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Land Beyond the River

The Untold Story of Central Asia

St. Martin's Press

Witnesses and actors

'And today no town in the countries of Islam will bear comparison with Bokhara in the thronging of its creatures, the multitude of movable and immovable wealth, the concourse of savants, the flourishing of science and the students thereof and the establishment of pious endowments.'

One evening in 1909 a boy passed through the gates of Bukhara for the first time, walked into the courtyard of the Mir-e Arab madrasa, one of the largest and most famous colleges in the city, and so realised the ambitions of his short life. His name was Muhammadjan, but later generations knew him only by the name Hindustani. His remarkable story survives in the terse account he wrote in old age and through his stepson Ubaidullah, who is the keeper of family memories and custodian of the past. It endures too, at least in fragments, in the recollections of friends and students who, after a great period of silence, are now free to talk.

Hindustani was born in about 1892 in the village of Chahar Bagh (Four Gardens), three hundred miles or so to the east of Bukhara in the dry, stony outskirts of the city of Kokand, in what was then Russian Turkestan. The family could hardly have been more ordinary. His father, Rustam, was a poor smallholder but a literate man, a village mulla, and anxious that his eldest son should value scholarship and make something of his life. Hindustani could read and knew the alphabet by the age of eight, and was soon pleading to be sent to Kokand to study further.

'When I was twelve my father agreed,' wrote Hindustani later, 'so we set out for the city on his little horse, a bit bigger than a donkey. We had only gone a short way when the horse balked at a ford. We dismounted, and I heard shouts behind us. I realised I had forgotten my Quran! My mother was rushing after us with it. My father said how merciful God was that the horse had stopped!' Rustam left his son in the care of a Kokand mulla, under whom Hindustani worked hard. He was declared Qari – a reader of the scriptures – two years later. To mark his achievement Rustam slaughtered an expensive sheep and held prayers of thanksgiving, as was proper.

Hindustani, the only poor man's son in the class, continued to excel. He followed the common curriculum of his time, reciting and memorising verses from the Quran and the Chahar Ketab, a famous anthology of writings on Islam that included lessons on adab – that is, good manners and correct behaviour. As a keen student, he went further than many boys and girls by learning how to write, using the Arabic script universal in Central Asia. He studied elementary Arabic grammar and poetics, as his father had, and also Uzbek, his mother-tongue – a new subject, lately introduced to the classrooms.

The copy-books of the day reveal something of the children who used them. A primer and a reader in Uzbek, printed not handwritten and kept safely over almost a century by an elder in the Ferghana town of Osh, show rows of small drawings from everyday life – a boy, a tree, a pomegranate – with naming and writing exercises beneath. 'These are the clothes we wear', reads one heading: 'Shalvar [trousers], Chapan [quilted robe], Pustun [sheepskin topcoat], Kamar [sash], Charoq [long, soft leather boots].' 'These are the Muslim cities', reads another: 'Mecca, Medina, Istanbul, Baghdad, Fez, Isfahan, Kabul, Balkh, Baku, Bukhara, Tashkent, Samarkand, Khujand, Kokand, Kashgar ...' The books contain moral lessons for the encouragement of respectful conduct, and a few simple tales.

Once Hindustani had the minimum qualifications, he supported himself by offering ritual prayers in exchange for bread and money at local sites of pilgrimage, to which he sometimes walked with his shoes stuffed in his sash to save the leather. 'Our people sit idle in the dust and fill empty minds with bangi [hashish],' he wrote, depressed by the poverty of the countryside. 'Our people ask for china bowls and find rough pottery – our bread is not wheat but chaff.'

Hindustani made the five-mile trip from Kokand back to Chahar Bagh each summer to help on the farm, as was usual for a schoolboy, but he knew that this was not the life he wanted. Though he had learnt much in Kokand, he was eager for a wider horizon: he became determined to reach the university city known to every student from Herat to Kashgar to Mashhad and beyond, the Oxford and Heidelberg of its time – Bukhara. When he was seventeen Hindustani sold his watch to pay for a railway ticket and said goodbye to his family. He boarded the train, one of those that had steamed into Kokand for the first time a decade before, and set off. Once beyond the border fort at Makhram and the old city of Khujand the train skirted the hills, cut through the plain, and passed from Russian-held territory into the kingdom of Bukhara. A kindly elder on board tutted over Hindustani's rashness. 'I told him that I knew nothing and nobody. He said, "Bukhara is an enormous city. Didn't anyone tell you that if you don't know anything you'll end up on the streets?'" When they arrived, the elder introduced Hindustani to a famous teacher connected with the Mir-e Arab.

