Culture  

The Oral Epic Tradition: Hazara Storytelling Before It Was Written Down

A dambura, the two-stringed long-necked lute associated with Hazara musical performance
The dambura: the two-stringed lute carried by Hazara performers of the oral tradition. Photo: Bertramz / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Before there were books, there was a grandmother's voice in the dark. Before there were printed anthologies, there was a dambura string humming in a village courtyard while a singer recited verses no one had bothered to commit to paper, because everyone trusted that memory would hold them. For the Hazara people of central Afghanistan, oral tradition was not a precursor to "real" literature. It was the literature. Its forms were sophisticated, its performers skilled, its audiences demanding, and its body of material vast.

That material is now under pressure. Decades of displacement, targeted violence, and the disruption of family and community networks have strained the channels through which oral knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Yet the tradition is not gone. It is being recorded, studied, and re-inhabited by Hazara communities at home and abroad. Understanding it means starting not with the threat, but with the thing itself.

What Oral Tradition Means Here

A wide view of the Bamyan Valley in central Afghanistan, the heart of Hazarajat
The Bamyan Valley, central Afghanistan. Photo: Danial f4, CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Hazaragi oral tradition is distinct from the written Dari literature produced in Afghan cities or the classical Farsi literary canon preserved in manuscripts. Those traditions have their own prestige and their own history. Hazaragi oral tradition belongs to a different register: the body of songs, stories, verses, and proverbs that circulated in homes, at weddings, in the fields, and at communal gatherings in Hazarajat, the central highland region of Afghanistan where Hazara communities have lived for centuries.

The working language is Hazaragi, a variety of Dari with its own distinct sound and a vocabulary that sets it apart from standard written forms. By one widely cited estimate, around ten percent of Hazaragi vocabulary derives from Turkic and Mongolic roots, reflecting the historical migrations that shaped the Hazara people. Words like ata (father), kaṭa (big), bêri (bride), and alaḡa (palm of the hand) carry traces of contact with Central Asian peoples and languages that no formal dictionary of Dari fully captures. The oral tradition was, and remains, the primary carrier of this vocabulary layer. It lived in sung lines, in story formulae, in the compressed grammar of proverbs. When it is not spoken, those words risk going with it.

The Major Forms

A page from the 1217 CE Florence manuscript of the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings
A page from the Florence Shahnameh, the oldest known surviving copy (1217 CE). The written tradition the oral tradition reaches toward and away from. Source: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Ms Magl CI.III.24. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Hazaragi oral tradition is not a single genre but a family of related forms, each with its own performance context, its own rules, and its own relationship to the audience.

The doheti (also written dubayti or dobeiti) is the foundational unit: a two-line verse, sometimes expanded into a four-line couplet, that encodes a single observation, feeling, or moral in compressed, often highly musical language. Scholars have documented thousands of these verses, passed orally from generation to generation by elders. They cover everything from romantic longing to agricultural wisdom to political complaint. Their brevity made them portable, easy to memorize, easy to trade, easy to adapt. A singer could deliver a doheti as a standalone piece or string them together into a longer performance. The form was flexible without being formless.

The chaharbeiti (literally "four lines") is a related quatrain form popular across Afghanistan, given a distinctly Hazara inflection in Hazarajat. Ethnomusicologist Veronica Doubleday documented gendered vocal traditions around chaharbeiti performance, showing that women had their own performance practices, their own thematic preoccupations, and their own informal spaces for performing these songs. Women accompanied themselves on the dâireh (a large frame drum) or tabla. Their subjects were family love, personal experience, and the texture of daily life. Not the heroic themes that dominated male-oriented performance, but no less crafted and no less valued within their communities.

Dastan refers to the broader category of narrative storytelling: long-form tales that could run across an evening or several evenings, mixing prose narration with inset verses, comic episodes with serious ones, human characters with supernatural beings. The dastan tradition in the broader Persianate world is ancient and well documented, and Hazara storytellers participated in it with their own local characters, themes, and reference points. These were the stories told by elderly men to younger men, by grandmothers to children by firelight.

