Some research begins with a carefully formulated question. Other research begins with something that has been around us for so long that we rarely think of it as a research problem.
For me, Pashto tappa was one of those things.
Tappa is deeply embedded in Pashtun cultural life. In only two lines, it can express love, longing, separation, sorrow, identity, and resistance. For generations, tappay have travelled through oral memory, homes, weddings, and communal gatherings, and today they also circulate through radio, television, and digital platforms.
I had long known tappa as a powerful form of emotional and cultural expression. But the society in which this poetry lives has also experienced conflict, displacement, militarization, and profound social change. Gradually, a question emerged in my mind:
When a society changes, what happens to the poetry through which it expresses itself?
When I began exploring the scholarship on Pashto tappa, I found valuable studies examining romance, gender, symbolism, resistance, and cultural identity. Yet much of this scholarship approached tappay qualitatively, often through selected examples or relatively small collections. This made me wonder whether a much larger collection of tappay could reveal broader patterns of change in their themes, symbols, voices, and emotions.
The intention was never to reduce poetry to numbers. A frequency cannot explain the full meaning of a metaphor, nor can a statistical test capture everything contained in two culturally rich poetic lines. Instead, I became interested in whether quantitative evidence could complement existing qualitative interpretations. That methodological gap became one of the foundations of our study.
The methodology of this study also has a personal story for me. My interest in quantitative research grew significantly through the influence of my research teacher, Dr. Nadira Khanum. She taught us measurement and scale development in considerable detail. I still remember one moment during her class when she called my name and said:
“Awrang, you have to study this.”
At the time, it was simply a teacher emphasizing something she wanted her student to understand. I did not know that I would remember those words while working on my own research.
Years later, while studying Pashto tappa, I encountered a methodological challenge. There was no standardized quantitative instrument suited to the dimensions I wanted to examine. If we wanted to identify patterns across a large corpus, we needed a framework appropriate to both the cultural complexity of tappa and the analytical needs of the study.
That classroom lesson returned to me. Sometimes, we understand the importance of a lesson only when we encounter the problem for which we need it.
Developing the framework became one of the most challenging parts of the research. Pashto tappay cannot simply be coded by looking for individual words. A flower can communicate beauty or longing. Blood can signify loss, sacrifice, violence, or resistance. Watan can evoke homeland, belonging, displacement, memory, or collective struggle.
The challenge was not simply to create categories, but to make culturally embedded meanings measurable without losing the context that gives them significance.
Drawing on previous scholarship and our theoretical framework, and refining the categories through pilot testing, I developed a self-constructed coding framework covering themes, symbolic imagery, gendered voice, and emotional tone. We eventually applied this approach to 1,000 tappay, equally divided between traditional and contemporary sources.
What began as an observation about culture had become something we could examine systematically.
What interested us most was not simply which category was larger. It was the cultural story emerging from the overall pattern. Romance had not disappeared from Pashto tappa. But contemporary tappay showed a stronger presence of resistance, while images associated with blood, graves, and homeland became more prominent. Female voices, meanwhile, remained an enduring presence across traditional and contemporary tappay.
For me, this was the point at which the numbers became more than numbers.
The flowers had not disappeared, but they were increasingly sharing poetic space with blood, graves, and homeland.
The poetic form had survived, but the world speaking through it was changing. Tappa was not abandoning its past; it was carrying its traditional language of emotion into experiences of conflict, displacement, insecurity, and resistance. The question was therefore no longer simply whether an old tradition was changing. It became a question of how an old tradition was finding ways to speak about a changing reality.
The framework was developed for the particular questions and cultural context of this study, so I do not see it as a universal or finished instrument. However, researchers studying Pashto tappa, Pashto poetry, or related folk traditions may find elements of it useful. Where appropriate, and with suitable validation for their own contexts, researchers may adopt elements of the framework, adapt or refine its categories, or use the approach as a starting point for developing new or adapted coding frameworks suited to different research questions and contexts.
I began this research by asking how a changing society might be reflected within Pashto tappa. What we found was a more nuanced story: a centuries-old poetic tradition can retain its familiar emotional character while absorbing the realities of a changing society.
Looking back, this paper connected several things that shaped me as a researcher: a cultural tradition I had known for years, a gap in the literature, and a lesson I had carried from the classroom. I learned how to think about measurement from a teacher, and a research gap later gave that lesson a practical purpose.
If the framework developed through this journey helps another researcher ask a new question about Pashto poetry or folk culture, that would be a meaningful continuation of a journey that began in that classroom.
References
Khan, A., & Ashraf, S. I. (2026). Romance, Resistance, and Symbolism in Pashto Tappa: A Quantitative Content Analysis. Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-026-01213-0