what is Tajik literature?
Perspective I: the shallow time
Roughly speaking, Tajikistan might be defined as a periphery of the Farsi-speaking world, locked in isolated mountain valleys. This is at least how I imagine it, since I just came into contact with this cultural reality episodically, during the sessions of Polish Oriental Society, and later on in Leiden. Certainly, there are two very dissimilar aspects of Tajik culture, one that it distant in time, and another that is quite recent, hemmed in what I called, in one of my essays, the shallow time of postcolonial chronopolitics. Tajikistan, just like several other republics of Central Asia, (re)emerged a quarter of a century ago, after the fall of the Soviet empire. It was a difficult a difficult (re)birth, under the black sun of a civil war (1992-1997). This is why it is, to a large degree, an unstudied reality, promissory of novel insights and quite trendy in such places as Leiden University, at least when I was there in 2018-2020.
The modern history of the country (I think about the final decades of the 19th century) was marked by Russian colonisation and a process that people like us, the Poles, call "russification". On the other hand, the beginning of the 20th century was marked by an Islamic reformist movement, so called jadids ("the new ones"; their opponents, by contrast, were called kadims, "the old ones"), who wished to promote education, progress, and the development of press. It was the time of such figures as Sadriddin Ayni and Abdurauf Fitrat.
The first half of the 20th century should also be regarded as an important period in the development of the language, roughly a variant of Farsi, that used to be called zaboni tojiku fors ("language of Tajiks and Persians", or simply "Tajik Farsi"). Certainly, such an identification reflects the contrast with the Turkic tongues of the region; but I also overheard some comments in Leiden, when Persian-speaking people asked each other how long it takes to learn Tajik. Apparently, it was just something "you need to get used to". At the beginning of the 20th c., this language was written in Arabic alphabet, and in this form it appeared in early printed press. After the October Revolution, a wave of Bolshevik propaganda reached the country, promoting the communist press, still printed in Arabic characters. After the creation of the Autonomous Tajik Socialist Republic in 1924, the pression on standardization of the language of Samarkand and Bukhara increased. Initially, the Arabic characters were replaced by modified Latin alphabet, yet in 1939-1940 a Tajik written in Cyrillic letters was invented. I have read at that moment only 0,5% of the Tajiks knew how to write, which I find hard to believe, given the region's past cultural glories. But if the specialists say so... As the communist press developed under the auspices of Moscow, with many materials translated from Russian into Tajik, it was naturally the period of many Russian terms finding its way into the local tongue. The tide turned in 1989, with the new Law on Tajik (Farsi) language, "Konuni zaboni Tojiki (Forsi)", that preceded the "February events" in Dushanbe (1990) leading to the country's independence. According to the new regulation, Tajik could be written in Arabic characters once again.
The Tajik "Golden Age" that started at the time of perestroika fostered a cultural regeneration, that may partially be associated with the political movement Rastokhez ("Revival"), representing a moderate nationalist position of the Tajik intelligentsia. There was also an underground newspaper with the same title, "Rastokhez", edited by a Tajik akademik (member of the local Academy of Sciences), Tohir Abdujabbor. The political-ideological spectrum of the early years of independence was varied, and so were the Tajik newspapers, among which such titles as "Najot" ("The Salvation") of the Islamic Party of Tajik Regeneration (Hizbi Nahzati Islomii Tojikiston), and several other of similar inspiration. In the early 1990s, there was a great appetite for reading those newspapers; they had a great social and emotional impact, especially the scandal-explorer "Charoghi ruz"; no wonder that the journalists were accused of having provoked the civil war of 1992-1997. The years that came after the short-lived "Golden Age" brought abuse and sometimes physical violence against journalists. Several titles were prohibited. The anarchic freedom of expression that characterised the early years of independence was over. Today, Tajikistan is ranked 159th in the Global Democracy Index, which is a few rows below Iran and Afghanistan.
The short-lived "Golden Age" was also where the modern literature of Tajikistan begins, with the poems and short stories published in those journals, especially those of greater cultural aspirations, such as "Haftganj" ("Seven treasures") or "Farhang" ("Culture"). Among the recognized modern Tajik authors, there are such names as Sadriddin Ayni and Mirzo Tursunzoda. There must also be some young ones, that I ignore. But overall, when I came to Leiden in 2018, the Tajik poet that bore into my mind was a shepherd in a lonely mountain valley, cultivating some archaic genres of Persian poetry and accompanying his verses on a home-made musical instrument. It was on a documentary made by some dare-devil anthropologist.
Perspective 2: the deep time
Well, that is, according to my terminology, the shallow time perspective, in which Tajikistan appears, roughly speaking, as quite an uninteresting country of incipient literacy. A country that you feel entitled to ignore. Yet on the other hand, there is also a deep time perspective to deploy. Let's try to do it.
According to some scholars (the debate goes on), the Tajiks are the descendants of the Sogdians and the Bactrians, with the admixture of ethnic Persians and other peoples. The importance of the divide between them and the Turkic peoples (such as Uzbeks) is contested in modern scholarship; the idea is that culture and values are the same, independently of the linguistic difference.