Folk tales in prose, shorter than full dastans and more episodic, often with animal characters or trickster figures, formed the everyday narrative repertoire of home and family. Lullabies, wedding songs, harvest songs, and laments each had their season and their occasion, woven into the rhythm of the year.

Buz-e-Chini and the World the Stories Built

The folk tale known as the Legend of Buz-e-Chini (The Chinese Goat) illustrates how oral stories carried meanings well beyond their surface plots. In this story, a mother goat named Buz-e-Chini warns her three kids, Algag, Bulgag, and Chulgag, not to open the door while she is away. A cunning wolf deceives two of the children and takes them. The third hides in a mud oven. When Buz-e-Chini returns, she confronts the wolf directly and wins back her children.

The story is structured as a children's tale, and it was told that way, mothers to children, elders to the young, across generations in Hazarajat. But many readers and scholars have argued it carried a political weight its audience understood. The wolf's cunning and the goat's defiant confrontation can be read as mapping onto experiences of dispossession and resistance that Hazara communities lived through for centuries. Scholars who have examined Buz-e-Chini note that Hazara folk fiction often processed historical persecution through fantastical or allegorical frames. When direct political speech was dangerous, imagination provided a different path to truth. Not every household told the story this way, and readings will vary by region and family, but the dual register is part of what gives the tale its long life.

This combination of entertainment and encoded memory is one of oral tradition's oldest and most important capacities. The stories were not merely distracting. They were carrying something.

The Dambura and the People Who Played It

No account of Hazara oral tradition is complete without the dambura. This two-stringed, long-necked lute, the body and neck often carved from a single block of mulberry or apricot wood, is the instrument most closely associated with Hazara musical performance. The dambura is fretless. The upper string typically holds a sustained drone while the lower string carries the melody. The player's technique is percussive and rhythmically driving, well suited to long-form performance and to the outdoor or social settings where oral material was recited.

The dambura is not merely an accompaniment. It is a mnemonic structure. The physical act of playing, the particular fingering, the rhythm, the interplay of drone and melody, helps performers hold long works in memory. Master singers (described in the research literature as dambura players who also composed or preserved narrative songs) were the specialists of the oral tradition. They codified song types, preserved established narratives, and trained younger performers. UNESCO formally recognized the dambura tradition as an element of intangible cultural heritage shared between Hazara and Uzbek communities in Afghanistan during a 2019 documentation workshop. The Dambura Festival in Bamiyan, revived after 2001, gave the tradition renewed public visibility.

Who Carried the Tradition

Highland terrain near Sokhtag, Daykundi Province, central Afghanistan
Highland terrain near Sokhtag, Daykundi Province. Photo: Ezzatollah Haidari, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Oral tradition does not carry itself. It travels through people, through relationships, through specific social occasions. In Hazara communities, transmission operated through several distinct channels.

Women were indispensable carriers. Within households, in spaces that male outsiders rarely entered, women passed songs, proverbs, lullabies, and folktales to daughters and grandchildren. The chaharbeiti tradition documented by Doubleday was almost entirely a domestic and ceremonial women's practice: songs performed at weddings, at women's gatherings, in the intimacy of family life. This was not marginal oral tradition. It was the primary vehicle for a distinct layer of cultural knowledge, one that sat largely outside the repertoire of male performers and outside the attention of most early scholars.

Male performers operated in different spaces: wedding celebrations, village gatherings, evening storytelling sessions among men. Master dambura players traveled between villages in Hazarajat, much as bards traveled in other oral cultures. They were not professional entertainers in a modern sense so much as repositories of narrative, people who carried the community's story of itself in their minds and gave it back at the right moments.

Elders of both sexes served as the living archives of proverbs. Hazaragi proverbs are not decorative. They are argumentative tools, used to settle disputes, make decisions, teach the young, and establish social norms. A proverb like "If your father owns the mill, you still must wait your turn to grind your flour" is doing real cultural work. It teaches that status does not suspend obligation. These compressed sayings required no dambura, no occasion, no extended performance, only the right moment and a speaker with the right authority.

