Ira Mukhoty is an Indian writer who writes about forgotten heroines of Indian history.

Two of her books—Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History and Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire—are about women who played outstanding roles in history but have not made it into textbooks as their male counterparts have.

In this interview, we discuss these female heroines of the Mughal Empire, from Babur’s mother and grandmother; to Gulbadan Begum, who wrote the biography of Emperor Akbar; to Sultan Raziya, the first and only female Sultan to ascend the throne of the Delhi Sultanate.

An interview with

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Ira Mukhoty 

Ira Mukhoty is an Indian author. She studied natural sciences at University of Cambridge. Her book Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History (2017, Aleph Books: ISBN 978-9384067496) tells the tales of mythical heroines including Draupadi and Radha, and “six real women who played extraordinary roles but who weren’t written into textbooks as were their male counterparts”, including Jahanara Begum, Rani Laxmibai and Hazrat Mahal.

Her second book Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire which was about the disappeared women of the great Mughals, was published by Aleph Book Company on 25 April 2018. In 2020 she published Akbar: The Great Mughal (Aleph Book Company, ISBN 978-9389836042). A reviewer in the Asian Review of Books described it as “an ambitious work crafted with great imagination about how the past and the present intersect”.

In 2021, her debut novel Song of Draupadi was published. The book reimagines Mahabharata through the narration of its women characters, particularly Draupadi. 

How did you start researching female heroines of the Mughal Empire? How did it all begin?

My first book was a result of my thoughts. I had two small daughters, and I was just thinking of stories to tell them, and I was reading all the popular books that we have in India. I was looking at female role models and I realized that in our culture, a lot of the women are presented in a particular stereotypical, patriarchal way. They have to fit within the mold of being very good women according to the Indian system, which means getting married, having sons, and sort of propagating the male line. Somehow the end result is always that story. If we think of Sita from Ramayana, that is what is held up to us—that is the perfection of Indian womanhood. So that was troubling me a little bit and I thought there must be other women from history or maybe from the epics that are culturally Indian symbols, but a bit different from the ones we are normally shown.

That’s how I started looking at these women. My idea, when I was speaking to a publisher, was to find Indian women across a large span of time—maybe 2,000 years. The first woman I talked about was in the sixth century BC, the time of the Buddha; she was a courtesan who later became a nun.

I thought if we were to write about different sorts of Indian women and the different ways in which they had been able to live out their passions, fulfill their ambitions, become rulers or do something worthwhile, then maybe we could find a different model for being an Indian woman. Maybe we could show that you do not have to be like Sita—that obeying your husband’s commands and being sexually chaste is not the only way to be a good Indian woman. And that’s really how the idea started and that’s how I found Raziya Sultan, one of the great Indian women that we do not talk about enough considering how extraordinary she was.

Your books deal with women in Indian history in the pre-Mughal and post-Mughal periods. Generally speaking, how were women viewed in these periods? Did anything change with the arrival of Mughals?

I think throughout recorded history, in most societies, women have been constrained within patriarchal systems. From the age of the Buddha, we can note that it was with great reluctance that women were allowed to join the Sangha and become nuns. Even then, there were great strictures on them: they had to submit to male monks even if the monks were younger and less experienced than they, etc. With the rise of Brahminical Hinduism, women’s role was further circumscribed. Married women were respected in society, no doubt, but their role was to bear children so as to honor the memory of their ancestors. They were not educated or encouraged to do anything other than marry and have children. Then by the fifteenth century, Rajput women began to be put into purdah, because men’s honor was heavily dependent on the chastity of their women. And because the Rajput tribes were constantly warring with each other and with invaders from the north-east from the fifteenth century on, elite men encouraged a strict purdah for their women. With the arrival of the Mughals, and especially from the time of Akbar onwards, this system of purdah became de rigueur among elite women, Hindu and Muslim alike, because Akbar married into Rajput houses. These ideas also reinforced Mughal notions about women in purdah.

How are strong women depicted in Indian epics? Sita from Ramayana was a very tragic yet strong character. What other myths surround strong women in pre-Mughal India?

Besides Sita in the Ramayana, the other great Indian woman from the epics is Draupadi, from the Mahabharata. I am very interested in her story, because if we examine the writings on her, it is clear that unlike Sita, Draupadi rails against her fate and voices her anger with the men in her life very powerfully. I think this is important to remember, because female anger is very frightening to the patriarchy, and it is rare to come across such examples in the ancient texts. But Draupadi is acknowledged to be learned (she is called a pandita) and virtuous but also argumentative, dismissive and critical of her husbands, and volatile.

The heroines of the Mughal Empire come from Central Asia, and it was customary—at least in the Chingisid Empire—for women to be active in politics. But the women of the Mughal Empire are not only strong and political but also intelligent and knowledgeable. How did they become so educated?

The Mughals were not only Chingisid, but also Timurid. In fact, it may be said that they claimed their Timurid legacy more visibly than their Chingisid one. Timur himself put a great deal of emphasis on education, on culture, on architecture, and on urban etiquette, since he was adopting some of the Persianate culture. And so we have a legacy of highly educated Timurid women, including the mother (Kutlug Nigar Khanum), grandmother (Aisan Daulat Begum), and sister (Khanzada Begum) of Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty. The Mughals greatly revered these famous matriarchs, who enabled Babur to retain his throne and empire even when he was vulnerable and in great danger. As a result, generations of women would continue to receive a thorough education similar to that given to male Timurid elites.

Could you provide us with more information about these women? What do we know about their personalities, their bravery, and what set them apart?

I came across them when I was writing my book on Akbar (Akbar: The Great Mughal) and on Daughters of the Sun before Akbar.

On Babur’s mother and grandmother, I think he would probably not have managed to do what he did in India without the help of these women. The following story is told about his grandmother. She was married to a nobleman and they were always engaged in battle, and one day her husband lost and she was captured by the enemy. So the enemy captured her and the ruler gave her to one of his noblemen to be his wife. She spent one night waiting and she pretended to be very happy and accepting of all of this—and then when that man entered her room, she and all her maidservants got hold of him and threw him out of the window, and he hit the ground and he died. And the ruler was really shocked; he said, “What have you done?! You have killed my nobleman.” And she very proudly said, “I am already a married woman! You can kill me if you want, but I am already married.” And this ruler was so impressed that he sent her back with an entourage and made sure that she was returned to her husband.

So we see the physical bravery of these women, in addition to the fact that they understood their own value and they put a worth on their own value—they were not just there to be slaves or to be passed from man to man. I find that self-belief to be quite extraordinary.

Khanzad Begum, who was Babur’s sister, had a similar thing happen to her. She was captured by Shaibani Khan Uzbek. Shaibani Khan married her, then divorced her and married her to somebody else. For over 10 years, she lived in the court of Shaibani Khan. Then after 10 years, Shaibani Khan was killed in another battle, and Khanzad Begum was sent back to India, to Babur’s court. And amazingly, after all these years, Babur took her back into his court and he made her Padshah Begum—that is, she was the most senior woman of the Harem and she was the one who controlled the administration and the running of the Harem. And that was a position of power that showed great respect for the woman who she was. It almost came as a shock to learn this because in Indian society we usually view divorced and widowed women as somehow not deserving of the same respect as married women. That is just kind of an Indian/Hindu tradition, unfortunately.

And to see that the Mughals were so pragmatic about the fact that women could be captured in battle, married off against their will, and widowed, but that it was not their fault and there was no blame laid upon them—there was no unnecessary value placed on their sexual chastity—I thought that was a very powerful message to bring to India, as we often put too much emphasis on Indian women’s sexual chastity.

The fact about Gulbadan is also huge—we see that a lot of importance was accorded to women because they were educated. It was expensive to educate people—you had to call tutors, you had to get people in to teach them—and these women were extremely educated. For example, Gulbadan Begum wrote a biography. She was not just educated and literate, but she was able to write. So Akbar asked her to write a biography that could be included in a larger biography of his life by Abu’l-Fazl. She started writing it and she wrote all her memories of Humayun and Emperor Babur. I think it was one of the only cases of a Muslim woman of that century writing a biography from within the Harem. This is a woman who lived in a Harem, who lived a long life; she wrote from within that structure and was able to give us her insights into that life.

It is a unique document and very little use has been made of it. Historians tend not to use it as much as all the male sources of writing. Yet we know that these women were educated and were able to produce works like this. So this was also something that I thought was very important to talk about: that all this effort was made to educate these women.

In Central Asia we learn only a little about Sultan Raziya, the first and only female Sultan to ascend the throne of the Delhi Sultanate, and the only one of Turkic origin. What can you tell us about her?

Raziya ruled during a time of extreme effervescence in Hindustan in North Northern India. It was the time of the Slave dynasty. Her father was Iltutmish, and before him there was Qutb ud-Din Aibak. They came with Muhammad of Ghor from Central Asia. Muhammad of Ghor had brought his Turkish slaves with him, and in time these Turkish slaves rose to become kings. So there was a lot of turmoil at this time. There were always competing factions. After all, these were men who had come from Central Asia. There were other, local men who were opposed them. There were other Freeborn Turks and Persians who opposed them. So it was a time of great uncertainty and it was incredibly difficult to rule for any length of time because you had to balance all these different factions and manage to keep everybody more or less happy.

The first extraordinary thing Raziya Sultan did was to put her claim forward. So when her father, Iltutmish, died—he was on the throne for 25 years and then he died—his second son became the ruler automatically, his eldest son having already died. But he was a very bad ruler and his mother started playing politics in the Harem and all sorts of things. So Raziya appealed to the military: she said, “I would like to be king now that my father has passed away.” And I think that it is extraordinary that she was not limited by her gender. All the biographers who wrote about her in her time said that she was a great ruler, a just ruler—she brought justice, she brought stability and peace to the empire—and that it was just unfortunate that she was not a man.

I think the fact that she came from this nomadic background—from this Turkish slave background—is very important. It was this semi-nomadic background that made Timurid and Mughal women so, in a way, brave about being on an equal playing field with the men. They do not seem to find their gender to be any restriction because when you are a nomad or semi-nomad and you travel from place to place for most of the year, you are on horseback, or you are walking, or you are traveling with the king’s entourage—and under those circumstances, it’s very difficult to keep women completely hidden in purdah.

Even when Babur came to India for the first time, his mother and grandmother were extremely important sources of advice. I think he was 14 years old when his father died, so he was extremely young, very vulnerable, and anything could have happened at that time. But his mother and grandmother gave him military advice and accompanied him physically—went from place to place. So these women had that strength of character that came from their nomadic steppe background. They brought that to Hindustan, and I think that’s why we suddenly find these examples of strong women in the middle of Indian history. I mean, Raziya Sultan is the only Islamic woman to have ruled in India. She is remembered, but with not a great deal of detail. The same is true of Gulbadan—the early Mughal women were completely unknown. When I wrote Daughters of the Sun, I don’t believe there was another book on the Mughal women. We had heard about the men, of course, the men were extraordinary, but the women were completely ignored, especially the early ones like Gulbadan and Hamida Banu Begum. Only the more recent ones were remembered. But now there is more interest. A scholar called Ruby Lal, who is based at an American university, is bringing out a biography of Gulbadan this year. So I am very excited. She has already written a book on Nur Jahan, she has written an academic book on early Mughal women, and now she is releasing a biography of Gulbadan. So I am hoping that now people are more excited to find out about the feminine side of Mughal rule, as well as the men who are so well known.

What are your favorite heroines of that time? Can you share some of the unknown stories?

I am very partial to the story of Jahanara Begum, who was the daughter of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan. After the death of her mother, she became Padshah Begum (head of the harem) at the age of 17, and from that moment onwards became a very wealthy and influential woman. She left behind a great legacy in architecture—she built a caravanserai, the Chandni chowk, and the hammams of Shahjahanabad (old Delhi)—wrote Sufi texts, considered herself the soul mate of her brother Dara Shukoh, and experienced Sufi trances. She was, in the seventeenth century, arguably the wealthiest and most powerful woman of her time. All the European traders had to negotiate with her if they wanted to carry out trade in India. When her father was imprisoned by Aurangzeb, she gave up all her privileges and followed her father into exile in Agra. And yet today, her legacy is almost forgotten, her buildings having all been destroyed by the British following the uprising of 1857.

Generally speaking, how were women viewed in each of these periods? Did anything change with the arrival of the Mughals?

I think with the arrival of the Mughals, women were given more freedom. They were very used to this sort of nomadic lifestyle, they were used to being part of the political structure, and so we see this in the early women. Later on, especially from the time of Akbar, things started changing because he married a lot of Rajput women. Also, a lot of his courtiers and his main noblemen were Rajput men.

The Rajput system had already introduced the system of Zenana and putting women in purdah because Rajasthan is in the northwest of India, and there were a lot of raids from people outside of India into Hindustan at that time. So the Rajasthan clans felt the need to protect their women, and so they brought in purdah. So this system of keeping women veiled was already there with the Rajput, and then Akbar married these women and it became, in a way, crystallized in the Mughal Empire. It became part of the social structure for elite women to be kept in purdah. It became something to emulate. All the elite clans of India wanted to do the same thing. And they also started increasing the level of women’s seclusion. So unfortunately, even though Akbar himself very much promoted the education of women and had a lot of sympathy for the women that he saw, it became much more normal to keep women in purdah. And then with the coming of the British later on, they brought in their own Victorian values: European women of that era were very much kept at home and did not have much independence at all. Thus, things became very rigid in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as these Victorian values became part of our culture. So we lost a lot of the freedom that women maybe enjoyed in earlier centuries.

The most famous woman with a camera in Central Asia, Umida Akhmedova—a photographer and the author of significant documentary works—talks about herself, her creative and personal path, self-realization in the face of public censure and rejection, a lawsuit against her, and the changes that women in Central Asia feel today.

