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Вестник СПбГУ. Востоковедение и африканистика. 2019. Т. 11. Вып. 1
Demographic Statistics among Pashtuns in Early Modern Period
M. S. Pelevin
St. Petersburg State University,
7-9, Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation
For citation: Pelevin M. S. Demographic Statistics among Pashtuns in Early Modern Period. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies, 2019, vol. 11, issue 1, pp. 64-74. https://doi. org/10.21638/spbu13.2019.105
The article explores rare specimens of demographic statistics extracted from the seventeenth century works in Pashto and Persian which were composed in the Pashtun tribal territories. The study's major source is the collection of historical accounts and genealogical records written by the Khaiak tribal rulers Khushhal Khan (d. 1689) and his grandson Afzal Khan (d. circa 1740/41). These writings have survived in "The Khaiaks' Chronicle" — the archive of the Khaiak chieftains included by Afzal Khan as a supplement into his historiographical compilation "The Ornamented History" (Tartkh-i murassa'). Other sources are the poetical works of Khushhal Khan and the book in Persian by the theologian Akhund Darweza (d. 1618/19 or 1638/39) "An Account of Pious and Wicked" (Tazkirat al-abrar wa-l-ashrar) which contains a report on the census conducted in the Yusufzay tribe in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The researched material includes data on the number of people in particular tribal units, birth dynamics, infant mortality and external negative factors, such as epidemics and natural disasters, that continuously affected demographic situation. The extant sources also shed light on family and matrimonial relations among Pashtuns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The facts examined in the article indicate that Pashtun tribal rulers were well familiar with the basics of practical demography which they needed to monitor the number of tribesmen while accomplishing specific administrative, military and economic tasks. The demographic notes left by the Khaiak chieftains are to be considered among the most unique documents on the history and the culture of Pashtun tribes in early modern times.
Keywords: Pashtun tribes, demographic statistics, historiography, tribal chronicles, genealogies, Pashto literature.
Records on the size of the Pashtun tribes became available in the first half of the 19th century, primarily, in publications of the British military officers [1; 2; 3, etc.]. These data originated from field reconnaissance and pursued quite obvious purposes. For example, Sir Alexander Burnes stated in his report of September 8, 1837: «The principal person among the Euzoofzyes is Futteh Khan, Chief of Punjtar, whose territories to the west are bounded by Swat and Hushtnuggur. He has about 1500 foot, and 200 horse, beside village (ooloosee) troops» [1, p. 2]. Since 1871, numerous and broad-spectrum statistics on Pashtuns, including demographic characteristics, have been regularly published in British gazetteers, encyclopedic reference books on Afghanistan and North-West India. These gazetteers were compiled from materials of diverse multiple origins, including periodic
© Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, 2019
census reports and were intended initially as a "database" in support of activities of the British colonial administration; however, they reflected as well a wide range of areas and outcomes of these activities. While A. Burnes was chiefly interested in the military potential of Pashtun tribes measured by the number of horse and foot warriors, the compilers of the Gazetteer of the Peshawar District 1897-98 already neutral civil statistics: "Of the people no less than 339,069 persons, or 47,2 per cent., are true Pathans and 562,649 persons, or 90 per cent., speak Pashtu" [4, p. 125].
As evidenced by the extant written sources, a native-grown interest in demographic statistics emerged among Pashtuns three centuries earlier and it was also caused by practical needs. It should be noted that in other areas of knowledge related to studying the national history and culture, priority was also held by representatives of the Pashtun people. Probably, the most indicative fact in this respect refers to lexical and grammatical descriptions of the Pashto language made by the native speakers before the works of European researchers. The first-ever scientific treatises on Pashto grammar and vocabulary — "The Gardens of Mahabbat" (Riyaz al-Mahabbat), "Vocabulary of Irtiza" (Farhang-i Irtiza'i) and "Miracles of the Words" (Aja'ib al-lughat) were written in 1807, 1810, and 1813, respectively, by descendants of the Pashtun Diaspora in North India: Mahabbat Khan, Irtiza Khan and Muhammad Ilahyar Khan. Meanwhile, the European works on Pashto grammar appeared only in 1840s1.
