afghanistanurban, Persianized intellectuals who did not speak Pushtu as their mother
tongue. It bore only a superficial resemblance to the culture and values
of rural Pushtuns, the maldar, or the Frontier tribes. In Nangahar, bards
composed satirical landai, or epigrams, and ballads mocking the mon -
archy’s attempt to ingratiate itself with Pushtuns, lambasting it for failing
to uphold the very Pushtun virtues it claimed to espouse.
The assassination of King Nadir ShahBy 1933 the government had established a degree of stability and had
secured control over most of the country, only for the reign of Nadir Shah
to come to an abrupt end. On 8 November 1933, the first anniversary of
the death of Ghulam Nabi Charkhi, the king held an award ceremony for
Nejat students in the grounds of the Dilkusha Palace. 30 During the cere-
mony ‘Abd al-Khaliq, a seventeen-year-old Hazara and the son of a trusted
retainer of Ghulam Nabi Charkhi, stepped forward and calmly shot the
king three times at point-blank range, killing him almost instantly. Despite
being tortured, ‘Abd al-Khaliq refused to implicate the Charkhis or anyone
else, claiming he had acted solely to avenge the death of his patron. A week
King Nadir Shah’s mausoleum on Kabul’s Tepe Maranjan. This stark square structure
shows a marked influence of the public architecture of Nazi Germany. Badly damaged
in the infighting of 1993–5 (as shown), after 2002 it was restored. King Zahir Shah
and his wife are also buried here.