Pashto

A landay is the shortest poem in Pashto: two lines, the first of nine syllables, the second of thirteen, usually ending on a -ma or -na sound. They are anonymous, and many are composed and sung by women, about love, war, separation and honour, often with startling frankness. Collected by the Afghan poet and scholar Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, among others, they are the folk voice of Pashto, Pax̌tó, the language of the Pashtuns.

Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language, a relative of Persian but quite distinct from it, with sounds Persian lacks, including retroflex consonants it shares with the languages of South Asia. It is spoken in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where it is an official language alongside Dari, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan in Pakistan, as well as in a large diaspora. Its dialects divide roughly into a southern, ‘soft’ group around Kandahar, where the language is called Pashto, and a northern, ‘hard’ group around Peshawar, where the same word is pronounced Pakhto.

Poets of the mountains

The classical age of Pashto literature is the seventeenth century. Khushal Khan Khattak, chief of the Khattak tribe and opponent of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, wrote poetry on war, hunting, love and statecraft, and is regarded as the national poet of the Pashtuns. His contemporary Rahman Baba, a Sufi poet who lived near Peshawar, wrote verses on love and God that are still sung at his shrine. Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani empire in 1747, also wrote poetry in Pashto. Many Pashtun writers were fluent in Persian too, and Pashto poetry adopted the Persian forms of the ghazal and the qasida.

Pashto is also a language of music and dance. The rubāb, a short-necked lute carved from a single piece of mulberry wood, is the instrument most associated with Pashtun music, and the attan, a circle dance that begins slowly to the beat of the dhol drum and accelerates until the dancers spin, is performed at weddings and celebrations and is widely regarded as Afghanistan’s national dance. Pashto singers from Kandahar, Kabul and Peshawar reach audiences on both sides of the border and across the diaspora.

Code and script

Pashto is written in an adapted Perso-Arabic script with extra letters, such as ټ, ډ, ړ and ښ, for its distinctive sounds. Much of Pashtun social life is governed by Pashtunwali, an unwritten code of honour, hospitality, refuge and revenge, and Pashtuns sometimes say that to ‘do Pashto’ is to live by it, not merely to speak it. The language has been at the centre of debates about Afghan national identity for a century, and its relationship with Dari, its partner as an official language, is a sensitive one. In homes from Kandahar to Peshawar to London, it remains a language of songs, proverbs and long evening conversation.