Before Taliban

Introduction / 9
2. Costume ball, Paghman, 1925 (Khalilullah Enayat Seraj Collection).
earlier pictures, those posing in Western garb appear stiff and uncomfortable:
they are adopting a foreign style in a purely imitative manner. Here, the attitude
seemingly has changed. The evident playfulness and irony seem novel.
At the same time, there is also a sense of unreality. This costume ball was
held shortly after the government had suppressed the first serious popular
uprising against Amanullah, an uprising that had gained momentum in large
part because of discontent over Amanullah’s reform program. In response to
this challenge, Amanullah briefly curtailed some of his more controversial
plans for modernizing Afghanistan, but the evidence of this photograph is
that he was still living in a hermetic cultural space closed off from the reality
of his society, a reminder of which can be seen in the lower right of the
picture. There sits Adeko, one of the wives of Amanullah’s father, the late
Amir Habibullah. Alone among the partygoers, Adeko is dressed in the
clothes appropriate to her background and station. While all about her others
fashion themselves in identities other than their own, the not-so-merry
widow stares forlornly into the camera, a grim reminder in the midst of gaiety
of the old ways and the grimmer world outside the villa’s gates.
The photograph illustrates the central paradox represented by Amanullah
and all reformers of his era, the paradox of whether a person is who he was