The Pashtun tribes were mentioned in medieval sources written in Persian from the second half of the 10th century, starting from the anonymous geographical tractate, "Boundaries of the World" (or "The Regions of the World;" Hudud al-alam) (982/3) [9]. However, up to the establishment of the Great Mughal Empire in India in the first half of the 16th century, Persian-speaking authors used to convey only brief and extremely scarce information about the Afghans and never called them by their historical endoethnonym "Pashtuns". Actually, the Pashtun tribes became an object of interest in Persian historiography through the memoirs of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire, which were originally written in his native language (Chagatai, or Old Uzbek) and were promptly translated into multicultural Persian [10; 11, p. 151-167].
The first books in Pashto appeared almost at the same time as the memoirs of Babur, in the second quarter of the 16th century. These books did not survive to our time but their existence is reliably confirmed by the later Pashto sources. Apparently, they contained chronicles with diverse historical, economic and socio-legal records. The assumed authors of these books were the Yüsufzay tribal rulers Shaykh Mali and Kajü Khan. Their names appear in the titles, under which these books became known later: "The Record Book of Shaykh Mali" (Da Shaykh Mali daftar) and "The Chronicle of Khan Kajü" (Tarikh-i Khan Kaju). The latter could have been originally entitled "Chronicles of the Afghans" (Tawarikh-i afaghina) [12, p. 21-26]. Records of the Yüsufzay chiefs were preserved in the revised form in "The Chronicle of Hafiz Rahmat Khan" (Tartkh-i Hafiz-Rahmat-Khani), a historiographical work of the mid-18th century (1767). However, the written sources underlying this bilingual work were not represented by the original texts of the 17th century but by their later narrations in Pashto in Persian [13; 14; 12, p. 66-67].
1 First, the works of B. Dorn (1805-1881) were published in Saint-Petersburg [5; 6]; the papers of H. G. Raverty (1825-1906) were published later [7; 8]. B. Dorn's studies were based primarily on the copies of the Pashto grammar "The Gardens of Mahabbat".
"The Record Book of Shaykh Mall" was of almost sacred value for the Yusufzays. This is implied, for example, in caustic couplets by Khushhal Khan Khaiak (1613-1689) dated to the mid-1670s, where "The Record Book" is compared with "The Treasury of Islam" (Makhzan al-Islam), a theological work by Akhund Darweza (d. 1618/19 or 1638/39), acknowledged as the main book on the Muslim faith among the Yusufzays and other Eastern Pashtuns [15, p. 925]. J. Darmesteter (1849-1894) developed the same opinion after his mission to North India in the late 19th century, when he heard from the local Pashtuns that a unique copy of Shaykh Mall's book was supposedly kept in secrecy in the Swat mountains, away "from the ignorant eyes" [16, p. 184-185]. Later, based on implicit information, "The Record Book of Shaykh Mall" was often defined as a "cadastral book," presumably containing a register of fertile lands in the Swat valley and the procedures of their use [12, p. 24]. Probably, cadastral records made only part of "The Record Book," whereas other sections should have included Yusufzay genealogies, historical information about the Yusufzays relocation to Swat, and, apparently, a summary of social and legal rules. In any case, "The Record Book of Shaykh Mall", the first book in Pashto, partly consisted of demographic records, which also included census statistics.
Pir Mu'azzam Shah, the author of "The Chronicle of Hafiz Rahmat Khan" mentioned that his primary source on the Yusufzay history was the non-extant book "The Chronicles of Afghans" by Mirdad Khalil, written in Pashto and Farsi, ca. 1621/22. Presumably, this written work was the first synopsis of the old Yusufzay books dated to the 16th century. However, there is every reason to believe that materials presented in "The Record Book of Shaykh Mali" and "The Chronicle of Khan Kaju" had been used earlier by Akhund Darweza in his Persian work "An Account of Pious and Wicked" (Tazkirat al-abrar wa-l-ashrar), which is a mixture of religious sermons, memoirs and historical notes [17; 18, p. 26-39, 289-295]. Although Darweza does not refer to the earlier Pashtun sources, his information about the past of the Yusufzays was obviously picked up from the books of Shaykh Mali and Kaju Khan, along with the oral traditions. Darweza provides a direct confirmation of the fact that Shaykh Mali dealt with the census in order to establish land use procedures. The quantitative evidence for the Yusufzay clans was most likely extracted from written documents:
When the Yusufzay tribe occupied the lands of Swat, the Chief Shaykh Mali decided that it would be right to count tribal people — children and adults, men and women — and to divide Swat according to their number. People [in the units] of Akozay and 'Isazay made six thousand, and people [in the unit] of Mandar made twelve thousand more. And he included in the calculation people from Nangarhar, Laghman and Kabul, who were with them, but did not include the people of these districts. According to this number, he made the division. Until now, this division of Shaykh Mali is unchanged, neither replaced, nor canceled [17, p. 106]2.
