A Road Trip by Way of Introduction

In October 1933, two motorcars drove out of Peshawar towards the Khyber Pass carrying a small delegation of Indian Muslims summoned to meet the Afghan ruler Nadir Shah in Kabul. While Nadir Shah had officially invited the travelers to discuss the expansion of the fledgling university founded a year earlier in Kabul, the Indians brought with them a wealth of experience of the wider world and a vision of the leading role within it of Muslim modernists freed of Western dominance. Small as it was, the delegation could hardly have been more distinguished: it comprised Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the celebrated philosopher and poet; Sir Ross Mas‘ud (1889–1937), the former director of public instruction in Hyderabad and vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University; and Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (1884–1953), the distinguished biographer and director of the Dar al-Musannifin academy at Azamgarh. The three were traveling to Kabul at the peak of their fame; they were not only famous in individual terms but also represented India's major Muslim movements and institutions of the previous and present generations. Ross Mas‘ud, grandson of the great Muslim modernist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), had fifteen years earlier been the impresario behind the foundation of Osmania University in the princely state of Hyderabad. A decade earlier, Sulayman Nadwi, the heir of the reformist principal of the North Indian Nadwat al-‘Ulama madrasa Shibli Nu‘mani (1857–1914), had been among the leading figures of the pan-Islamist, Khilafat struggle to save the Ottoman caliphate. And eighteen months earlier, Muhammad Iqbal had represented India's Muslims at the Round Table Conference in London that would shape India's route to independence.

Before their journey to Kabul, all three men had traveled widely: Iqbal studying in Cambridge and Munich, Mas‘ud touring the new polytechnics of Japan, and Nadwi negotiating for a democratic Arabia with Ibn Sa‘ud in Mecca. By 1933, the trio who drove into Kabul were veterans of the international project of Muslim regeneration, a project that drew its intellectual resources and ideological contours from the acts of travel by a small group of mobile intellectuals and their encounters with people they encoded as fellow “Muslims” like themselves. Behind their Afghan journey was a story of transnationally woven aspirations for Afghanistan's future: it is this trans-border traffic of Afghan modernism that I explore in the following pages.

The Afghan road trip of Mas‘ud, Nadwi, and Iqbal belonged to a lineage of trans-border texts written either by themselves or their illustrious forebears. Two generations earlier, Ross Mas‘ud's grandfather Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan had described his 1869 journey to London in a series of Urdu letters published in his journal Tahzib al-Akhlaq (“Social Reform”).Footnote ¹ Forty years earlier, Sulayman Nadwi's teacher Shibli Nu‘mani had written about his Egyptian travels of 1892 that laid the basis for his modernization of the Arabic madrasa curricula in India.Footnote ² Thirteen years before Nadwi's own journey through Afghanistan, he described his meetings with Arab and Turkish Pan-Islamists in Istanbul and London in a series of polished, published letters.Footnote ³ In a similarly public declaration of travel as the transformative act of modernism, Muhammad Iqbal's journeys through Europe in 1905, 1931, and 1932 were carefully documented by his companions and published in such Urdu newspapers as Lahore's Akhbar-e Watan.Footnote ⁴ Even the soon-to-be founder of Pakistan, Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, was presented in the traveler's mould, his frequent visits to the towns of the Afghan frontier being widely reported in the Urdu press.Footnote ⁵ Amid this local and international traffic, the aspirations of Muslim modernism were formed through a series of verbal and written transfers—of pacts and advice, skills and information—the fruits of which we find preserved in the vernacular travelogues these mobile intellectuals penned on their return.

While the Ottoman Empire is the better-known focus of Indian Muslim internationalism, from the early 1900s India's Muslim modernists began to turn toward Afghanistan in response to the optimistic policies of the reformist King Habibullah. Like the Middle Eastern journeys of the same period, the Afghan itineraries through which Indian Muslims sought to transform aspiration into action left a rich (if neglected) record in Urdu. Had it been a unique event, the 1933 Afghan road trip of the Indo-Muslim internationalists might be little more than an historical curiosity and its written account a mere Indian accompaniment to the many European tomes on Afghan travel.Footnote ⁶ Yet the journey of Nadwi, Iqbal, and Mas‘ud occurred at the zenith of a longer series of travels both into and out of Afghanistan with which, in both practical and ideological terms, the Afghan modernism of the first decades of the twentieth century emerged in fusion.

It is the excavation of this Indian and Urdu dimension to Afghan modernism that is this essay's primary purpose. My aim is not to deflate the contributions of an older historiography that has pointed to late Ottoman influences on the “Young Afghans” of the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁷ Nor is it to deflect attention from the Young Afghans’ as yet un-researched interactions with neighboring Iran, which were certainly also a feature of the period. Instead, alongside the more specific documentary aim of presenting unknown evidence of Indo-Afghan exchange, my goal here is a cumulative one of recovering the multiple transnational sources of Afghan modernism as the product of an imaginary that was at once global and multi-local, national and diasporic, through which in the opening decades of the twentieth century a multiplicity of ideological investors regarded Afghanistan as a unique space for the grand Muslim experiment of tajaddud, or “renewal.” An imaginary shaped less by theology than by technology—whether as a logistical means or a visual object of travel—this experiment was more the product of a globalizing (and decolonizing) world than a colonial one. It was born of aspirations for a Muslim renaissance that fed on the moral and political implosion of the colonial powers during World War I. As Afghanistan won its diplomatic independence from an exhausted Britain in the two-sided victory of the Third Anglo-Afghan war of 1919, the country's rulers tapped a transnational assortment of contacts with enthusiasts who, from Lahore, Istanbul, or Cairo, traveled to Kabul to lend muscle or mind to the building of a modern yet nonetheless Muslim Afghanistan.

Scholars have overlooked the important role played in this project by India's Muslims, equipped as they were with technical and intellectual skills as teachers, printers, or engineers. At this time, Kabul was better connected to the Indian (now Pakistani) city of Peshawar than to any of the other major cities of Afghanistan (let alone the far-off capitals of Tehran and Istanbul). The closeness of this relationship was measured in skills, capital, and confidence, as well as the basic facts of geographical proximity and historical connection. India's Muslims during this period emerged as major intellectual and infrastructural investors in Afghanistan's modernist movement.

The abrupt modernization program of the Afghan rulers Habibullah (r. 1901–1919), Amanullah (r. 1919–1929), and Nadir Shah (r. 1929–1933) has long been seen as the axial age of modern Afghan history. Yet, in both specialist and survey works, the pseudo-Afghan Jamal al-din “al-Afghani” (1838–1897), and through him the Arab Middle East, and the exiled Afghan intellectual Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933), and though him the Ottoman Empire, are the accepted sources of inspiration for Afghanistan's modernists: “Young Turks” rendered “Young Afghans.”Footnote ⁸ Again, it is not my intent to negate the significance of Afghan interactions with the late Ottoman Empire. Both Turks and Indians were welcomed in Kabul with the opening of Afghanistan's borders that followed the death of the “Iron Amir” ‘Abd al-Rahman in 1901, and again after Afghans won the right to independent diplomatic contacts in the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919.

