Writing Central Asia

Samarkand is a perfumed name…it had delicate aromatic associations as if it were a magic city…

John Gunter (Inside Russia Today)

Gunter’s description of Samarkand as a “perfumed city” is reflective of a narrative mode that dominated the study of the region identified as Central Asia. In fact, so pervasive was this ‘romantic’ influence that even today the idea of an ‘antique world’ remains the overwhelming impression in many non-specialist studies on the region. This ‘romantic’ interest was created by a genre of literature, in the early 1990’s (though it had its roots in the classic ‘great game’ literature at the turn of the last century) that identified the region as an ‘unexplored’, yet naturally well-endowed area, geo-strategically situated at the crossroad of civilizations and thereby repeatedly subject to invasions by groups of people who left behind traces of their own culture. Fascinating tales emerged from the writings of people who ventured into these strange lands and set the tone of writings on the region.

This examination of the region from an onlooker’s perspective has its tradition in the era of the ‘great game’ when focus on the expanding Tsarist and British imperial powers reduced the historical status of the region to a pawn. This was also the era of the invasion of the region by numerous travelers, who visited the region under varying pretexts, to report back on what was actually happening in the heartlands of Asia. While many of them left behind copious records of their travels and impressions of the people, these were coloured by prejudices, that in a number of cases had already been formed even prior to their arrival by negative reports of the fate of missionaries who had preceded them. In most cases they were also the political agents of their governments and had particular motives in mind while writing their reports. While these narratives remain as interesting sketches of the social, political, economic and cultural life of the people, the constant strife that they portray was of course conducive to the imperialist plans for takeover that followed in the decades to come.

Two travelers who left interesting accounts of region are Alexander Burnes( a British officer) and Arminius Vambery (a Hungarian Turkologist and traveler). Burnes had travelled to Bokhara in 1831, at the time of Emir Nasrullah and Vambery later in 1863, during the reign of his son Mozaffar-ed-Din. Since these two accounts were written in the context of the developing conflict over the region, they are useful as political accounts of the nature and extent of boundaries of the Khanates and of the constant internal dissensions in the region.

The Bolshevik victory in the region resulted in another group of men who led ‘desperate plots’ to overthrow the Bolsheviks in the region. Their accounts of the time and the story of their escape out of the region were also part of the ‘great game’ writings. In the course of their flight out of lands controlled by the Bolsheviks, these men moved across towns and villages and the portrayal of the journey provides not just personal experiences but also the reactions of people and the condition of the region. These reminiscences furnished valuable information and supplied the ingredients for numerous sensational romances and fictions. Paul Nazaroff’s Hunted Through Central Asia, is an account of a prosperous mine owner and a leading member of the Russian community in Tashkent whose opposition to the Bolsheviks resulted in his arrest. The story that he narrates is of his escape to Kashgar. In the course of this journey he describes groups of people with whom he hid, the Sarts and the Kyrgyz, and portrays the misery that the revolution  brought in its wake. It also carries the impression of an imminent British intervention suggested by the activities of such men as Colonel F.M. Bailey whose own account of his anti- Bolshevik activities is available in Mission to Tashkent. Bailey had been sent to report on the possibilities of an anti-Bolshekiv uprising which would be helped by British forces. The nearly total lack of support that this mission faced led to its abandonment.Mission to Tashkent is a bizarre story of a British agent who escaped out of the region into Meshad, disguised as a Bolshevik agent in pursuit of himself.

The emergence of ‘new’ states in the region once again engaged the attention of a number of non-specialists who moved through desert and mountain and a long course of abandoned history to weave together images of a lost world — “somewhere in the core of the greatest land mass on earth, beyond more familiar nations, there pulsed another country, half forgotten, to which the rest were all peripheral…” writes Colin Thubron, in his The Lost Heart of Asia. There is however an amazing continuity in the images that have emerged in the two sets of writings nearly a century apart from each other. A similar reflection of the exotic Orient, which eludes the Occidental traveler’s rational mind and the fallout of the colonial encounters remains an abiding theme. The images in these writings are made real by encounters with individuals whose casual observations serve to reinforce assumptions against reality and stand in place of serious ethnographic research. The importance of this need not be reduced, for in numerous instances these lead to amazing insights into the essence of groups of people and their demographic character.However, the images generated in the course of these accounts reinforce the authors own preconceived understanding of the ‘lost world’ and fail to explore the possibilities inherent in the region itself. Like all non-specialists, Thubron’s delight in certain themes would have gained from a more moderate projection closer to reality. One such theme is that of ‘revival’ in general and the revival of faith in particular. The sense of all pervasive Naqshbandi upsurge, for instance, is possibly more a reflection of Thubron’s expectation of a sudden revival rather than an actual event.