2 Cf. translation of this excerpt made by V. V. Kushev from the manuscript (C 1560) stored in the IOM RAS collection [12, p. 23]. The text of the St. Petersburg manuscript bears a significant textual discrepancy related to statistical data; instead of "people [in the unit] of Mandar — made twelve thousand more" it states: "people [in the units] of Malizay and Ilyaszay — also made six thousand. [So] people [in the tribe] of Yusufzay turned out twelve thousand". It may be assumed that these figures mean the number of families, rather than serfs.
Demographic data on the size of tribal units were of paramount importance to tribal rulers. Military force, administrative and political influence, as well as economic potential of the units were largely determined by their numerical strength. Tax levies depended on the number of families. In cases where land ownership was public and agriculture was based on patriarchal land tenure, including the principle of regular redistribution of fertile land (among Pashtuns — wesh custom), the actual size of land holding of each clan unit also depended directly on the number of comprising families. These reasons dictated the census of Swat land users implemented by Shaykh Mali, who could have recorded additionally the wesh rules in his "Record Book" [8, p. xv; 19, p. 125]3.
The most valuable and in many ways unique written source highlighting the everyday life of Pashtun tribes in the 17-18th centuries is "The Khatak's Chronicle," a kind of home archive of the Khatak chieftains included by its author, Afzal Khan Khatak (1665/66 — ca.1740/41), grandson of Khushhal Khan, in a compilatory historiographical work "The Ornamented History" (Tartkh-i murassa') (completed in 1724) [21, p. 254-513]. Records of Khushhal and Afzal in the "The Chronicle" demonstrate the great practical importance of statistical data, including demography, for executing tribal rulers' military and administrative functions. The texts of "The Chronicle" abound with various quantitative indices suggesting that educated Pashtun chieftains counted much and often [22]. First and foremost, they counted people, both to assess the combat power of military units, and to evaluate the clan units' number in general. Pashtun chieftains had no taboo on counting people, though we know nothing about the attitude of ordinary tribesmen to such censuses4.
The fundamental importance of demographic statistics in reports on the Pashtun tribes is well illustrated by a story from "The Chronicle" about a talk Khushhal Khan had with the Mughal Emperor Shahjahan (1628-1658). This meeting took place on the lands of the Khatak Principality in 1649, when the Emperor was on his way to Kabul to take a lead of another Mughal military campaign at the western borders of the Empire. In the talk, which was only one step away from an interrogation, Shahjahan showed immediate interest in demographic data — the number of the Yusufzays, the northern neighbors of the Khataks, and their troops. Khushhal Khan reported to the Emperor that the Yusufzays had eleven thousand families, and that the Swat Yusufzays can bring forward five thousand horsemen, and those from the Sama Valley — four or five hundred [21, p. 278]. The same kind of information was reported by the British officer A. Burnes in 1837 (see above).
3 According to O. Caroe, the land tenure order, which was established by Shaykh Mali and persisted in Swat until the first half of the 20th century, implied that land plots assigned to certain clans and defined by the term daftar (quite obviously, by the name of "The Record Book of Shaykh Mali"), were separated by plots granted specifically to tribal spiritual authorities, in order to prevent borderline conflicts [11, p. 182]. In the mid-17th century, Khushhal Khan Khatak, who observed the rules of feudal tenure of the Mughal Empire on his territories and was extremely dissatisfied with the old order of Shaykh Mali, briefly mentioned that in Swat "Malik's fields are within the Daftar borders" that can be interpreted as an indirect allusion to the wesh custom [20, p. 32].
4 Census data of the British colonial administration suggest that the Pashtuns were not eager to provide accurate information about their families, for many pragmatic reasons. Critical attitude to the very idea of counting people is reflected in the biblical story of King David, who took census of his people by Satan's incitement and was punished by God: "And (Joab) gave David the number of them, whom he had surveyed: and all the number of Israel was found to be eleven hundred thousand men that drew the sword: and of Juda four hundred and seventy thousand fighting men.... And God was displeased with this thing that was commanded: and he struck Israel" (The First Book of Paralipomenon, 21: p. 1-8).
