Reading the Power of Printed Orality in Afghanistan: Popular Pashto Literature as Historical Evidence and Public Intervention

Abstract

Access to popular Pashto literature grants the historian a good amount of material with which to write the social history of Afghanistan in the early twentieth century, a period for which we do not have many sources on rural society in particular. In contrast to the heavily bureaucratized colonial regimes to the north and the south of Afghanistan, even twentieth century Afghan sources are far sparser in their information on populations in rural areas, on rural elites and especially non-elites. Up to the 1960s or 1970s, what we primarily have are haphazard colonial British intelligence reports, an occasional article from economy-oriented periodicals, and the odd cache of the Afghan regime's own local court records.1 Of course, this situation is not unique to Afghanistan's history. The primary question for this essay is how we might engage oral and other popular literature as an alternative source of social narrative; and how we might read these sources in as many dimensions as possible, in order to write social history of rural non-elites in particular. This essay uses the restricted example of Pashto sources to explore larger methodological points that should hold equally well for other Islamicate societies that transmitted and recirculated poetry in similar ways. But also, some of these points speak to the use of folk or popular evidence in history writing more generally, to bring out new social perspectives in regions and periods for which there is not a shortage of other sources. Especially when dealing with older periods, for which most available popular literature has been collated and recirculated multiple times already, what are some ways to treat decontextualized (or recontextualized) texts in such a way that the mediation of their transmission becomes a potential asset to the historian rather than an unwelcome intrusion? Here, I find that reading popular literature in the way that its collators did, in the creation of their anthologies, opens up interesting possibilities. Another related question: how can one read the overall cultural history of emergent genres, both popular and elite, as itself a form of evidence for social history writing?