Another such journey by an Italian, Tiziano Terzani,(Goodnight Mister Lenin) has the rather gruesome task of a search for the ‘corpse of Communism’ which takes the author through Siberia, Central Asia and the republics of the Caucasus. It provides an image of the turbulent times and elucidates the political transformations that took place as the Soviet Union crumbled. But it is also an interesting ethnographic record of minorities forgotten by time, of rebels who become state leaders of old poets and young mafiosi.The end of an era and the tumbling down of the ‘scepter and crown’ is more palpably present in Terzani’s descriptions as is the pathos of groups of people displaced by turbulent political change. Terzani quotes Misha, “a pale faced bearded Jew” who hopes that the last remaining statue of Lenin would remain in the square in Bishkek, as without it he too would have to go for “… after all I’m not Kyrgyz either”. At other times the artificiality of the ethno-territorial divisions of the people is evident in the words of a group of elders, who when asked by the author, imbibed with modern notions of the sanctity of territorial boundaries, about their nationality answer, “… the Prophet knows no races … It was the Communist party that divided us.”The overriding impression that one gets from Terzani’s description of his journey is one of an all pervasive search for ‘dollars’ among the people rather than of social transformations in the period of transition. One aspect that he stresses however is the deterioration of ethnic relations, particularly a strong anti-Russian feeling among Central Asians. He also notices a sense of superiority among Russians for whom Central Asians are “lazy and less civilized”. The growing sense of a difference among Central Asians themselves is also evident as a group of Tajiks told the author about the Uzbeks, “… we are poets and they are traders.” A certain element of the exotic is also present throughout Terzani’s descriptions. Terzani describes an early morning bazaar in these words, “an old man walks about with a pan of smoking medicinal herbs. The vendors wave their hands to waft the smoke over themselves and brush it into their hair. They pay a few kopecks for the service which is meant to drive away evil spirits.” While on the one hand this description is an interesting pointer to the non-Islamic traditions that are a continuing part of the culture of the people, it is also typically a European’s picture of the Orient, dominated by images of a quintessentially non-European world.

Travel and exploration books often create images which lead to what Mary Louise Pratt terms “discursive reformulations” of the explored lands that then came to be generally accepted. In a number of instances they also provided the first impetus for detailed ethnographic studies, particularly along what Pratt calls the “contact zone”. This zone was the space of colonial encounters–“the space in which peoples historically and geographically separated come into contact with each other and established ongoing relationships.  One such classic contact zone was Central Asia–the zone where orthodox Russian culture came into contact with the mores of a frontier Muslim world and became the continuing object of “imperial eyes”. For the Central Asian region the influence of travel writing on social science is evident from the fact that geopolitics and its corollary, the importance of the strategic location of Central Asia, subsequently become central in social science writings on the region.

Anita

10.03.2018

Travel Writings

Arminius Vambery,Travels in Central Asia- Being the Account of a Journey from Teheran    Across the Turkman Desert on the Eastern shore of the Caspian to Khiva, Bokhara and Samarcand (performed in the year 1863) London: John Murray, 1863.

Alexander Burnes, A Journey from India to Cabool, Tatary, Persia. Also Narrative of a   Voyage on the Indus from the Sea to Lahore(in three volumes) reprint, New Delhi: Asia Education Services, 1992.

Paul Nazaroff, Hunted Through Central Asia- On the Run From Lenin’s Secret Police,  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

F.M. Bailey, Mission to Tashkent, London: Jonathan Cape, 1946.

Colin Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia, England: Penguin, 1994.

Tiziano Terzani, Goodnight Mister Lenin, London: Picador, 1993.

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York: Routledge, 1992.