War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan

The Ethnographer's Tale

John Baily

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315466910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Etnomusicologia

In the 1970s John Baily conducted extensive ethnomusicological research in Afghanistan, principally in the city of Herat but also in Kabul. Then, with Taraki's coup in 1978, came conflict, war, and the dispersal of many musicians to locations far and wide. This new publication is the culmination of Baily's further research on Afghan music over the 35 years that followed. This took him to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the USA, Australia and parts of Europe - London, Hamburg and Dublin. Arranged chronologically, the narrative traces the sequence of political events - from 1978, through the Soviet invasion, to the coming of the Taliban and, finally, the aftermath of the US-led invasion in 2001. He examines the effects of the ever-changing situation on the lives and works of Afghan musicians, following individual musicians in fascinating detail. At the heart of his analysis are privileged vignettes of ten musical personalities - some of friends, and some newly discovered. The result is a remarkable personal memoir by an eminent ethnomusicologist known for his deep commitment to Afghanistan, Afghan musicians and Afghan musical culture.

John Baily is also an ethnographic filmmaker. Four of his films relating to his research are included on the downloadable resources that accompanies the text.

1 Before the Communist Coup of 1978

DOI: 10.4324/9781315466934-2

Afghanistan in British Popular Imagination

I always say no one goes to Afghanistan once … once you go, you always go back. (Lyse Doucet, personal communication, 3 February 2009)¹

¹ Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, is probably the best-informed and most well-connected journalist who has covered Afghanistan over a period of many years.

Afghanistan has occupied a place in the popular imagination of the people of Britain for the last 200 years. The story has been told many times, yet it is necessary to say something about the history of the relationship for readers who may be unfamiliar with British colonial history. Afghanistan was closely linked with British economic and political domination of the Indian Subcontinent and with maintaining that jewel in the imperial crown; it was the land-route through which those who might wish to rob the British of their prize possession would come.

The remote land-locked country we know today as Afghanistan came into existence as a political entity in 1747. Celebrated as the ‘Crossroads of Asia’, the region had enormous strategic and economic importance, with trade routes from east to west along the many-stranded Silk Road, and north to south, connecting Central Asia with India. In addition, it was an important cultural crossroads, where different ethnic groups, often with individual languages, met and intermingled. The region was not called Afghanistan – the ‘Land of the Afghans’ – in 1747: much of the terrain was known as Khorasan (or Khurasan), once a great centre of urban civilization, scholarship and Sufism (Figure 1.1). In the eighteenth century the term Afghanistan, as used by European geographers, referred to a small area of the Pashtun homeland, as maps of the period indicate.² Naming the whole area Afghanistan did not come into general practice until the nineteenth century, and was probably a British invention.

² According to Thakston (2002: 481, footnote 6), Emperor Babur’s ‘Afghanistan’ referred to the regions of Bangash, Bannu and Dasht, an area southeast of Kabul down to the Indus.

Long before 1747 there had been significant populations of Pashtuns (Afghans) inhabiting parts of northern India. The British labelled them as Pathans, a name that has stuck persistently in the English language. Pathan is derived from Pakhtanah, the plural of Pakhtun, which is the same word as Pashtun in the dialect of the language known as Pakhto (Allen 2000: xii).³ Pashtuns populated principalities we hear little of today, notably around the city of Rampur, in Rohilkand, which is today part of Uttar Pradesh. The Pashtuns of this area, also known as Rohillas, were professional warriors, mercenaries for the Moghul emperors and heavily involved in the lucrative trade bringing horses from Central Asia to India (Gommans 1995). The cavalry horse was an important military asset, and the importation of horses from the north was part of the arms trade of the time. The north–south transit routes passing through what was to become Afghanistan were of crucial importance, and were controlled by Pashtuns. Pashtuns were also an important element of the Iranian military forces and formed part of the army led by the Iranian ruler Nadir Shah that sacked Delhi in 1739. After the assassination of Nadir Shah in 1747 his Pashtun mercenaries defected to Kandahar, their ancestral homeland, where the young tribal chieftain Ahmad Shah from the Durrani tribe was elected paramount chief by a tribal gathering. He is revered as the founding father of Afghanistan, known respectfully as Ahmad Shah Baba. Capturing a caravan on its way to Iran that was filled with treasure plundered from the Punjab, Peshawar and Kabul, allowed Ahmad Shah to buy the support of other Pashtun khans, and he embarked on a period of rapid conquest in northern India. By 1762 the newly created ‘Afghan empire’ was at its peak, extending from the Caspian Sea to Delhi, and from the borders of Tibet to the Indian Ocean. It endured for little more than 50 years; the Afghans lost most of the Punjab in 1801, Kashmir in 1819, and Peshawar in 1832, all to the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh.