An Interview with

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Umida Akhmedova

Umida Akhmedova is a photographer and photojournalist working and living in Central Asia. In 2010 she was convicted of “slander of the Uzbek nation” after making a documentary. Since 2010, she can not participate in any official exhibitions in Uzbekistan. As a photographer she has participated in exhibitions addressing urban and rural issues and has collaborated on film and book projects including the presentation of the short film The Burden of Virginity. As an Associated Press photographer, her images have been published in the photography sections of the online editions of The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail.  In the course of her work she has documented the traditions, disparate cultures and everyday events in the modern borders of Uzbekistan.

 Wikipedia

About Myself

I always start a story about myself with the fact that when a person is 17 years old, he/she does not always know what he/she needs in life, hence he/she has no idea what he/she needs to do in life, and ambitions usually lead somewhere. Ambitious people always know that they need to do something so as not to disappear from the earth without a trace. It was with such thoughts that I unexpectedly found myself at the door of the Vladimir Kultprosvet (a cultural and educational school in the Vladimir Oblast of Russia). After failing to gain admission to Moscow State University as a girl from Parkent (in the Tashkent district of Uzbekistan), I could not return home. Now I understand, soberly assessing my academic preparedness at that time, that I could not have entered the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, but as a young girl I had high hopes. The school in Vladimir was not at all a prestigious educational institution. As my husband says, I was pressed against the wall. I had to study because I had left my home in Parkent for good. This school helped me find myself: I connected my life with photography. We were given FED cameras, and we took pictures ourselves, processed the pictures ourselves. At that time, I had a symbolic dream that foretold my future fate: I saw my photos and they were moving.

After graduating from the cultural and educational school in Vladimir, I resolved to continue my studies in the camera department of VGIK (the Moscow cinematography school). To do this, it was necessary to work as an assistant cameraman at a film studio. Before hiring me, the director of the film studio summoned my father. He told him that no girl had ever been hired as a cameraman, but that after looking at my photos, he was inclined to give me a chance. It was hard to work as an assistant cameraman, because the male operators did not really want a girl to carry the equipment behind them.

Nevertheless, I was preparing to enter VGIK, where there were strict criteria for admission. By a happy coincidence, I met on the set the chairman of the Panorama photo club, Mikhail Stein, who really helped me to prepare for the exams and later to become a photographer. Due to the experience of working in a photo club, I gained the knowledge for the creative competition for admission to VGIK. I passed that test—at VGIK they really liked my photos—and enrolled in the “feature cinema operator” department. I continued to work and studied via distance learning. In my third year, I asked the director of Uzbekfilm (the film studio) to hire me, as I wanted to become qualified as a feature film operator?. However, this time I had no luck. So I have stayed in the documentary industry, which I no longer regret at all. I would add that it is almost impossible to combine films and photography. I “departed” from photography during the perestroika period—or, as I like to say, the period “when socialism had not left, but the time of ‘Mustakkilik’ (independence) had not yet come.” It was a good period for creators because there was no state censorship or strict control thanks to Gorbachev’s short-lived Glasnost (publicity).

Later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no point in staying at UzKinochronika either morally or financially. At that turbulent time, I threw myself headlong into my family and into photography. I have always photographed what I liked or what I considered significant. The image of my hometown, Parkent, did much to inspire my works. Even when I left my father’s house and later moved to Tashkent, that image was always with me.

See more photos by Umida Akhmedova: A visual journey through Uzbek society: Ten iconic moments by photographer Umida Akhmedova

Parkent

In general, I have great respect for cosmopolitans, people who can live and create far from their roots. Unfortunately, I have a different story. It’s okay to be a globalist, a cosmopolitan, but to me, it is important to have a connection to your roots, the place where you were born.

There were many people—among them my parents—who were not obsessed with the issues of patriotism or sources of roots. Speaking of my parents, I would like to note that I consider my parents to be intelligent people, although my mother did not work officially anywhere. She had a phenomenal memory. In her life, she learned three alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, and later Arabic, as she was deeply religious and wanted to read the Quran in its original language. She read many books. If all believers were like my mother, then there would never have been a single conflict on religious grounds. My dad was a doctor, a participant in the Second World War (1941-1945). All my relatives lived in Parkent. My maternal grandparents were progressive, they were literate. It seems to me that being a pioneer meant more in those years than it would later.

I think the intelligentsia are the intelligentsia everywhere; this does not depend on nationality. It is about spirituality, and my father understood this very well. He taught us to respect other cultures. Despite having been a soldier who fought on the front lines, he was not against German culture. He could distinguish between politics and art, and knew that one should not be confused with the other. This affected my family. My sister, for example, became a literary editor, writer, and translator. She has been translating world classics into Uzbek. I think the role of my family in my development is very important. Moreover, my love for Parkent—as my source, my family-related roots—is very important to me.

Husband

I will not say that Oleg [Oleg Karpov, her husband] was immediately accepted by my family. In our society, there was and still is a certain concern about shame, prompting questions like “What will people say?” and “How will we look in their eyes?” Such questions overwhelmed my parents, but I am grateful to them for not throwing tantrums. My parents showed wisdom, understanding that what is good for a child is good for the child’s parents. They treated my husband with great respect. From the very beginning, our relationship was based on mutual respect. Nobody was going to win over—or submit to—someone else. That is, no one was going to become Uzbek—or, conversely, become Russian. We understood that we were different and accepted our differences with great respect. That is, as usual in my environment, there was no cursing (“ok kyldym”). I knew a family in which the girl’s mother was Russian and her father was Uzbek. Despite the fact that the girl was not a pure Uzbek, her father cursed her for marrying a non-Uzbek. That friend put her son in an Uzbek kindergarten, and when the child went to his grandparents’ house and greeted his bobo (grandfather) in Uzbek, the grandfather kicked the child out. The child peed out of fear. This hostility toward people of different nationalities, which reaches horrific proportions in some families, did not happen in mine. I cannot say that I have felt discrimination or humiliation. This has not happened to us.

Women with Cameras

I was the first girl from Central Asia to graduate from the Cinematography Department of VGIK. Previously, I did not emphasize that I was the first and only, because I thought that I had not done enough for this. However, I accept it as a fact now.

As I said above, the cinematic community met me with suspicion; they did not trust me completely. The male directors were in no hurry to work with me. Gradually, once I proved that I was a serious specialist, they began to work with me. At the film studio, I had my own teachers among the cameramen, in particular Kakhramon Khasanov. I admired his attitude toward the profession. I received credence from a woman director, Galina Ogurnaya. She and I made such films as “The Deadlock of Baysun,” “Milky Way,” and “Zainuddin’s Golden Apple,” among others. She was a film director, I was a director for cinematography, but unfortunately, I did not work in the film industry for long. I consider men as techno whizzes; they are much more inclined to follow the technical rules. It is always more interesting for me to reflect the mood or the atmosphere than to pay attention to the correctness of the frame, staging, and composition while filming. It seems to me that this is less about gender than about your psychotype—your sensitivity and perception of the world. It also depends on your type of thinking.

Men are often more organized than women—but again, not always. Everyone is an individual, and therefore I can’t say that there are big gender differences between men and women’s works. Let’s take a look at the work of Margarita Pilikhina, a director of cinematography for the film Ilyich’s Outpost. It seems to me that a man would never have filmed as she did. She was an extremely talented artist. Unfortunately, she passed away early. I grew up at a time when the operator was a co-author of the film director. Now I don’t see this. We were taught to show our visual version of the scripts. We were taught to develop our handwriting. It seems to me now that cameramen shoot beautifully, evenly, but almost everyone has the same handwriting; few people have a creative personality. Certainly, this does not mean that they shoot badly; there is simply no individual style in the camera work.

Creative Path

It is very difficult for us to be creative in Central Asia. It always used to be hard, but now it’s even harder, I think. In general, we consider a woman with a camera extraordinary. I am still not considered an “earthly” person by my neighbors in Parkent. People are always surprised when I tell them that I have children and grandchildren. There is an opinion in society that a woman with a camera cannot have a family, and everyone is surprised at my “normality”—having a family is the norm in our society. I remember when I was shooting in my Parkent in Soviet times, I felt the same as those who had taken off the veil. From all sides, I heard ridicule, mockery. Yet although it was difficult at that time, there was a better attitude toward women with cameras; now, I think, the situation has deteriorated. Back then, there was the excuse that people were building the future, and therefore the difficulties of becoming were understandable, but today, people no longer have faith in the future.

The attitude toward women here has always been suboptimal. From my perspective, I came into the profession from nowhere. During the Soviet times, a recommendation was important—it mattered “who brought you there.” It was important who was backing you; there were all these behind-the-scenes games on the path to professional growth. It was hard for me because I was not just a girl with a camera, but also a girl “from nowhere,” without connections and support. However, I had a strong desire to become a professional in my field. It was very difficult to grow without this extra support. I remember everyone who hurt me, but I don’t want to say their names right now. Many of them are no longer in this world. Besides the negativity, there was a lot of positivity too. There were always friends nearby, most of whom were professionals in my industry.

Trial

Exactly 13 years ago, in February 2010, there was a trial not only against me, but against a large group of people.[1] The witch hunt began due to a fear of the Color Revolutions that were taking place in the post-Soviet space. That was the first reason. The second one was about the gender programs that bothered the authorities. It was important for the State Prosecution to know on whose initiative we had made our films, which organizations had commissioned them, what goals we pursued in our work. I have to admit that independent people are not liked everywhere. There is always a bit of annoyance toward people who are outside control. This is always an unpleasant feature of authoritarian societies, as it is believed that only the authorities have the right to public spaces. I remember accusations against the Soros Foundation, the Tashkent branch of which was closed in 2004. Then we had the Andijan bloody events in 2005. After these occurrences, repression of civil society increased, and many public organizations and activists suffered. They treated civil activists very rudely and unceremoniously.

My husband and I produced a film, The Burden of Virginity, that was the main argument for the charge of “insulting the feelings of the Uzbek people.” This film was accepted neither by the Gender Program at the Swiss Embassy in the Republic of Uzbekistan nor by the public. However, we screened it at the Cinema Museum founded by my husband, Oleg Karpov. There was a newsbreak due to Fergana.ru and therefore Oleg and I turned out to be the main defendants in this case. We were all granted amnesty later on, but I still do not like to remember that time. I felt great irritation that this was an insult to all active creative work and a clear civic position. I felt an echo of the Soviet legacy in the fact that I had to report to the authorities, who sought to control us all, in front of everyone. I’m glad that I had strong support in my family; thanks to the support of my husband, Oleg Karpov, I survived everything.

Women’s Creativity

Whether Uzbek or Tajik, as women from traditional societies, we have always had limited rights in terms of our actions. Nevertheless, I always have great respect for our women: it seems to me that if our women want something, they always achieve it. Unfortunately, there are few examples, but they still exist. I believe that self-realization requires inner strength. You can’t go anywhere without it. Your life is in your own hands, and an ability to take risks is required for self-realization. “You can’t be a little pregnant” is a saying in Russian. If you worry about what people say, you will never achieve anything. You have to hold on; do not be afraid to stand out from the crowd. My neighbors got used to me, and your neighbors will get used to you. I remember that when I used to walk around with cameras hanging around my neck, everyone used to stare at me, but then they got used to me and I got used to them. I think no one in the neighborhood can now imagine me without a camera. The environment accepted me for who I am.

You have to get what you want for yourself. No one will come and do it for you. In general, what is the recipe here? We understand very well where we live, in what kind of society we reside. For example, sometimes I am asked about not covering my head. I reply that it is my choice to go without a headscarf. That is it. Women should do what they want to do, not what society expects from them. I love our rituals and traditions very much, but I do not always want to follow them. For example, why should I have a grand wedding to please society? I won’t do something to please anyone. We have to learn to rise above conventions. Actually, I am the same wife, mother, grandmother, I just spend more of my time on my profession, on self-realization. I realize that it is absolutely impossible to become free from society, but why not become an example of staying above convention?

Unfortunately, nowadays the situation is not very good for positive changes. If in Soviet times there was an ideology supported by the main Party Committee or the Komsomol, now this is all gone. Previously, in our youth, what we desired was knowledge, perseverance for excellence, but this is no longer the case. Now everyone wants to get married, if not legally, then at least illegally as a second, third wife, but always “to a wealthy man.” It makes me wonder why the victims of the liberation of the women of the East were needed, if my sisters are so comfortable being “slaves” to the rules. Ichgari (the inner side of the house where only a woman’s husband could enter) has become a symbol of young women’s success. Now, women are ready to endure many humiliations just to have the status of being married.

Success

I am quite successful. I consider my education, the realization of my goals in my distant youth, to be my first achievement. The opportunity to meet new people and cultures is a further achievement. I feel empty if I don’t travel around the world. It is very important to travel and return home. My next achievement is my family. I am happy that I have a family, children and grandchildren. My husband is my co-author, my colleague, and my support. Despite the difference in our cultures, we have been able to create a strong family. My son (Timur Karpov), who is in the same profession as my husband and I, is different. I learn from him, because he belongs to the generation of younger modern visualists. There is always something new to learn about and to grasp.

[1] Umida Akhmedova was convicted of “offense through mass media” by the court in the capital, Tashkent, after government experts found her documentary “offensive to the Uzbek nation.” She could have been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, but was released under an amnesty in honor of the 18th anniversary of Uzbek independence.

All photos by
Umida Akhmedova

Last month, an exciting photographic exhibition on Central Asia, entitled “Bound for Life and Education”: Sara Eshonturaeva and the Jadid Movement in Soviet Uzbekistan, was shown at Asia House in London.

