan Academy, History
and Literature Society].
 298

Rahlml, M. H., and M. S. Rohl.

1979. Paxto-IngilTsi Qamus [Pashto-English Dictionary]. Kabul: Da Afghanistan
da 'Ulumo AkademI [Afghanistan Academy of Sciences].

Rawan, Shir Muhammad.

2002. "Modern Mass Media and Traditional Communication in Afghanistan."
Political Communication 19: 155-170.

Rishad, 'Abd al-ShukUr.

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. "Da Qam Ghamkhor [Concerned Servant of the Nation]",
pp. 28-32 in Gharibyar, ed. Stdr Paxtun: Muhammad Gul Momand Baba. Peshawar:
Da Danish Khparanduye Tolsna [Danish Publishing Society]

Rishtiya, Sayyid Qasim.

1997. Persian. Khatirat-i Siydsi-yi Sayyid Qasim Rishtiya: 1311 ta 1371 [The
Political Memoirs of Sayyid Qasim Rishtiya: 1932-1992]. Virginia: Matba'a-i
Amerikan-i Sapldl [Sapidi American Press].

Rixtln, Siddlq Allah.

1988. Pashto. NumiyalT Pohan aw Ghdziydn [Notable Intellectuals and Warriors].
Peshawar: YunlvarsitI Buk Ejansl.

Robinson, Capt. J. A.
1978 [1934]. Notes on Nomad Tribes of Eastern Afghanistan. Orig. Pub.
Government of North-West Frontier Province. Quetta: Nisa Traders.

Rohl, Muhammad Siddlq.

2005. Pashto. Da Paxto Adabiyato Tarikh vol. 2. [History of Pashto Literature, vol.
2] Peshawar: Da Danish Khparanduye Tolana [Danish Publishing Society]

Rose, H. A., ed.

2008 [1919]. A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West
Frontier Province. 3 vols., bound in 2. Orig. pub.: Superintendent, Government
Printing, Lahore. Delhi: Low Price Publications.

Rubin, Barnett.
1994. "Redistribution and the State in Afghanistan: the Red Revolution Turns
Green", pp. 187-227 in Weiner and Banuazizi, eds. The Politics of Social
Transformation in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press.

Sabir, Sayyid Sabir Shah.

1998. Pashto. Wazir Muhammad Gul Khan: Luy Afghan [The Minister Muhammad
 299

Gul Khan: a Great Afghan]. Peshawar: Khalll Ulasi Adabi Jirga [Khalil Popular
Literature Society].

Saikal, Amin.
2004. Modern Afghanistan: a History of Struggle and Survival. With assistance from
Ravan Farhadi and Kirill Nourzhanov. London: I. B. Tauris.

Sallm, Ahmad.
1990. Urdu. Azddiaur 'Awam [Freedom and the Masses]. Lahore: Nigarishat.

Samatar, Said.
1982. Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The case of Sayyid Mohammad 'Abdille
Hasan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sanyal, Usha.
1996. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Sapai, Imam al-Dln, ed.

1383 SH [2004]. Pashto. Da Momand Baba Yad [Memories of Momand BabaJ.
Peshawar: Da SapT da Paxto Sepno aw Prakhtiya Markaz [Sapai Center for the
Research and Development of Pashto].

Sarkar, Sumit.
2002. "Two Muslim Tracts for Peasants: Bengal 1909-1910." pp. 96-111 in Sarkar,
Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sho'ur, Asad Allah.

1367 SH [1988]. Persian. Mufahama-yi Shifahi wa Sayr-i TarTkhi-yi An dor
Afghanistan [Oral Communication and its Historical Trajectory in Afghanistan].
Kabul: Da ZhurnalTstano Ittihadiyya [Journalists' Union].

Sidky, M. H.
1990. "Malang, Sufis, and Mystics : an Ethnographic and Historical Study of
Shamanism in Afghanistan.'Ms'z'aH Folklore Studies 49(2): 275-301.

Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban.

1996. "The Natural History of Discourse"; pp. 1-20 in Silverstein and Urban,
Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Skuse, Andrew.
2002. "Radio, Politics and Trust in Afghanistan: a Social History of Broadcasting"
Gazette: The InternationalJournal for Communication Studies 64(3): 267-279.
 300

Steinbeck, John.
1939. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press.

Steul, Willi.
1981. Paschtunwali: Ein Ehrenkodexund und seine rechtliche Relevanz. Beitrage zur
Sudasienforschung Siidasien - Institut Universitat Heidellberg Band 54. Wiesbaden:
Franz Steiner Verlag.

