Agents of translocal power, from Mughal governors to US Marines, have relied on hierarchical networks of local elites (tribes and warlord factions) to contain sociopolitical agency among non-elite Pashtuns. Memoirs and popular poetry, however, provide evidence attesting to large-scale Pashtun agency that resisted compartmentalization. Since the 1880s, countercultural young men called “taliban” and the carnivals they brought from village to village circumvented the discipline of landed propriety and state power, providing discursive and institutional space within which anti-elite critical poetry flourished. Casual participation of viewers, and poetic cross-fertilization with more quotidian domains, contributed to a cumulative subaltern “background noise” that emerged at specific points as politically consequential – and adaptable to postcolonial nation-state politics.
As postcolonial states and their local networks undermined regional media and horizontal politics, non-elites across regions continued to imagine common belonging to a beleaguered “Pashtun” public, separate from hostile states, through Pashto small media circulation. This paper surveys poetic symbols and performative contexts that have linked taliban to wider popular culture trends since the late 19th century; and sociopolitical changes which helped transform taliban “social type” into Taliban “movement” - wherein national- and international-scale political agendas, and an abstract Taliban “brand” in Pakistani mainstream media, sustain specific networks rather than the reverse.