Author

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Zaynab Mukhammad-Dost

Independent analyst, specializing in post-Soviet Central Asian politics and international affairs. She holds a postgraduate diploma of SAIS Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s Degree in International Relations and Contemporary Political Theory from the University of Westminster.

Sara Eshonturaeva was one of the first professional actresses from Central Asia to become a major theatre star in Soviet Uzbekistan. The great Uzbek actress visited England in 1964 on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. In the fall of 2022, Eshonturaeva returns to the UK as a powerful memory and historical figure, prompting many questions not only about history, but also about the present and the future of her homeland.

Initially scheduled to run between October 25 and October 30, this exhibition of historical documents and photos that make up Eshonturaeva’s family archives, was extended until November 4 following a generous donation. The exhibits focused on Eshonturaeva’s life and career progression, but in so doing, they remarkably resuscitated Sara Eshonturaeva’s forcibly forgotten connection to the Jadids—progressive thinkers in Central Asia who were brutally repressed by Stalin’s killing machine in the 1930s. The exhibition also revealed the previously untold story of Eshonturaeva’s first love, as well as other challenges she had to endure during the totalitarian era.

As an Uzbekistan native, the more I looked at the documents and black-and-white images tracing Eshonturaeva’s life and extraordinary path, the more I felt they served as a reference point and a reminder of issues that still need addressing in Uzbekistan today.

The Idea

When asked about the initiative, curator Niloufar Edmonds explained to Voices on Central Asia how Sara Eshonturaeva’s granddaughter and entrepreneur, Nadira Khidoyatova, had exhibited part of her family’s archives at the National Bank of Uzbekistan Fine Arts Gallery in Tashkent earlier this year. This is where Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, “first discovered the Uzbek actress’s story and came up with the idea to exhibit these photographs in London,” said Edmonds.

The exhibition in London was based on both Eshonturaeva’s family collection and the archive of Oleg Karpov, a private collector from Uzbekistan. The UK event was fully sponsored by the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, and Niloufar Edmonds, an arts and culture expert, was commissioned to work on a unique catalogue with fascinating details about Eshonturaeva’s life, career, and historical context.^[1]

Having agreed to meet for a coffee in leafy Chancery Lane in London prior to the exhibition, Edmonds spoke about her motivation to work on the project. “Only after a few hours looking at Sara Eshonturaeva’s archives, I knew there was a compelling story to be told about how photography and family archival material can shape a society’s collective memory of individuals long forgotten and inform the construction of a national identity,” she said. She also spoke highly of Nadira Khidoyatova’s efforts to preserve her family’s archive and personal energy for the project. The curator complimented her and all the present-day Uzbek women who care about restitutional justice and preserving the historical memories of their families, which the authorities attempted to erase from collective memory.

Who Were the Jadids?

The exhibition officially kicked off with a panel discussion on October 25 moderated by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj that included contributions from Dr. Adeeb Khalid, Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College; curator Niloufar Edmonds; art critic Tim Dr Smith Laing; and Nadira Khidoyatova.

Dr. Khalid explained that Jadidism was a movement of cultural modernism originated in the aftermath of the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the 19^th century. “The Jadids had questions on why Central Asia had been conquered and what to do next. They had an agenda to adopt new styles of education,” he said. Dr. Khalid reminded the audience that at similar movements were happening in other Muslim regions of the Russian empire and around the world. “Jadids were hoping to reconcile Islamic tradition with the modern age. This question is still with us,” he added.

The Jadids sought to reform society and pursue development via education and the usul-i-jadid, a new method for applying phonetics to learning. Most importantly, they promoted the dramatic arts as vital to education and progress. In their efforts to reform society, the Jadids not only looked at Western plays, but also produced plays of their own. This can be seen from Sara Eshonturaeva’s early journey too.

Born into poverty in the Ferghana Valley, young Sara left her family to attend the Zebunniso boarding school for girls in Tashkent, as per catalogue. She missed her family very much and she found solace in the school drama club, taking a role in the play “Indian Revolutionaries,” written by none other than Abdurauf Fitrat, the Uzbek writer and renowned Jadid.

According to the exhibition catalogue and the panel discussion, the idea of using the arts for education and progress initially overlapped with the agenda of the Russian imperial and then the Soviet authorities. But this did not last. A critical confluence between the views on the use of arts and education of the Jadids and the authorities began in the late 1920s and by the late 1930s most of the reformists, including Fitrat and Cholpon, had perished at the hands of the ruthless NKVD—the security service that served as the killing arm of the Soviet regime. The Jadids were accused by the Bolsheviks of being “nationalist bourgeois” and were executed on the basis of these made-up charges.^[2]

For the young and talented Eshonturaeva (as well as for her future husband, Abror Khidoyatov), the political repressions and crackdown on freedom meant that she would spend years concealing her true feelings and sympathies in order to survive. This resulted in what her granddaughter Nadira Khidoyatova calls a “duality” that many Uzbek people, including her grandmother, had to live with throughout the Soviet era.

Participating in the Asia House panel discussion via Zoom late at night in Tashkent, Nadira Khidoyatova recalled her surprise upon finding out that her grandmother, a self-described “communist,” had been praying in the later years of her life. Similarly, Eshonturaeva could not speak freely about the influence the Jadids, so-called “enemies of the state,” had had on her formation. “Grandmother shared with me the secrets she’d kept hidden in the Soviet times. She really wanted to share these with future generations,” Khidoyatova said.

The first image of Sara Eshonturaeva to greet those entering the exhibition is the one of her graduating from college in Moscow. It was a rather sad day for the young actress due to her first heartbreak, we’re told. She had to say goodbye to her first love Ibrahim Agdarov who also studied with her. But the expression on her face may also reflect a premonition about the challenging days to come. While Sara was among the first 17 Uzbek students to become professional actors, their fate would be uneasy given the growing tensions between the Soviet authorities and the Jadids.^[3] Upon graduating in 1927, Sara already lived in a country set on a rather sinister course.

Theatre

The purges of the 1930s had a direct impact on the works that Eshonturaeva and others would perform in theatres. She could not star in original plays written by Jadids. Instead, the Soviets started using theatre—and Eshonturaeva herself—for their own propaganda. Significantly, however, having scrapped the Jadids’ original plays, the authorities had no trouble using these victims’ ideas and work—including Abdulhamid Cholpon’s translations of William Shakespeare’s work into Uzbek—to further their own interests.

During the panel discussion, Dr. Tim Dr Smith Laing, a UK-based writer and art critic, explained that Shakespeare’s work was permitted by the Soviet authorities, who (quite interestingly) had come to perceive this English writer as a “founding father of Soviet socialist literature.”^[4] The English writer’s work and ideas were, naturally, adjusted to fit the agenda of the Soviet Union. The topic of patriarchy and the need for daughters to be obedient to their fathers seems to have resonated with the Soviets, including Uzbek society. During the discussion, Dr. Dr Smith Laing pointed out that Desdemona had been punished for not listening to her father (i.e., authority) and marrying a “Moor,” who then took her life.

Seeing “Othello” from this perspective reveals a clear parallel between how theatre was used by the Soviets and how Eshonturaeva was indeed “bound” by the Soviets, as the title of the exhibition suggests. Whereas the Jadids saw theatre and the arts as means of promoting freedom of thought and education, the Soviet authorities seem to have favored a particular type of plays. Many Uzbeks today know that Eshonturaeva played Desdemona a staggering 400 times, across from her stellar spouse, Abror Khidoyatov, who played Othello, the Moor. The play was a major “hit” in Soviet Uzbekistan: while they both performed in numerous plays, this was the one that turned them into stars. But as an Uzbek woman myself, I cannot help but ask why Eshonturaeva was not put forward to play Caterina in “The Taming of the Shrew”? The answer is obvious. After all, in the latter Shakespeare play, the woman’s open disobedience does not result in a tragic finale…

Women’s Agenda

It is broadly claimed in Uzbekistan^[5] that the Soviet power alone “liberated” the women of Uzbekistan. Photographic exhibitions based on historical archives as well as scrupulous historical research may prove otherwise. As Dr. Khalid mentioned during the discussion, modernist movements were indeed forming in Central Asia and in the world. This process was taking place independently of the Bolsheviks. The Jadids of Central Asia had raised the issue of women’s illiteracy, the woes of polygamy, and the need to modernize Islam to pursue much-needed development. Let us recall Abdulla Qodiriy’s stance on polygamy as relayed in his famous novel “Bygone Days”. Another example is Abdulla Badriy’s drama “Juvonmarg,” which condemns domestic violence against women.

On the one hand, the so-called “liberators”—the Soviets—did enshrine women’s equality in law, abolish the veil, and ban polygamy, but on the other hand, they did not allow women (or men) to live freely as citizens. It should therefore come as no surprise that having Sara Eshonturaeva play Desdemona—a woman who is killed by a man, who symbolizes power and authority—fitted their agenda better than having her play Caterina, a daring female rebel who is “tamed” and…rewarded with love.

Sara’s friend Tursunoy Saidazimova was murdered in 1928 by her husband due to jealousy.

This is where I see the paradox of women’s emancipation in Uzbekistan come to the surface again. Born into a world where women covered their faces and were even killed for performing as dancers or actresses, Eshonturaeva got educated and rose to stardom in Soviet Uzbekistan. She traveled, saw the world, and became involved in multiple social endeavors. She was free to dress as she liked, yet she was not free to speak about her vanished friends and mentors – the Jadids. She was bound to perform and act in a certain way, keep her thoughts private, and collect photographs and documents in secret until the day came that she was no longer afraid to share them.

Legacy of the Jadids

Like many, I wonder about the relevance of Jadidism and its modernist ideas for today’s Uzbekistan and Central Asia as a whole. Given the Jadids’ preoccupation with social woes, including illiteracy, lack of social justice, and women’s issues, it would be useful to reflect on the lessons to be learned from their legacy.

Khidoyatova remains hopeful things can get better due to the post-Karimov thaw and an ongoing social discussion about people’s state of mind. “Progress-orientated people both within and outside of Uzbekistan, who hadn’t lost their links with [the] motherland, find beneficial ideas in the agenda and philosophy of the Jadids. These ideas fit those who believe in Islam and those who are not practicing any religion,” she said. According to her, the main idea is the pursuit of education following European standards, with the aim of integrating the country into the developed world. “It is a spiritual awakening, and an understanding of the Western world, while preserving one’s authentic national identity. The entire Islamic world needs to find a way and employ religion to serve as a stimulus for development, as opposed to an obstacle,” she elaborated.

New Reformist Movements?

The Jadids as a topic are rather popular in modern Uzbekistan. Activists of all kinds seem to be interested in remembering the early reformists’ legacy, applying their knowledge, and even identifying as a new type of Jadids in an attempt to pursue development. In summer 2022 the word “neojadid” started trending on Uzbek social media. So, who are the “neojadids”?

“We already see some people who call themselves ‘neojadids,’ while others may not openly identify as such, but they do think as Jadids. For now, this is not a consolidated group of people,” Nadira Khidoyatova said. “Maybe I could count myself in and so could my sister Nigara Khidoyatova, a historian who studied the liberation movements of Turkestan. There are enthusiastic people, such as Maksud Askarov, who self-finance exhibitions and research the Jadids’ work. Others, including businessmen, such as Zafar Khashimov, invest in education. There is also a state center—a group of people under the leadership of Bakhtiyor Khasanov who have access to the state’s special archive; they work on a great project of reviving the history and the ideas of the Jadids. Our talented journalist Shukhrat Babadjanov also considers himself a Jadid. Amongst women, I’d like to mention Shakhnoza Soatova, who relentlessly studies and spreads the progressive ideas of the Jadids amongst the women of Uzbekistan. I see a future in these ideas: they can be a life-saving opportunity to cure society and serve as a lighthouse for the Turkic and Persian worlds,” she added.

British Imaginations

I asked Niloufar Edmonds about the impression the exhibition and the panel discussion had on UK imaginations of Uzbekistan and its women. She believes it has presented a more nuanced narrative of Uzbekistan to the British public that goes beyond orientalist paradigms of its connection to the Silk Road. According to her, by exploring Uzbekistan’s Soviet past as well as its connection to the Jadid movement, the exhibition has conceptualized Uzbekistan in a way that is entirely new for many Britons.

“What is really interesting is that whilst 100 years ago Eshonturaeva was forced to sever ties with her intellectual lineage to the Jadids for self-preservation, her granddaughter, Nadira Khidoyatova, is reconciling this rupture by pioneering a movement amongst young Uzbeks, and Uzbek women in particular, to identify with the Jadids. I think sharing her family’s archives allows her to finally speak the truth about many events that were shrouded in mystery or erased for so many years. I hope this exhibition will encourage others to come forward and share their individual family stories and photographs, to weigh in on this conversation around collective memory and erasure,” she said.

Conclusion

Sara Eshonturaeva was an actress whose career became a reality due to the efforts of the Jadid movement. She became the national pride of Uzbekistan, making it normal for an ethnic Uzbek woman to act on stage. Eshonturaeva was also a product of politically repressed teachers and had to speak her truth via art, not openly. As a woman, she also witnessed the misogyny around and even lost a dear college friend, Tursunoy Saidazimova to domestic violence. Yet, Eshonturaeva played Desdemona over 400 times! It must have been hard for her to do it and keep it all inside for so long. But the fact that she did provides further evidence that Eshonturaeva was a great actress committed to her destiny and purpose.

Eshonturaeva was not known as a Jadid, but she was their student and an important medium for their original idea to transform a society via art and education. Her dedication to theatre and her mission—her life-long intellectual commitment to collecting all the relevant documents and pictures and even her final “testament” about the first innocent love she had to let go of—may be indicative of her desire for future generations to remember their roots, history,^[7] and purpose as they move toward their own future. In this sense, Eshonturaeva may have been an educator—i.e., a Jadid—too.

