At the turn of the eighteenth century a number of Afghans, i.e. Pashtuns began translating Persian texts into Pashto and these subsequently acted as a foundational canon for a Pashto literary tradition. But Pashto also had a strong oral tradition and during this same period numerous authors started transforming oral tales into literary texts and these also became a core of the Pashto literary tradition. In this paper I seek to understand the social and literary landscape of the Persianate world at its linguistic margins by examining developments at the turn of the eighteenth century in Pashto. When the son of the famous Khushal Khan Khattak (c. 1636-1689), Abdul Qadir Khan (c. 1652-1714) decided to translate Sa’di’s Gulist?n into Pashto he described the decision as a response to requests of Pashtuns who desired to have texts in their own language that could be enjoyed by people of all classes. The implication was that Persian and Arabic, while functioning as a lingua franca and language of religious authority, were limited in other crucial ways, namely in their ability to be a language for the people. Through an examination of extant manuscript copies of Pashto oral tales this presentation interrogates the limits of the Persianate by underscoring attempts to not only incorporate Persianate literary traditions into Pashto, but also to distinguish and differentiate Pashto as a language not beholden to Persian. Through an examination of the circulation and production of Pashto literary texts the Persianate as a dialogic arena of negotiation, differentiation, and expanding social imaginaries comes into clearer focus.