PASHTO, THE PAMIRI LANGUAGES AND THE CURRENT ISSUES OF DEFINING A TAJIK
Tajiks are nowadays known to be located in Tajikistan, Afghanistan and recent research has revealed their presence in Pakistan. A minority also exists in western China. Some will also mention Iran in this regard. However Tajikistan is the only global nation state which bears the ethnonym of “Tajik”, so it merits importance that we examine it first in order of priority in this regard.
Tajikistan was originally a Soviet creation — carved out of the Tsarist Russian Turkestan Province in accordance with the 1922 Soviet Policy on Nationalities, which codified a set of measures designed to meet the needs of national identity on the basis of cultural and ethnic factors determined scientifically. This would in turn ensure the creation of stable national, and sub-national autonomous units which would effectively integrate into the overall Soviet federation while satisfactorily representing their constituent peoples. There were many other factors involved too, but we will keep to the topic under discussion.
As in other cases, regarding the Tajik political unit of the USSR, this policy stated that any language spoken on the territory of the Tajik SSR (Tajikistan) would be designated as a “Tajik language” and its speakers would accordingly be known as Tajiks. There were many such small local languages — of the Eastern Iranian category — spoken in this territory. Of this category the Pamiri (or Saka) group of languages is the largest. It contains the languages of Vanji, Yazghulami, Shughni, Oroshori, Rushani, Khufi, Bartangi, Sarikoli, Sanglechi, Ishkashemi, Yidgha and Munji. In the times of antiquity, two major non-Pamiri Eastern Iranian languages dominated the territory now called Tajikistan. These were Sogdian and Bactrian. Both are now extinct. Sogdian has given way to a tiny language called Yaghnobi now spoken in the Sogdian (Sughd) region, while Bactrian or Arya has been subsumed primarily into Pashto and other related Pamiri tongues. It should be noted at this point that New Persian is a recent historical arrival in the area called Tajikistan; although now the predominant tongue and state language, it was introduced here by the Samanids about 1100 years ago. That is not to say that key areas such as Sogdia and Bactria were cut off from the earlier Persian political and cultural mainstream: the latter was among the most important Achaemenid satrapies, but always retained a degree of simultaneous autonomy throughout.
Pashto, (the ethnic Pashtun-Afghan language) is technically the largest Pamiri-group language (as well as the largest Eastern Iranian language overall). However it is not spoken on the territory of present day Tajikistan or in the Pamirs, but further to the south and southeast in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). It carries the designation “Pamiri” owing to its Saka origins — which applies to the other Pamiri languages which are genuinely Pamiri in that they are spoken in that location.
Having made this point, it should be noted that vast populations of Tajiks also exist on the territory of the nation state called Afghanistan, which derives its name from the fact that it was created and dominated by the Durrani Afghan clans and their other Afghan allies and confederates. It is known that while professing an Afghan identity, the Durranis prefer Persian language and culture to those of Pashto. Be that as it may, in the last century the Durrani establishment ruling Kabul and Kandahar for reasons of political propaganda accorded the southern Pamiri language of Pashto major importance and raised it to the status of the key symbol of their Afghan state. It should be noted that the considerations exercised by the Soviet Nationalities Policy in Tajikistan were restricted solely to that entity, and do not exist in Afghanistan in any form. Tajiks in Afghanistan are universally identified with the term “Farsiwan” or Persian-speaker and this distinction has become even more acute in the recent times of the Taliban, as well as the so-called American puppet “Republic” which existed from 2001 to 2021.
But it therefore follows that by the official standards of Tajikistan, Pashto also qualifies as a Tajik language -- and Pashtuns.....???
Lately, we have revealed the existence of sizeable populations of Pashto-speaking Tajiks in Pakistan. Their reasons for speaking Pashto are other than any likely Pamiri/Saka origins — however we will not digress on that for now.
Suffice it to say that there are fundamental differences over the definition of the term “Tajik” and what constitutes it — between all of the three major regions where people own the Tajik ethnonym….based upon diverse considerations such as those of classifying the political identity of Pamiri speakers on the one hand, and the centrality of the Farsi language to the Tajik identity on the other. The validity of these have to be settled satisfactorily before any questions of unity can be thought of in the political or cultural sense. They do reflect the diversity of historical processes of development as reflected in the culture and politics of different regions, but the requirement now is, that they nevertheless have to be addressed and dovetailed actively at the same time.
It is interesting to note that the Dards (Chitralis and Gilgitis) who lie in the southern neighbourhood of Badakhshan, refer universally to all local Iranian peoples (Pashtuns and Tajiks) by the appellation of “Taji”.