It is hoped this exhibition provides an opportunity for more people to come forward and reclaim truth and justice. Most importantly, I also hope we will hear more female narratives such as Sara Eshonturaeva’s. Stories told by women need to continue being heard in Uzbekistan and beyond, and become an integral part of the formation of a future Uzbek identity. Any reformist movements would be incomplete and not sustainable without women having an equal say in them.

[1] A printed version of the catalogue is not yet available to order, however, a PDF is available. Please inquire for further details.

[2] This was the fate of many Jadids in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. See “Ispoved” by Masud Rasuli, O’qituvchi, Tashkent, 2000. Republished and updated version (2022) available at https://reader.bookfusion.com/books/2417609.

[3] https://mailchi.mp/bourseandbazaar.com/bound-for-life-and-education-exhibition

[4] From Dr. Tim Dr Smith Laing’s article in the catalogue, we discover that William Shakespeare was admired by Karl Marx which may have contributed to such a warm reception.

[5] It is a popular cliché among many Russian-speakers, including Uzbeks, that the Russians “civilized” Uzbekistan and the region. This “white man’s burden” narrative is also frequently encountered in pro-Kremlin media in Russia. As of February 2022, if not earlier, Tashkent must be somewhat uncomfortable knowing of yet another “liberating” mission that Moscow may pursue in an undesired turn of events. The government in Tashkent must be walking a tightrope trying to balance things out.

[6] Soviet Uzbek politician, First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party between 1937 and 1950.

[7] Sara Eshonturaeva is the mother of Goga Khidoyatov, a prominent Uzbek historian. At the opening of the exhibition at Asia House, a short film was played that showed Sara Eshonturaeva, in later years, watching archival footage of her fellow actors in their younger days. She smiles and exclaims, “Show this to my son, please, let him watch it!” prompting appreciative laughter from the audience.

Music occupies an enormous place in Central Asia, and in particular in Afghanistan.

Dr. Razia Sultanova, a musicologist and cultural anthropologist, has studied the music of the Uzbeks and other national minorities of Northern Afghanistan. How cultural life survives in constant turmoil? That basic question is examined and answered by Razia Sultanova with extensive eye-witness and personal contacts and conversations with a wide variety of Afghan men and women. She looks at basic questions of gender, identity, tradition, and especially the role of music as a vital element for survival. She made a short film and wrote a book, Afghanistan Dispossessed: Women, Culture and the Taliban, to document her studies, but is worried that with Taliban now in power, female performance and music making in the country will cease.

Interview with

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Razia Sultanova

Dr. Razia Sultanova is a musicologist and cultural anthropologist. She is a Visiting Professor at Charles University, Prague, and a Research Fellow at Cambridge Muslim College. Her primary areas of research are Central Asian and Middle Eastern culture, within which she studies Islam and music and gender and music. Razia Sultanova has been awarded a number of international scholarships, including, but not limited to, ones in Germany (DFG in 1993, the Ministry of Culture of the Land Brandenburg in 1994 and 1997); in France (L’Institut français d’études sur l’Asie centrale, in 1996 and 1997); and in the UK (from 1999 onwards).

 http://raziasultanova.co.uk

How did you become interested in Afghan Uzbeks and their music? What kind of music did you study?

The answer to this question can be found in my short documentary film, “Music of the Uzbeks of Northern Afghanistan.” The 35-minute-long film (in Uzbek language with English subtitles, sponsored by the British Council, edited by Usman Tufail), which I directed and produced in 2013, is a story of cultural survival, told through the voices of musicians and performers interviewed and filmed by me in 2006.

Following the collapse of the USSR, I was fortunate to receive a grant in 1993 to work at the Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg, Germany, transcribing the Uzbek folk songs of Northern Afghanistan that had been recorded by Dr Ingeborg Baldauf in 1977-1978, i.e., prior to the Soviet invasion. So I was dealing with Uzbek songs from Afghanistan recorded on six old bobbin magnetic tapes. The lyrics of all those songs were transcribed and published in two large volumes called Materialien zum Volkslied der Ozbeken Afghanistans (Reihe Islam & Ethnologie) (Emsdetten: A. Gehling, 1989), and it was a privilege to be involved in these musical transcriptions.

However, those Uzbek songs were not examined from a musicological point of view, even though the songs were very beautiful and there were quite a number of them. Dr. Ingeborg Baldauf is a philologist and an outstanding scholar who specializes in Turkic-speaking world languages and cultures and had spent two years in the North of Afghanistan traveling from one village to another, recording songs and meeting with local musicians.

So, in 1993 I arrived at the University of Bamberg to work on that project. Once I began working on it, I became deeply impressed with the scope of the material. At the time of my grant, the Soviet Union had already lost the war in Afghanistan and withdrawn its military presence. We who had lived in the Soviet Union did not know much about what had happened in Afghanistan, because press coverage of the war was practically non-existent. So certainly, in a time of war, music was the least of all concerns in that country, and that’s why for me, as a musicologist, it was so exciting to find such a treasure-trove of little-known recordings and songs. While the song lyrics had been transcribed, musically, the songs had not been examined at all, so I tried to help with musical transcriptions. This was the point at which I became interested in Northern Afghanistan, its music and culture.

There is a huge population of Uzbeks in the North of Afghanistan (according to scholars, up to 5 million people). People think that they migrated there following the October revolution in 1917, but in fact, Uzbeks have been living there for centuries. If you refer to the map of Central Asia, you will see mainland Uzbekistan on the right-hand side, and on the left-hand side is the Uzbek part of Afghanistan, located on the left bank of the Amu Darya river, which is historically known by its Latin name, Oxus River. Anyway, when I came across these folk song recordings, they were in Uzbek. They were all very beautiful and had catchy tunes.

So what kind of songs were they? Ingeborg Baldauf had collected a huge amount of love songs with instrumental accompaniment, as well as female domestic songs like lullabies, songs of celebration, children’s songs, and religious songs.

The various genres of Uzbek songs from Afghanistan were a completely new discovery for me. As you can imagine, in Soviet Uzbekistan, many examples of old folk-style music completely disappeared from the public domain due to the Soviet policy of rejecting the old “feudal” traditional heritage, and only through these recordings of the old Uzbek songs could one understand how rich it all had been and how meaningful was the performance of these old Uzbek songs that had been preserved in the Uzbek part of Afghanistan and on the Uzbek bank of the Amu Darya river. Listening to them, it was easy to feel the close connection of Afghan Uzbek culture to the culture of the Uzbek mainland.

The more I transcribed, the more interested I became in these songs and their performance by Afghan Uzbek musicians. Some famous musicians—like, for example, Mammat from Acha, Sabzi Gul, and Taj Muhammad—were real icons for local music-lovers. Those beautiful songs, sometimes improvisational, like the Kazakh kuis, were simply accompanied on daf (frame drum) or dombura. In this, they were very close to our Central Asian culture, even though Northern Afghanistan was virtually outside the awareness of Soviet scholarship and absent from public knowledge in Soviet Central Asia.

So for me, it was like discovering a whole new universe, which I came across by chance, thanks to the grant and scholarship from Bamberg University. Since then, I have received some further grants and scholarships to continue my research on the area and to keep an eye on Afghan culture. I have been able to search for further data in famous archives around the globe (the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress; the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the British Library Sound Archive; and the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv).

When I went to the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv, well-known for its huge recordings collection, there were so many new discoveries to be made there—for example, recordings by the Austrian ethnographers Max Klimburg and Hermann Markus Preßl, who documented rare data on Afghanistan. However, because they were primarily studying ethnography and languages, they archived these song recordings under the Languages category and not in the Music section, so they remained unknown from a musical point of view.

Having come across them, I found that the first scholarly evidence of the Uzbek folk-song heritage in the North of Afghanistan indeed came from these Austrian ethnographers Max Klimburg (in 1958) and Hermann Markus Preßl (in 1967-68). It means that Austria was the first country to explore the rich multinational culture of Afghanistan. There was a myriad of folk-song recordings there, waiting to be discovered by us music scholars. So thanks to the very strong Austrian scholarship (by the way, Ingeborg Baldauf is also an Austrian scholar), I had a chance to gain access to those old Uzbek songs. I was fortunate to later obtain grants for this project from the British Academy and the British Council, visiting Washington, DC, and the Library of Congress, etc.

The Afghan population is nearly 40 million-strong and speaks 40 minor languages, but the official language there is Dari Persian. Some highly valuable studies on music in Afghanistan were conducted from 1960 in the main Afghan cities of Kabul and Herat by Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, John Baily, and Veronica Doubleday. They were followed by an American scholar, Mark Slobin, who traveled there in the 1970s, i.e., more than 50 years ago, to research provincial countryside folk music in Northern Afghanistan. But then Afghanistan descended into a very difficult time of 40 years of uninterrupted war, preventing further study and exploration.

Please tell us about your new book Afghanistan Dispossessed: Women, Culture and the Taliban. How have Afghan women changed since the Taliban have seized power? Are they finding the courage to speak out against the Taliban? Do they have a connection with global women’s movements—and if so, how?

My book is in the process of being published. It is in the very final stages of book production. I am particularly grateful to my commissioning editor, Dr Lester Crook, and the production editor, Harriet Fielding, at the Pen and Sword publishing house for their work preparing the publication.

Another reason behind their inability to rise up against the oppression is that Afghanistan is, in essence, a multinational country. It consists of many districts, each with a different government, different rules, and its own language. The resulting language barriers and ethnic diversity actually prevent people from uniting. For women, in particular, it is a real problem. Afghan women do not have a voice, which young Iranian women do have at the moment. Afghan women have lived for 40 years under conditions of non-stop war, arrests, restrictions, and prisons, so for them to challenge the current political situation is far too complicated and challenging a task.

When I started learning about Afghan female music, I had to research the general situation of Afghan women and learn some facts about them. I was horrified by their history and by the difficult life of the female population, which is harrowing even against the backdrop of female suffering across the globe. Here are some statistics: the total fertility rate in Afghanistan is about five births per woman, although the infant mortality rate is the highest in the world. Around 10 percent of all newborns are stillborn, which means even going through labor has always been a lottery for Afghan women. They simply don’t know, when delivering a baby, whether the child will be born dead or alive and whether they will go on to live. Even now, life expectancy in the country is only 40 years for women and 42 years for men.

The country’s population is quite young. Forty-two percent are under the age of 15. More than that, 43 percent of all males but only 13 percent of females are literate. That’s the harsh reality of their existence. Can you fathom what a difficult country it is to live in for Afghan women?! For example, in 2002, an estimated 900,000 boys attended school, while women and girls were almost completely excluded from educational communities and opportunities.

It is obvious that it is extremely difficult for Afghan girls and women to survive, to be educated, and to live a normal life. In 2011, there were around 8 million students in Afghanistan, a third of whom were women. But now, following the return of Taliban-2, a ban on female education has been announced again, which spells disaster for the country.

So what can we observe? Before the return of the Taliban-2, women were given some opportunities to partake in education and allowed to have careers in medicine, media, and justice. But now, since the Taliban-2’s return, these women have no right to study, to work, or to be in the public eye as TV presenters, etc. So once again, we can see the return of medieval times, when women were not allowed to do much in terms of partaking in public life.

We can also talk about how Afghan women were treated, particularly during the time of Taliban-1, based on the original documents issued to govern the country. I quote from the Decree announced by the General Presidency of Amr bil Ma’ruf and Nahi Munkar (religious police) in November 1996: “Women, you should not step outside your residence. If you go outside the house, you should not be like those who go out with clothes that provoke lust, wearing much make-up, and being seen by every man, as you did before the arrival of Islam.” The same kind of bans and limitations applied to music: a law was issued preventing music from being broadcast by sources of public information, in shops, hotels, vehicles, at rock shows, and in cassette form and recordings. That meant everything that was more or less available before the onset of Taliban-2. So women did enjoy a little bit of freedom and new possibilities before 2021, whereas now everything has once again been banned. Music and dancing have also been forbidden at wedding parties. Ahmed Rashid, the world-famous expert on Afghanistan, has said that the Taliban has banned every conceivable form of entertainment. I will give you some quotations from the speech of the Afghan Education Ministry, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund: “Of course, we realize that people need some entertainment. But they can go to the park and look at flowers and from this they will learn about Islam.” So according to Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, the Taliban opposes music because it creates a distraction and a strain on the mind and hampers the study of Islam. During the time of the first Taliban, all the musicians who struggled to survive fled to Pakistan. And now the situation is the same. Everyone who had the means has left the country and moved abroad with their family, seeking safety.

We know that many experts see Afghanistan as part of Central Asia. Please tell us, what distinguishes Afghan women from Central Asian women?

First of all, the harshness of their living conditions, embodied by the burqa, which is worn by Afghan women. The burqa—or, as locals call it, chadri—is a mark of Taliban rule. It is a terrible thing for local women to wear, as I found out when I spoke to them. From the first minute of arrival in Afghanistan, every woman has to wear the burqa, which is very unusual for us Central Asian women—although I immediately found an advantage in wearing it.

I came to Afghanistan because I wanted to make recordings and to talk to musicians, so I always had my video camera, a sound recorder, and a photo camera on me. The burqa actually increased my chances of survival, as it helped me conceal the equipment. As I traveled long distances from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif with the families of musicians by car, at all the numerous checkpoints we passed through during our journey, soldiers would stop the car, shouting, “Get out of the car!” as they approached it, searching through everything. They would certainly have confiscated all my equipment if they had found it. Since I kept all my equipment hidden under the burqa, it remained safe! Therefore, in my situation, the burqa was the only thing that protected me and my recordings. So I was happy to wear it!

