Afghan Life in Afghan Songs

Publishing Date: Wednesday, September 8 2004

In the Contemporary Review for October 1887 is an article by James Darmesteter on Afghan life in Afghan songs. Mr. Darmesteter has much to say on the political relations of Afghan to the British Empire of India, but introduces his article with some account of the native folk-songs. On the night of the 7th of April, 1886 (Wednesday, 11 P.M.), as he was sitting in the garden of his bungalow at Peshawer, gazing at the stars and the silver moon, etc., Mr. Darmesteter heard his Afghan chaukidar (life and property not being very safe at Peshawer, it is usual to keep an armed watchman, called chaukidar), Old Piro, of the Khalil tribe, muttering in a broken voice fragments of a song that sounded like a lovesong. He asked him to repeat the song to him. This he modestly declined to do for a longtime, but at last he gave way, and began,

"My love is gone to D I Khan, and has left me alone;
I have gone to him to entreat him.
What is it to me that thou shouldst become a Raja at Azrabad?
I seized him by the skirt of his garment and said, "Look at me!"

Here old Piro stopped, and neither for love nor for money could he prevail upon him to go on: his repertoire was exhausted. But Mr. Darmesteter's interest had been awakened, and from that night he resolved to collect what he could of the Afghan popular poetry. The field was new and unexplored.

He had gone to the border to study the Afghan language and literature, but had soon to recognize that the so-called Afghan literature is hardly worth the trouble of a journey from Paris to Peshawer. It consists mainly of imitations and translations from the Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani. For a time, under the Moguls, an original and free spirit permeated those imitations, and Mirza Ansari, the mystical poet, or Khushhal Khan, prince of the Khatak tribe, would be accounted a true poet in any nation and any literature. But these are rare exceptions, and the theological lucubrations of the much-revered Akhund Darveza, that narrow, foul-mouthed, rancorous, and truly pious exponent of Afghan orthodoxy, the endless rifacimenti of Hatim Tai, the most liberal of Arabs, of Ali Hamza and the companions of the Prophet, or the ever-retold edifying story of Joseph and Zuleikha, - all seem as if they had been written or copied by medieval monks or unimaginative children.

The popular, unwritten poetry, though despised and ignored by the reading classes, is of quite a different character. It is the work of illiterate poets: but it represents their feelings; it has life in it, - the life of the people; it is simple, because the natural range of ideas of an Afghan is simple and limited; it is true to nature, because it represents those ideas without any moral bias or literary after thought. Sometimes, therefore, it is powerful and beautiful, because it renders simply and truly powerful passions or beautiful feelings.

During a few months stay on the border, Mr. Darmesteter collected about one hundred and twenty songs (published by the French Asiatic Society) of every description, - love songs, folk lore, hymns, romantic songs, and political ballads. If we want to know what an Afghan is, let us put all books aside and receive his own unconscious confession from the lips of his favorite poets. The confession, it is to be feared, would not be much to their honor on the whole, but it will be the more sincere. This is the value of the wild, unpremeditated accents of these people: a poor thing it is, but it expresses their nature.

The Afghans are divided into three independent groups:

The Afghans under British rule, or what we may call the Queen's Afghans, who inhabit the border districts along the Indus, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, Kohat, Peshawer, and Hazara. They were conquered in 1849, with the Sikhs, their then masters.
The Afghans of Afghanistan proper, or the Emir's Afghans, - the only part of the race that forms something like an organized power.
The Afghans of Yaghistan, "the rebel or independent country," that is to say, those Afghans who do not belong either to the British Raj or to the Emir, but live in the native national anarchy in the western basin of the upper Indus, - Swat, Buner, Panjkora, Dir, etc. The Afghan of Yaghistan is the true, unsophisticated Afghan.

The songs were collected in the British districts of Peshawer and Hazara, but most of them express, nevertheless, the general views of the Afghans to whatever part they belong: for though there is no real nationality amongst the Afghans, yet there is a strongly marked national character; and though nothing is more offensive to an Afghan than another Afghan, still there is nothing so much like an Afghan as another. Moreover, many of these songs come from Yaghistan, or Afghanistan.

Songs travel quickly. The thousands of Powindas that every year pass twice across the Suleiman range, bringing the wealth of Central Asia and carrying back the wealth of India, bring also and carry back all the treasures of the Afghan Muse on both sides the mountain; and a new song freshly flown at Nowshera, from the lips of Mohammed the Oil-Presser, will very soon be heard upon the mountains of Buner, or down the valley of the Helmend.

