Amid the historical works, diaries, journals and other depictions of the British invasion, occupation and eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan in the mid-nineteenth century is a series of Persian war-ballads (jangnāmas). These works narrate the various events of the first Anglo-Afghan War (1839– 42), modelled on the Book of Kings (Shahnama) of Firdawsi (d. 1019 or 1025), and provide information on the war from an Afghan perspective. Composed in the mid-nineteenth century in the years immediately following the war – at the same time as a ‘literary return’ was in full flower in Iran – these war-ballads occupy an intriguing place within Afghanistan's literary and national history. Located at the juncture of interpretations of war, Afghan nationalism and the legacy of the Book of Kings in Persianate societies, the war-ballads of the first Anglo-Afghan War highlight the dialogical process in which texts narrating Afghanistan's history emerged through engagement with geographically far-reaching genres, patronage networks and modalities of power.

Multiple war-ballads in Persian of the first Anglo-Afghan War are known to exist, and still others may come to light. The focus here is on the three texts that congealed in nationalist historiography as products meant to shape a sense of shared Afghan history and collective memory: the War Ballad ( Jangnama, c.1843) of Muhammad Ghulam ‘Ghulami’ Kuhistani, The Book of Akbar (Akbarnama, 1844) of Hamid Allah Kashmiri and the variously titled The Victory Book of Kabul (Zafarnama-yi Kabul, c.1844–7) by Qasim Ali.

Like other texts recording elements of Afghan modern history, the war-ballads of the first Anglo-Afghan War ‘can only be understood through the recognition of cross-border networks, dialogical developments and deep regional dynamics’ governing their production, circulation and reception. Understanding the war-ballads in this way recognises both how Afghan literary products were shaped by transregional processes and the manner in which engagement with the ‘masters’ remained a purposeful and productive endeavour outside of Iran in the nineteenth century. Before turning to such developments through a close appraisal of the texts, an account of their location and reception within Afghan nationalist historiography is in order.

The first two of these texts, War Ballad and The Book of Akbar, were brought to life for an Afghan audience in the mid-twentieth century and rendered as national accounts of ‘the Afghan struggle for liberation from a colonial power as an image for the Afghan quest for self-determination’.