reform and repression, 1901–19of the twentieth century Pushtu was barely a written, let alone a literary,
language. The emergence of Pushtu as a written language only really began
following the British occupation of the Punjab, when Frontier officials were
required to learn Pushtu and missionaries translated the New Testament
and other religious tracts into the language. Tarzi’s advocacy for Pushtu
as the national language of Afghanistan, therefore, was equivalent to
the British government making Welsh the national language of Britain.
Yet despite this, Tarzi’s Afghaniyya became the foundation stone of all
subsequent ro yalist-nationalist discourse.
Many Young Afghans, like the Young Turks, went a stage further
and conflated Afghaniyya with social Darwinism, German ideas of racial
supremacy and Aryanism. Aryanism was popular in the early twentieth
century and was derived from a misreading of Sacred Books of the East, a
comparative study of the Vedas and Avesta by the German-born Orientalist
Max Müller. Based on linguistic and theological similarities between these
ancient Hindu and Persian sacred texts, Müller posited that there had been
an ancient race, whom he called the Aryans, who lived somewhere in
Central Asia and spoke a language that was the precursor to Sanskrit, Greek
and Persian. According to Müller’s theory, the Aryans eventually migrated
south and west, bringing the Vedic religion to India and Zoroastrianism
to Iran, while in Europe they were the primogenitures of the Nordic and
Germanic races.
Müller’s Aryan theory was later hijacked to justify the racial theories
of Germany’s Nazi party and other Fascist movements, but it also had a
profound influence on both Turkish and Afghan nationalism as well as in
India, where ‘the acceptance of the Aryan theory underlined the Hindu
idiom in nationalist historical writing’. 22 Indeed Tarzi probably first heard
of the Aryan theory from the Indian revolutionary and refugee Mahendra
Pratap, a member of the German Mission of 1915. After the mission ended,
Pratap remained in Kabul and Tarzi published several of his articles in the
Seraj al-Akhbar. Some years later, when Pratap published his memoirs of
Afghanistan, he entitled it Afghanistan: The Heart of Aryan.
As Afghan nationalism increasingly became intertwined with
Aryanism, many Afghan intellectuals began to claim that Pushtu was a
proto-Aryan language. Though this theory was based on the slimmest
of evidence, it allowed advocates of Pushtun to assert that their language
was more ancient than Iranian Persian and that the Achaemenid dynasty,
who referred to themselves as Aryan in their dynastic inscriptions, were
actually Afghan. Later in the twentieth century members of the Pushtu
Academy identified Balkh, ancient Bactra, as the original Aryan homeland,