The really deep time perspective includes archaeological remnants of Sarazm, dating back to the 4th millennium BC. Even the recorded history is quite deep, as it dates back to circa 500 BC, when Tajikistan was a part of Achaemenid Empire. After the conquest by Alexander the Great, it became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. The northern part of the country was part of Sogdia, a group of merchant city-states on the Silk Road. From 1st to 4th century AD, the region was dominated by the Kushan Empire, whose makes were the nomadic Yuezhi tribes. It was a time of criss-crossing spiritual influence of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism. Still later on (5th-8th c.), there came the Hephthalites, also called the White Huns. Temporarily, Tajikistan was even under Tibetan control, till the Islamic conquest that reached the remote region in 710.
One of the greatest periods in the history of Central Asia comes with the Samanid rule (819-999), when the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara entered their full blossom (today they are in Uzbekistan, yet their role is crucial also in the formation of Tajik identity). Between 999 and 1211, Tajikistan was part of the Kara-Khanid Khanate that ruled Transoxiana (the whole region, including also Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and part of Kazakhstan). The Kara-Khanids were Turkic people that culturally merged with the blossoming Perso-Arab culture of Central Asia. Finally, the early modernity (16th to 18th c.) was under the sign of the Khanate and thus Emirate of Bukhara, and the Khanate of Kokand, before the epoch of the colonial Great Game, played between Russia and the Great Britain, properly began.
This is the history that explains why many people believe that the greatest poet of Tajikistan was Omar Khayyam; but to understand fully the peculiarity of the local literary tradition, it is necessary to explore the epic of Gurugli (Dastan-e Gurugli). This is of course one of those profound sentences of mine, which is supposed to evoke the essential tension of the Tajik culture between Persia and the Turkic world. Neither Omar Khayyam nor Gurugli were properly Tajik. The story of the latter is common to several Turkic ethnic groups, and some scholars say that it is all about the crucial importance of milk (and breastfeeding) in those cultures. Gurugli takes a foal from its mother and feeds it on the milk of several species, including human. This is how the horse acquires human intelligence, as well as the traits of each of the animal species. This is of course only the beginning of many a heroic adventure.
In general, the tradition of epic storytelling (alternating plain narration and verses accompanied by string instruments and a drum) is still alive and defining for Tajik culture, typically in the villages of Boysun district. They still tell the stories accumulated all along that complex cultural history mentioned above. Those Turkic ones and those taken from Firdawsi's Shahnameh.
Roughly speaking, Tajikistan might be defined as a periphery of the Farsi-speaking world, locked in isolated mountain valleys. This is at least how I imagine it, since I just came into contact with this cultural reality episodically, during the sessions of Polish Oriental Society, and later on in Leiden. Certainly, there are two very dissimilar aspects of Tajik culture, one that it distant in time, and another that is quite recent, hemmed in what I called, in one of my essays, the shallow time of postcolonial chronopolitics. Tajikistan, just like several other republics of Central Asia, (re)emerged a quarter of a century ago, after the fall of the Soviet empire. It was a difficult a difficult (re)birth, under the black sun of a civil war (1992-1997). This is why it is, to a large degree, an unstudied reality, promissory of novel insights and quite trendy in such places as Leiden University, at least when I was there in 2018-2020.
The modern history of the country (I think about the final decades of the 19th century) was marked by Russian colonisation and a process that people like us, the Poles, call "russification". On the other hand, the beginning of the 20th century was marked by an Islamic reformist movement, so called jadids ("the new ones"; their opponents, by contrast, were called kadims, "the old ones"), who wished to promote education, progress, and the development of press. It was the time of such figures as Sadriddin Ayni and Abdurauf Fitrat.
The first half of the 20th century should also be regarded as an important period in the development of the language, roughly a variant of Farsi, that used to be called zaboni tojiku fors ("language of Tajiks and Persians", or simply "Tajik Farsi"). Certainly, such an identification reflects the contrast with the Turkic tongues of the region; but I also overheard some comments in Leiden, when Persian-speaking people asked each other how long it takes to learn Tajik. Apparently, it was just something "you need to get used to". At the beginning of the 20th c., this language was written in Arabic alphabet, and in this form it appeared in early printed press. After the October Revolution, a wave of Bolshevik propaganda reached the country, promoting the communist press, still printed in Arabic characters. After the creation of the Autonomous Tajik Socialist Republic in 1924, the pression on standardization of the language of Samarkand and Bukhara increased. Initially, the Arabic characters were replaced by modified Latin alphabet, yet in 1939-1940 a Tajik written in Cyrillic letters was invented. I have read at that moment only 0,5% of the Tajiks knew how to write, which I find hard to believe, given the region's past cultural glories. But if the specialists say so... As the communist press developed under the auspices of Moscow, with many materials translated from Russian into Tajik, it was naturally the period of many Russian terms finding its way into the local tongue. The tide turned in 1989, with the new Law on Tajik (Farsi) language, "Konuni zaboni Tojiki (Forsi)", that preceded the "February events" in Dushanbe (1990) leading to the country's independence. According to the new regulation, Tajik could be written in Arabic characters once again.
