A Touch of Reverie and Quaint Lunacy: Mahmadji of Pakhli Sings From Prison (c. 1886)

Register for this Teams event at go.uncg.edu/mahmadjipakhli

Around 1886 CE, a wandering poet named Mahmadji of Pakhli was imprisoned in Abbottabad for breaking a Hindu’s leg in a drunken fight. What remains of him in the historical record are some processing notes—that he claimed to be a king and all was not as it seemed, that this was not his first encounter with the law, that he was a “lunatic” (divana)—and two Pashto ghazals.

The tale of Mahmadji is a sort of anti-history of Afghans, cut away from the rationality of empire and ethnostate through the framework of dreaming and madness. Thus is Mahmadji shuttled to the wrong end of the spectrum between poet (shaʿir) and itinerant bard (dum), the latter denigrated in terms of both race and literary craft. But what happens when we grow history from such outcast reverie and lunacy? In this talk, we invite ourselves into Mahmadji of Pakhli’s social imaginary, dreamt up at the zenith of British carceral power. We will wander along the radical pathways of Mahmadji’s love songs, in which we find a strange sovereignty bleeding through the black locks of the beloved, rage for an impoverished girl refusing to work the land, and more.

Presented by: Dr. Tanvir Ahmed
Assistant Professor, Arizona State University

Tanvir Ahmed works on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Islam with an eye
toward critical historiography, rebellion, and thaumaturgy. His present monograph explores popular uprisings against the Mongol Empire across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He is also working on a project for the Cambridge Elements in the Global Middle Ages series, tentatively called The Idea of Afghanistan. Alongside various academic articles, he has published works of cultural criticism, translation, and fiction. He is an Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University.