The key difference between Afghan interactions with the Middle East and those with India was one of scale. In part, this was an inevitability of geography: Afghanistan (and particularly Kabul) neighbored such major Muslim population and publication centers of North India as Peshawar, Lahore, and at a push, Delhi. Just as key was the attraction of the scientific, religious, and material resources that India's vast Muslim labor pool offered, with theological modernists and experts on education as significant as industrial laborers and skilled printers. For in the decades since the catastrophic failure of the 1857 Rebellion and the dismantling of the old Muslim establishment that followed, India's Muslims had devoted vast energies to creating a new social and intellectual apparatus that ranged from schools and journals to scientific clubs and welfare societies.Footnote ⁹

If this immense assembly of resources led Afghan modernists to cast an envious eye across their eastern borders, then from the early 1900s many Muslim intellectuals in India looked longingly to Afghanistan as possessing one asset they lacked—the independence (istiqlal, azadi) that was a principal aspiration of the era. As the freedom movement gathered pace in India after World War I, Afghanistan became for many Indian Muslims a space of projected idealism, which in the “Hijrat” episode of the early 1920s led tens of thousands to emigrate to the “free Muslim nation” just over the border.Footnote ¹⁰ Between the 1900s and 1930s, geographical proximity combined with mutual attraction to encourage a substantial traffic of Indian Muslims. Whether they arrived as conscientious objectors to empire, skilled migrant laborers employed in the first Afghan factories, or as the roving teachers and ideologues I track in this essay, they made important contributions to the ideology and institutions of the Muslim modernism that sought to reshape Afghanistan in the opening decades of the century. Seventy years before the rise of the Taliban from the ashes of the Cold War, here in the era of “progressive” revolutions and visionary republics that followed World War I we find the older, trans-border siblings of the talibs.

Between Mobility and Modernity: Afghanistan and the Indian “Urdusphere”

The travel writings that emerged from this heightened mobility are important not merely as “sources” documenting trans-border interactions but also as windows into the cultural and ideological meanings with which these actions were invested. Travel was a processual activity, but it was also a literary genre woven from a new aesthetic imaginary and political ideology in which travel was celebrated as the highest form of a Muslim modernity. Travel was the means to witness, access, appropriate, and ultimately relocate modernity, which was itself configured as a set of moveable ideas and commodities. Nowhere is this seen more vividly than in the translation into Dari Persian of four novels by Jules Verne, which became the first fictional prose texts ever published in Afghanistan.Footnote ¹¹ In what amounted to a state-sponsored aestheticization of the modernity of industrial travel, under instructions from King Habibullah between 1912 and 1914 the Afghan intellectual Mahmud Tarzi (himself a long-term émigré) translated those of Verne's novels that featured American tramways and pan-Indian railroads, balloon flights and flying machines, Pacific steamships and deep-sea submarines. If such nautical contraptions appear superfluous for land-locked Afghanistan, then in the travelogue of King Habibullah's 1907 journey to India he was presented riding a fast motorboat along the River Hooghly in Calcutta (and then buying it), while in the account of his successor King Amanullah's journey to Europe in 1928 the king was portrayed as an Afghan Captain Nemo testing a submarine off the coast of England.Footnote ¹² Between French novelists and Afghan kings, travel was appropriated into both the act and the imaginary of Afghan modernism.

The Afghan stake in travel writing was therefore not limited to printing fictional journeys. Between 1900 and 1930 the three modernizing rulers of Afghanistan made their own trans-border journeys from which detailed travelogues were published. In these texts, Habibullah, Amanullah, and Nadir Shah are presented as perpetually on the move: driving in motor cars through their own borders, standing on train platforms across the vast length of India, flying by airplane in the skies over London.Footnote ¹³ Yet what is most striking about these Afghan travelogues—none of which has ever been discussed in the scholarship—is that they were written not in Dari Persian or Pashto, Afghanistan's “national” languages, but in Urdu. Mahmud Tarzi's Phileas Fogg-beating travelogue, “Journey of Twenty-Nine Days” (through the Middle East and Greece), offers the solitary Persian example of the period.Footnote ¹⁴ If the prominence of Urdu appears initially puzzling, in a period when printing in Afghanistan was still in its infancy, it can be explained by a combination of the far greater development of Muslim printing in India; the shared knowledge of Urdu among educated Afghans and Indians; the employment of Urdu-speaking Indians in the Afghan bureaucracy; and the growing interest from the Indian side of the border in the independent rulers of Afghanistan. Like other regions surrounding the industrializing colony of India, Afghanistan was drawn into the far larger literary economy of its neighbor, which exported printed books in languages ranging from Arabic and Persian to Swahili and Malay.Footnote ¹⁵

If the more robust printed Urdusphere of the early twentieth century was part of this transferred modernity, then its far greater productivity in comparison to the nascent public sphere of Pashto and Dari Persian means that the Urdu accounts of Afghanistan in this period are considerably richer than any so far located in Dari and Pashto. Aside from the singular perspective of the Afghan state newspapers, the impersonal edicts of the nizam-nama law codes, a few diasporic Afghan novels, and the writings of Mahmud Tarzi himself, the available sources in Dari Persian on this crucial transformative period are relatively few in number and narrowly official in scope; in Pashto we have even less before the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁶ In many respects, Afghanistan in this period was more knowable through the medium of Urdu than through Persian. Whether by way of gazetteer-style guidebooks, trade manuals, or historical writings, Afghanistan's landscape, economy, ethnography, and past were more accessible (and indeed purchasable) through printed Urdu texts than through the small and limited range of Afghan printed books available before the foundation of such national text-producing bodies as the Afghan Literary Society in the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁷ As a result, the Urdu sources on Afghanistan are especially significant because accounts of the Indian Muslims who visited and resided in Kabul provide by far the richest picture of the concrete results, both social and infrastructural, of the policies pursued by the Afghan modernists of the period.

In addition to arguing for the unacknowledged role of Indian Muslims in the creation of Afghanistan's Muslim modernism, this essay asserts that Urdu itself played an important role in the process. In a period in which literature and particularly publishing in Afghanistan's notionally—one is tempted to say “aspirationally”—national languages of Dari Persian and Pashto were far less developed than in the burgeoning Urdu public sphere across the border, Urdu served as an important medium for the transmission and exchange of ideas between India's Muslim intellectuals and their “Young Afghan” counterparts. After the decline of Persian in India from the mid-1800s, and before the Afghan governmental investment in teaching and printing in Pashto from the 1930s, the emergence of a trans-regional “Urdusphere” connected Muslim intellectuals as far apart as Kabul and Madras, not to mention readers in such maritime Urdu outposts as Durban, Istanbul, and Cairo.Footnote ¹⁸ Systematic evidence of Young Afghan interactions with the Urdusphere is presented below, but there are repeated references to Urdu in the Afghan Persian sources from the early twentieth century. Urdu appears even in the writings of the most famous exponents of “Turkish-imported” modernism, by way of Mahmud Tarzi and his Kabul-based newspaper Siraj al-Akhbar. Celebrating his newspaper's correspondence with an Indian Urdu newspaper from Muradabad, Tarzi for example published in Siraj al-Akhbar an Urdu ghazal poem that the Indian editor had sent to him and responded by writing a ghazal in Dari Persian, but with each verse ending with the Urdu title of the poem he had been sent.Footnote ¹⁹

Despite the linguistic blinkers of Area Studies scholarship, for the elites of Afghanistan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Urdu was more important than Pashto—or even in some cases, Persian—as a source of ideas and a means of engagement with the world beyond their borders. The transnational dimensions of Afghan modernism are typically traced in a westerly direction through the influence of Ottoman Syria on the exiled Afghan reformist Mahmud Tarzi before his return to Kabul in 1902. It is usually overlooked that Tarzi also knew Urdu. Indeed he compiled his earliest work, Majmu‘a-ye Sana'i‘ (“Industrial compendium”), in 1883 during his first period of exile in Karachi rather than in the Damascus with which he is generally associated.Footnote ²⁰ Clearly, Persian and Turkish were important. The introduction to a 1911 textbook issued for the first modern Afghan schools founded in the early 1900s reported that King Habibullah ordered the translation of books and documents from India, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran that had been published in Urdu, Persian, and Turkish.Footnote ²¹ Rather then dislodging these multiple literary and ideological flows, my aim here is to contextualize them in relation to the more abundant flows from the massive publishing economy of North India on Kabul's doorstep. Even as the 1911 Afghan textbook acknowledged translated materials from Turkish and Persian as well as Urdu, the fact remained that the textbook itself was published in the Indian city of Lahore. In what follows, I reconstruct the Afghan interaction with the Urdusphere that emanated from the reformed Muslim schools and tireless printing presses of colonial India, and reposition Urdu as the mobile and trans-border medium that it was in the decades either side of 1900, before it became a narrower, nationalized language with the founding of Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century.

