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 of leaving darkness behind. With a scarf draped over her expressionless face, Zarsanga resembles almost a saint-like figure. Her voice often induces a delirium in some of the audience members who burst into a variation of the Attan, a gracious, circular dance said to be used by Pashtun warriors to intimidate the soldiers of Alexander the Great.