The Tajik "Golden Age" that started at the time of perestroika fostered a cultural regeneration, that may partially be associated with the political movement Rastokhez ("Revival"), representing a moderate nationalist position of the Tajik intelligentsia. There was also an underground newspaper with the same title, "Rastokhez", edited by a Tajik akademik (member of the local Academy of Sciences), Tohir Abdujabbor. The political-ideological spectrum of the early years of independence was varied, and so were the Tajik newspapers, among which such titles as "Najot" ("The Salvation") of the Islamic Party of Tajik Regeneration (Hizbi Nahzati Islomii Tojikiston), and several other of similar inspiration. In the early 1990s, there was a great appetite for reading those newspapers; they had a great social and emotional impact, especially the scandal-explorer "Charoghi ruz"; no wonder that the journalists were accused of having provoked the civil war of 1992-1997. The years that came after the short-lived "Golden Age" brought abuse and sometimes physical violence against journalists. Several titles were prohibited. The anarchic freedom of expression that characterised the early years of independence was over. Today, Tajikistan is ranked 159th in the Global Democracy Index, which is a few rows below Iran and Afghanistan.
The short-lived "Golden Age" was also where the modern literature of Tajikistan begins, with the poems and short stories published in those journals, especially those of greater cultural aspirations, such as "Haftganj" ("Seven treasures") or "Farhang" ("Culture"). Among the recognized modern Tajik authors, there are such names as Sadriddin Ayni and Mirzo Tursunzoda. There must also be some young ones, that I ignore. But overall, when I came to Leiden in 2018, the Tajik poet that bore into my mind was a shepherd in a lonely mountain valley, cultivating some archaic genres of Persian poetry and accompanying his verses on a home-made musical instrument. It was on a documentary made by some dare-devil anthropologist.
Perspective 2: the deep time
Well, that is, according to my terminology, the shallow time perspective, in which Tajikistan appears, roughly speaking, as quite an uninteresting country of incipient literacy. A country that you feel entitled to ignore. Yet on the other hand, there is also a deep time perspective to deploy. Let's try to do it.
According to some scholars (the debate goes on), the Tajiks are the descendants of the Sogdians and the Bactrians, with the admixture of ethnic Persians and other peoples. The importance of the divide between them and the Turkic peoples (such as Uzbeks) is contested in modern scholarship; the idea is that culture and values are the same, independently of the linguistic difference.
The really deep time perspective includes archaeological remnants of Sarazm, dating back to the 4th millennium BC. Even the recorded history is quite deep, as it dates back to circa 500 BC, when Tajikistan was a part of Achaemenid Empire. After the conquest by Alexander the Great, it became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. The northern part of the country was part of Sogdia, a group of merchant city-states on the Silk Road. From 1st to 4th century AD, the region was dominated by the Kushan Empire, whose makes were the nomadic Yuezhi tribes. It was a time of criss-crossing spiritual influence of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism. Still later on (5th-8th c.), there came the Hephthalites, also called the White Huns. Temporarily, Tajikistan was even under Tibetan control, till the Islamic conquest that reached the remote region in 710.
One of the greatest periods in the history of Central Asia comes with the Samanid rule (819-999), when the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara entered their full blossom (today they are in Uzbekistan, yet their role is crucial also in the formation of Tajik identity). Between 999 and 1211, Tajikistan was part of the Kara-Khanid Khanate that ruled Transoxiana (the whole region, including also Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and part of Kazakhstan). The Kara-Khanids were Turkic people that culturally merged with the blossoming Perso-Arab culture of Central Asia. Finally, the early modernity (16th to 18th c.) was under the sign of the Khanate and thus Emirate of Bukhara, and the Khanate of Kokand, before the epoch of the colonial Great Game, played between Russia and the Great Britain, properly began.
This is the history that explains why many people believe that the greatest poet of Tajikistan was Omar Khayyam; but to understand fully the peculiarity of the local literary tradition, it is necessary to explore the epic of Gurugli (Dastan-e Gurugli). This is of course one of those profound sentences of mine, which is supposed to evoke the essential tension of the Tajik culture between Persia and the Turkic world. Neither Omar Khayyam nor Gurugli were properly Tajik. The story of the latter is common to several Turkic ethnic groups, and some scholars say that it is all about the crucial importance of milk (and breastfeeding) in those cultures. Gurugli takes a foal from its mother and feeds it on the milk of several species, including human. This is how the horse acquires human intelligence, as well as the traits of each of the animal species. This is of course only the beginning of many a heroic adventure.
In general, the tradition of epic storytelling (alternating plain narration and verses accompanied by string instruments and a drum) is still alive and defining for Tajik culture, typically in the villages of Boysun district. They still tell the stories accumulated all along that complex cultural history mentioned above. Those Turkic ones and those taken from Firdawsi's Shahnameh.
I have read... nothing ...
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I have written... nothing ...
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