The aims of this essay are therefore chiefly argumentative, stressing the unrecognized Indian and Urdu dimensions to Afghan modernity. Yet in view of the obscurity in which the existing sources have draped the modernizing Kabul of the 1920s and 1930s, I also pursue a documentary agenda of clearing a source route to these hazy mountains of modernity. In so doing, the goal is not to champion Indian “influence” or “origins” for a second-hand Afghan project. On the contrary, my aim is to show how the attempt to create out of Afghanistan a modern and independent Muslim nation was the product of a shared imaginary stretching from Istanbul to Hyderabad. This imaginary was fed at least as keenly by the aspirations of Muslims under British rule in India as by the reluctant Afghan subjects who ultimately either murdered or exiled their modernizing rulers. Taking the longer view of Afghan history, it is important to recognizing the multiple supra-national and extra-territorial investments in Afghan nation-making. For if we appreciate the input of Indian Muslim modernists to the creation of the Afghan state in the first decades of the twentieth century, then we can identify a much longer trajectory, whether structural or symbiotic, for the later and different trans-border imaginary that created the Islamic emirate of the Taliban. Indeed, in their quest for an unadulterated Muslim tradition, the similarly trans-border Taliban reappear as the closing of a circle that began with the forward-looking seekers of Muslim taraqqi, or “progress,” who crossed the border three generations earlier. When the ideology of “progress” failed after its apogee under the Afghan socialists of the 1980s, then in an inverse of chronological and ideological time, the exponents of “tradition” triumphed.

Sources of Connection: Afghanistan and the Urdu Travelogue

The main sources used for this essay are the series of Urdu travelogues that described the modernization process in Afghanistan during the reigns of Amanullah and Nadir Shah between 1919 and 1933. From the reign of Habibullah and the early reign of Amanullah survive the Kabul memoirs of the Indian revolutionary ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi (1872–1944). His account of his seven years in Kabul emerged in the context of the rise and fall during World War I of the transnational Khilafat movement, and the formation in Kabul of a provisional Indian “Government in Exile” made up of such former students of the Indian Deoband madrasa as ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi himself. His detailed Urdu account sheds valuable light on the achievements of King Amanullah and describes meetings with Afghan officials, Indian exiles, and Turkish military advisors, as well as the trans-border correspondence that Sindhi exchanged with Muhammad Iqbal to the east of the border and Mahmud Tarzi to the west.Footnote ²² Another highly insightful source on Amanullah's reforms is the Urdu educational travel memoir of Mir Shams al-Din, the Indian secretary of the Anjuman-e Himayat-e Islam (Society for the Support of Islam). I will use Shams al-Din's journal to assess Kabul's modernist educational institutions as they existed at the end of Amanullah's reign, and the role of Indian employees within them.Footnote ²³

From the reign of Nadir Shah, when the achievements of the previous decades had become visible and tangible, survive two extremely rich travel accounts written by Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1879–1955) and Sulayman Nadwi (1884–1953). A prominent social activist and heir to the great Sufi lineage of the medieval saint of Delhi, Nizam al-Din Awliya (d. 1325), Hasan Nizami visited Kabul in 1931, where he composed an Urdu travelogue for immediate publication in India, submitted via the postal service and carried by truck along the new road between Kabul and Peshawar.Footnote ²⁴ The next and most valuable account on which the essay relies is that of the three Indian travelers described at the opening of this essay, written on their return to India by Sulayman Nadwi.Footnote ²⁵ To an even greater degree than the other sources, Nadwi's account illuminates the larger pattern of trans-border interaction of which their journey was part. Finally, as a point of closure from the early reign of the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah (r. 1933–1973), I draw on the poetic travelogue and manifesto-in-verse written by Muhammad Iqbal in the wake of his Afghan journey.

If we are to properly recognize the trans-border trajectories of the Urdusphere, in a period that saw increasing Afghan mobility but an underdeveloped literary economy, the Urdu travelogues describing the journeys of Habibullah, Amanullah, and Nadir Shah, the royal architects of Afghan modernization between 1901 and 1933, must also be considered. As spotlights on larger currents of connectivity, these royal travelogues offer detailed descriptions of the regional integration and global interaction of Afghan modernism: here are the sole indigenous sources on Habibullah's visits to the factories of Delhi and Bombay and his initiation into freemasonry in Calcutta; on Amanullah's journey down the Thames in a submarine and receipt of a Junkers airplane in Berlin; on Nadir Shah's return in maturity to the Indian cities of his upbringing.Footnote ²⁶ These Afghan-Urdu travelogues shed parallel light from the Afghan side on the trans-border sources of Afghan modernism and the role of Urdu as one of its chief literary registers. This was not merely a passive matter of texts being written about these rulers in Urdu, for as we see below in more detail, the Afghan kings and intelligentsia were themselves directly exposed to the language. This exposure reached its zenith with King Nadir Shah (r. 1929–1933), who was part of the Musahiban (“Royal Companion”) family that in the late nineteenth century was exiled to India in counterpart to the banishment of the Tarzi family to Ottoman Syria. He had been born and raised in India until the age of eighteen before ascending to the throne, and he spoke Urdu far better than Pashto. These regal currents in the Urdusphere reflected the more general Afghan royal integration into a larger South Asian (and thereby Indian) context, albeit a context that was more Islamic than the imperial emphasis on the Great Game in recent scholarship would suggest.Footnote ²⁷ By 1929 even the new Afghan king had grown up in India, but on his ascent to the throne it was more to a Muslim than a colonial India that he gazed across the border. Indian Muslim intellectuals gazed back with expectation and aspiration for the making of a modern and independent Muslim utopia.

Middlemen of Modernism: The Indian Community of Kabul

In the early 1920s, the emergence of the Hijrat (“pious exile”) migration from the ruins of the Pan-Islamist Khilafat movement saw large numbers of rural and uneducated Indian Muslims relocate to Afghanistan.Footnote ²⁸ Estimates of the number of these muhajirs range from eighteen thousand to over fifty thousand, and though most returned home because of impoverished disenchantment and a shift in Afghan policy towards them, many of the Indian migrants chose to remain in Afghanistan.Footnote ²⁹ Their presence, combined with that of the large pre-existing community of Hindu and Sikh trans-border merchants in Kabul and other eastern Afghan towns, meant there was no shortage of potential traffickers of Indian ideas in the high age of Afghan modernism. But what is distinctive about the Indians whose travel writings have survived is their high status in Afghanistan, placing them in a category apart from the unwanted Hijrat migrants and the politically marginalized Afghan Hindus and Sikhs. While, as we will see, there was also a middle rank of Indian opportunity-seekers who found outlets for their skills in the expanding Afghan bureaucratic and industrial sector, the authors of the travelogues went to Kabul at the invitation of high Afghan officialdom, and this in itself points to the conscious Afghan investment in transnational proponents of Muslim renewal. The Indians who left travel accounts were either expressly invited or, in the case of ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi, befriended by leading figures in the modernizing Afghan governments of the period.