Tair, Nawaz and Thomas Edwards. L. N. Bartlotti and R. W. S. Khattak, eds.

2006. Rohi Mataluna: Pashto Proverbs. Peshawar: The Interlit Foundation.

Torwayana, Najlb Allah.

1324 SH [1945]. Persian. "Khitaba-i N. Torwayana bi-Mazar-i Sayyid Jamal al-Dln
Afghani dar Kabul [Speech of N. Torwayana at the Tomb of Sayyid Jamal al-Din
Afghani in Kabul]." Printed in Aryand 3(1): 35-44.

Ulfat, Gul Pacha.

1320 SH [1941] Bala Dewd [The Burning Lamp]. Kabul: Da Paxto Tobna.

Wafa, Muhammad Da'iid.

1377 SH [1998]. Pashto. Da Nangrahdr FarhangT Bahir ta Yawa Katdna [An
Analysis of Cultural Movements in NangarharJ. Peshawar: Da Afghanistan da
Mutali'ato Markaz [Afghanistan Study Centre].

Wajid,'Abd al-Wajid.
2004. Pashto. Da Malang Jan pa Ash 'dro ke da Azadi aw Hewad Pahne Angaza
[Reflections of Freedom and National Service in the Poems of Malang Jan]. Kabul:
Da Afghanistan da 'Ultimo AkademI [Afghanistan Academy of Sciences].

Wakman, Amln.
1384 SH [2005]. Pashto. Da Afghanistan Milti Nuhzatuna [Nationalist Movements
of Afghanistan]. Peshawar: Da Danish Khparanduye Tobna [Danish Publishing
Society]

Warburton, Col. Robert; and Mary Cecil Warburton.

1900. Eighteen Years in the Khyber, 1879-1898. London: John Murray.

Warner, Michael.
2002. "Publics and Counterpublics." Public Culture 14(1): 49-90.

Wedeen, Lisa.
2007. "The Politics of Deliberation: Qdt Chews as Public Squares in Yemen." Public
Culture 19(1): 59-84.
 301

wz
1327 SH [1948]. Pashto and Persian. Wex Zalmiydn. Various authors and editors.
Kabul: Da Matbu'ato Mustaqil Riyasat aw Da Paxto Totana [Independent
Directorate of Publications and Pashto Totana].
ZabulT, 'Abd al-MajTd.
1380 SH [2001]. With edition, notes, and commentary by Wahid Muzhda. Persian.
Ydddasht-ha-yi 'Abd al-MajTd ZabulT, sabiq Wazir-i Iqtisad-i Mill! Afghanistan
[Notes of 'Abd al-Majid Zabuli, Former Minister of the National Economy of
Afghanistan]. Peshawar: Markaz-i NasharatI Maywand [Maiwand Publishing
Center].

1328/1949. Persian. Mushkilat-i Iqtisadi-yi Ma wa Mujadila ba An-ha. Kabul:

Mudlriyat-i 'Umuml-yi Intibatat [General Directorate of Printing, Iqtisad Magazine].

Zalmai, Muhammad Wall.

1349 SH [1970]. Pashto. Da Kandahar Mashahir: Sufiyan, 'Arifan, Mazarat
[Notables of Kandahar: Sufis, Gnostic, Shrines]. Kabul: Da Itala'ato aw Kultur
Wizarat [Ministry of Information and Culture].

Zewar, Zewar al-Dln.

1385 SH [2006]. Pashto. Da Paxto Adabiydto Tarikh Osdnsy Dawra [History of
Pashto Literature, Contemporary Period]. Peshawar: Da SapT da Paxto Serano aw
Prakhtiya Markaz [Sapai Center for the Research and Development of Pashto].

Zlrakyar, Rahmat, ed.

1995. Pashto. Malang Jan: da be Darbdra Mill! Zhdbe Mill! Sha 'ir [Malang Jan - a
National Poet of a National Language without an Audience]. Santa Barbara, CA: All
Afghan.

Ziyar, Mujawar Ahmad.

1377 SH [1998]. Pashto. "Yadsxt [Note]." pp. v-vii in Da Malang Jan Khwage
Naghme [The Sweet Songs of Malang Jan]. Oxford: Da 'Allama Sayyid Jamal al-
Dln Afghan FarhangI Totana [Sayyid Jamal al-Din Afghan Cultural Society].