According to the records of the Khatak chiefs, tribal groups were considered "strong" or "weak" mostly depending on their number. For example, when describing the failed attempt of Jamal Khan Mohmand to become tribal leader in 1710/11, Afzal Khan emphasizes that the warfare of this Mohmand chieftain was doomed to failure because of the weakness (i.e., the small number) of his native clan Müsrizay:
After the death of Padishah Aurangzeb, Jamal Mohmand and some short-sighted fools with him, raised their heads to rebel. He was a Müsrizay among the Mohmands. And Müsrizay is a weak clan (kamzore tapa) within the Mohmands. His goal was like that: "In this rebellion I will get honor and glory to myself, will gain power" [21, p. 402].
The basic demographic unit of the Pashtuns was a family, household (kor); the numerical strength of tribal units was measured in the number of families. "The Khatak Chronicle" provides unique information about the number of families in all major Khatak clans. This demographic account is given in the first sections of "The Chronicle," which represent an exposition of draft records made by Khushhal Khan. The list of the Khatak clans arranged in descending order (by number of families) is as follows: Gulzay — 2000, Amanzay — 1000, Sagharay — 1000, Isoray-[Nusrati] — 500, Tsinay — 400, Muhman-day — 400, Sinay — 400, Hasankhel — 300, Babar — 300, Oryakhel — 300, Ghorizay — 300, Fathkhel — 250, Amanday — 250, Isma ilkhel — 200, Achokhel — 200, Durmalik — 200, Müshak — 200, Khwaram-[Bolaq] — 200, Mughalkay — 200, Mahmütay — 180, Tsalozay — 150, Khwaram-[Torman] — 100, Idrishkhel — 100, Nandark — 100, Man-day — 90, Radzar — 60, Hünay — 60, Yüsufkhel — 50-60, Amir — 52, Watar — 50, Dangarzay — 50, Khwajakhel — 40 [21, p. 262, 266]. Thus, according to "The Chronicle", the number of the Khatak families at the eve of the 18th century was about 9,690. This number correlates with the data on the Yüsufzays, eleven thousand families, as reported by Khushhal Khan to Emperor Sháhjahán in 16495.
Assuming that the minimum size of a nuclear family made five members, on average, the total number of the Khataks in the times of Khushhal Khan was at least fifty thousand. This number correlates remarkably with data of the Peshawar Gazetteer 1897-98, where the total number of the Khataks is estimated at 49,512 [4, p. 126]. However, the actual average number of a nuclear (married) family was probably greater than five. Moreover, the term kor could be applicable as well to the so-called "extended" family, which included relatives of various degrees of kinship, as well as servants and slaves; in this case, the number of family members could be even greater. Materials of "The Khataks' Chronicle" prevent an indisputable conclusion about the exact definition of kor, but it is little doubt that this term was based on the notion of a family consisting primarily of spouses and their offspring. In any case, relying on the demographic account made by Khushhal Khan, it can be suggested that the actual number of the Khataks in the 17th century exceeded significantly the fifty thousand minimum.
5 Khushhal's data on the number of the Yusufzays agree with those provided by Akhund Darweza in "An Account of Pious and Wicked" according to the St. Petersburg copy of the work. In the Peshawar edition of "An Account" the total number of the Yusufzay families is estimated at about eighteen thousand (see above).
Another number related to the demography of the Khataks was mentioned by Khushhal Khan in his autobiographical poem "Come and listen to my story.." written in 1680. Here, Khushhal says the following: "Thirty thousand Khataks mine, / Each one to my word intent" [15, p. 582]. If Khushhal means here the number of families, it is set too high, but if he means the total number of tribal members, it is underestimated. Given the poem context, it most likely implies the maximum number of combat strength, foot and horse, which the Khatak tribe could raise, according to their leader's calculations; all these are men of mature age, starting from 14-15 years old. It is noteworthy that the British military experts estimated the Khatak forces ("the number of the fighting men") in 1899 at twenty four thousand [3, p. 108]. Given that thirty thousand refers to men of mature age only, the total number of the Khatak tribe could amount up to one hundred thousand.