Between 1914 and 1921, ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi held meetings with such leading figures as Mahmud Tarzi and General (later King) Nadir Shah, and reached out to other government figures through a series of articles he wrote with Muhammad Ibrahim, the Indian teacher at Kabul's Habibiyya College, and then sent to Tarzi and other members of the government.Footnote ³⁰ Sindhi claimed to have subsequently held many private meetings with King Amanullah.Footnote ³¹ In the late 1920s, the Indian educationalist Shams al-Din made his college inspection tour as guest of the Afghan educational minister, Sardar Fayz Muhammad Khan, and in 1931 the Sufi and colonial critic Hasan Nizami spent most of his time in Kabul as the personal guest of the Afghan foreign minister. Nizami met with senior members of the government and also held meetings with King Amanullah's successor, Nadir Shah. In 1933, Nadwi, Iqbal, and Mas‘ud were no lesser guests, and met with almost every major figure in the literary and governmental establishment. Every page of the travelogues these figures produced is testament to the high status modernist intellectuals of the Indian Urdusphere enjoyed in Afghanistan.

Let us turn first to the interactions of the visitors with the “Young Afghan” rawshan-fikr, or “enlightened,” since the Urdu sources contain numerous accounts of meetings between the Indian visitors and the Afghan intelligentsia and government officials who feted them. Given that Urdu contains a substantial literature on the mahfil, or soirée, some of the richest sections of Nadwi's travelogue were dedicated to capturing the ambience and conversations on these occasions. Soon after their arrival in Kabul, his trio received a telephone call at the royal guesthouse inviting them to a “newcomers party” at the house of the chief minister, Sardar Hashim Khan.Footnote ³² Their host welcomed them at his large house, which was completely illuminated by electricity and filled with furniture in the “European style,” and in keeping with his domestic environment, Hashim Khan wore his beard in the farench kat or “French cut.”Footnote ³³ The food served at these gatherings aptly symbolized the “best of both worlds” model of progress that the Young Afghans championed: a typical meal, Nadwi noted, consisted of English dishes followed by “eastern” (mashriqi) foods which, except for their lack of pepper, were similar to Indian recipes.Footnote ³⁴ Those gathered around the visitors included not only the chief minister but also war minister Sardar Shah Mahmud Khan, foreign minister Sardar Fayz Muhammad Khan, and the head of the general assembly (Majlis-e A‘yan) Mir ‘Ata Muhammad Khan.Footnote ³⁵ Nadwi recounted in detail the food and decor, the clothes and conversations, with the latter ranging from the content of the newly founded Kabul literary journal and the history of the Buddhist Mauryans to ancient Punjab and Afghanistan's more recent connections with India. This, in turn, brought up the subject of Indo-Afghan connections during the struggle against the 1929 coup of Bache-ye Saqaw that brought down King Amanullah. Warming to the international theme, the Indian Ross Mas‘ud explained to the Afghans what he had learned from his educational tour of the new polytechnics of Japan ten years before.

A few days later, the Indian party was hosted at the home of the minister of war.Footnote ³⁶ Though the home was unremarkable from the outside, within the surrounding walls Nadwi found a neatly kept lawn on which sports were being played. When he asked to be excused to pray, he was led to the minister's private rooms upstairs and seized the opportunity to peer into bedrooms that were expensively decorated in European style and luxurious bathrooms fitted with imported plumbing.Footnote ³⁷ In the reception room downstairs, the guests were faced with an unexpected set of party arrangements: on one table there was English kek and biskit laid out, on another an imported German gaming board, and from a corner cabinet came music as the minister played his collection of Russian and Iranian records. At every point of Nadwi's description of the home life of this governmental modernist, we glimpse the relocated modernity of imported commodities. In a domestic equivalent to the English textile machines and German printing presses in Kabul's new factories, it was through display of imported material symbols that the Young Afghans were able to show their devotion to the making of a new era for their nation.Footnote ³⁸

It was not only ministers who hosted visitors from India, for the travel accounts also tell of Kabul's considerable community of influential Indian Muslim residents. This more scholarly Muslim circle, distinct from Kabul's better-known Hindu merchant community (who featured in some detail in Hasan Nizami's account of the city), was comprised of Indian teachers, printers, doctors, and bureaucrats working in Afghan service, descriptions of whom crop up repeatedly in the Urdu sources.Footnote ³⁹ Since the 1903 founding of Habibiyya College, the first modern school in Afghanistan, Indian Muslim teachers had been highly valued for their access to modern learning through the scientific translations of the Urdusphere. Sulayman Nadwi met several of the Indian Muslims teaching at the elite Habibiyya College, and also the long-term Indian resident Ghulam Rasul Khan, who by 1933 had been teaching in Kabul for almost a quarter century.Footnote ⁴⁰ Another of the new schools, the Ghazi School, appears at this time to have been chiefly the preserve of the Indian community itself at both student and teacher levels.

Aside from migrant teachers and civil servants, a large number of Indians had remained in Afghanistan after the mass Hijrat migration of the early 1920s, having found work in various spheres through their imported skills. Given the importance of Afghan interaction with India, it is hardly surprising to learn that many Indians found work as interpreters. During the reign of Habibullah, the position of chief interpreter at Kabul's Foreigner's Office belonged to Kawus Khan, an Indian Parsi convert to Islam.Footnote ⁴¹ At the head of the important translator profession a few years later was the chief royal interpreter Rahmatullah Humayun, who belonged to the family of Shams al-Din, the aforementioned educational secretary of the Lahore Anjuman-e Himayat-e Islam who toured Afghan schools in the 1920s.Footnote ⁴² Educated Indian Muslims found similar work elsewhere in Kabul. For example, Nizami reported meeting a young Indian called ‘Abbas Effendi who worked as translator for the Turkish embassy in Kabul.Footnote ⁴³ With their better access to modern training, Indian doctors also migrated to positions of influence in Afghanistan. As early as the 1910s ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi described the Indian physician Allahjuwayna Khan as being the head of Kabul's Nizami Hospital, while the American engineer A. C. Jewett wrote of another Indian Muslim doctor, ‘Abd al-Ghani, in a senior position.Footnote ⁴⁴

Kabul's nascent industrialization also attracted a range of skilled Indian migrant workers. By the early 1900s the city had its first industrial workshops for cartridge-making, a blacksmiths and steam-hammer shop, an iron and brass foundry, and boiler and engine houses, as well as the government printing office, at the head of which served the immigrant Indian printer Munshi ‘Abd al-Razzaq of Delhi.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the 1910s ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi recorded Indian printers at work on Mahmud Tarzi's foundational modernist newspaper, Siraj al-Akhbar (“The Torch of News”), in the coin presses of the national mint, and at the hydro-electric generator that Sindhi claimed was completed by an Indian engineer after having been set up initially by an American.Footnote ⁴⁶ The American in question was A. C. Jewett (1870–1926), who, drawing on his extensive first-hand experience of Afghanistan's first factories, noted in a letter from Kabul around 1905, “The master mechanics and best workmen are imported from India.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Jewett's own presence as a Californian in Kabul in the 1910s highlights still more vividly the global ambit of Afghan modernism. Even so, Jewett had won his contract to build Afghanistan's first hydro-electrical generator as a result of his earlier work in India, and American involvement in Afghanistan's development as such did not commence until the late 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hasan Nizami still found Indians working at the Kabul mint in 1931, and also reported meeting Indian workers in the government weapons factory. As late as the 1930s there were still many Indians employed in providing technical assistance to Afghanistan.Footnote ⁴⁹