Zmariyalai, AmTn Allah

1314 SH [1935]. "Paxtun". Da Kabul Kahnai [Kabul Almanac]: 392-419.
 Thematic Index:

Aristocracy
Ideologies of biographical specificity and personality 53; 183
Tense ideological affinities with elite Pashtunness 119; 134
Integration with new classes 43^5; 73

Ascetics
And the politics of anonymity 219-223
Use as a trope by elites 69;216-219

Authorship, and Flexibility of... 244-247

Civil Society (definition) 42

Chapter Summary 14-18

Conflict Theories in Afghan discourse 75-77; 114-1

Consensus Theories in Afghan discourse 40; 65; 70;

Cosmopolitanism
Persianate 55-56; 74
Shifts from Persianate to British Imperial 46; 55

Dialogism and Monologism 59; 66-70;

98

Economy
Regional reorientation 20-21; 49
92-95
Republican capitalist centrism during World War Two 145-148

Ethnic Tension
Before 1930 65; 74; 77-78
After 1930 107;113
 303

Historiography
Alternative views in oral poetry 7-8; 214; 230;
233
Of rural Afghanistan 4-5; 264
Tazkiras 9-12

Hujra (village men's lodge)

And Muhammad Gul Khan Momand 130-139
As a site for performing inequality 125-128
As a site for oral poetry 200; 205-207

Islamic Learning
Akhlaq 34-36; 182
In cosmopolitan court culture (curriculum and practice) 23-24
In rural Nangrahar andNWFP 158-160; 197
Neo-Platonism andfalse consciousness 184-186
State Involvement 169; 197

Jirga (tribal meeting) 32; 81; 106

Extended definition of... 124

Liberalism (political)
International 195-196
Rural 173-174; 247
Urban 68; 73

Lineage Inequality
152;154

Linguistics Research in Pashto, and Politics

165;169; 176

Literary-Historical and Folklore Research in Pashto 177-179

Malang See 'Ascetic'

Marriage
As politics 28; 38-40; 50

Masculinity
Activist critiques by youth and women 184; 231
Everyday critiques of 'hegemonic masculinities' 211-212
 304

In court ethics 33^1

In elite Pashtunness 118; 218-219

Migration
Affective aspects of... 257-258
Economic 47-48; 228-229
Intellectual 159-160; 219-
221
Political 24-25; 107-110

Modernization theory 27;261

Nationalism
Historiography of... 11-12

National Military
And tribal integration 108

Networks
And the constitutional movement 26; 28-29;
And intermediation between court and society 19; 95-107
And trans-local insurgency 150;152
As a form of trans-local social awareness 82-83; 166-167
Underground radicalism 175-176

Pashto Cultural Organizations

And state control 87-89
Da Pashto Adabi Anjuman 87
Da Pashto Maraka 42^3;
Da Pashto Totena 42;164-165

Pashtunness
As performance 119;133-135
As youth activism 192-193
For court scholars before 1929 32-33
National pride as... 116-117; 247-
248
"Tribal" values 118-121; 249;
256

Passion (romantic/sacrificial; (ishq)

Critique of hegemonic masculinity 215
Critique of social inequality 224-226
 305

Deployment by elites 216-219

Patriarchy
Adams, Julia; and Weberian theory of... 111-112; 122;
Gerontocracy 34-35; 114
154; 183
Ideological links to personalized state rule and hierarchies 35-36; 129
183; 198-
199; 238
248-249;
255-258

Poetic Performance
Everyday 208-213
Formal genres .performance, theme, and transformations in 203-206; 214;
232-234;
243-244
In hujras, establishing contingent social space 200; 205
In weddings 201
Musha'ira, shift from private to public 51-52

Print and Electronic Media

Efforts at establishing newspapers in 1905-1929 25-26; 30; 45
In the 1930s 115; 162-165
In the 1940s and 1950s 194-196; 199

Public
Integration of multiple zones of participation 12-14; 135-139;
170-171;
173 191-
194 196-
197 207;
239-243;
251-253;
258
Theories of... 6; 63-66; 68;
128-129;
263; 267-
272

Reformism
In cosmopolitan awareness of other regions 25; 26-27; 75;
154-158;
161-162;
 306

171-172
Parallel responses to comparable political-economic issues 27; 171-172;
246-247

State and Social Structure

Ideas of non-linkage between... 265
Integration of state and social organization in practice 83-85; 110-112;
121; 265-
266
Integration of state and patriarchy in theory 120-124; 265-
266

Taliban
As a public phenomenon 3^1; 220-221

Typologies (Social)
As a form of social critique 179-181; 183;
198
Early articulations of social class 56-64; 171; 186
Segmentary ideology and the state 84
Tribalism in local conceptions 41; 181-182

Uprisings 3 8 ^ 0 ; 149-153