But for local women, it is very difficult to wear it on a regular basis. The climate there is very hot, especially during the summer. To leave the house, women have to be completely covered in the burqa from head to toe. The women with whom I have had a chance to talk said that it is like being in a cage, or even worse: they end up breathing in their own carbon dioxide and cannot get enough oxygen in through the small eye opening. They said that after a while, you start to feel as if your lungs are going to explode—as if you are suffocating—and as you walk, the sun blinds you from the front and its heat burns your back. So it is really difficult for Afghan women to experience all the social bans imposed by the Taliban, and they hate the limitations with which they have to live.

We in Central Asia certainly do not have a tough life to that degree! Going to Afghanistan was an eye-opening experience for me, even though I had studied many publications prior to my visit. In Central Asian countries, even a hundred years ago, my great-grandmothers used to live in fairly adequate domestic conditions. When you visited our Central Asian villages, you would see that households had all the essential kitchen furniture, like tables and countertops designed specifically for cooking. Afghan village women do not have these simple luxuries—they literally cook food for their families on the ground, without access to any domestic comforts.

Tell us about some of the remarkable women-singers in Afghanistan that you studied.

Among the most famous Afghan singers, only a handful are women, but the most famous is Mahwash. She was born in 1947, and when the country started to descend into war, she emigrated to California in the United States. Now she lives there, and many years ago I had the opportunity to enjoy a performance of hers here in London, at the Royal Albert Hall.

There was an Afghan-Uzbek female performer called Sabzi Gul (1957–2017). When I met her in 2006, she was in her prime. She was the only female wedding singer in Northern Afghanistan. Meeting her was a memorable experience for me because in Uzbekistan there are many female wedding singers. They have a number of female students they teach, so they usually sing a repertoire of special female wedding songs at local weddings. In Afghanistan, wedding singers faced many difficulties and were not allowed to have any students. Sabzi Gul was a fantastic lady who was the only representative of this genre. Luckily for her, she was supported by General Abdul Rashid Dostum (born in 1954). General Dostum, who was born in Sheberghan, is of Uzbek origin. He protected Uzbek and Turkmen villages. That was his land, which he kept under his protection and somehow people lived more safely in the North of Afghanistan than in other parts of the country.

In my interview with Sabzi Gul, she came across as very proud of the fact that General Dostum could not host any parties without inviting her. She used to perform regularly at his evening gatherings. However, when I asked her who would be her successor in female wedding singing, she said that as long as the Taliban remained in power, she would not be allowed to have any students. It was not even possible for a lone woman or a teenage girl to make her way from one end of the village to the other unaccompanied to meet her teacher, and without the opportunity to meet, learn, and practice, knowledge transmission could certainly not take place.

Nowadays, however, one can still find some noteworthy pop singers of Afghan origin. I had a chance to meet one of them, Elaha Soroor, in London. Elaha recently produced a CD album, “Songs of Our Mothers” (CD Album, Kefaya +Elaha Soroor. Bella Union. September 2019). Elaha is a Hazara pop singer who was born in 1988 in Iran before her family moved back to their native place in Afghanistan, where all her troubles began. Elaha wanted to become a musician and a singer. For a short time, it was possible to dream about it, and then everything came to a halt because her father told her: “Stop. Just forget about it!” She, however, took part in a TV singing competition under her nickname. She won the competition because her voice was so powerful and beautiful. And she became famous in Kabul practically overnight. That came at great cost to her safety. She had to leave her family immediately, as her neighbors informed her father that she had gone on TV and had won the competition! Somehow she managed to escape abroad. I met her in 2012 in London, and now she lives in Switzerland. She is a well-educated girl with a degree from a London university. Her testimony about how difficult it is to be an Afghan female professional singer demonstrates that Afghanistan is a very challenging country for female professionals.

Now, following the arrival of Taliban-2, all female singing and performance have been rendered virtually non-existent.

Tell us a bit more about the documentary that you made about your trip to Afghanistan.

If you watch my short documentary film, there are a couple of explanations of my trip to Afghanistan. A few years after returning from Afghanistan, I learned that some of the Uzbek musicians with whom I had conducted interviews had passed away. I thought to myself, I made these recordings with my tiny hand-held video camera just for myself and for my students. However, I realized that my video recordings represented the only documentary evidence of the amazing musicians I met in Afghanistan. Fortunately, it was possible to produce a 30-minute documentary film from the footage I took to honor these memorable music masters and so that you could enjoy their work.

In the documentary, Afghan women happily gather for Eid (a celebration of the end of Ramadan) and other religious events. They sing their religious songs, as well as some teasing songs and lullabies, and these are passed on to the younger generations by women, as you can see in the film. In fact, Eid Mubarak is the most important time, when they all gather together to mark the end of Ramadan. You see three generations of women—grandmothers, mothers, and young girls—singing the songs all together. It is something they do in Uzbek language, which means you can witness their national identity surviving through mutual interest in their culture, in their shared musical experience—and certainly, those genres mean so much to their hearts and to the younger generations that follow in their footsteps.

One of the most important factors shaping female life in the country today is gender segregation. It is a highly important issue in Afghan society. When the family has a newborn boy, this event is followed by a huge celebration. However, if the newborn baby were a girl, they would normally keep it quiet. Sometimes they do not even tell anyone about the newborn baby because it is not considered a joyful occasion. They consider having a girl to be a failure.

It is no wonder, then, that Afghan traditional folk songs—lullabies—are all addressed to baby boys. From this point of view, it is so interesting to hear the songs of the pop singer Elaha Soroor, who was born in 1988. She has composed several songs, including lullabies, that substitute the usually male hero with a baby girl. Her lullabies bring girls into the spotlight.

She has created a song saying: “You, girl, you have come into a difficult world, but I believe you will win. Your fight will be a struggle for your own sake. You will achieve everything you set out to and be happy when you get there, girl.” It is very touching, because you see that these women, who have gone through so many difficulties and achieved something, believe that in music you can see a kind of blessing for the new generation of girls, encouraging them to be strong, to keep fighting, to hope to become professionals, and to get out of the country, which is seen as success.

The music of the countries of Central Asia often serves as a calling card for the region. How do you think it attracts tourists and foreigners? What music do you play for your friends when you talk about Central Asia?

Central Asian music is very powerful and is one of the strongest aspects of the area’s cultural heritage. It is multi-faceted and there are many genres coming from various strata of society and different periods of history. But besides music, we have inherited medieval architecture, classical poetry, visual arts, crafts, and many other traditions.

I play the Uzbek dutar, which is my favorite instrument, and right now I am learning the Kazakh dombra. There are plenty of similarities between these two string instruments, despite some visual differences. There are epic genres that are a big part of Kazakh and also Uzbek heritage. We all belong culturally to the Turkic-speaking world. It makes us united.

Historically, in Central Asia, the Uzbeks, Turkmens, and Tajiks were sedentary people, while the Kazakh and Kyrgyz people were nomads. But nowadays, everything has become thoroughly mixed. I think this explains the many mixed marriages among all these ethnicities and nationalities. I believe we have more commonalities than differences. Music, along with other local traditional heritage, attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists and foreign visitors from around the globe every year.

Have you studied gender issues in these countries? If so, can you tell us what gender segregation is like and how women in these countries differ from each other? What distinguishes women in the Central Asian countries now from their counterparts during the Soviet Union? I am especially interested in learning about women in politics in those countries.

I studied gender in music in the most detailed way. I was the first scholar in UK academia to do so, designing from scratch a new course entitled “Gender and Music” and teaching it in 2004-2006 at SOAS, University of London.

The gender issue was never as important in the Soviet Union as in the West. In the Soviet system, gender equality was a key policy and the state demanded that women be educated and work equally, on par with men. In Central Asia’s recent history, Kyrgyzstan had a female President, Roza Otunbayeva (2010-2011), and there are many female government ministers in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

I remember from my personal experience, when I arrived in Europe, having worked at several universities, and currently still working at the University of Cambridge, UK, that looking at the gender mix in various faculties, you would see that majority of the faculty members were men, with only a few women. My UK colleagues also posed the question: “How many women did you have at your faculty when you were working in your country?” So I replied that the numbers were proportionately the same—fifty/fifty. They were surprised, enquiring: “So how could those women find time for children and housekeeping?” Somehow, our Soviet women managed to find time for everything!

I believe that in our challenging twenty-first century, more Central Asian women will get a chance to advance their careers so that their individual voices can be heard, becoming famous not only in music, but also as active figures in local politics and social care. I hope that for Afghan women, in particular, brighter days lie ahead.

Interview by Elvira Aidarkhanova,  Analyst, PhD in International Affairs

In her book entitled Modernization of the Early Soviet Era in the Fate of Women of Kazakhstan, 1920–1930: Monograph (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, 2017), Janat Kundakbayeva, Doctor of Historical Sciences and Professor of the Department of History of Kazakhstan at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University explores the gender aspect of the formation of Soviet identity in Kazakhstan: how the ideological construct of a “new Soviet woman” was created and how it was reflected in the fates of early-Soviet-era women in Kazakhstan. This construct prescribed new moral norms, different standards of behavior, and new roles in the family and society. A Soviet Kazakh woman was supposed to think differently, speak differently, and even look different from her predecessors. 

Interview with

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Janat Kundakbayeva

Doctor of Historical Sciences and Professor of the Department of History of Kazakhstan at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University

 Full bio

What was women’s status and what were attitudes toward them like in the Kazakh aul (village) in the pre-revolutionary period (the nineteenth century and the twentieth century before 1917)?

As is known, before the revolution the Kazakhs had their own social organization, with clearly demarcated gender roles and a high level of symbolic content. This was based on a patriarchal agreement between a man and a woman. Here I rely on Deniz Kandiyoti’s theory. In accordance with it, I consider patriarchal relations in Kazakh society not as a relationship of dominance and subordination, but rather as a mechanism for balancing the system of social relations under the conditions of a nomadic way of life. As is known, before the revolution the Kazakhs had three types of households: nomadic, semi-nomadic, and semi-sedentary. But all farms had a high degree of cooperation because they were extremely labor-intensive. The most intensive activity was supplying water for livestock. But winter grazing also required physical effort, since it was often necessary to clear pastures after heavy snowfall in order to give the cattle access to natural grass. All members of the community had to participate in this labor. Only some children, the elderly, the sick, and women in labor did not participate.

There was a division of labor in traditional Kazakh society. Wandering with the herd, feeding, watering cattle, castration, vaccination and slaughtering, digging wells, and constructing outbuildings were considered men’s occupations. Within these tasks, men were assigned different roles according to their status and age. For example, older men were responsible for planning and making decisions about livestock, while younger men and boys performed most of the physical labor.

For their part, women took care of the young animals; produced livestock products (including milk, butter, and cheese); and were responsible for fuel (including making it from manure), handling wool and animal hides, and preserving meat. In addition, women were in charge of the entire household: they cooked, sewed, cleaned, washed, and put up and dismantled yurts. Children, the elderly, and young animals were entirely in the care of women.

Women actively participated in the household (they had the daily needs of the family on their shoulders: cooking; milking cattle; processing dairy and meat products; and creating such objects of material culture as felt carpets, carpets, clothes, woven items, etc.), but in general they were under the care of their husbands. A woman had the right to be supported by men: by her father in childhood and her husband in marriage, according to the norms of adat. One of the justifications for the dissolution of a marriage was a husband’s refusal to support his wife for 6 months and 13 days.

A woman had no property rights: she shared property with her husband but had no right to dispose of it. The rights to the herd and livestock products belonged to the male representatives of the clan; the privileges belonged to the elders of the clan. Another factor behind men’s level of responsibility for women in Kazakh society was the extremely low level of endogamy in Kazakh marriage practices, which led to the complete absence of links between a bride and her relatives. Because of the strict observance of the taboo on marriage for up to seven generations, a married Kazakh woman was akin to a foreigner in China due to the long distances between nomads of different clans and the high degree of separation from her relatives.

What forms of adaptation to male dominance did Kazakh women develop?

The gender order in Kazakh society was regulated by social norms. A peculiarity of Kazakh society was that informal social control was provided by public opinion in the form of social condemnation or approval. The harshest punishment a person could receive was contempt or condemnation from members of the group, while the highest reward was others’ approval.

A woman built her life strategies in accordance with social norms. From childhood, she learned the prescribed norms of behavior, her rights and duties, her position in the team, and her place in the hierarchy. The Kazakh woman observed the rules of the game—that is, she had no right to vote and no freedom of action—in exchange for which the man took full responsibility for the welfare of the family. In Kazakh tradition, disobedience by a wife—her opposition to the will of her husband—was regarded as a vice. In accordance with this, a woman did not flaunt her influence over her husband or his relatives; instead, she showed obedience.

That being said, as noted by many pre-revolutionary researchers, Kazakh women had considerable freedom compared to the women of the normative Islamic culture. In daily life, they did not cover their faces, were not secluded (as dictated by the norms of Sharia), and were not legally deprived of the right to communicate with members of other families without the permission of their husbands. These provisions were fixed by adat. Often, a woman took an active part in solving family problems, and when her husband was absent during long seasonal migrations, she was the head of the family. But this leadership was always hidden, not only within the husband’s family group, but also within the immediate family. This was expressed, for example, in supporting the father’s authority in interactions with the children, using such everyday expressions of submission as “as the father decides, so it will be” and “you need to ask your father’s permission.”

In general, a woman’s social status always depended on the status of her husband and sons. Officially, women’s main duty was to give birth and raise children. Therefore, having many children gave a woman a higher status in society. The husband’s family-kin group had control over a woman’s fertility. In patriarchal Kazakh society, the preservation of the clan, the male line, and property was an absolute value. Therefore, sons—as perpetuators of the clan and family line—were highly desirable. Girls were treated differently because they left the family after marriage. Therefore, the mother of many sons had the highest status.