³ That is, Pashtun is equivalent to Pakhtun and Pashto is equivalent to Pakhto. Here I use Pashtun and Pashto as being the more common words used in Afghanistan.

Figure 1.1 Map of Afghanistan, showing the extent of historic Khorasan

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the British in India, in the form of the East India Company, had little interest in what was going on in Khorasan. Their presence at the time was limited to a few East India Company coastal trading entrepôts in Surat, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. The last of these became the main British settlement, and from Bengal British power slowly expanded westwards and northwards. By the late eighteenth century the British started to become concerned about the possible expansion of the Russian Empire across Central Asia (Hopkirk 2006: 22), foreseeing an eventual attempt to wrest control of India. In view of this threat the East India Company sent Mountstuart Elphinstone on a fact-finding mission to the ‘Kingdom of Caboul’, then ruled by Shah Shuja, a grandson of Ahmad Shah Durrani. At that time the rulers of Kabul still had an extensive territory that included much of northern Punjab, and their winter capital was Peshawar. Elphinstone arrived there on 25 February 1809 and remained for several months, collecting data of every kind. He never visited Kabul itself. Those were troubled times and Shah Shuja was deposed later that year by Dost Mohammad.

The results of Elphinestone’s research were published in 1815 as An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary, and India (Janata 1969). It became the standard reference book for the British about Afghanistan for decades, and is still regarded as an important anthropological source. It includes some information about music and dance of the period (Elphinstone 1815: 236–7, 279; Baily 1988a: 17). Elphinstone summed up the character of the Afghans as follows: ‘their vices are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity, and obstinacy; on the other hand, they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependants, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious, and prudent; and they are less disposed than the nations in their neighbourhood to falsehood, intrigue, and deceit’ (1815: 253). Thus began the strange idealization of the Pashtuns in British popular imagination, which was prominent in the first half of the twentieth century; they were an enemy worthy of respect.

Elphinstone was followed by a long succession of adventurers travelling in Afghanistan, some of them intrepid young officers from the East India Company’s Bengal Army, conducting unofficial reconnaissance, often disguised as natives. Many of these visitors published books about their experiences, for example: Sir Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara (1834), and his Cabool. Being a Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and residence in, that City in the Years 1836, 7 and 8 (1842); Arthur Conolly’s Journey to the North of India, Overland From England, Through Russia, Persia, and Affghaunistaun (1834); Charles Masson’s Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and the Panjab, including a Residence in those Countries (1842).⁴ There was clearly a ready market for travellers’ tales of this kind amongst certain sections of the British public.

⁴ Hopkirk (2006: 525–40) provides the essential bibliographic guide to this kind of literature.

The perceived Russian threat to Afghanistan increased markedly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their seemingly inexorable advance across the vast territory of Central Asia caused consternation in Britain and Afghanistan became a British pre-occupation. In 1839 the British restored Shah Shuja to the Kabul throne, supported by a British army of occupation. The British suffered an historic defeat in 1842, only to return as an ‘Army of Retribution’, razing towns and cities, culminating in the complete destruction of the Grand Bazaar of Kabul. After the debacle of the Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–42 many more travellers’ memoirs were published, along with detailed examination of the conduct of the war itself (notably Kaye 1851, 1874).⁵ The flow of new publications fed a lively political debate about British policy with regard to Afghanistan as the Russians successively conquered the cities of Tashkent (1865) and Samarkand (1868), and the three khanates of Bokhara (1868), Khiva (1873) and Kokand (1875). On one hand there were the advocates of the ‘forward policy’, which amounted to taking control of Afghan foreign affairs, and its converse, ‘masterly inactivity’, leaving the Afghans to get on with their own affairs in their own way. Afghanistan was the focus for many fierce parliamentary debates between the parties of Disraeli (Conservative) and Gladstone (Liberal), the former advocating the forward policy, the latter, masterly inactivity. Russian overtures to the Afghan ruler Amir Sher Ali Khan led to the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–79), which, like the previous conflict, resulted in a severe defeat of the British Army, this time at Maiwand. The British returned, won the decisive battle of Charasiab, near Kabul, followed by widespread destruction, executions and withdrawal. The strategy, which came to be known as ‘butcher and bolt’ (Stewart 2011: 111), allowed the British to claim victory in both these Anglo-Afghan wars. A positive outcome of the 1879–80 conflict, from the British point of view at least, was the coming to power of Amir Abdur Rahman, their former enemy, returned after a long exile in Tashkent.

