PESHAWAR: Speakers at a ceremony here on Tuesday lauded noted Pashto fiction writer and former Afghan president Noor Mohammad Tarakai as a strong voice of the downtrodden and marginalised sections of the society.

The ceremony was organised by Pashto Alami Congress to launch complete fiction works of late Noor Mohammad Tarakai.

The book has been published under the auspices of Pashto Adabi Ghurzang, a Quetta-based literary organisation.

They said that Mr Tarakai was not only a political visionary but also a social reformer and pioneer of introducing realism in Pashto fiction.

They added that characters of his novels and short stories were drawn from typical life of Pakhtuns.

The speakers said that Tarakai wanted Pakhtuns to shun away extremism and adopt forward looking on life to live a peaceful life and uphold a positive image in the comity of nations.

They said that Mr Tarakai had envisioned a progressive society for his people.

Shedding light on his short stories, they said that most characters of Mr Tarakai’s fiction were unpopular as they found no mention in any poetry or prose of his contemporary writers. Mr Tarakai was bold, fearless and a man of strong conviction, the speakers added.

Addressing as chief guest, Prof Sarfaraz Khan, former director of Area Study Centre, University of Peshawar said that Mr Tarakai was a social philosopher and fiction writer par excellence. His celebrated Pashto short story Da Bazgar loor (Daughter of a peasant) showed his deep insight in understanding of social injustice in which a poor was convinced by a mullah to get his daughter wedded to the son of an influential person to pay back his loan, he said.

Mr Tarakai was born to a rural Ghilzai Pakhtun peasant family in Naawa district Ghazni province of Afghanistan on 15 July 1917. He was the oldest of three children and attended a village school in Naawa before leaving in 1932, at the age of 15, to work in the port city of Mumbai, India. There he met a Kandahari merchant family, who employed him as a clerk for the Pakhtun Trading Company.

Mr Taraki's first encounter with communism was during his night courses, where he met several Communist Party of India members, who impressed him with their discussions on social justice and communist values.

In 1937, he started working for Abdul Majid Zabuli, the minister of economics, who introduced Mr Taraki to several Russians. Later, Mr Taraki became deputy head of Bakhtrar News Agency and became popular author.

His best known book, Da Bang Mosaferi, highlights the socio-economic difficulties facing Afghan workers and peasants.

His works were translated into Russian. In Soviet Union, his work was viewed as embodying scientific socialist themes and he was hailed by the government as ‘Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky’.

The rule of Mr Taraki, though short-lived, was marked by controversies from beginning to end. As a president of Afghanistan, he launched a land reforms programme on January 1, 1979 that proved to be highly unpopular and led to a popular backlash, which initiated the Afghan civil war.

At the beginning of his rule, the government was divided between two factions of Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Mr Tarakai was leading the majority Khalq faction of PDPA. The other faction of PDPA was known as Parcham.

In 1978, shortly after his rule began, Mr Taraki started a purge of the government and party which led to several high-ranking Parchamite members being sent into de facto exile by being assigned to serve overseas as ambassadors.

Mr Tarakai added five valuable novels and short stories to Pashto fiction which were reflective of his class-consciousness as he was against a class-ridden society, the speakers said.

Young critic Faisal Faran said that the character of mullah in Ghani Khan’s poetry was the same as it was delineated by Mr Tarakai in his fiction.

He was the first and last fiction writer in Pashto until now who wrote profusely on the miserable plight of the poor, he said.

His style was eloquent, fluent and full of powerful imagery, Mr Faran added.

Sadiq Zarrak, a young scholar, said that Mr Tarakai had advocated purity of thoughts leading to social cohesion and universal brotherhood in his writings. “His characters are life-like narrating their own stories of oppression,” he added.

Prof Yasin Iqbal Yousafzai, Prof Asif Sameem, Khan Zaman Kakar, Qazi Imdad, Rahmat Shah Sail, Moazzam Jan, Dr Khurshid Alam, Sher Jan, Zafar Kaka and Nazif Lala also spoke on the occasion.