The Balkans have always been
buffer states .Augustus there erected his barriers against the barbarian
hordes : there the Byzantine Empire
made its last long stand : and there the Christian Europe held the advancing
Turks at bay. Since the days of imperial Rome , no European sate has been more
often the subject of anxious inquiry : for those mountain valleys are the key of
Europe. So is the case of North West Frontier Province.From the days of
Alexander the great ,it has been the key to India. If on one hand it
remained the most important part of the subcontinent
,for whoever had command
over these narrow valleys and
terrain , had won the
fertile plains of India: on the other it had been remained a curse for
the inhabitants of this area. It
has always remained a route and a
highway for invaders , it’s
people always remained in
peril of conflict ,and the
fear of captivating doom have made them very
suspicious and quarrelsome. They always
sought refuge in the high peaks and craggy
mountains , they could never come down to plains , for coming down
to valleys meant extinction.
Pakhtuns are
divided into countless clans
and tribes although in aggregate they form one nation, one of the probable
reason is the strategic location of the area in which they are
sprawled . Most of them
remained ( and still live) in perilous
mountains and valleys with
very little space to sustain them ; they had to sprawl and disperse all over the
remotest land , each tribe has to enclave itself into its own territory. The result was a divided
nation , in which each tribe developed
it’s own ego. A Pakhtun can be
very loyal to his own tribe , but
he can never think beyond his own tribe; because everybody outside his own tribe
is his rival.
They have been remained in
isolation for centuries , the area
comprising the Pakhtun nation has never been fertile: thus no invader gave any
importance to it .Every invader, who passed through these rough and barren land
had a greater ambition of conquering
India ; hence
a little troubled by these fierce tribes ,
was overlooked , for the
reason of the greater cause .Centuries of harsh life have made these people
masters of this area ; no body could compete them in ambush and swift
attacks. They had full command over the valleys and their high peaks ,
naturally for any invader however
efficient may be could not easily
overcome their centuries old hide
and seek tactics ; even
fighting them was meaningless; for the invader could get
nothing out of them ; they had no rich booty to offer. Thus
Pakhtun developed a sense of in-convinciblilty
, for they have been ruled
by none . This feeling made them proud and they always called themselves the
unconquerable ;as a result each
Pakhtun developed his own
individual ego , falling from which means death to him.
The greatest
tragedy with Pakhtun nation has been it’s geographical location. It has
always remained the route to India , nothing more than it. The people living
here were only important as long as the situation
demanded ; beyond that they were
considered useless. Pakhtuns
lived in constant terror of attacks
, they could never come out from their mountainous asylums ; they remained only
tribes and clans as it was the only way of survival ; therefore they never
developed homogeneity nor ripened into a
civilization; which could have mellowed
their material
progress.
The Pakhtu
language itself is thousands of years old ;
the alphabets of Pakhtu are
almost a thousand years old , yet this nation has not produced prolific
writers , who could enrich
their language from time to time. The obvious reason is ; they never had enough
opportunity for learning : for them survival was the most important
issue above
anything else . Another probable reason is their own isolation , they
have never been in touch with any other civilization , with which they could
communicate. Even among themselves they were rivals as they had always been
warlike people; but there wars were petty skirmishes and
tribal feuds compared to the
great wars fought down on the plains of India, which always decided the fate of
India in the favor of some intruder. They never conquered any land
nor established any state (save the
Lodhis and Sher Shah) due to
the lack of unity and inspiring leadership .They were lesser in number ;they
could never sustain tiresome and long battles ; moreover
the tactics they used were
hide and seek, which
never produced any conclusive result. Their battles were only target
oriented , as soon as the target
was achieved the battle was over ;
naturally this method worked only
in their own mountainous area. Naturally
Pakhtu constantly remained only a language of communication , nothing more than
it. Oft en when two cultures meet
there is some interaction between them , but the case of Pakhtun is different ,
they always remained unconquerable and unruly .
They never produced any
gigantic leadership which could
have unified them : they only had
petty chieftains ;but never a grand
and illustrious leader who could have filled them with the aspiration of
triumph of distant land. And if someone tried to unify them , their petty
ego could never tolerate
it ,for a Pakhtun can rule
another Pakhtun ; he would prefer to die rather than to be ruled
A Pakhtun
is simple by nature , he can be flared up into passions very easily ; he
never thinks of the consequences. His stubbornness may take him to the point of
no return , but coming to compromise – impossible: he may win in the end , but
the cost of his victory is often useless , as it often
costs him much more then he could have done without the victory. This
point has often been exploited by the rulers of India ,
they fathomed their nature, Akbar , Alamgir and in the last the English
,all played with these people shrewdly. The region where these tribes live has always been a boundary
, where sub-continent was permanently demarcated imaginatively ; it was a
buffer zone created to resist any possible ambitions of the neighboring
countries. The ruler knew they could not rule them
easily, it’s better to divide and rule
: in return they were secured from the danger of
advancement of bordering
states, without any specific strain , as Pakhtuns
were enough in themselves to resist any ambitions of these countries . This
policy worked for centuries, without raising any extra army or spending a very
huge brass ; while these simple
tribes have been given the false illusion of freedom, and the ruler ruled
without fear. The rulers were wise
enough to gave up the idea of
conquering this barren land ; for it was
only dry and sapless land ; they
only stationed there forces at
their own chosen locations , from
where they could peruse their policies and tame these people by lucrative offers
time to time ; thus they achieved their great objective without much sacrifice.