Hindustani passed his entrance exams and was admitted to the madrasa, lodging at the house of his master and devoting himself to study and prayer. As a raw student he had no income from teaching. Often, he wrote, he lived on a couple of rounds of bread a day, with no money for rice or fruit, let alone meat. He was able to pay his fees only because he stumbled upon a gold ring in the street and sold it in the Caucasian jewellers' bazaar after some keen bargaining. He worked as he had never worked before. His memoirs record the fields of study he mastered, step by step: Arabic, of course, as the language in which God revealed himself to the Prophet, and Persian, as the literary language of Bukhara. He also studied poetics and calligraphy.

Outside the Mir-e Arab lay the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan Central Asian city north of the Amu. From five in the morning, Hindustani noted, the square outside was filled with crowds of different peoples. Tajiks, Afghans, Turks, Arabs, Kashmiris and Jews lived inside the eleven gates alongside Uzbeks like himself. Outside the city wall Tajik and Uzbek villages were set among wheat fields and orchards of apricots, persimmons and pomegranates, watermelon patches and mulberry groves. Herders and Kazakh nomads lived in the steppe beyond.

In 1909 Bukhara was thick with talk – not only of university matters, business and the harvest, but also of politics – world politics and Bukharan politics, the politics of appeasement, the possibilities of invasion and war. They talked in the tea houses, in the painted wooden courtyards of the well-to-do, and in the streets. They also talked in the mosques, and Hindustani records that his master's house was tryingly full of guests from morning to night. Already he loathed politics: what he loved was books. 'I had', he wrote, 'a passion for knowledge.' He gave up blocking his ears and moved to other lodgings, close to one of the cemeteries, in search of quiet.

At the heart of the political debate was a schism between different groups of intellectuals about what sort of place Bukhara should be, and how it should respond to the changing times. One lively group advocated opening new avenues in Bukharan cultural life – such as the establishment of printing presses – and political reform at the palace.

In the name of God, Wise and Knowing

I, an indigent slave of God, Mirza Muhammad Sharif-e Sadr, al-Zia by pen-name, in the year 1306 of the hijra, at the end of his excellency my father's life, committed myself to inscribe and record the internal and external events and affairs of my life, which are of importance, describing them day after day, some in detail, some in brief ...

So began, in 1888/89, the diary of the eminent Bukharan scholar Sadr-e Zia. In the first decade of the twentieth century Sadr-e Zia was in his prime, a high-ranking judge in the Bukharan judiciary. Man of letters, poet and anthologist, he was also a keen horseman and a genial host, and a champion of the young, father of many children and sponsor of numerous young scholars.

Sadr-e Zia represented the spirit of intellectual openness for which Bukhara was once famous. The five hundred pages of his diary – a later re-creation of the original – are full of news of the outer world as well as of Bukharan matters. He records the Boxer uprising in China in 1898–1900, the Russo-Japanese Wars of 1904–5, and the crumbling of the Ottoman empire. In 1910 Sadr-e Zia gazed into the night sky and saw a star 'like a huge minaret; with its head directed eastward and its tail stretching westward, it pervaded the entire sky.' It is typical of Sadr-e Zia that he knew the European name for the comet – Halley – and could also cite references to tailed stars by poets of medieval Persia, who thought them heralds of misfortune.

Twice a week Sadr-e Zia, a tall man in his forties, dressed generally in a grey robe and wearing a silver ring, opened his house to people he called ravshangaran, or bringers of light – 'poets, wits, tellers of entertaining tales and devotees of literature,' recalled the celebrated poet Sadriddin Aini, who was taken into Sadr-e Zia's household at the age of eleven, having been spotted by the scholar as a promising boy. These young intellectuals were grounded in the Persian poets, in Hafez, Sadi, Ferdausi and Rumi, and were often poets themselves. They read their own works aloud, and spoke too of social and political matters. They, and other young Bukharans, were not all of one voice. Some advocated an independent parliamentary monarchy; others saw annexation by Russia as the only feasible way forward. The ravshangaran discussed tax reform, ways to reduce the corruption that rotted the Bukharan system, and the possibility of starting a newspaper.

A few months before Hindustani began work on his texts at the Mir-e Arab, the ravshangaran had launched a bold project: they had opened a school of a kind never seen in Bukhara, though there were several in Afghanistan and in Russian Turkestan. Gone were rows of boys crouched on the ground reciting scripture in a tongue they did not understand. In came modern mathematics and geography, local languages, and cotton mats on the earth floor. Amir Abdulahad had given his consent to the New School, but the Qaziat, the religious judiciary, indicated its displeasure; the amir withdrew his consent. The New School, and many others like it that had sprung up, went underground.

The Qaziat opposed the ravshangaran not just over education but in many regards. The Qazi Kalan, Mulla Burhanuddin, argued that Bukhara would be severed from its roots, even lost altogether, by such radical alterations. Many of his followers were adamantly opposed to the Russian presence and felt it was only a matter of time before St Petersburg drew in the net and made Bukhara part of Russian Turkestan. In parish mosques, some mullas preached against the train, calling it the aruba-e shaitan – the devil's cart – and against the telephone, the bicycle, the potato and tomato – foods new to Bukhara that had arrived from the farms of the Russian pioneers on the steppe. When Russian advisers promoted a means of killing the swarms of locusts that stripped the fields each spring, there were mullas who forbade the murder of God's insects.

