Pashtun

In a bootleg video from the 1990s, an entire audience of Pakistani men in shalwar kameezes stare transfixed as the steely voice of Zarsanga – the renowned Pakistani Pashtun folk musician – thunders through the air.For more than five decades, the illiterate village girl who metamorphosed into the beloved “nightingale of Peshawar” has sung folk songs like this, of yearning lovers turning to sand, of old Pashtun tribes and their reverence for ancestral lands, of tribal jewellery hanging from the necks of Pashtun women, and…