Texts of Islam

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Khushḥāl Khān, Khattak: Introduction

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This is a biographical introduction from H.G. Raverty's 1868 anthology of Pashto poetry, presenting the life of Khushhal Khan Khattak (1613–1691), a chieftain of the Afghan Khattak tribe who was simultaneously a military leader and prolific poet writing in both Pashto and Persian. The essay traces his rise to tribal leadership, his years of loyal service to the Mughal emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, his imprisonment at Gwalior for roughly seven years on suspicion of disloyalty, and the determined guerrilla war he subsequently waged against the Mughals — a campaign that came close to expelling them from the region before it was undermined by bribery and tribal feuds. His final years were marked by betrayal at the hands of his own son Bahram, who delivered Khushhal's favored son Ashraf to Mughal captivity and repeatedly threatened Khushhal's life, yet the aged chieftain defied capture until his death at 78, free in the mountains among allied Afridi tribesmen. Raverty frames Khushhal as an unusual figure in "Oriental" literature — a poet whose verse is animated by patriotism and love of homeland comparable, he claims, to Scottish Highlanders or Swiss mountaineers — and argues that even in literal English translation his prison poems and resistance writings possess genuine literary and emotional force. The introduction is primarily useful as a historical and cultural frame for reading the poetry itself, establishing Khushhal as a canonical voice of Afghan identity forged under Mughal oppression.

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Khushḥāl Khān, Khattak: Introduction

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