Census Commissioner, India (1937). "Census of India, 1931, Volume 17, Part 2". Times of India: 292 . Retrieved 7 June 2009. At the same time Pashto has borrowed largely from Persian and Hindustani, and through those languages from Arabic.

Ali, Saleem Hassan (2007). Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution (illustrateded.). MIT Press. p.291. ISBN 978-0262012355 . Retrieved 7 June 2013. Landays began among nomads and farmers. They were shared around a fire, sung after a day in the fields or at a wedding. More than three decades of war has diluted a culture, as well as displaced millions of people who can’t return safely to their villages. Conflict has also contributed to globalization. Now people share landays virtually via the internet, Facebook, text messages, and the radio. It’s not only the subject matter that makes them risqué. Landays are mostly sung, and singing is linked to licentiousness in the Afghan consciousness. Women singers are viewed as prostitutes. Women get around this by singing in secret — in front of only close family or, say, a harmless-looking foreign woman. Usually in a village or a family one woman is more skilled at singing landays than others, yet men have no idea who she is. Much of an Afghan woman’s life involves a cloak-and-dagger dance around honor — a gap between who she seems to be and who she is. There is a University in Karak, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, named after Khushal Khan Khattak. [24] A train service, the Khushhal Khan Khattak Express, is also named after him. Khushal Khattak and Rehman Baba are both icons of Pashtun resistance, but their work is very different. R ehman Baba’s verses were much more spiritual, focusing on God, mysticism and love . Khattak’s poetry revolved around honour, war, resistance and, most importantly, memory and freedom, as seen in this couplet:Khushal´s daughter married Sayyid Ziauddin Shaheed, the son of Sayyid Kastir Gul. [12] Rebellion and the Moghul Empire [ edit ] A poet is a slave of his environment -- his example being that of an animal which does not have the protective covering of a skin. If you so much as touch him with the tip of a thorn, he yells himself to death; and when he gets a little relief, his happiness so overwhelms him that he loses consciousness." The above couplets make it clear that Khushal's war were not based on his personal greed or enmity. Fighting for the defense of motherland and for the rights of his compatriots is the struggle of peace and that is a noble cause. He fought up to the end of his life for the rights of oppressed people and for thefreedom of his mother land. Thus, all of his struggles were for the establishment of peace. [ citation needed] Published works [ edit ] Early manuscript of Khushal Khan's Baz-nama [The Book of Falconry], dated 1689-1690. This particular manuscript was written within a year of Khushal Khan's death After he was freed in 1954, Khan abandoned his political career and devoted himself to artistic pursuits, which also included painting and sculpture. But a love for his people and homeland remained a dominant theme in his poetry. Although officially supporting the use of Pashto, the Afghan elite regarded Persian as a "sophisticated language and a symbol of cultured upbringing". [35] King Zahir Shah (reigning 1933–1973) thus followed suit after his father Nadir Khan had decreed in 1933 that officials were to study and utilize both Persian and Pashto. [41] In 1936 a royal decree of Zahir Shah formally granted Pashto the status of an official language, [42] with full rights to use in all aspects of government and education – despite the fact that the ethnically Pashtun royal family and bureaucrats mostly spoke Persian. [38] Thus Pashto became a national language, a symbol for Pashtun nationalism.

Christopher John Fuller (2004). The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India. Princeton University Press. pp.291–293. ISBN 978-0-69112-04-85.

Acknowledgements

A collection of Rahman's poetry, called the Dīwān ("anthology") of Rahman Baba, contains 343 poems, most of which are written in his native Pashto. The Dīwān of Rahman Baba was in wide circulation by 1728. There are over 25 original hand-written manuscripts of the Dīwān scattered in various libraries worldwide, including ten in the Pashto Academy in Peshawar, four in the British Library, three in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, as well as copies in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the University Library Aligath. The first printed version was collected by the Anglican Missionary T.P. Hughes and printed in Lahore in 1877. [8] It is this version which remains the most commonly used to this day. Both Rehman Baba and Khushal Khattak expressed what it was like to have their culture and way of life threatened by invasion. Their poetry came to represent the collective voice of Pashtuns. Centuries later, mythology would come to play a critical role in maintaining this collective voice through the fable of Malalai, beloved for helping rally Pashtun troops against the British in the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. (Malalai also features in the PTM’s anthem, immortalised in the line “Our Malalais are dishonoured”.) Policharki is an infamous prison built by the Russians in Kabul. More recently, it has housed insurgents, American military contractors (accused of running a private prison for profit), and a motley array of thieves and murderers. Basbibi, who sang this poem and the two that follow, told me, “I am the mother of landays.” She lives in Char-i-Kambar, a Kabul refugee camp where more than two dozen people froze to death in 2012. One was her husband. Robert Sampson and Momin Khan. Sow Flowers: Selections from Rahman Baba, the Poet of the Afghans. Peshawar: Interlit Foundation, 2008.

Romanization system for Pashto" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 June 2012 . Retrieved 4 February 2012. House, Roy Temple (1946). Books Abroad - Volume 20. University of Oklahoma. ... and most popular , of Afghan poets is Abdur Rahman . A member of the Momand tribe Just as Pashtuns are marginalised in Pakistan, Pashto poetry is yet to get due recognition in Pakistan’s mainstream literary circles, despite its immense and vital tradition. Even a cursory glance at the programmes of popular events like the Lahore Literary Festival and the Karachi Literature Festival shows a fixation on certain themes to the exclusion of others. The clearest example of this is Partition, which is endlessly pored over – and which, tellingly, affected chiefly the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, which dominate power and politics in Pakistan to this day. In debates on social media, the argument has been made that the main victims of violence within Pakistan, including marginalised people such as the Pashtun and Baloch, have not produced anything that could be considered “literature”, and so cannot be included in these festivals. This offensive suggestion is echoed by the state. In effect, it amounts to an act of double violence: the perpetuation of state violence, and the erasure of minority voices by arguing that they are inaudible, irrelevant, or “not good enough”. In reality, there are floods of Pashto poetry – the beating heart of Pashtun literature – that deserve greater space and attention.His poems cover a wide variety of subjects ranging from freedom, patriotism, love and nature to the exploitation and ignorance often symbolized by the Khans or landowners and mullahs or clerics. Ahmed, Akbar (2013). Pukhtun Economy and Society (Routledge Revivals): Traditional Structure and Economic Development in a Tribal Society. Routledge. p.92. ISBN 978-1136598906 . Retrieved 7 June 2013. Khan abandoned the theme of morality, which had dominated Pashto poetry for centuries. He broke new ground by focusing on aesthetics instead. Buneray’s poem points to two realities: life under the Taliban and the impact of military operations against the Taliban. To fight the militants, the Pakistan military imposed strict bans in the territories under their control against any questioning of its operations. Here, in simple language, Buneray shows the toll of self-censorship in a repressive regime.