We get only tantalizing glimpses of these Indian working middlemen of modernity because the Urdu sources, written by prestigious men of letters, tell us more about the wealthier and more “respectable” members of Kabul's long-term Indian resident community. One of them, Allahnawaz Khan, invited Nadwi, Iqbal, and Mas‘ud during their 1933 visit to a supper at his house attended by no fewer than one hundred and fifty of the city's Indian residents.Footnote ⁵⁰ Allahnawaz Khan, from the Indian (now Pakistani) city of Multan, was the senior aide-de-camp (yawwar-e awwal) of King Nadir Shah. Though widely viewed as a British agent, he later became Afghan ambassador to Germany, where he was arrested and transported to imprisonment in Moscow at the end of World War II.Footnote ⁵¹ That his residence was sufficiently commodious to host so large a party indicates his status among the city's ruling class. While by the 1930s Allahnawaz Khan was working for King Nadir Shah, his Afghan career had begun as early as 1920 when he became assistant editor of Jalalabad's Muslim newspaper Ittihad-e Mashriqi (“Oriental Unity”).Footnote ⁵² Its chief editor was, in turn, visited by the Indian educationalist Shams al-Dīn in 1927, underscoring again Muslim unity as the fruit of texts and actions of travel.Footnote ⁵³

Among the Indians gathered at Allahnawaz Khan's party were many Muslim theologians or ‘ulama who had migrated earlier in the century. They included members of the anti-colonial mujahidin movement of the 1910s such as Mawlana Mansur Ansari and Mawlana Sayf al-Rahman, who had formerly taught at Delhi's prestigious Mughal era Fatehpuri mosque.Footnote ⁵⁴ Since Shams al-Din and Hasan Nizami also met these Indians on their visits to Kabul in 1927 and 1931—in Shams al-Din's case in a grand new hotel overlooking the Kabul River—it is clear that the Indian mujahidin still existed as a coherent body in the Afghanistan of the 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁵ By the time the new Indian visitors met Sayf al-Rahman in 1933, the Indian migrant and graduate of the great North Indian madrasa at Deoband had already served the Afghan government in various official capacities, including as military judge, high court judge, and examiner at Kabul's new law school.Footnote ⁵⁶ Among the former Indian holy warriors mentioned by the visitors was Mawlana Muhammad Bashir, who in the 1930s was president of the Jama‘at-e Mujahidin organization in Kabul and, in a sign of the importance of Indians to the emerging Afghan public sphere, served as the editor of the journal al-Mujahid (“Holy Warrior”).Footnote ⁵⁷

Here we see a fusing of the anti-British rhetoric of Afghan independence and the anti-colonial aspirations of Indian Muslims from across the border. In the company of such experts on the finer points of Shari‘a, Nadwi had to admit his surprise when, just before the party broke up, none of the guests objected to posing for a collective photograph for reproduction back in India.Footnote ⁵⁸ By proving in photographic print the unity of Afghan and Indian Muslim aspirations, the era's new technologies were once again used to serve a trans-border project of Muslim renewal and unity.

Educational Imports: Afghanistan's New Public Institutions

Nothing was more important to the project of Afghan modernism than the creation of a new intellectual infrastructure by way of schools, printing presses, and journals. The basic aim of the educational reforms between 1903 and 1933, which culminated in the founding of Kabul's first university, was to establish schools and colleges capable of training a cadre of modern bureaucrats and technicians. In 1903, King Habibullah had founded Afghanistan's first modern school, the eponymous Habibiyya College, on the reformed Indian Muslim model of the schools of colonial India, and he staffed it with imported Indian teachers. This project of creating a new class of Muslim civil servants was modeled on the success of the Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in educating Muslims capable of administering the complex bureaucracy of colonial India. India's governmental industrial schools, meanwhile, offered a model for Afghan technical education.

Nowhere was the trans-border character of this educational modernism more visible than at the Habibiyya College. Over the following decades, immigrant Indian teachers were the faculty mainstay of this educational manufactory of modern Afghans. When ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi resided in Kabul for seven years from 1915, he too became a protégée of one of these Indian teachers, Shaykh Muhammad Ibrahim, who had earned his position at the school on the strength of a masters degree in economics from Bombay University.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the same period the American engineer Jewett described Habibiyya's teachers as being almost entirely “Hindustani Mussulmans,”Footnote ⁶⁰ and others reported the same thing. Shams al-Din in his Urdu educational travel memoir described Habibiyya as still staffed by mainly Indian teachers in 1927, as it had been since its foundation.Footnote ⁶¹ And when Hasan Nizami visited Kabul in 1931, he was guided around the city's other new schools by the Afghan educational minister Sardar ‘Ali Muhammad Khan, who was himself a graduate of Habibiyya and founded other schools after its model.Footnote ⁶² Nizami likewise reported that this earliest and most lasting of all the Afghan modernist institutions was still staffed predominantly by Muslim teachers from India.Footnote ⁶³

I have already said that the chief Afghan modernizer Mahmud Tarzi composed his first work, Majmu‘a-ye Sana'i‘ (“Industrial compendium”), during his early exile in Karachi. Urdu was of tremendous importance by this time as a linguistic medium of modernity, especially through schooling and textbook printing. By the time King Amanullah ascended to the Afghan throne in 1919, Urdu was reaching the zenith of its intellectual influence through the founding of such Indian higher-educational institutions as Osmania University in 1918 and Jamia Millia Islamia University in 1920. None of these developments went unnoticed across the border. Habibullah had patronized the construction of the main building of Islamiyya College in Lahore, a school itself run by the Anjuman-e Himayat-e Islam that had strong links across the border. In 1927, when King Amanullah passed through Bombay on his way to Europe, he held a fundraising meeting with Jamia Millia Islamia University's first chancellor, Hakim Ajmal Khan (1863–1927).Footnote ⁶⁴ As already mentioned, in 1933 King Nadir Shah invited Sir Ross Mas‘ud, vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University and prime mover behind the establishment of Hyderabad's Osmania University, to advise him on the founding of a university in Kabul. Here was the emergence of a modern Afghan education system conceived on patently Indian lines, and built on two-way traffic across the border.

Important here is that Indian schools and educationalists were linked to independent Muslim charitable institutions rather than to schools sponsored primarily by the colonial government. While the Afghan agenda drew on such Indian models, the goal remained to create robustly national institutions that would free Afghans from having to cross the border for their studies. This seems to have been the case even prior to the foundation of the new schools under Habibullah and his successors. Even such prominent Afghan bureaucrats as Fayz Muhammad Katib (d. 1931) had been forced to study in Peshawar and Lahore, where the celebrated bureaucrat and pioneering historian learned English as well as Urdu.Footnote ⁶⁵ For this reason, both the new schools and their attendant intellectual infrastructure of printing and journals lay at the foundation of the planned project of Afghan modernism. These new institutions remain relatively obscure in the existing literature on the period, but the Urdu sources once again tell us much about them since the Indian travelers, as urban intellectuals moving in equivalent circles in Kabul, were chiefly concerned with the urban institutions that supported the intellectual and moral progress of their Muslim neighbors. Many of these travelers themselves governed Muslim colleges back in India.

