Flavours of Pashto Music Dr. Raj Wali Shah Khattak Excerpts from Sheikh Aziz's 'The Richness of It All'

  Flavours of Pashto music

Publishing Date: Friday, December 17 2004 
Pashtoon is a unique nation. The Pashtoons are a romantic people and extremely love music butdon't like musicians. This seems very strange on their part, but there is a background to this. Themusicians would belong to lower cast of the society and they adopted music as their professionfor livelihood, while Pashtoons are warrior people and like manly professions. The other reasonmay be the soft and delicate nature of this profession, which is considered among the Pashtoonsto be the job of women folk. If we look at the history of nation, they are rough tough people.They have their own taste of aesthetics. They are fond of music and have very romantic approachtowards it. The disliking for musicians has some grounds. The musicians earning through musicis thought to be against Pashtoon character. The Pashtoons only like the profession of soldieryand agriculture. They have less patience for all other professions.If we look through ages the Pashtoons have promoted music indirectly by generously spendingon it rather lavishly by giving too much money to the musicians for their performance. This waythe Pashto music has developed. The Pashto music has very rich traditions though so far notwritten in notation locally, but by tradition it transfers from one generation to the other. Verylittle is written about it in the past. However, some of the notations and symphonies havesurvived, other are created and being transferred practically. Before the coming of radio, themullahs sternly opposed the music but Pashtoon would carryon their musical ceremonies.Apart from the professionals the staunch Pashtoon would practice music in his hujras and love to play 'Rabab' or 'Sitar' with the beating of 'Mangay' (water pot) as a drum.

 

 He would like to singfolk songs but not as profession. So the Pashto music has not written but has a long history andtradition.Pashto music has its own terminology for teaching, but professional musicians have been usingthe Indian musical terminology. The use of Indian terminology is common because the richmusic of India has influenced the Pashto music due to interaction of both the cultures. Thereason is that the professional musicians used to come from the sub-continent of India. Besidesthis the Pashtoon would practice his original music non-professionally in the privacy. So wehave a history of our own nature of Pashto music, which started like other nations from folklore.In folklore the Pashto has a very rich history. The Pashto doesn't have in writing its own mode of music. Much of the and antes have been taken from Indian 'Ragas' for harmonizing the Pashtotunes. From so many 'Ragas' of India only Bhairvien Raga is popular among the Pashtoons because of its evergreen melodious composition fit for all seasons, times and geographicalconditions. The same raga was first of all adopted for the composition of Pashto 'Tappa' anevergreen and most popular folk genre of the Pashto folk poetry. Then all the Pashto songs were based on this unique genre.

 Mshafiq,1/11/2022