Bacha Posh, the pretend-boys of Afghanistan

The United Nations Security Council recently condemned the Taliban’s systemic oppression of the female population across Afghanistan, following a decree by the Islamist regime instructing them neither to speak loudly, if at all, in public, and to cover their bodies and faces when outdoors. Twelve of the 15 Security Council members strongly condemned the Taliban’s new 114-page anti-women laws in accordance with the Islamist rulers’ strict interpretation of the Sharia.

But even as the future of Afghanistan’s 19-odd million female population under Taliban rule remains harsh and tenuous, the bizarre but hoary practice of Bacha Posh — in which innumerable Afghan parents without sons bring up their daughters as boys, till they attain puberty — continues unabated and unquestioned in the country.

Translated from Farsi and Dari to mean ‘girl dressed like a boy’, this socially sanctioned Bacha Posh concept entails parents ‘transforming’ their daughters at the age of three or four into boys for the next 10 or so years. These girl-boys were given masculine names and boyish haircuts and dressed as males. To further buttress their role, they were encouraged to emulate boys in all ways, playing games like soccer, flying kites and even cycling openly, an activity that is taboo for all females in Afghanistan.

Mixing or playing with children of their own sex was accordingly banned for Bacha Posh, too, but the upside of being pretend-boys made it easier for them to secure odd jobs, run errands and move about relatively freely, rendering them useful and pecuniarily worthwhile to their families.

Numerous anecdotal accounts revealed that a majority of child street vendors in several cities were Bacha Posh, thereby bestowing a commercial slant to this phantastic charade that exists nowhere else in the world, except to some extent in parts of Pakistan’s contiguous tribal areas populated by Pashtuns.

Furthermore, the Bacha Posh pretence was made all the more easier by the fact that other than their parents, everyone else around them — neighbours, family friends and even teachers — willingly participated in this formalised gender deception. However, for the play actors themselves in this illusionary simulation, it temporarily opened up a whole new world, that not only included freedom of movement, but also freedom to frolic, shout and play freely, all of which was generally deemed illicit for girls.

But as soon as nature asserted itself, as it invariably does and the Bacha Posh attained adolescence, they had to instantly dump their male identities and revert to becoming real girls once again, with all attendant feminine behavioural traits and household responsibilities. In many instances, this transition was hugely traumatic, to say the least, with many Bacha Posh experiencing untold angst, disorientation and puzzlement; after a nearly decade-long hiatus, they were now required to be shy, coy and to display feminine reserve of which they had no notion.

Thereafter, many in their teens were summarily married off by their parents, often to men far older, only adding to their trauma and overloaded psychological baggage. Besides, having briefly experienced a modicum of independence as boys, the Bacha Posh found it difficult to resign themselves to being submissive wives with the sole role of begetting male offspring.

Any display of even the slightest individuality invariably prompted brutal punishment and endless beatings from both their spouses and their extended families — a state of affairs vividly, but disturbingly and despairingly, portrayed in the brilliant fictional novels by US-based Afghan writers Nadia Hashimi in ‘The Pearl that Broke its Shell’ and Khaled Hosseini in ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’.

No statistics, however, exist regarding even an approximate number of Bacha Posh in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, but this age-old phenomenon was widely publicised in 2014 by Jenny Nordberg, a New York-based Swedish journalist. In her fascinating account in ‘The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan’, the investigative reporter revealed that the Bacha Posh phenomenon was rooted not in the country’s religious faith, but in its cultural practices. She also declared that it existed nationally, cutting across tribal and socio-economic groups that comprise Afghanistan’s complex human mosaic.

Azita Rafat, an educated Afghan MP from northwest Badghis province and mother of four daughters whose life Nordberg examines in her book, for instance, was formerly a Bacha Posh who ended up raising one of her younger daughters as one too. “It’s hard for you to believe why one mother is doing these things to their youngest daughter,” she told Nordberg. Things are happening in Afghanistan that are really not imaginable for western people, she added.

Others like Zarifa Sabet from the non-governmental organisation ActionAid International claimed that the Bacha Posh practice dated back centuries, but that its provenance was unknown. “Being born a girl in Afghanistan is to be condemned to a half-life,” Sabet wrote in the South Asian Monitor in 2018, adding that this necessitated resilience that was difficult to imagine. At best, being a girl child was viewed with disappointment; at worst, it is a humiliation calling for ‘desperate measures’ of which Bacha Posh was one such, she declared.

Sabet goes on to state that having even one boy child was mandatory for good standing and reputation for many families in Afghan society, while having none provoked open contempt. She conceded that widespread indigence necessitated the need for parents to temporarily force their daughters into becoming boys, to enable them to work and earn money, however meagre. Superstition amongst the predominantly illiterate population, she said, also buttressed the myth that having a Bacha Posh in a son-less family could actually lead to the birth of a male.

Sons in Afghanistan are favoured for reasons of inheritance, their eventual earning capacity and dowry prospects. Accordingly, their births were celebrated at a Nashrah ceremony with festivities and prayers. Female babies, on the other hand, invited only derision and their mothers were societally labelled as ‘dokkhtar zai’ or she who only breeds daughters. Conversely, their husbands were dubbed ‘mada posht’, or he whose woman will only deliver girls. Predictably, women were invariably censured for birthing girls, conveniently ignoring the biological reality that men determine a baby’s sex, depending on whether their sperm was carrying a corresponding X or Y chromosome.

— The writer specialises on strategic and security matters