There are two sorts of poets, - the Shayar and the Dum. With the Sha-ir we have nothing to do: he is the literary poet, who can read, who knows Hafiz and Saadi, who writes Afghan Ghazals on the Persian model, who has composed a Divan. Every educated man is a Shayar, though, if he be a man of good taste, he will not assume the title. Writing Ghazal was one of the accomplishments of the old Afghan chiefs. Hafiz Rahmat, the great Rohilla captain, and Ahmed Shah, the founder of the Durani empire, had written Divans, were 'Divan people,' - Ahl e Divan, as the expression runs. The Shayar may be a clever writer, he may be a fine writer; but he has nothing to teach us about his people. We may safely dismiss him with honor and due respect.

The Dum is the popular singer and poet, for he combines the two qualities, like our Jongleur of the middle ages. The Dums form a caste: the profession is hereditary. The Dum is despised by the people with literary pretensions, who fly into a passion when one of these ignorant fellows, flushed with success, dubs himself a Shayar. He is not a Pathan by race, though he has been Pashtunized: he is a low sort of creature, whom the Khans and Sardars treat as the mediceval barons might have treated the itinerant Jongleur, -despised, insulted, honored, liberally paid, but intensely popular amongst the people.

The novice Dum goes to a celebrated Dum, who is a master, an Ustad: he becomes his disciple, his shagard. The master teaches him first his own songs, then the songs of the great Dums of the present and past generations. The Ustad takes his shagard's with him to the festivities to which he has been asked, private or public, profane or religious: he takes them to the hujra, the 'common house' or town-hall of the village, where idlers and travelling guests meet every night to hear the news that is going round, and listen to any man that has a tale to tell or a song to sing.

The Ustad pockets half the sum given by the host, and the other half is divided between the shagards. When a shagard feels he can compose for himself and is able to achieve a reputation, he leaves his master and becomes himself an Ustad. I am sorry to say that Dums generally are not over-sensitive about literary honesty: plagiarism is rife among them. A Dum will readily sing, as his own, songs of the dead or the living. It is the custom that poets should insert their names in the last line: you have only to substitute your own name for the name of the real author or of the former plagiarist. People will not applaud you the less, though of course the injured party may retort with a satire or a stab.

A good Dum may die a rich man. Mira would hardly open his mouth anywhere under fifty rupees. He was an illiterate man: he could not read, but he knew by heart a wonderful number of songs, and could improvise. You would ask him for a song in a certain shade of feeling; then he would go out with his men, and an hour afterwards they would come back and sing a beautiful chorus on the rebab. His song of 'Zakhme' is sung wherever there are Afghans, and sets them a dancing as soon as the first notes are struck. It was sung at the Rawalpindi interview as the national song of the Afghans, though it is nothing more - or, rather, nothing less - than a love-song. An Irish journalist - Mr. Grattan Geary, of the Bombay Gazette-was struck with its melody, and had it printed.

It is probably the only Afghan song that has ever been published (two songs have been translated by Mr. Thorburn in his book on Bannu, and another by Colonel Raverty in the introduction to his Afghan grammar).

The people piously inclined object to song, among the Afghans as well as elsewhere; and the Mollahs inveigh against the Dums. There is only one occasion when even a Mollah will approve of the song of a Dum: it is when the Crusade, or, as the Anglo-Indians say, the Crescentade, has been proclaimed; then is the time for the Dum to rehabilitate himself, as he sings the glories of the sacred war, the bliss reserved to the Ghazi's, the roses that grow for him in the groves above, and the black-eyed houris that come from heaven and give the dying man to drink of the sherbet of martyrdom. But, in spite of the Mollahs, the Dum is as popular in his profane as in his semi-sacred character. Song is a passion with the Afghans; in fact, one of the few noble passions with which he is endowed. Whenever three Afghans meet together, there is a song between them.

In the hujra, during the evening conversation, a man rises up, seizes a rebab, and sings, sings on. Perhaps he is under prosecution for a capital crime; perhaps tomorrow he will be hunted to the mountain, sent to the gallows; what matters? Every event of public or private life enters song at once, and the Dums are the journalists of the Afghans. Possibly the Dum of today has preserved for us faithfully enough a picture of what the Bard was with the Gauls.