Greek survived centuries of
Turkish rule because of the nationalistic reasons. Similar is the case of Pakhtu
language , it survived despite the
hordes of invaders during the past two thousand years. It endured
for several reasons, one of the reason is ,that the language of the
invader is never liked any where.
Accepting the language of the conqueror means one has accepted the
conqueror, even mentally superior
,as a result the whole conscious
and unconscious thinking of the
subdued society suffers from
inferiority complex , they give up their own ways of thinking
and accept whatever the ruler offers them. Their own customs and
traditions become a symbol of
backwardness, and in no time ,every
one of them strives hard to think the way ruling
class believes. Everything is
borrowed and readily accepted , there is no filtration , for the language of the
ruler means success and prosperity. Soon their own language becomes corrupt ;
if the rule extends for several centuries
a time comes the language
becomes obsolete :as happened with our Persian in India . The subdued class
cannot evolve its own way of intellectualization ,whatever the ruler
offers them, they accept it blindly , as
happened with us. Even after
the descent of British rule
fifty years ago , English is still the language of prestige and a symbol of education and
culture. This never happened with
Pakhtuns, they were never beaten ;they were
tough and resistant to any change. From the earliest time
they evolved their
own code of life , deviation from which meant
death to a Pakhtun. As they were never city dwellers , in such situation
,leaving the tribe’s traditions meant a social outcaste , which was
impossible for any one to accept ( still impossible). Living in those barren and dry
lands without the clan meant extinction ;
nobody could ever dreamt of revolting against the mores of
tribal society.
The words of a language
function primarily as symbols rather than signs. This means that their reference
is to the internal world of concepts and the
external world of objects. Attending to concepts is ,what we call thinking , and the expansion of vocabulary
means expansion of thinking.
The language is the first and foremost instrument of thought ;a mean
for outward expression or communication. In the
absence of any outer communication with other languages , a language will
remain isolated , which means the thoughts of a language will remain stagnant.
This is the reason that some
primitive societies of the world never
developed their culture and knowledge beyond
few basic necessities of life . Intellectually they are still infants ,learning
to live and understand
the world , where
our ancestor were
thousands of years ago.
Pakhtu is thousands of years old , yet it has not been in touch with
the outer world : which kept it stagnant
; it’s vocabulary never developed as constantly
and rapidly as it should have been ; as a result we remained timid in material
and mental progress for centuries.
Today Pakhtuns are
highly educated , rapidly filling the vacuum of high
education and learning which
they lacked for centuries. Now
there is complete change in their mode of life and thinking ,
they have become modern and sophisticated
, adopting the western standard of living. At
surface it may look a new and an
admirable change , but for the new
generation it’s
a new danger , lurking ahead
,of which majority of us are entirely unaware.
Our generation is completely alien to Pakhtu language( Pakhtu folk literature
and language in written form).This new generation
is fluent at Urdu and English , but
when it comes to their own mother tongue , they are helpless , because they
can’t read and write in their own language.
No matter Urdu is the language of communication in our country ,and
English being an international language is a necessary part of life
in the modern world , but the price we are
paying is much higher. We look down upon our own language , most of us
consider it backward and even consider it a symbol of ignorance. We don’t realize , we are losing our individuality ; we are giving up the Pakhtun-hood
which was so dear to our ancestors, which
they kept it alive ,
even in the most precarious situations.
The people living in Balkans ,the Kurds
in Middle East , and we the
Pakhtuns , all are located on borders : all of these three nations struggled
through out the centuries for their
survival . Only Pakhtuns were able to get a separate identity , while
they are still finding it hard to
keep themselves alive. We are the one of the most luckiest people ; after
centuries of hard conditions , at last we
found a land , which unified us as
a nation. If fate has bestowed an opportunity , we should avail it , we need to
instill our language with fresh thoughts and ideas, we have to make it a
language of complete expression and knowledge. Mere translation of foreign
books, borrowing foreign phrases and expressions is not expansion of
language. We need our own words , our own vocabulary , our
own literature , our own ideas , our own imaginations , and our own inner pride
and satisfaction in learning our blood language – nothing less
can make Pakhtu a living and animate
language . Giving up the
language is no escape , wherever we go ,we will be Pakhtuns ;
even if our children forget to speak
Pakhtu ,they will be called
Pakhtuns , for language is
identity and losing identity
means death.