Book on Khudai Khidmatgar movement’s cultural impact published

PESHAWAR: A recently published book, rather a research on cultural impact of Khudai Khidmatgar movement, is a new addition to Pashto literature.

It is a complete study on the Khudai Khidmatgars, a social and cultural movement launched among the Pashtuns in the early decades of the 20th century.

The book has been authored by Ahmadullah Archiwal.

The Khudai Khidmatgar movement under the leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was initially started as a cultural reformist movement in 1929 in the North-West Frontier Province (now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). Later, it diverted its attention to politics.

The idea behind the creation of the movement was to fight against the societal problems among Pashtuns, reform their lives and restore their cultural identity. However, the movement later changed its trajectory and was forced to resort to politics.

Most of the existing studies on the movement discuss its political dynamics, though there have also been studies that focus on cultural footprints of Khudai Khidmatgars. A situation was created in which majority of people considered the Khudai Khidmatgar solely a political movement and ignored its cultural aspects. Given the strong cultural footprints that the movement left, it is important to study the cultural impact of the movement and highlight them for scholarly and curiosity purposes.

Qualitative in nature, the book mainly relies on primary and secondary sources supplanted by the author’s observation.

Borrowed from Professor Najib, he has relied on the definition of culture as man-made environment for this study. The whole discussion about culture revolves around the above definition.

Under this umbrella definition, he has discussed the impact of the movement on the Pashto prose and poetry, women, economy, drama and music, schooling and education, journalism, and more importantly Pashtuns’ attitude towards power, politics, violence, and their customs, etc.

The book tries to respond to certain fundamental questions. Whether the movement has had any impact on the Pashtun culture and, if yes, what were they? How did the movement affect Pashtun way of life, their language and literature, their attitude towards power, politics and towards each other and their cultural identity.

Just like impact of every other social movement, studying cultural impact of Khudai Khidmatgars is also associated with methodological challenges. There is no such yardstick that can measure intensity of the impact from one side and cover all such impacts from the other side. As the impact that was triggered by the movement is still felt and seen after 90 years, defining a timeframe that covers the era under study also poses challenges.

Moreover, scope of the study and defining its limits is another serious methodological problem. In order to overcome some of the stated problems, the author relied heavily on anecdotes in the secondary sources.

The book will help to a great extent in addressing the methodological intricacies in studying the cultural impact of Khudai Khidmatgars in future and serve as a reference for those who are interested in exploring the topic further.