Abdulahad's uncomfortable relations with both clergy and intellectuals went from bad to worse. When pro-reform demonstrators took to the streets on 24 February 1910, he called out the troops. A few weeks later, however, protestors brought to the palace a new petition, more strongly worded than ever. According to the American reporter William Eleroy Curtis, 'They demanded a constitution, a legislature, a free press, freedom of speech, and the privilege of electing by ballot municipal and provincial officials. They ... gave the emir six months more to answer and act. When the time was up, nothing was done; but the spirit of freedom is growing.'

It was on one of Amir Abdulahad's frequent sojourns out of his claustrophobic capital, in late December 1910, that he died, apparently of kidney disease. His son was hustled to the Ark and there, borne aloft on a carpet into the coronation room, he was crowned Amir of Bukhara. His name was Alim Khan, he was thirty years old and an experienced politician, having served as the governor of Kermina (modern Navai), north-west of Bukhara. In the streets below, a crowd waited expectantly. The future of the businessmen and the mullas, of intellectuals like Sadr-e Zia, of the quiet student Hindustani of Kokand – the future of Bukhara itself – all depended upon what sort of ruler Alim Khan would turn out to be.

* * *

A photograph of Crown Prince Alim Khan taken in 1893 survives. He stands up taut and straight for the photographer, a small boy, his hands almost buried in his robes, his round face expressionless beneath his turban. It might be the image of a Bukharan prince of a century earlier, or of five centuries before that. Yet the photograph was taken far away from Bukhara, in St Petersburg, where the young Alim Khan had been sent to receive the schooling his father hoped would fit him for the modern world.

A second photograph shows Alim Khan as a cadet at the Emperor Nikolai military academy. His chubby face peers out under a smart peaked cap above a brass-buttoned suit: dressed as a Russian, he stands between an upholstered chair and an ormolu clock. Alim Khan, groomed for compromise, learned Russian well, and some French. He is said to have read Dostoyevsky as well as the Bukharan poets. He also acquired a taste for women and cars – he drove a Mercedes – and for champagne, called tactfully kandsu or sugar-water. Alim Khan spent three winters in St Petersburg. Each summer he made the journey home across the steppe, over the Caspian Sea and through the desert to Bukhara.

The accession of this relatively worldly man gave the intellectual ravshangaran hopes. He promised an end to corruption, some freedom of expression, and limited controls on the power of the clergy. It was not long before his authority was put to the test. In 1912, the reformists realised one of their ambitions and brought out the first newspaper Bukhara had ever seen. Bukhara-e Sharif (Bukhara the Noble), published daily in Persian, brought literate Bukharans news not just of their own country but of the outside world. Alim Khan had approved: 'I myself have read newspapers in Russia,' he had said. Soon a supplement in Turkic was added. The Qaziat was enraged – 'Do you want to make kafers [infidels] of Bukharans?' one demanded – and pressed Alim Khan to revoke his consent. The battle was long, but by the end of the year Bukhara-e Sharif had been banned.

It was a sour moment for the ravshangaran. They continued to meet, but their discussions became more private. Some left the country in disappointment, others printed pamphlets for underground circulation. Copies of the Afghan newspaper Seraj ulAkhbar (The Light of the News), launched in Kabul in 1911, passed from hand to hand; it was renowned for its wide international coverage, and for its editorials attacking both European imperialism and reactionary mullas. Many felt that if Alim Khan would not or could not reform his state, Bukhara was headed for an internal collision from which no one would benefit.

The chubby prince of the photographs, meanwhile, ran to fat. Wadded in his robe, feet apart, he looked gigantic. A rare reel of film survives, showing the stout amir climbing from the royal train in Crimea – where he kept a summer palace adjoining that of the Romanovs – and greeting the Russian princesses on the terrace. When the Romanovs held celebrations for the three hundredth year of their rule, in 1913, Alim Khan and the Bukharan court attended. Alim Khan was obviously aware that, in the event of insurrection, the Russian soldiers just outside the walls of Bukhara could slaughter his army – which was armed and trained by the Russian military just enough to give it the appearance of being a fighting force. Yet he seemed powerless to bridge the differences among the political classes, caught between the old order and the new, between the state and the mosque, progress and tradition, foreigners and Bukharans, ever more dependent on the Russian military – the very people who could so easily bring about his fall. Weighed down by these insoluble affairs of state, Alim Khan began to spend less time in the oppressive Ark and more in a new palace built for him by the Russians outside the city walls. The move left his capital more vulnerable than ever.

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Excerpted from Land Beyond the River by Monica Whitlock. Copyright © 2002 Monica Whitlock. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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