What Displacement Does to Oral Tradition

Aerial view of snow-covered mountains in Ghazni Province, central Afghanistan, in winter
Snow-covered mountains in Ghazni Province, central Afghanistan. Photo: Daniel Wilkinson, US State Department. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The past five decades have subjected Hazara communities to a form of sustained disruption that is particularly devastating for oral cultures. Oral tradition depends on proximity: on grandparents living near grandchildren, on communal gatherings where singers can perform and listeners can absorb, on the slow, repeated exposure through which a child internalizes not just the words but the music, the timing, the gesture, the context.

Mass displacement, from Hazarajat to Kabul, from Kabul to Iran and Pakistan, from there to Australia, Europe, and North America, broke many of those transmission chains. Children who grew up in refugee camps in Quetta or in Iranian cities like Mashhad were often cut off from the extended family networks through which oral knowledge had traveled. Hazara communities now living in Australia, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere include large numbers of second-generation young people who may know fragments, a half-remembered lullaby, a proverb their grandfather said, a story their mother told once, but have never had the sustained immersion that produces confident transmission.

This is not unique to Hazaras. It is a pattern repeated across many communities forced to move under pressure. But the specific combination of targeting (Hazara communities experienced systematic massacres and persecution across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), geographic dispersal, and the collapse of Afghan state institutions after 2001 made the disruption unusually acute.

What Is Being Preserved, and by Whom

The response to this disruption has come from multiple directions simultaneously, with varying levels of resources and reach.

Academic scholars have produced some of the foundational documentary work. Mohammad Javad Khavari published a collection of Hazara popular dobaiti in 2003, providing one of the first systematic records of this verse form in print. Ali Akbar Shahrestani produced a study of Hazara folk literature that catalogued forms and themes. Abbas Deljou's work on Hazaragi folklore added another layer of documentation. These publications, mostly in Dari, mostly produced in Afghan academic contexts, are not widely accessible to English-language readers, but they represent serious scholarly engagement with the tradition.

The Hazaragi Academy (Keblagh e Azergi) has done important institutional work, including establishing a formal Hazaragi script and keyboard, creating digital publishing infrastructure, and collecting oral material for print publication. Founder Ali Torani worked for years to systematize what had previously existed only in spoken form.

Community-driven preservation projects have operated on a more grassroots level. In Australia, a community bookmaking project made the Legend of Buz-e-Chini available in Hazaragi, Dari, and English, distributing it through local and national libraries. A direct attempt to put an oral story into the hands of Hazara children growing up far from Hazarajat. Shukria Rezaei, a Hazara scholar and poet living in the UK, launched a project to collect, transcribe, and translate Hazaragi oral and written poetry into English, explicitly framing the work as both cultural documentation and an act of public witness.

The Hazaragi Language Living Dictionary (available online through livingdictionaries.app) represents a digital-age effort to capture vocabulary, including words found in oral tradition but absent from formal Dari dictionaries, through community contributions and recordings.

What has been lost is harder to name precisely, because the nature of loss in oral tradition is that the lost thing leaves no record. Specific narrative cycles, regional variants of well-known tales, the repertoires of individual dambura masters who died without students. These are gone without a trace. The gap in English-language scholarship on Hazara oral tradition is itself significant. Compared to the attention given to oral traditions in sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, or Indigenous North America, Central Asian oral traditions remain understudied in Western academic contexts, and Hazaragi specifically has attracted far less attention than it warrants.

A Tradition Still Speaking

It would be a mistake to end here with only loss and documentation. The oral tradition of the Hazara people is not a museum exhibit. It is alive in the dambura players who perform at festivals in Bamiyan when conditions permit, in the grandmothers in Hazara communities abroad who still tell Buz-e-Chini to their grandchildren in San Diego and Denver and Toronto, in the young Hazara poets who write in English but reach back into the verbal rhythms of Hazaragi to find images and music that standard literary English cannot provide.

The forms have adapted. They always have. The doheti traveled from village gatherings to YouTube videos. Chaharbeiti sung at weddings now sometimes appears as voice messages on WhatsApp. The story of Buz-e-Chini, once passed mouth to ear in a Hazarajat household, now sits in an Australian public library in three languages. Oral tradition is not destroyed by writing. It is transformed by it. The question is whether the transformation is slow enough, and accompanied by enough care, for the essential character of the tradition to survive the journey. For the Hazara oral tradition, that work is underway.

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