According to the detailed genealogical data presented in the first sections of "The Chronicle," the Khataks were subdivided into two large units — the Tormans and the Bolaqs [21, p. 254-263]. The Torman clans numbering 6,520 families dominated the Bolaq clans, which were less than twice (3,170 families). The Hasankhel clan, which included the Khatak ruling family Akorkhel, was average in size, but was the latest established within the general list of clans: its founder Hasan belonged to the latest generation of the clan eponyms. The demographic account mentions 300 Hasankhel families, though other Chronicle sections imply that there were about 200 families and the other 100 were probably the adjoined Mizhakhels. In the opinion of the Chronicle authors, clans consisting of 200 families were considered small: "Bakay has a few descendants, only two hundred families in total" [21, p. 261].
The priority importance of demographic indices in tribal relations is confirmed by the fact that the common names of certain tribal units were just numerals indicating the number of families. For example, two clans of the Dilazak tribe, whose founders were brothers Haydar and Sanay, had no separate eponymous names but both were known under the collective name "Sisada" (from Persian st sad, "thirty hundred") [21, p. 255]. Obviously, this case indicates the merging of two close tribal groups with a total number of about three thousand families.
The number of members in each nuclear family depended mainly on the number of minor children and women — wives, concubines, unmarried and widowed female relatives of various degrees of kinship. Data of the Khatak lineages show that the number of children in the tribal elite varied strongly. For example, Nizam and Tawus Khan, sons of Malik Akoray, great-grandfather of Khushhal, left no children6; Shahbaz Khan, father of Khushhal, had four sons who reached the age of maturity; Yahya Khan, grandfather of Khushhal, had eleven, and Khushhal Khan — thirty-one son7. If we compare representatives of the same generation, Khushhal's three full brothers — Shamshir, Mirbaz and Jamil Beg — had one, six, and thirteen sons, respectively. Afzal Khan, who belonged to grandchildren of Khushhal, mentions his four sons: fifteen, fourteen, eleven and nine years old, in his records dated 1718 [21, p. 417].
The Khatak chieftains' lineages bear no much information about daughters. The total number of Khushhal's daughters (thirty-one, nameless, cf.ootnote 7) is indicated only and
6 As regards Nizam, "The Chronicle" states that he "died young while his father was alive" [21, p. 257].
7 In his poem "The Book of Separation" (Firaq-nama) written in 1665-66, Khushhal Khan tells that he has twenty-seven sons and thirty-two daughters [23, p. 34].
a daughter of Yusuf Khan, one of the Akoray's sons, named Fatima, is mentioned briefly [21, p. 257].
Fragmentary information about the wives and concubines of the Khaiak chieftains, starting with Chinjo, great-great-grandfather of Khushhal Khan, is also indicative of the absence of any "average statistic standards" in marital relations. "The Chronicle" reports that Chinjo had sons with two women, Malik Akoray — with seven, Yahya Khan — with six, and Shahbaz Khan — with three. According to his own confession, Khushhal Khan had increased libido and, in addition to the four wives allowed by the Muslim marital laws, he also kept a large number of concubines [24, p. 166-167]. "The Chronicle" mentions his four Pashtun wives, whose names are unknown, and eleven concubines with the legal status of umm al-walad. This status guaranteed acknowledgement of paternity in respect of children born to the concubine from her owner and the appropriate subsistence level. One of the concubines, who gave birth to Farhat, son of Khushhal, in 1668, during his forced stay in India, is identified as an "Indian" (hindustanay).
Female fertility also varied. Khushhal Khan had six adult sons with his first wife, daughter of Alif Alakkhel; two sons with both daughter of Dawlat Khan Kahiar and daughter of Sahib Khan Muhmandzay, and one son with daughter of Malo Khan Bayizay. In certain cases, emphasis is put on the fact that a child "was the only (guxay) one to his mother" — as is said in "The Chronicle" about the three sons of Malik Akoray: halfbrothers Yahya Khan, Nizam and Yusuf Khan, whose mothers were Taruka Mizhakhel, Nandarko Bolaq and Durdana Mohmand, respectively [21, p. 257].