Even so, the Young Afghans’ opening of Afghanistan's borders attracted other educational opportunists from much further afield. At the French-medium Istiqlal (“Independence”) school, founded by King Amanullah in 1922 (and, until 1931, named after him), Hasan Nizami exchanged ideas on education with the school's French principal, whom he recalled by the name of “Buzlay.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Nizami also toured the German-medium Amani school in the company of its principal, Dr. Ivan, who demonstrated the scientific teaching in which the school specialized.Footnote ⁶⁷ For a hint at the personal trajectories of these European traffickers of modernity, when Nizami asked why Dr. Ivan's hair was so white, he learned that Ivan was a survivor of the trenches of World War I who had left Europe far behind in his search for solace.Footnote ⁶⁸

Between the Indian-modeled Habibiyya and the French and German schools founded in the 1920s, we are able to trace further consequences of the opening of Afghanistan to the wider world. India, having played the initial and dominant role, was by the 1930s beginning to make way for more distant purveyors of modernity, most of whom from the 1940s and 1950s would come from Washington and Moscow.Footnote ⁶⁹ This point of balance between an Indian-inspired educational modernism and the availability of other European models was also reflected in the 1933 account of Sulayman Nadwi. As the successor to Shibli Nu‘mani, the chief modernizer of traditional Indian madrasa education, Nadwi was fascinated by the development of Afghanistan's educational system. While he did describe the schools visited earlier by Shams al-Din and Nizami, Nadwi also turned his attentions to Kabul's industrial schools—the institutions of more practical modernization. At the two-storey stone-built School of Fine Arts (sana‘a-nafisa), for example, he found five hundred boys learning painting from an Indian, carpet weaving from an Iranian, and carpentry from a German.Footnote ⁷⁰ After the German surprised Nadwi by greeting him with the Muslim salutation salam alaykum, he showed him the fine furniture the boys were joining from teakwood imported from Bombay and Burma. Though the technique was German, the material came from India. In their wooden if not their mental materials, the young Afghan industrialists were fashioning their products of progress from commodities carried across the Indian border.

When the Indian educationalist Shams al-Din was invited by King Amanullah to inspect Afghanistan's schools in 1927, he examined Kabul's new Dar al-Mu‘alimin, or teacher training college.Footnote ⁷¹ In the report Shams al-Din wrote for the king he made firm recommendations regarding the behavior of teachers, proper syllabus formation, the education of girls, the value of physical education, and the dangers of adopting non-Muslim educational methods.Footnote ⁷² While French and German teachers certainly contributed to Afghan technical education, they could not compete with their Indian counterparts in sharing a vision of a distinctly Islamic modernity. As the secretary of the Lahore educational charity Anjuman-e Himayat-e Islam, Shams al-Din drew his methods from the modernized Muslim educational system that had developed in India since foundation of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875.

Yet it was a particular kind of Islam that the Young Afghans sought to place in the service of the modern state, and both Nizami and Nadwi witnessed attempts to bring Islam under the control of the Kabul government. One means was the old method of the state construction of mosques, and Nizami noted how King Amanullah had completely rebuilt what was popularly regarded as the oldest mosque in Afghanistan, dating from the reign of the seventh century Caliph ‘Usman.Footnote ⁷³ The other strategy of state control of Islam was to found governmental madrasas, such as the Dar al-‘Ulum-e ‘Arabi described by Sulayman Nadwi and Shams al-Din.Footnote ⁷⁴ Its foundation appears to have been a response to the increasing number of graduates of the great Indian madrasa at Deoband who over the previous decades had established influence in Afghanistan, not least through the far-reaching patronage of Deoband's principal Mahmud al-Hasan (1851–1920).Footnote ⁷⁵ Since the Afghan graduates included the rebellious former Deoband student Fazal Wahid Turangzai, in 1928 Amanullah issued official restrictions limiting Deoband graduates from serving as religious leaders in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁷⁶

Despite this rejection of the traditionalist side of Indian Muslim input, which would in transmogrified form return with the Taliban, King Amanullah and Nadir Shah were happy to accept advice on educational matters from “progressive” Indian Muslims such as Shams al-Din and Nadwi. Shams al-Din had noted in his Urdu report how Amanullah was founding such state religious schools, and in line with the agenda he shared with the Afghan king he examined the Kabul governmental madrasa's students concerning the proper relationship between Islam and “progress” (taraqqi).Footnote ⁷⁷ In the same school a few years later Nadwi found students wearing large round Afghan turbans and receiving lessons on two classical texts. These were the Mishkat al-Anwar, the exegesis of the Quranic “light verse” by al-Ghazali (d. 1111), and the Hidaya, the foundational textbook on Hanafi jurisprudence by al-Marghinani (d. 1197). The latter had previously laid the foundations for the state codification of Islamic law in colonial India and been printed there in abundant numbers.Footnote ⁷⁸ While Nadwi was pleased to note that the madrasa's Afghan teachers had been trained in Indian madrasas, he was less happy with the methods they employed, which appear to have been more traditional than the modernized pedagogy devised by his own teacher, Shibli, and propounded by himself. The importation of education was no easy project, and much had clearly fallen by the wayside in transit. When one of the madrasa teachers asked his students to explain the meaning of a particular section of the Mishkat on the correct timing of the prayers in relation to sunrise and sunset, for example, Nadwi disagreed with their explanations, though he chose to keep silent rather than cause dissent before the students.Footnote ⁷⁹ The spirit of cross-border cooperation was clearly more important than the exact precision of the ideas being transferred.

Nadwi also made a tour of several other of Kabul's new educational institutions and though pleased to witness the “new teaching” (jadid ta‘lim) in action, with his background in Pan-Islamism and teaching through modernized Arabic, he was critical of the use of so many foreign (ghayr-mamliki), that is, European languages to educate students from the same country.Footnote ⁸⁰ The dilemma this presented, he explained, was why Nadir Shah intended to found a national university in Kabul and had summoned him to Afghanistan for advice on how to do so.Footnote ⁸¹ When viewed together with the fact that Nadwi's travel companion Ross Mas‘ud had been the prime mover of India's first vernacular-language university—Hyderabad's Urdu-medium Osmania University—the link between the delegation's visit to Kabul and Afghan official interest in Indian Muslim educational reforms seems clear.Footnote ⁸² However, more than a university for Kabul was under discussion; when Nadwi met the Afghan chief minister Sardar Hashim Khan and the subsequent minister of justice, Mawlana Fazal Ahmad, he also laid out his ideas for the reform of religious education in Afghanistan, and he reported that his proposals were warmly accepted.Footnote ⁸³ When Nadwi eventually met Nadir Shah, one of the main topics about which the Afghan king inquired was that of Muslim education, particularly the modernized Arabic system used at Lucknow's Nadwat al-‘Ulama madrasa, where Nadwi had studied and taught.Footnote ⁸⁴ While German and French high school principals were appearing in Kabul by the 1920s, Muslim India, with its longstanding intellectual ties to Kabul, remained a major model for this university stage of Afghanistan's educational path to modernity.

