Act two: Pashto play on struggle for freedom from British Raj reprinted

Dard, banned by British authorities in 1932, highlights the role of Pukhtuns in the uprising.


Hidayat Khan December 16, 2013
Dard, banned by British authorities in 1932, highlights the role of Pukhtuns in the uprising. PHOTO: FILE

PESHAWAR:


Pashto play Dard, based loosely on the Indian freedom movement, was banned by the British Raj in 1932 immediately after its publication. It has now been reprinted by the Bacha Khan Research Centre.


Dard was written by Ameer Nawaz Khan Jalya and is considered one of the first plays on Pukhtun history. The play came at a time when the independence movement against the British Crown was at its peak. It is the only work of Jalya that is available today. The playwright was born in 1910 in Utmanzai village in Charsadda.

Upon its release, all copies of Dard were confiscated by officers of the Crown. When in 1985 British libraries published a list of sub-continental literature, three of them were Pashto books, including Dard.



Dr Khalid Khan, former principal of Government Postgraduate College, Mardan, visited the British Museum in London to make a copy of the play. After being refused the chance to photocopy it, Khan sat and laboriously copied out the entire script with a pen.

In the original preface, Jalya wrote that his work was for Pukhtuns, highlighting the efforts of Pukhtun men and women for freedom.

Khan writes in the quarterly research journal Pashto that the original book is eight inches by five inches in dimension and has 42 pages. It comprises two acts and highlights problems and ground realities for Pukhtuns of the time. Khan says the exact date of when Dard was written is unknown, however the British Museum has put the year of publication at 1932.

The script takes the form of both verse and prose, highlighting the impact of Urdu plays of the times on Pukhtun writers, surmises Khan.

Notes on Dard

The play was written in the backdrop of the freedom movement and specifically highlights the Pukhtun struggle.

The story is set in a village where people declare their support for independence from the British. When the government hears of this, it sends a military contingent to subdue the uprising with the use of force. British forces are successful to an extent with the help of the Khans of the area.

The plot circulates around an impoverished family from the village – a woman, her husband and their two sons. The wife implores her husband to fight against the British Army and take revenge in the name of his fellow villagers who lost their lives in the uprising. The husband agrees but is caught by the army and imprisoned for three years for sedition. The sons then ask their mother’s permission to follow their father’s path but are also arrested and killed in front of their father. After watching his offspring being murdered in front of him, the father takes his own life in agony.

Professor Fazl Raheem Marwat, who wrote the introduction for the recent print, says Dard was performed on stage in 1932 to instil educational, political and social awareness among Pukhtuns.

“Even though it was banned at the time, the British still preserved the play as it represents Pukhtun culture and history,” says Marwat.

In addition to Jalya’s Dard, Abdul Akbar Khan’s Yateem (1924), and Tarboor (1927) are other plays that talk about the sacrifices made by Pukhtuns for freedom from the British. The writers of the time wanted to show how Pukhtuns of the time actively participated in the fight for freedom from the British despite living in extreme poverty, shares Marwat.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 16th, 2013.

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