⁵ The most recent contribution to this body of popular historical literature in Dalrymple (2013).

Abdur Rahman’s accession to the throne in 1881 led, unexpectedly, to an easing of tension between Afghanistan and British India, for now an agreement was reached by which the British took control of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs, so effectively blocking Russian contacts with the Afghan government. The Durand Line of 1893 settled for the time being the contentious issue of the border between British India and Afghanistan, though it left a legacy of armed conflict that is a major political problem even today. In the First World War, Amir Habibullah resisted strong pressures to join the German–Turkish axis. His successor, Amir Amanullah, apparently in a move intended to appease his Pashtun tribal subjects, launched incursions across the frontier. In response, the British declared war. The Third Anglo-Afghan War was a relatively brief conflict of a few weeks only and is memorable for the British arial bombing attacks on Jalalabad and Kabul, not the first but an early example of the use of this new weapon. The Treaty of Rawalpindi of 1919 resolved the conflict and gave Amanullah the prize of Afghanistan’s full independence.⁶

⁶ Stewart (2011: Chapter 8) has a lot of detailed information about the Third Anglo-Afghan War.

Until the partition of India in 1947 the British remained preoccupied with controlling the Pashtun tribes in North-West Frontier Province (renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010) and the Tribal Areas that were adjacent to the border with Afghanistan. This was the time when the romance of ‘The Frontier’ really flourished. A measure of the seriousness of the situation from a military point of view is the fact that in the 1930s there were up to 50,000 British and Indian Army troops on the frontier (Swinson 1967: 311). Blood feuds between Pashtun tribesmen were a serious problem, ‘accounting for three hundred murders a year in Peshawar district alone … [as was] raiding for cattle, women and guns’ (Allen 1976: 198). The British responded to these incursions from the hills with, ‘a punitive foray, a light bombing raid after advance warning or, as a last resort, a military column involving several brigades’ (ibid., p. 199). The fighting took place in very difficult mountain territory, where the Pashtuns had all the advantages of familiarity with the territory and support from local inhabitants.

Paradoxically, this was the time when British admiration for the Pashtuns reached its zenith; they respected their adversaries as warriors, tacticians and expert marksmen. Many were the publications that described the military actions undertaken by the British. The television film Khyber (1979), directed by André Singer, contains some quotable statements by three of the most eminent British officers who served on the Frontier in this period about their dealings with ‘the Pathan’ (that is, Pashtuns).

I must say I have the greatest respect for them as fighters, particularly the Masuds, who I think were on a par with the Germans and the Japs as perhaps the toughest people I’ve ever had to fight against. (Sir John Smythe, VC)

Our dealings with the Pathan was a gentleman’s game, you know, no matter how poor a Pathan was, he may meet the King of England or the Viceroy of India, but he’ll look him straight in the eye and shake hands with him as if to say that, ‘I’m as good a man as you are’. (Colonel Buster Goodwin)

The Pathans were not treated as enemies really, rather as naughty children who misbehaved from time to time. They were all under the Indian Government, they were all in Indian territory, they weren’t invading India, they had their own British Political Officers looking after them, but now and again they played up, being Pathans, and if they played up and made a nuisance of themselves by attacking each other, or by looting villages in Indian territory, they had to be punished. It’s quite different to an ordinary war. You had to organise your columns and go and punish these people or show them where they got off, in their own country. One looked on it as rather a summer vacation really, and the other side looked at it the same way. Mind you, they were not the sort of people into whose hands you wanted to let your men fall, because they wouldn’t last very long. (Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck)

After independence and the partition of India and Pakistan ‘The Frontier’ became someone else’s problem_ with the liberation of India from colonial rule in 1947, Britain too was liberated from its colonial responsibilities of maintaining law and order there, at least unti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• Films on the Accompanying DVD
• Acknowledgements
• Some Notes on Terminology and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 Before the Communist Coup of 1978
• 2 The Jihâd (Holy War) Era
• 3 The Mujahideen Parties Come to Power
• 4 Taliban Times
• 5 Kabul after the Taliban
• 6 The Global Circulation of Afghanistan’s Music
• 7 The Summing Up
• Glossary of Musical Instruments
• Bibliography
• Index