The woman was excluded from formal political institutions. All decisions regarding nomadic routes, conflict resolution, and relationships with neighboring tribes were made by men, with the eldest in the family enjoying the greatest rights. Women could not take an oath in court and could almost never be present in person in court; their interests were protected either by their husband or by their husband’s relatives. One of the taboos in Kazakh society was women’s presence in the public sphere.

Kazakh etiquette clearly defined the norms of male and female behavior—that is, there was clear gender differentiation in society. This etiquette supported male supremacy in every way. For instance, the internal space of the yurt was divided into three parts: the right part was for men; the left part was for women; and the central part was for the head of the family, elders, and guests. There were also restrictions on women’s behavior related to their physical condition—such as pregnancy, postpartum bleeding or menstruation. These restrictions prohibited her from stepping over rifles, tackle, traps, saddles, or whips. The etiquette of displaying emotions was also spelled out in detail. Thus, it was considered normal for a man to show anger, rage, stubbornness, or impatience, but never for a woman to do so. The image of the ideal man in Kazakh society was harsh, stingy with affection, and laconic. The image of a woman, meanwhile, featured such qualities as humility, care, and endless patience. A woman was destined to be a hearth-keeper who guarded and protected her children; a devoted and faithful wife; an assistant to her husband. Deviation from the traditional stereotype—whether due to childlessness, an inability to manage the household, or infidelity—was regarded as a violation of custom.

A woman only had the right to show her emotions in the ritual cases of wedding, maternity, and funeral rites. Inga Stasevich, the author of a book about the status roles of a Kazakh woman, described the bodily canon of a woman mourning the death of her husband. Every aspect of a woman’s behavior during funerals and memorials was meant to indicate her despair (self-inflicted bodily injury—that is, scratching her face, arms, and chest), powerlessness (a state of emotional trance, to which she must have brought herself), and defenselessness (loud crying with textual, structured lamentations). The pose of the mourning woman and her spatial location was also expressive. She had to sit facing the hearth with her right leg tucked under her and her left leg bent at the knee. This posture is extremely uncomfortable; the sitting person’s legs fall asleep and her back hurts. Afterwards, her legs cannot hold her weight. Thus, this pose is a symbol of powerlessness, the collapse of life for the woman who has lost her supporter. Meanwhile, according to Kazakh funeral etiquette, a man was to mourn his deceased relative standing on his feet; leaning on a stick; restraining his crying; and not keening but mumbling individual phrases, all of which indicated his steadfastness, vitality, and responsibility.

In everyday life, etiquette for women depended on the woman’s age and social status. Women of each age group had a prescribed status and strictly adhered to norms. For example, a young married woman had a number of new norms of etiquette and prohibitions on her behavior: she was prohibited, for instance, to call her husband’s father, her husband’s brothers, and even her husband by their names.

Thus, Kazakh society had clearly delineated gender roles and stereotypes of behavior that maintained the gender order based on the patriarchal bargain between man and woman. The man bore the function of breadwinner and the woman showed submissiveness and care in return.

There is an opinion among historians that when Kazakhstan became part of the Russian Empire, the courts began to be filled with women’s claims against men and women’s struggle for their rights gradually began. How much does this correspond to reality?

I think this period was too early to talk about women’s struggle for their rights, since the Russian Empire did not fundamentally change the economic way of life of the Kazakhs. Yes, because of the withdrawal of Kazakh lands for the resettlement fund, pasture lands had been reduced and nomadic routes had broken down. But the Russian Empire did not break the traditional economic structure based on seasonal migrations. Forced settlement and the destruction of nomadic production occurred only in the 1930s. Therefore, in the conditions of nomadic reproduction, it was impossible for anyone to survive outside the community, especially a woman.

What role did the “women’s departments” play in Soviet policy on women’s issues in Kazakhstan?

In the process of writing this book, I studied all documents that were left by the Department of Workers and Peasant Women under the Kirov Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Such departments were established everywhere in 1919 under the central and local party committees. The idea was that these departments would direct all work on the education of women in the spirit of socialism. Moreover, they had to organize their work in such a way as to make women different. Women had to understand and accept the ideas of socialism, they had to allow themselves to work, to be in the limelight, to have a voice. Women had to understand that marriage and divorce, childbearing and childbirth, housekeeping and the possibility of public work were all now in their hands. Assessing the work of the women’s departments (active from 1919 to 1930) today, many scientists believe that it was declarative in nature. The heaps of documents left behind by these departments are considered paperwork. But I believe that the women’s departments—both in Kazakhstan and throughout the Soviet Union—did a tremendous amount of work that had no immediate impact, but rather effects of a delayed nature.

Women’s departments appeared in 1921 and functioned until 1930 in Kazakhstan, when the Women’s Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) was abolished and reorganized into a women’s sector of the agitation and mass campaigns departments of the party committees. This persisted until 1934. Thus, women’s departments in Kazakhstan functioned for about ten years. It should be emphasized that in addition to general difficulties (understaffing, financial issues), there were also difficulties conditioned by the specifics of Kazakhstan. It was a huge territory with regions that had their own specifics. For example, women’s departments in the Ural Province had to work with Kazakhs (in the nomadic auls), Russian women, and Ural Cossack women. But in southern and southeastern Kazakhstan (Syrdarya Region, Alatau District, and Karakalpak Autonomous Region), annexed to the KASSR as a result of the demarcation of the lands of Central Asia in 1924, there was an extremely mixed ethnic composition (there were many Uzbeks, Taranchis (Uighurs), and Dungan women), a different way of life and cultural environment (the dominance of Islamic customs and traditions). Simply put, there were many women who wore a burqa.

Despite the difficulties, women’s departments in Kazakhstan took into account the socio-economic and cultural specifics of Kazakhstan. Much of the credit for this goes to the women in charge of these departments. At the local level, they became supportive bodies for women, places they could come in search of justice. It was not a question of how well they managed the main task—to get all the women of Kazakhstan to accept the Soviet power—or how successful they were in eliminating illiteracy, or how many child care centers appeared in the late 1920s. The women’s departments of Kazakhstan did an excellent job in their basic mission of conveying the basic ideas of the Bolsheviks—that is, the ideology of the Communist Party—to every single woman.

For a certain segment of women, they became a launching pad and a springboard for their future activities. And finally, the women’s departments helped every woman to realize her rights and place in society. Of course, as throughout the country, in the 1930s there was some formalism in the activity of the women’s departments. But in general, in the pre-war period, the activities of the women’s departments were already reaping results: a layer of women who held positions in state institutions, mastered professions, and even gained education was formed.

What were the methods for modernizing family and marriage attitudes and instilling new educational, hygienic, and medical practices in Kazakh women?

As I said, the Kazakhs had their own system of family and marriage relations. We know about it from the works of Russian researchers who described them. For example, A. Levshin emphasized that until the kalym[1] is paid, the wedding does not take place. L. F. Ballyuzek, the military governor of Torgay Region, highlighted two features of marriage relations among the Kazakhs. The first feature is the forced nature of the marriage. The second is the payment of kalym as a basis for marriage. In addition, everyone knows that polygamy was allowed among the Kazakhs, and there was also amengerism.[2] The Bolsheviks understood the purely material aspects of kalym: “from the cradle sold and bought for kalym.” They saw in polygamy an unequal relationship between a man and a woman, “a slave to the shameful customs of polygamy,” and the quintessence of powerlessness was the custom of amengerism: “as a thing passed on after the death of her husband through the family line.”

Upon coming to power, the Bolsheviks began to fight the old customs in the sphere of family and marriage relations by adopting a number of legislative acts. In Kazakhstan these included the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the KASSR “On the Cancellation of Kalym” (1920), the Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the KASSR “On the Marriage Law of the Kyrgyz” dated January 17, 1921, and the Law “On the Punishability of Polygamy” (1920). By the mid-1920s, the Bolsheviks had established legal liability for forced marriage (1922), for bigamy and polygamy (1924), and for marriage with underage individuals, abduction, and amengerism (1925).

But the Bolsheviks clearly realized that it was impossible to change the attitudes of the Kazakhs in the field of family and marriage relations in a short time through punishment. Moreover, the Bolsheviks saw the weakness of Soviet justice in the face of longstanding Kazakh customs. They understood that great efforts were required to change the attitude of society—and, above all, women—toward these remnants of tradition. Finally, the Bolsheviks were fully aware of the degree of economic dependence of Kazakh women on men under the conditions of nomadic production. Therefore, in the fight against old marriage attitudes, they skillfully used various forms of agitation and propaganda.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks developed a core project, part of which was to influence mass consciousness through mass festivals. It should be noted that the culture of so-called “red festivals” had always been an effective weapon of the Bolsheviks. Malte Rolf, the German scholar who is the author of a book on Soviet holidays, noted that holidays were both political because they “served to popularize ideas” and a specific form of domination because they were a means of “manipulating people,” as well as “one of the channels through which regime policy was carried out.”

So, to familiarize women with the ideas of socialism, a holiday was introduced on March 8, namely the International Day of Women Workers, “a symbol of the emancipation of proletarian women.” It was introduced to the calendar in 1921; it began to be celebrated in Kazakhstan in 1923 but did not find resonance with the population. Therefore, from 1924 a new holiday was introduced: January 1, 1924, was announced as Kalym Cancellation Day. The organization and conduct of the “Kalym Cancellation Day” campaign was carried out in accordance with general trends in the development of the Soviet festive culture. There was careful preparation and in everything they followed instructions from the center. The women’s department was in charge of everything. First there were meetings, then solemn demonstrations—so-called “red feasts”—were held in Kazakh auls.

With the help of this campaign and through symbolic actions, the Bolsheviks “hoped to conquer emotionally” Kazakh women. But its introduction into the calendar of holidays shows that before the Great Breakthrough, the Bolsheviks “took into account the established cultural practice” and the ethno-cultural attitudes of the Kazakhs. This is evidenced by the fact that by introducing the holiday, they struck at the custom of payment for the bride, which was considered the basis of Kazakh family and marriage relations. In addition, it is impossible not to take into account the political and psychological impact of the campaign. It had not an immediate, but a delayed result. But its implementation was an important link in the integral policy of the Bolsheviks.

As for instilling new educational, hygienic, and medical practices in Kazakh women, they should be seen as part of an integral and elaborate Soviet project of modernity. The fact is that central to this project is the creation of common symbols that would be shared by all. One of these new symbols in society was “culture.” The Bolshevik understanding of culture was explained by Sheila Fitzpatrick, a famous American researcher of Stalinism. She identified three levels of culture that the Soviet man had to master. The first level was the culture of personal hygiene and basic literacy. The second level was the rules of conduct at the table and in public places, as well as the treatment of women. The third level was good and correct speech, neat clothes, and the ability to understand literature, music or ballet. In accordance with this common standard of culture, the Bolsheviks began to transform Kazakh women. For this purpose, they used a vast arsenal of propaganda and agitation methods, including a mobile agitation station, the Red Yurt (Kzyl Otau), specially developed for Kazakhstan. Moving from aul to aul, the Red Yurt not only acquainted women with communist ideology (conversations in the Red Yurt corner on ideological topics, reading newspapers and magazines), but also with new forms of life and other standards of hygiene and sanitation. The Red Yurt had medical workers on its staff who examined women and gave lectures on contagious diseases. They gave talks on hygiene, health, rules of child care, contagious skin diseases, and sexually transmitted diseases. It should be explained that immediately after the 1917 revolution, the principles of hygiene became part of state policy in the field of medicine. Thus the Bolsheviks declared the fight against “backwardness and inertia of life.”

Paramedics became the conduits of this policy in Kazakhstan. Of course, the texts created by paramedics (who were mostly Russians) had a pronounced tinge of “cultural colonialism.” They conveyed to the Kazakhs ideas about the modernization of medical practice based on preventive medicine by maintaining cleanliness in everyday life and social hygiene. As medical attendant Vasilyeva wrote in her report: “Here is what our yurt teaches: to wash laundry and children, bake bread, make good cheese and butter, go after cattle, plant vegetable gardens, read a book, raise tasks and cooperation practice, write and even think, and speak to women.”

Here I would like to emphasize that the discourse on purity should not be understood literally. It should be understood as a symbol of unity, a symbol of cleansing of old meanings and introducing new meanings, as if to purify and change people’s consciousness. It would seem that the paramedics were intent on introducing the principles of hygiene that they had been taught. But the intentions of the Bolsheviks ran much deeper. After all, in order to lead a different life, the Kazakhs first needed to settle down. The Kazakhs were introduced to new forms of yurt decoration through the Red Yurt: its column of vehicles contained such new household items as a table, chairs, cupboards, and washbasins.

It is known that the entire life of the Kazakhs was adapted to a nomadic lifestyle. They had a limited set of household items, but this does not mean that they were “dirty.” Simply put, the Kazakhs had different cultural practices of housekeeping. They stored food in the living space and ate from a common dish with their hands; they had neither tables nor chairs in the household. That is, the Kazakhs had their own norms of culture and hygiene, which were based on nomadic traditions and normative Islamic culture. We draw our knowledge of the ethnographic features of the Kazakhs from the notes of travelers, participants in academic expeditions, and officials within the apparatus of the colonial regime. They were unanimous that the sanitary and hygienic norms of the Kazakhs were quite high. It is possible to dispute the degree of implementation of normative Islam in the everyday life of the Kazakhs. But one thing is beyond dispute: the Kazakhs were guided in their everyday household practices by the cleanliness norms of Islam.