Given the importance to Afghan modernism of the beginning of sustained printing under Habibullah and Mahmud Tarzi, the Urdu sources are also invaluable for their depictions of the infrastructure of publishing in Afghanistan, offering details which are unavailable in the more limited Afghan sources.Footnote ⁸⁵ Since several of the Indian travelers were themselves publishers of magazines and books, their travelogues provide expert testimony on the state of Afghan printing relative to the more abundant presses of the Urdusphere. While inspecting the government printing office in Kabul, Hasan Nizami went so far as to remind his readers that in making his comments he drew on thirty-five-years of experience in book printing.Footnote ⁸⁶

As the founder of a major Urdu journal and the director of Azamgarh's Writers’ Academy (Dar al-Musaniffin), Sulayman Nadwi was also curious about the progress of printing in Afghanistan, and he too toured the government printing office, from which the textual output of Afghan modernism was issued by way of governmental decrees and school textbooks. A remarkably well-informed as well as observant traveler, Nadwi included in his travelogue a summary of the development of Afghan printing since the introduction of the first printing press from India under Shir ‘Ali Khan (r. 1863–1879).Footnote ⁸⁷ His and Nizami's descriptions of the printing office thus afford an overview of the development of the Afghan publishing that disseminated the Young Afghan ideology between its starting point and the 1930s. According to Nadwi, by 1933 there were eight electric-powered “Treadwell” printing presses in operation in the government office (though two years earlier Nizami had counted thirteen), which were used to issue postage stamps, forms for the bureaucracy, the government newspaper Islah (“Reform”), and the new nationalist literary journal Kabul.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a paper echo of the opening of the country's borders to outbound and inbound travelers, the press also printed both passports and postcards.Footnote ⁸⁹ Imported lithographic and typographic machines were in use, as were machines capable of the illustrated printing that was so important to Afghanistan's national development, responsible as it was for the issuing of photographs of royals and government leaders in the official newspapers; stamps; maps; postcards of “national” scenes; and other printed paraphernalia of the modern state.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nizami claimed that even the finest publishers of Calcutta or Bombay did not own imported image-printing machines such as Kabul's, sourced as they probably were from Germany.

Here, as elsewhere, Nizami's and Nadwi's accounts draw our attention to the trans-border traffic behind early Afghan printing, whether in terms of machinery or personnel. Although most of the workforce in the government office was Afghan (serving under the management of the Afghan printer Sufi ‘Abd al-Hamid Khan), the Urdu travelogues also record the presence of several German workers, as well as a Turk employed through his mastery of the new zincographic method of illustrated printing. Although Nadwi did not name this figure, Nizami did, as Muhammad Nuri Beg. Not the first Turkish printer to appear in Afghanistan, he succeeded the Turkish zincographer Mehmed Fazlı, who twenty years earlier had published a travelogue describing his own experiences in Kabul.Footnote ⁹¹ In addition to the Turkish printers, Nizami noted the presence of an Indian master printer, Muhammad Barakatullah, who had worked for many years at the government press and was the successor to Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman's chief printer in Kabul, the Indian Munshi ‘Abd al-Razzaq.Footnote ⁹² In the office of the government newspaper Islah, Nizami met another Indian Muslim named Maqbul Ahmad Khan, who used his access to the Urdusphere to gather news for the Afghans by making translations from Urdu newspapers carried across the border.Footnote ⁹³

In an appropriate signal of the multiple sources of Afghan modernism, both Kabul printers and their equipment were imported from many different sites. As with the presence of American cars on Afghanistan's roads by the 1920s (Nadwi and Iqbal reached Kabul in a Buick), in the machines being used for the government press we gain a sense of the increasingly global traffic of commodities across the border.Footnote ⁹⁴ Between the 1870s and 1890s, Kabul's earliest printing presses were brought from India.Footnote ⁹⁵ By 1933, Nadwi noted that King Nadir Shah had recently ordered enough new presses from Germany to double the government's printing capacity.Footnote ⁹⁶ Though the government press was one of very few printing establishments in Afghanistan by the 1930s, Nizami still compared it favorably with Indian printing houses, and described it as cleaner and more orderly than any printers he had seen there.Footnote ⁹⁷ Here was the machinery to print the nation toward progress, which was still envisioned as a distinctly Islamic path to modernity. In a subjection of technology to ritual purity, one printing press was set aside specially for printing Qurans, and in the neighboring offices of the nationalist literary journal Kabul Nizami was pleased to find a young man writing an article on the immorality of alcohol.Footnote ⁹⁸

Indians, then, engaged not only with Afghanistan's printing machines but also with their products. In one section of his Sayr-e Afghanistan, Nadwi described all of the newspapers and journals then available in Afghanistan, providing details of their editors, summaries of their contents, and information on their prices and distributions.Footnote ⁹⁹ A tireless journalist himself, Nizami, too, took an interest in the emergent Afghan press, which relied largely on Indian newspapers for its views of the world. Nizami also met with the editor and staff of the government newspaper Islah and, in a significant indicator of wider Afghan awareness of the Indian presence in Kabul, was asked for and agreed to grant an interview with one of its reporters.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For his readers on the Indian side of the border, Nizami used the twice-weekly mail trucks of the Afghan postal service to dispatch the first version of his travelogue for newspaper serialization in Delhi, the same vehicles which carried Indian newspapers to Kabul.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nadwi's interest was drawn particularly to Ayina-ye ‘Irfan (“Mirror of Knowledge”), the official journal of the Afghan education department, which published translations and articles written by government-employed teachers and was sold in both Kabul and Delhi (for 10 afghanis and 4 ½ rupees).Footnote ¹⁰²

Pashto journalism began around 1930, riding the crests of the trans-border waves of the larger Urdusphere. Here again migrant Indians were of central importance. After participating in the Hijrat migration to Afghanistan of the early 1920s, in 1928 the Indian Pashtun ‘Abd al-Ghaffar Khan (“Bacha Khan,” 1890–1988) established the pioneering Pashto news journal Pakhtun,Footnote ¹⁰³ printed first in Rawalpindi and then in Peshawar. Funded by the Pashtun diaspora in California and distributed to audiences on both sides of the Afghan border, Pakhtun aptly captures the widening intellectual networks into which Afghans were being drawn through their contacts with India.

Mobile Poets and International Ideologues: Urdu and the Afghan Intelligentsia

As the memoirs of Indian Urdu speakers who were also scholars of Arabic and Persian, the Indian travelogues offer insights into the linguistic and intellectual horizons of the Afghan government and intelligentsia of the period. They allow us to assess the degree of direct Afghan interaction with the Urdusphere. The sphere's trans-border reach can be seen in the fame that writers such as Nadwi, Iqbal, and Nizami enjoyed in Afghanistan, which underwrote their invitations to travel there. At the time of Nadwi's journey to Kabul in 1933 he was a celebrated man of letters, held in the highest regard for his painstaking multi-volume biography of the Prophet Muhammad and his equally recondite study of the Persian poet and astronomer ‘Umar Khayyam. From the moment of his arrival he was introduced to virtually every major intellectual in the city (and in governmental favor), making his travelogue an important source on the Afghan modernist intelligentsia of the period. More broadly, the work reveals the fame that he and his fellow travelers enjoyed among the Afghan intelligentsia, and the Young Afghan engagement with the Urdusphere.

