Folklore: The folktales in this book were narrated by Saeed Khan Bhaba and recorded by Aisha Ahmad and her husand Roger Boase at Peshwar in 1977. Bruce Stewart was highly impressed with this record of an immemorial tradition.
Bhaba, a Mohmand Pashtun and professional story-teller, was formerly employed by a wealthy land-owner and latterly reduced to working at a village hujra (or guesthouse) before slipping into obscurity with the progress of modern media. Though illiterate, he possessed a repertoire of 500 tales of kings, princes and princesses, viziers, merchants and peasants, djinns and treasure, fabulous lands and talking animals, love, adultery and revenge, both in rhyming verse and prose (though here in prose only). Although numerous collections of Indian and Asian stories have been made in the past, this is almost certainly the last first-hand record of an immemorial tradition that bears obvious comparison with the seanachaí of Ireland.
The Pashtun people are a 20-million strong Muslim tribal society inhabiting large parts of Afghanistan and bordering areas of Iran and Pakistan (where the majority now live due to refugeeism). The British called them Pathans. Afghanistan was the scene of numerous imperialist adventures - invariably disastrous - on the part of British and Russian forces in the 19th century.More recently, the Americans have taken on the Taliban in that country - with mixed results.
Pashtun society is essentially governed by a code of honour called the Pakthtunwali, which involves related notions of hospitality, forgiveness and revenge. The term badal at the core of the code signifies an exchange of any sort, but more specifically a marriage-pact, a substitution, requital or retaliation. (As in other Middle-Eastern countries where the exigencies of tribal life dictate the pattern of behaviour, women are used as primary unit of exchange.) Offences against the code must be requited sooner rather than later, yet he who takes revenge after 100 years is said, in a local proverb, to have taken it too soon.
During the Soviet occupation, the Mujaheddin gained a reputation for ferocity epitomised by the "Afghan shirt" and "the Afghan tie" - anatomically ingenious slow deaths inflicted on captured Russian conscripts.
No such matters are covered in these exclusively traditional narratives, but the preface, nevertheless, makes passing reference in his introduction to the recent political history of the region, suggesting that Osama bin Laden took advantage of the Pakhtunwali to make himself a "'guest' of the Taliban". It is evident from this that there exists a certain commonality of feeling between the Taliban and the Pashtun . In reality, while all the Taliban are Pashtun, only those Pashtun who emerged from the American-funded training-camps are Taliban . Established in Pakistan to prepare Afghan and Arab jihadis to fight against the Russians , these followed a very narrow religious curriculum shaped by the Wahhabi sect more prevalent in the Arabian peninsula.
Many of the stories are elaborate tales of love, marriage, adultery and abduction, accompanied by magically-assisted deeds of heroism and ending with the decapitation of the erring wife and her lover.
In the tale of 'The Merchant and the Parrot', the title character acquires a beautiful young wife by placing her weight in gold in a scales and is cuckolded when "he began to deteriorate physically" so that "his weight and stature diminished to half their former size". The wife then takes a lover and attempts to kill the talking parrot who serves the merchant as a magical adviser. For this she is expelled. Tricking her back into the household, however, the parrot next reveals her adultery to her husband before advising him "to dig a hole in the ground, kill your wife, and bury her". The merchant now follows "the clever parrot's advice" and afterwards marries Princess Padama, a former owner of the parrot; and "from that day onwards the merchant and his wife lived happily ever after".
Several stories do indeed celebrate women's superior intelligence to that of viziers, but the weight of self-serving patriarchal law provides the dominant note in the collection. Some actually reveal their origins in bath-house society, as in the tale of the king, merchant and peasant who jointly discover a diamond and who then compete with strange stories for its possession. As the last to speak, the peasant offers an explanation for his celibate condition. Apparently he was in a relationship with a fairy dame when his father arranged for him to be married to a village girl, whereupon he suffered the fate of Mr Bobbit at the hands of his spirit-world companion. On making due apologies, however, he was miraculously healed - though unfortunately, as he tells the others, the fairy threw his pecker at him from a distance "and it landed slightly squint". On examining the medical evidence with their own eyes, the others are compelled to award the diamond to the peasant.
Allowing for deviations under pressure, the translation language of these tales is shaped by the norms of English orientalism - a lucid nursery-ese coloured by the occasional archaism. The Irish experience of translation affords a relevant point of comparison here. For W. B. Yeats, folk tales were the chief form of resistance that Ireland could offer to "Anglicisation" - a term he adopted from Douglas Hyde when contemplating Ireland's position between the "upper and the nether millstones" of England and America in 1892. Writing in the United Irishman, he declared: "Whether we have still to face a long period of struggle, or have come to the land of promise at last, we need all our central fire, all our nationality".
For Yeats, Hyde and Lady Gregory alike, the stories of the common people were coals from that fire, and their translation elicited a range of dynamic styles in which the idea of resistance, rather than diversion, found expression. No such idea informs these translations, and they are undoubtedly the poorer for it; yet the stories themselves retain a power to charm and shock by turns.
Roger Boase has added a proficient Folkloristic Analysis together with an appendix of folk motifs and informative footnotes which alone ensure the book a place in the folklore literatures of Asia minor and the subcontinent.
Bruce Stewart lectures in literary history and bibliography at the University of Ulster and serves as Literary Adviser to the Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco). He was assistant editor of the Oxford Companion to Irish Literaure
Pashtun Tales from the Pakistan-Afghan Frontier. Compiled by Aisha Ahmad and Roger Boase, Saqi Books, 379pp. £14.99