As the famous Turkologist V. V. Radlov wrote: “Undoubtedly, it is due to the influence of Islam that the Kyrgyz have great order in clothing and housing, cleanliness, orderly family relations, and better ethical principles.” From an early age, the Kazakhs were inculcated with the idea that the Creator loves only clean and tidy people. Knowledge of the rules of hygiene, as well as compliance with the rules of personal hygiene, was a symbol of worship and a guarantee of receiving a reward from the Almighty. From a young age, Kazakhs learned the sanitary norms of Islamic culture and knew the rules for how to clean the body, hair, ears, nose, throat, and teeth, as well as how to take care of the beard and nails in everyday life and before offering namaz.

Obligatory hygiene included shaving body hair, circumcision of the umbilical cord and foreskin, and a prohibition on keeping animals in the same room as people. The norms of Islamic hygiene that were strictly observed by the Kazakhs included a list of defilements: bad, unfit things that pollute a person if they touch them. These “unclean things” included: urine, feces, semen, vomit, blood, dead flesh, pork, dog saliva, alcoholic beverages, and the sweat of camels and other animals. If we consider the discourse of purity through the lens of this cultural understanding, then the Bolsheviks’ introduction of new principles of hygiene and cleanliness looks like an intention to cleanse, first of all, the consciousness of Kazakh women of old meanings and habits.

How did the Bolsheviks want to use the press and Kazakh literature to promote new relations between men and women, as well as the image of a new Soviet woman?

Patterns of gender relations among the Kazakhs immediately became an object of attention for the Bolsheviks. They wanted to break this system. In doing so, the Bolsheviks first looked at gender relations as part of the old social order among the Kazakhs. Subsequently, they consciously prescribed new roles for both women and men. The Bolsheviks wanted to remake women into working mothers. In their view, a woman was to work, “produce future generations of workers,” and run the household. The state provided their protection and independence because it gave them work. As Russian researcher I. Tartakovskaya emphasized, this project was based on the idea of “freeing women from the power of patriarchal family relations in order to subordinate women, as well as men, to the power of the state.” The roles of men also changed. The function of head of the family was taken over by the state, while men were to lead the construction of the communist system and manage the new state. Thus, a man could show his dominant role in the public sphere. But his dominance at home now depended on his social status, not his gender.

The state had an alliance not with men, but with women, on whom it relied as agents of social transformation. This was a direct challenge to male power. First, the mass involvement of women in social production affected private gender relations, as it gave women economic and social freedom from men. Second, the politicization of motherhood and the relative neglect of fatherhood legitimized women’s control over children and undermined men’s position in the family. Third, women gradually became disciplinary agents of the state, as they helped the state control men’s behavior. There was a conflict of different understandings of the male role in Soviet society. A man’s word was no longer law; a woman had the right to protest her husband’s shortcomings. Moreover, women were dissatisfied with men’s non-participation in domestic life and the fact that men no longer fulfilled the role of a breadwinner.

The Bolsheviks skillfully used agitation and propaganda, as well as the press, to force members of society to accept this new gender order. First of all, through the press, agitation, and propaganda, they broke the stereotype of the Kazakh woman as the mother of a large family, whose economy she skillfully managed. The woman of the past now appeared humiliated, deprived of rights, and crushed by everyday life. She was contrasted with the image of a new—free, liberated, working, and educated—woman. In the 1930s, male dominance was no longer claimed, and men’s private power was regarded with suspicion. This distrust was reflected in silence about men in the public sphere. Mothers were glorified, women were written about, but male figures were silenced so that there was no competition with fatherly public figures. There was also a symbolic exclusion of men from the private sphere; there were no pictures of men with their wives and children in home and family settings.

Authors were also assigned canons. Above all, they had to describe the old customs, traditions, values, and attitudes as something horrible. In literature, the woman of the past should be described as destitute, deprived of all rights, sold for kalym, in an unequal marriage. Females of the pre-Soviet era were depicted as bent from the weight of the world; their figures expressed despair, even the desire to die. Soviet-era women, by contrast, straightened their shoulders and saw other perspectives of life.

In the book, I also looked at how the first Kazakh women’s magazine helped the Bolsheviks create a new image of the Soviet Kazakh woman. The target audience of the magazine was a simple Kazakh woman from a village. The magazine imposed a completely different paradigm of existence on Kazakh women, in accordance with which they had to build their lives. The new Kazakh woman had to be literate and educated. She had to adhere to Soviet hygiene standards in everyday life. According to the Bolsheviks, the new Soviet woman had to be an active member of society and participate in the construction of a new socialist state.

At the same time, the magazine was as close to its reader as possible. This is evidenced by the “friendly and unaccented” manner in which it communicated with its readers. The magazine does not contain the directive strategy of agitational publications, with their rigid business style. On the contrary, the tone of the articles was emotionally colored and personal; articles were written in a subjective manner and included individuals’ letters. The atmosphere of trusting care created in the pages of the magazine made the frightening changes of the new Soviet reality more comfortable for the Kazakh woman.

What was the attitude of Soviet Kazakh authors of the early Soviet era to the Soviet gender order?

Authors were instructed to consolidate through literary images the new gender order of the Bolsheviks. But how did they embody it? In my book, I conducted a literary analysis of a number of works by acknowledged Soviet authors who did not work against the canon. I analyzed a number of works by G. Musrepov (“Ulpan Is Her Name” and the cycle of short stories “Mother’s Courage”: “Mother’s Song,” “Mother,” “Man’s Mother,” “A Mother Who Won Death,” “An Angry Mother,” “Mother’s Advocacy,” “Mother’s Courage,” and “Mother’s Mother”), as well as the story “Communist Raushan” by Beyimbet Meilin, the short story “Sholpan’s Transgression” by M. Jumabayev, and a number of short stories by Saken Seyfullin. On the one hand, Soviet Kazakh authors played by the rules. They showed that they accepted the new order, including in gender relations. On the other hand, these authors used artistic means to express their latent attitude toward the new roles of men and women, as well as the new vision of patriarchy in which the state took over the role of patriarch. I will give just one example: the story “The Nights of Aijan the Shepherd” by G. Musrepov. At first glance, this literary work looks like a story about the courage and fortitude shown by Aijan the shepherd during a three-day blizzard, when she was left alone in the pasture to save a flock of sheep, two horses, and a camel. In fact, the rhythm system of the short story and its composition immerse us in a halo of endless condemnation of the new patriarch, a state that would sacrifice women on the altar of building socialism. Thus, the author showed how a small defenseless woman with a flock of sheep (600 sheep)—accompanied by two horses, a laid-back camel, and two faithful dogs—found herself at the mercy of the elements for three days. She faced a fierce snowstorm in the middle of the vast desert, which was plunged into darkness; bitter cold; and an attack by three starving, emaciated wolves. The author also condemned Aijan’s husband for leaving her alone in the pasture when he knew that another shepherd had asked for two days off. At a stroke, he showed him to be careless. First, he wrote that the guy was cheerful, always optimistically humming: what else did a guy need except a fast horse and a beautiful wife? But then he added that in fact the horse was far from fast and the wife was far from beautiful. He also condemned the authorities: the head of the agricultural department, who had no face in the story, but only a cracking and creaky voice, and the soulless farm manager, who asked the exhausted, silently crying heroine with a frostbitten and black face whether the cattle were intact in the final part of the story.

In this book, I addressed only a small part of the works of Soviet Kazakh authors of the pre-war period. But even this analysis allows us to draw some conclusions. On the one hand, Kazakh authors followed the state’s orders. On the other hand, they used artistic means to express their subjective attitude toward the new gender order, the new roles of men and women, and the new vision of patriarchy—where the state became the patriarch and subjected both men and women to itself.

In the last chapter of your book, you looked at women’s life stories based on documents authored by women. How did different categories of women change under the influence of the Soviet government’s gender discourse?

There is a chapter in my book about the extent to which the Soviet project was reflected in the lives of specific women. How did the rapid changes that took place in Kazakh society during Soviet-style modernization affect the lives of women? How did they feel within themselves during this difficult time? To what extent did they let the revolution and Soviet ideology in? Finally, how did they define their place in the Soviet system? I had to find texts that came from the hands of women themselves to answer these kinds of questions. But there were extremely few of them. This part of the book is the most difficult for readers who are not professional historians to understand.

Fatima Gabitova’s diaries, letters, memoirs, essays, and sketches, which her descendants have preserved and published, proved to be extremely valuable. This was the voice of a woman who belonged to the narrow circle of Kazakh creative intellectuals, which suffered most severely from the Stalinist repressions. Who was Fatima? How did she assess herself? In her autobiography, Fatima Gabitova appears as a unique woman, both in her beauty and in her innate qualities. She appears to us as extremely talented, educated, and extraordinarily persistent. A sociostructural analysis of Fatima’s texts shows that she distanced herself from the official and ideological language. This was her peculiar survival tactic: not to think nor write about what bothered her in public life, but to withdraw into the world of private life.

The second group of texts came from activists of the women’s movement. Women activists could not think of themselves outside the language of ideology, even at retirement age. Having passed through the party’s programs, they soon became an ideological force themselves, acting on par with the party leaders. The paradigm of their biographies is a hagiographic model in which attention is focused on the heroic. Their profession required them to write, but they wrote organically from the position of a participant in the construction of socialism. In these texts, the “inner man” is constantly transformed into “we.” The world of big politics is closely intertwined with the authors of memoirs. They work for government bodies. The state and the authorities occupy too much space in their memoirs. They are constantly involved in and discussing socially relevant events, even at retirement age. Their leisure time exists in the framework of communist performance. The resource of literacy and culture is high, but stereotyped.

Fatima Gabitova’s texts represent a diametrically opposed subjectivity. Her entry into modernity took place earlier and under different conditions. She is characterized by gender relations and modern parenting. A new-type family is not patriarchal and is based on friendship and equality. Terms with evaluative, emotional coloring are always used to describe her husband. She often writes about him using “He” with a capital letter, expressing that he is at the center of her universe. Her relationship with her husband is one of friendship-love. For her, the private is synonymous with the personal. The concept of “self” is clear: the “self” is hers and only hers. Her alienation from power is clearly marked in her writings. Power, which she calls in an abstract way “Soviet power,” never became part of her. Her diaries and memoirs demonstrate conscious and unconscious practices of dealing with ideological narratives. Fatima Gabitova shows empathy, solidarity, and narrative identification with other victims of terror: the families of Saken Seyfullin, Beimbet Meilin, and thousands of other innocent victims of the system.

Undoubtedly, Fatima Gabitova lived in the modern world. Both women activists and Fatima Gabitova were subjects reflecting “self” who consciously positioned themselves in historical time. They understood and analyzed the moment of time about which they wrote as part of a universal integrity. Unfortunately, the voices of ordinary, illiterate women are difficult to hear today, due to the lack of sources produced directly by them. To some extent, oral histories and interviews with descendants can fill this gap, but this will be the subject of other studies.

What were the differences between women’s status/rights and attitudes toward women in Soviet Kazakhstan and in other Central Asian republics during the period of history under study?

As many researchers have noted, prior to the revolution Kazakh women had considerable freedom compared to women with a normative Islamic culture. They did not cover their faces in everyday life, were not secluded as mandated by Sharia law, and were not legally deprived of the right to communicate with members of other families without the permission of their husbands. These provisions were fixed by adat. Islamic norms prevailed in the southern regions of Kazakhstan.

The Bolsheviks were well informed about the peculiarities of the position of women in Kazakh society. They therefore took these peculiarities into account when working in each region. In regions where gender relations were regulated on the basis of Islamic norms, the removal of the burqa became a symbol of women’s liberation. This happened in Uzbekistan when on March 8, 1927, on the initiative of Isaac Zelensky, First Secretary of the Central Asian Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), thousands of Uzbek women took off their burqas, put them in a pile, and set fire to them in Samarqand’s Registan Square. A similar thing happened in Azerbaijan, where in 1929 about 270,000 Azerbaijani women gave up the chador. Some Tajik women, like Uzbek women, used to wear the burqa, a garment that completely covered a woman’s face and body. This type of clothing was characteristic of the northern, flat part of modern Tajikistan, namely Khujand and its surroundings. (Women could also throw other types of coverings over their heads.)

After the Soviets came to power in Turkmenistan, the struggle was just against wearing a borik.[3] The campaign was called “Down with the Borik.” During the massive campaign, cartoons in magazines, as well as medical articles, said that the headdress was heavy and therefore harmful to the posture/back and health in general; satirical songs about it also used to be aired on the radio. The final knell sounded in the 1970s, when collective farmers began to receive passports. One had to be photographed without a headdress for a passport photo. The desire for a passport was stronger than the urge to cover one’s head. This accelerated and eased the process of giving up the borik.

In Kazakhstan, the removal of the burqa affected only women in the Syrdarya Region. It was not women’s seclusion that led them to cover their bodies and faces, but the extent to which Islamic norms and customs prevailed in gender relations.

Today, one often hears that the process of women’s emancipation (that is, granting women equal rights in public, labor, and family life) began much earlier in the West than in the Soviet Union. Is this really the case?

Today, actually, everyone—feminist activists, scientists in the field of gender relations, politicians—is almost unanimous that Soviet women were “emancipated on average 50 years earlier than Western ladies.”

Soviet women gained access to education, the opportunity to work, and the chance to have their own source of income—that is to say, the chance to be economically independent of their husbands. In Austria it was not until 1975 that a law was passed stating that a woman no longer needed her husband’s permission to go to work, whereas in socialist Hungary such a law had been passed one generation earlier. Or take the right to get a credit card without a husband’s permission. Even Hillary Clinton recalls being denied a credit card in the 1970s. “I got a letter saying I couldn’t apply for my own credit card, I had to use my husband’s one.  And it’s not some ancient story,” she said in an interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “I was making more money than he was, and I was really ready to have my own credit card.”