The demographic situation in tribal units was greatly affected by a high rate of infant mortality that reached almost 1/2. In other words, every second child did not survive to the age of maturity. "The Chronicle" provides exact information about the sons of Yahya Khan and Khushhal Khan: the former had eleven sons, who lived to the age of maturity and "had nine children more, but they died in infancy (pa tufuliyyat) [21, p. 257-258], while the extensive list of Khushhal's sons mentions fifty-eight sons, of whom twenty-seven died in infancy [21, p. 260]. Of the twelve sons born to Khushhal and his first wife, daughter of Alif Alakkhel, six died in infancy, and only one of the four sons born to a daughter of Malo Khan Bayizay survived.
"The Chronicle" also contains detailed statistics on the age of infant mortality; the reported data almost exclusively refer to sons of Khushhal Khan: four of them, including the firstborn Akbar, died within a week after birth, one son was aged one year old by death, one — aged two years, two sons — aged two-and-a-half years, one — by five years old, one — by eight, and one — by nine. One of Yahya Khan's grandsons, i.e., the cousin of Khushhal, also died at the age of ten. Seven sons of Khushhal Khan died in premature delivery at the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy. In three cases, the dead babies were twins (bgargunt).
Persistent factors of negative impact on demography also included regular epidemics, natural disasters and famine caused by crop failures. These accidents are mentioned in "The Chronicle" only occasionally. For example, the story of Afzal Khan about the start of an unrest among the Pashtun tribes in the spring of 1695 tells sideways that "in that year, severe cholera ('aztma waba) emerged in this region, which apparently was the cause of the illness and death of the Kabul Governor Amir Khan [21, p. 489]. Khushhal Khan mentions in his diary an epidemic of fever in the winter of 1673-1674 that struck his family refuging in the mountain fortress Takht (Taray-Bolaq territory). "Most people got sick
with fever" (aksar tabzhan shawl wu) and his beloved daughter Taj Bibi died [21, p. 315]. "The Chronicle" presents a story of Khushhal's suffering from fever (taba) just before his wedding in the summer of 1631, a very exciting narration, both in artistic representation and with numerous ethnographic details [21, p. 273].
Recalling the facts of natural disasters and epidemics are not rare also in Khushhal Khan's poetry, which partly represent diary records shaped in verse and complement the Chronicle records. Thus, the Khushhal's dlvan communicates on the three droughts that caused crop failure and large-scale famine in 1649, during the war for Kandahar between the Great Mughals and Iranian Safavids, in 1677, immediately after the end of the great Pashtun-Mughal war of 1672-76, and in the next year of 1678 [15, p. 578, 842-843, 904]. In the qi/a-fragment about the drought of 1677, Khushhal tells briefly of the demographic sequels of the famine-induced deaths: "Many children from the chieftain family (khelkhana) died; / the stigma on the heart is [death of] 'Abdallah, [son] of Yahya Khan8".
A similar reference to drastic consequences of famine caused by the demographic factor (overpopulation) is found in personal memories of Akhund Darweza in "An Account of Pious and Wicked". The record refers to appr. 1591/92, when the Mughal Emperor Akbar (ca.1556-1605) conducted a military campaign against the Swat Yusufzays and neighboring districts of the south-eastern Hindu Kush. Akhund Darweza does not render statistical data on the victims but draws an impressive picture of the vast famine, which reveals the scale of this disaster and its impact on the demography over these territories [17, p. 101-102]. This excerpt attracted the attention of Afzal Khan, who made a precise translation from Persian into Pashto and included it in the section of "The Ornamented History":
Finally, the Almighty God sent famine (qaht) upon them (the Yusufzays. — M. P.) and put under the wrath of Padishah [Akbar]. They were struck by famine to such an extent that they left both [valleys] — Sama and Buner — and got crowded in Swat. Akhund Darweza tells that so many people died in Swat every day, that the remaining had no strength to bury them. If they found carrion, they ate it as permitted food (halal). They ate even dead flesh, if they could not find [carrion], and died. Men and women left each other, adults and children went away from each other. Out of hunger, they stole each other's children and sold them [into slavery] to other places. They stole things from each other and spent on food. To such an extent [it came to] that they lost everything they had [21, p. 240-241].