His diary's details are revealing. On reaching the royal guesthouse in Kabul Nadwi was greeted by Sarwar Khan, one of the pillars of the Afghan Literary Society (Anjuman-e Adabi), whom he described as a speaker of Arabic and English as well as Persian.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Having himself written a good deal of Persian verse (much of it published in the Literary Society's journal, Kabul), Sarwar Khan was an admirer of the new literary criticism of Indian Muslim scholars such as the Shi‘r al-A‘jam (“Poems of the Persians”), written by Nadwi's own teacher Shibli Nu‘mani. At a dinner held by the Society a few days later, Nadwi found himself seated next to an elderly Afghan who had spent many years in India, and who “knew and loved” both the educationalist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the founder of Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia university, Hakim Ajmal Khan. Like many of the other Afghans Nadwi met, he found that this member of the Afghan Literary Society spoke Urdu extremely well.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This case of direct Afghan interaction with the Urdusphere was not exceptional. Nadwi reported that the minister of war, Sardar Mahmud Khan, had studied with the Indian teacher Mawlwi Najaf ‘Ali Khan and that he, too, spoke Urdu very well, leading Nadwi to present him with a copy of his recently published biography of the poet Khayyam.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ When Nadwi was granted an audience with Nadir Shah, the king's Urdu was such that he quickly switched from Persian into Urdu, which, Nadwi's high literary standards notwithstanding, he described the king as speaking perfectly.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ On further discussion, Nadwi learned that Nadir Shah personally read several Urdu newspapers and magazines each week, including Nadwi's own journal, Ma‘arif (“Learning”). Nizami for his part recorded that Prime Minister Sardar Muhammad Hashim Khan was also a fluent Urdu speaker, as was his entire family. Moreover, he added, all of the women and children in the king's household ordinarily conversed in Urdu.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This royal fluency with Urdu was not unique to the Musahiban family of King Nadir Shah, for earlier in the century King Habibullah was also described as a speaker of Urdu.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Our sense of the connectedness of the Urdusphere and of the Afghan and Indian ideological and literary arenas is reinforced by Nadwi's account of the reception of welcome given in his and Iqbal's honor by the same Afghan Literary Society, which was also reported in the Society's own journal, Kabul.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Established in 1931, the Society and its younger sibling the Pashto Academy (Pashto Tolaney), started in 1937, owed their very existence to the trans-border traffic of literature and books. Both aimed to promote publishing in the “national” languages of Dari Persian and Pashto in the face of over-reliance on imported literature and books.Footnote ¹¹¹ Even so, many of the leading figures of the Society were familiar with Urdu, partly as a result of their education in Indian Muslim educational institutions. For example, the Society's chief figure and secretary, Prince Ahmad ‘Ali Khan Durrani, had studied at Lahore's Islamia College. The College had been founded by the Indian educational charity Anjuman-e Himayat-e Islam, with which Nadwi, Iqbal, and Shams al-Din had many dealings, and its connections with the Young Afghan elite stretched back to the moment when King Habibullah had laid its main building's foundation stone during his 1907 tour of India.Footnote ¹¹² The Anjuman-e Himayat-e Islam also had other representatives in Kabul and Nadwi later described meeting the son of its director there.Footnote ¹¹³ When Shams al-Din had been invited to inspect Afghanistan's schools in the 1920s, he had similarly done so through the prestige of his association with the same Lahore-based Anjuman-e Himayat-e Islam.

To return to 1933, the reception for Nadwi and Iqbal, a formal banquet held amid the modernist architecture of the Hotel Kabul and attended by all of the Literary Society's members, was followed by a series of speeches. Opening these was the Afghan poet laureate (malik al-shu‘ara) and teacher at Kabul's Habibiyya College, Qari ‘Abdullah Khan (1871–1944), who recited a Persian poem of thirty-seven couplets which he had composed for the occasion.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Appropriately, this first holder of the national office of poet laureate had spent most of his own career teaching alongside the Indian faculty at Habibiyya College.

Responding to the poet's address, the Indian vice-chancellor of Aligarh college, Ross Mas‘ud, wished the Afghans all success on their path to “progress” and stressed the special position of their country as the midpoint between Asia and Europe.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Nadwi opened his speech with a greeting to his “brothers of the same faith and homeland,” before holding forth on the longstanding unity of the Muslim peoples of India and Afghanistan, who had only been divided by “politics” (siyasat), a negative word in Nadwi's vocabulary.Footnote ¹¹⁶ He stressed that the Persian that the Literary Society promoted was an Indian as much as an Afghan language. Nadwi also reviewed the common heritage of the two countries’ traditions of literature and learning, praised the mountains and gardens that dignified the Afghan landscape, and then returned to his main theme by declaring that, while politics may have divided the Muslims of India and Afghanistan, learning and literature, ‘ilm wa adab, still united them. Finally, in characteristic form, the great poet of Muslim unity Muhammad Iqbal stood up to praise the Afghans for their bold march towards progress and to encourage the academicians to use literature as a means of bringing Afghan youths toward spirituality (ruhaniyat) and so (in a nod to his own Nietzschean philosophy) toward the true state of psychological independence he termed “selfhood” (ananiyat).Footnote ¹¹⁷

With his long-term intellectual and emotional investment in Afghan affairs, Muhammad Iqbal's speech to the Afghan Literary Society in 1933 was by no means his only direct address toward the “Young Afghan” modernists. After his return to India, he went on to write his late Persian masterpiece, Musafir (“Traveler”). In it, his Afghan journey was transformed into a versified itinerary to the burial places of the mighty Muslim dead in Afghan soil, from the conqueror of India Mahmud Ghaznawi and the Persian poet Hakim Sana'i to the Mughal Emperor Babur, the founder of Afghanistan Ahmad Shah Durrani, and the modernizer King Amanullah, to whom he had earlier addressed his poem Payam-e Mashriq (“Message of the east”).Footnote ¹¹⁸Musafir was not Iqbal's sole response to his Afghan travels. In 1936 he published his longer Persian poem, Pas Chi Bayad Kard ay Aqwam-e Sharq? (“What should be done then, O people of the East?”), as the Indian counterpart to the 1913 Aya Chi Bayad Kard? (“What must be done?”) by the former Afghan exile to the Ottoman Empire, Mahmud Tarzi.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Iqbal's Pas Chi Bayad Kard? was a poetic distillation of the Indian Muslim vision of an Afghan and thereby wider Islamic revival. Like the Urdu travelogues we have examined, and the discussions and meetings between Afghan and Indian intellectuals they describe, Iqbal's late poems were part of a far larger Indian counterpart to the Ottoman influence on Afghan modernism represented by the better-known activities of Mahmud Tarzi. When the forward march of Afghan progress appeared to stumble with Amanullah's exile in 1929, Iqbal had rushed to meet his India-residing successor Nadir Shah at Lahore's railway station and had pledged his life-savings to the campaign against the anti-reformist rebels of Habibullah Kalakani, known derisively as the “Son of the Water-bearer” (Bacha-ye Saqaw).Footnote ¹²⁰ Soon after, Iqbal pushed the joint project of Indo-Afghan modernism in new trans-border directions when, on a 1931 journey to Europe, he even shared his plans for Afghanistan's future with the exiled King Amanullah in Rome.Footnote ¹²¹ Back on more familiar territory, when King Nadir Shah was himself murdered within weeks of Iqbal's departure from Kabul in 1933, the poet dedicated his poetic travelogue Musafir to Nadir Shah's heir, Zahir Shah (r. 1933–1973), so handing the trans-border traffic of Afghan modernism to the last king of Afghanistan.