Two poems of Khushhal Khan, a qaslda and a qit'a, represent poetic responses to cholera epidemic of 1686-1687, which claimed many lives of his tribesmen, including members of his family [15, p. 506-507, 834-835]. In the qaslda, Khushhal not only calls to memory his deceased relatives, but also reports that in one case a hunting dog was the infection carrier:
Cholera of 1097 / May God not repeat! // My Akorkhels died off from it: / adults and children, men and women. // My [son] Bakhtnak Khan died from it, / and ill fate took his mother. / One boy remained from him, / but soon he also died after them. // Also Sarfaraz, [son] of Sa'adat — / good and beautiful was my grandson. // Learnt the Quran by heart / and was unequaled in literacy. / He raised a hunting dog, / and it got rabid quietly. / He held out his hand to it / because he took it as his friend. / But it bit his hand, / and this could not be cured. // In the same year ill fate / took him away from me [15, p. 506-507].
8 Here, Yahya Khan is a Khushal's son named after his great grandfather.
The qi/a-fragment is written in the genre of mourning elegy (marsiyya) and is entirely devoted to his son Bakhtnak. Along with traditional posthumous praises and grievous exclamations, two facts are mentioned in the poem: Bakhtnak's age — twenty-three years old, and the length of illness — two weeks.
Derived from several early Pashtun sources the above data relate to particular localities and provide a documentary corpus to study the outset of demography in certain Pashtun tribes only, in this case, the Khataks and the Yusufzays. Second, these data reflect, to a limited extent, only basic elements of demography related to the size of ethnic groups and factors affecting demographic indices. The same sources contain the extensive genealogical and historical material allowing for a more detailed study within a wider range of topics related to the ethnogenesis and social demography of Pashtuns. As evidenced by data sources, mainly "The Khataks' Chronicle", the Pashtun tribal leaders had to make use of the basics of practical demography — first and foremost, since they needed to monitor the number of people in tribal units while performing specific military, administrative and economic tasks. Moreover, the very fact of the presence of demographic statistics in Pashto written sources dated back to the 16th-17th centuries adds them more value as the documents for studying the history and culture of Pashtun tribes in early modern times.
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Received: September 17, 2018 Accepted: December 6, 2018
Author's information:
Mikhail S. Pelevin — Dr. Sci. in Philology, Professor; [email protected]
Демографическая статистика у афганцев
на рубеже Cредневековья и Нового времени
М. С. Пелевин
Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет,
Российская Федерация, 199034, Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., 7-9
Для цитирования: Pelevin M. S. Demographic Statistics among Pashtuns in Early Modern Period //
Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Востоковедение и африканистика. 2019. Т. 11.
Вып. 1. С. 64-74. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2019.105 (In English)
В статье собраны и прокомментированы редкие образцы демографической статистики из произведений XVII в. на языках пашто и персидском, созданных непосредственно на территориях паштунских племен. Главным источником являются хроникально-исторические и генеалогические записи вождей племени хатак Хушхал-хана (ум. 1689) и Афзал-хана (ум. ок. 1740/41). Эти записи сохранились в «Хатакской хронике» — архиве хатакских вождей, включенном Афзал-ханом в качестве приложения в его историографическую компиляцию «Украшенная драгоценностями история» (Tärtkh-i murassa'). Дополнительно были привлечены поэтические произведения Хушхал-хана и некоторые разделы из персоязычного сочинения богослова Ахунда Дарвезы (ум. 1618/19 или 1638/39) «Повествования о праведных и злых» (Tazkirat al-abrär wa-l-ashrär), где
сообщается о переписи, проведенной в племени йусуфзай во второй четверти XVI в. Исследуемые материалы содержат уникальные данные о количестве членов отдельных племенных подразделений, динамике рождаемости и детской смертности, внешних негативных факторах — эпидемиях и стихийных бедствиях, постоянно влиявших на демографические показатели. Сведения из источников позволяют получить более ясное представление о семье и брачных отношениях у паштунов в XVI-XVII вв. Анализ приведенных фактов показывает, что афганские племенные правители владели основами практической демографии, необходимой им для мониторинга численного состава племенных подразделений при выполнении конкретных военных, административных и хозяйственных задач. Сохранившиеся демографические справки хатакских князей имеют исключительную ценность как документы по истории и культуре паштунских племен на рубеже Средних веков и Нового времени.
Ключевые слова: паштунские племена, демографическая статистика, историография, племенные хроники, генеалогии, литература пашто.
Контактная информация:
Пелевин Михаил Сергеевич — д-р филол. наук, проф.; [email protected]