Soviet women gained the right to attend university, the right to pursue professions in science and technology, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Ivy League universities did not admit female undergraduate students until the second half of the twentieth century.

We can take family law as another example. Soviet women almost immediately received the right to divorce, the right to carry their name after marriage, the right to abortion, and the right to have custody of their children after divorce. Meanwhile, in Austria, the law granting a woman the right to keep her name after marriage was adopted only in 1995. Or take the right to terminate a pregnancy. In socialist countries, the right to decide to terminate a pregnancy was given much earlier than in capitalist countries. For example, in the USSR, the relevant laws were adopted in 1920 and then in 1954. Abortion was permitted only in 1967 in England, in 1973 in the United States, in 1974 in Austria, and in 1979 in France.

Feminists today talk as if emancipation under socialism descended upon women from above and as a result, women were given control by the state (the state became a patriarch) instead of by their husbands. Kristen Godsey, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania known for her contributions to the field of post-socialist gender studies, responds: “The radical lesson is that the state intervened and did some good things on behalf of women, such things that markedly changed their lives were day care, abortion rights, etc. Feminist activism, the way it looks in the West with painted posters and rallying cries, did not achieve these things. The bureaucrats did it.”

Another feminist criticism of the socialist emancipation of women is that it resulted in women bearing a double burden: they performed the functions of both breadwinner and household slave. Godsey replies: “As soon as women stopped depending on their husbands for their basic needs for food, housing, and medical care, they gained some control over their own lives, even under regimes where political rights were restricted. Isn’t that one of the fundamental goals of feminism: to give women control over their lives?”

Thus, the answer to your question would be that Soviet/Communist women had a degree of education, economic independence, and legal status that their Western counterparts only received much later.

[1] Kalym—a groom’s gift to a bride in the form of a dowry, which remained at her disposal even after the wedding (and in the event of a subsequent divorce).

[2] Amangerism—marrying the widow of the deceased brother, or custody of the husband’s brother’s family in the event of his death.

[3] Borik—a big fur hat.

Translated from Russian Модернизация ранней советской эпохи в судьбах женщин Казахстана, 1920-1930 годы. Интервью с автором монографии

Over the past few years, there has been a marked increase in the volume of content on the topic of how to be a “true Kazakh woman.” Among the most notable examples of this are the emergence of uyatmen who police women’s behavior in public, the viral short film Zhezokshe about how young Kazakh women should dress modestly in order to avoid harassment and violence, a series of lectures on the moral education of young women, and the release of Qaraqat Abden’s book You Are a Kazakh Girl. Be Proud!

This trend piqued my curiosity back in 2019, prompting me to undertake an ethnographic study of gendered nationalism in Kazakhstan. As a Kazakh woman myself, I sought to observe the way in which societal expectations imposed on women and victim-blaming of female survivors of sexual violence are tied to Kazakh national identity, as well as explain why this is.

Author

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Aizada Arystanbek

Aizada Arystanbek is a Kazakhstani intersectional feminist, activist, and sociologist specializing in gender and culture, nationalism, and decoloniality. She received her Master of Arts degree in Gender Studies from Central European University and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. Aizada sees her work as an intersection of research and activism and is dedicated to contributing to the non-violent production of knowledge on Central Asia.

Nationalism versus Traditionalism

Nationalism is often conceptualized as a phenomenon that has an equal effect on all members of a community. However, many feminist scholars have argued that nationalism is inherently gendered, putting a disproportionate burden of cultural representation and biological reproduction on women. By recognizing the importance of nationalism in a contemporary patriarchal culture, we add intricacy to the vague concept of traditionalism, which presupposes a rather linear idea of feminist liberation. According to the traditionalist narrative, the women’s rights movement has taken a linear trajectory, from a more conservative society to a more egalitarian and progressive one. Focus on traditionalism paints contemporary misogynistic practices as echoes of the past that seek to undermine women’s liberation today. Not only does this view negate positive aspects of many traditions that are pillars of our communities, but it also fails to explain why misogyny persists even in societies that have supposedly reached modernity and are governed democratically rather than traditionally. Moreover, if traditions themselves were so core to misogyny, then many men exhibiting misogynistic traits would arguably be more traditional in all their behaviors, not just when it comes to women. Yet looking at male perpetrators of gender-based violence, they do not necessarily look “traditionalist” or lead a traditionalist lifestyle.

Nationalism is what makes traditions matter. Nationalism helps us understand why particular traditions become so important to patriarchal societies and how they are enforced unequally onto male and female members of society. It illuminates why misogyny continues to exist even when misogynistic traditions appear to have been expelled from state policies. Our societies’ national identities are built around the idea of the “Other,” a multifaceted third party that is a covert or overt threat to the survival and thriving of a community. The fear of being undermined by the Other—be it immigrants from the “Third World,” war refugees, or local minorities—is what drives patriarchal societies to place a burden of biological reproduction and cultural transmission on women. Women’s bodies thus cease to belong to women themselves and become weaponized by their communities on the pretense of national survival and wellbeing.

One concept I found particularly useful is the idea of hegemonic femininity: a set of standards of behavior that is perceived as the ultimate expression of desirable femininity and against which the gender expression of all female members of a community is measured. Hegemonic femininity presupposes that womanhood is a homogeneous identity that is always positioned in a subservient position to masculinity and demands heteronormative behavior from women for the sake of a traditional, monogamous, heterosexual family. Hegemonic femininity is tied to nationalism, as it is seen as a tool for ensuring the survival of the nation and the preservation of its traditions and uniqueness. By being made into representatives of national culture, women are placed on a metaphorical pedestal from which they ultimately fall either by acting on their humanity or by becoming a subject of sexual violence and, subsequently, victim-blaming.

In my study, I used digital ethnography to trace how casual interactions in online settings—namely, comments on social media—perpetuate these standards of hegemonic femininity and normalize victim-blaming and the stigmatization of female survivors of sexual violence.

My main finding is that digital spaces of the Kazakhstani internet perpetuate real-life patriarchal dynamics. Kazakh women are forced to perform hegemonic femininity and represent the nation’s honor even when they fall victim to sexual violence at the hands of their countrymen. Traditions and cultural mores are continuously imposed on Kazakh women in different spaces and contexts, with violence increasingly normalized against those women who do not appear to abide by the standards of hegemonic femininity.

For Kazakhs, Who Is the Other?

Another indication that victim-blaming of female survivors of sexual violence is closely connected to nationalism and ideas of national honor is the constant blaming of the “Other” I observed in online comments discussing the root cause of violence against women. For instance, in 2019, NUR.kz published a short video reporting that cases of domestic abuse had increased by more than 100% in 2018 and that, according to UN Women, approximately 400 Kazakhstani women die from domestic abuse each year. The video, which had received 153,000 views and 397 comments on Instagram as of this writing, goes on to note that cultural and religious practices contribute to the perpetuation of violence. Observing that an international organization had provided the statistics, many users expressed doubts about the data’s authenticity and relevance to the Kazakhstani context. These comments juxtapose Kazakh culture against “Western” culture, as these users argue that the only way to tackle the issue of violence against women in the country is to preserve the uniqueness of Kazakh culture and its “morally right” behavior—such as heteronormative femininity. According to some commentators, the emancipation of women and the emasculation of men are also at the root of the problem of rampant sexual violence in the country. This narrative juxtaposes the feminist movement and the empowerment of women against the preservation of the institution of the family in the country. Violence against women is then set up as a natural consequence of Kazakh women’s breach of hegemonic femininity, which is seen as the only way to ensure the reproduction of the nation and the maintenance of its cultural borders.

Uncivilized Self

One of the more interesting trends I observed was internal divides within the Kazakh national identity. As in other societies, while traditionalists blame modernity, modernists blame tradition. The internal divide that juxtaposes traditionalism and modernity has been imported to all countries by the global imperial and capitalist system. Thus, within “Third World” communities, those who are less globalized and more closely tied to certain traditional—but not necessarily misogynistic—practices are perceived as “uncivilized.” The idea of uncivilized behavior is rooted in colonial ways of thinking. For example, in Kazakhstan, the idea of civilization is often tied to such colonial features as speaking Russian, going to a Russian-speaking school, and consuming non-Kazakh cultural content. While many social media users blamed the West for its corruption of society, some also blamed certain regions of Kazakhstan and the “savage” local culture for perpetuating misogynistic behavior. For example, a few commentators employed the words mambet and mambetism when pointing fingers at various regions (particularly the South and the West of the country) and discussing their role in normalizing violence against women.

Thus, the idea of the Other that helps fuel misogynistic nationalist behaviors does not always come from external sources. Internal divisions along the linear view of modernity also create an internal Other: uncivilized practices rooted in many contexts, from postcolonialism to religiosity.

My study helped me to delve into the nature of Kazakh nationalism and its connection to the normalization of violence against women. National culture places Kazakh women in a precarious position where they are expected to adhere to Kazakh standards of hegemonic femininity even as victims of gender-based violence. Looking at online comments by various users across multiple platforms provides evidence that Kazakh women’s bodies and behavior are subjected to constant policing by others, as they are expected to act according to the standards of hegemonic femininity to preserve their respectability and right to protection. These standards of hegemonic femininity are attached to women even when they suffer from sexual violence like rape and domestic abuse, as evidenced by the way online users fuse common rape myths and sexist stereotypes about victims of domestic violence with the national culture and ideas of “Kazakhness.” Thinking about nationalism critically and understanding its gendered norms shines a light on victim-blaming as a social phenomenon and helps us to understand that it does not occur randomly, but is rather closely intertwined with local understandings of femininity and respectability.

It is important to note now, especially as Kazakhstan is experiencing a resurgence of a grassroots decolonial movement and Russia, its biggest neighbor, is waging war against Ukraine, another former Soviet state, that traditions and community organizing do not have to carry the misogynistic aspects often assigned to them. Resistance to the imperial way of thinking and to internalized ideas of civilization and modernity, as well as a new appreciation for indigenous practices and customs, are important parts of decolonization. However, as my study points out, it is vital to remain vigilant as to which power groups are popularizing which traditions and views and how these limit or threaten the safety of community members.

All illustrations by
Dinara Satbayeva

Author

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Aksana Ismailbekova

Aksana Ismailbekova is a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum-Moderner Orient (ZMO). Ismailbekova completed her PhD dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Halle, Germany. Based on her dissertation, she wrote her monograph Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan, which was published by Indiana University Press in 2017.

Complex context

In recent years, the Internet and social media have brought attention to domestic violence against women in Central Asia, as well as the suicide of young married women, bride kidnappings, early arranged marriages, and conservative beliefs (such as the insistence that brides be virgins). Central Asia is known for strong kinship systems with traditional marriage patterns. Though these ostensibly protect women and children, serving as a safety net and security provider, the prevalence of various forms of violence against women cuts against this.

Some women justify domestic violence, participate in bride kidnappings and arranged marriages, and encourage their daughters to stay with their husbands’ families despite hardships. Such women, who defend “traditional” norms, are attacked for being backward and unintelligent for their acceptance of their “property” status. They are marginalized and valued less as valid producers of knowledge, and as such are “muted” not only locally, but also internationally. Yet it is crucial to consider all women’s voices, as well as the experiences, incentives, and constraints that encourage women to maintain these traditional practices. Only in this way can we see the complexity of gendered subjectivities.

There is also a context worth examining more closely: the impact of the Soviet era and post-Soviet changes on the lives of women in Central Asia. The situation of Central Asian women is different in some respects from that of women in other parts of the world. The Soviet and post-Soviet experience can be described as “neither colonized nor modern.”[1] Central Asian women live within a system that has maintained its traditional kinship structure, arranged marriage rules, and gendered control of resources. Yet they are also actively involved in local economies. They are the social and cultural drivers of a particular kind of change and adaptation.

International donors and agencies follow their neoliberal notion and ground economic gender empowerment in individual property rights, in opposition to social norms and customs that would hinder women’s economic rights. Their main agenda, therefore, is empowering women by increasing gender equality through the provision of access to land rights and other resources. What this misses, however, is the complexity of women’s position in Central Asia: the multiple meanings underpinning the concept of women being viewed as ‘property’ and local women’s perceptions of property. These aspects need to be examined through the lens of kinship and marriage systems and power/hierarchy relations in Central Asia. Kinship and marriage are a fundamental cultural horizon for Central Asians, informing how women think through these legal, social, and political categories. Indeed, women could be empowered by their membership of large extended-kin networks.

Soviet Heritage vs Strong Nationalism; Islam and Conservatism vs Western Ideas

On the one hand, we have the Soviet legacy of women’s emancipation, which not only allows, but actively encourages, women to engage in the wider economy through work as well as looking after children. On the other hand, with the collapse of the USSR, we have witnessed the revival of Islam, conservatism, and traditionalism, due primarily to the promotion of nationalism. Western donors, too, have influenced the situation by promoting gender equality and individual private property. Thus, women are caught between the Soviet heritage and strong nationalism, between conservative Islam and Western ideas. It is under these conditions that they claim their right to work and hold property.

Based on a significant body of anthropological literature covering many parts of the world, I argue that a decisive factor for women’s overall status is their position in the system of property relationships: as actual and potential property owners, as potential items of property themselves, and as providers—as well as recipients—of productive and reproductive labor. Together, labor and property transactions comprise the bundle of practical activities known as “provision.”[2] Provision practices tend to influence and be influenced by understandings of social identity.

In my long-term projects, I explore property through the prism of women’s worldviews, looking at how kinship and the marriage system shape understandings of property relations outcomes in comparative context. While giving voice to Central Asian women, I also engage with postcolonial discussions of feminist anthropology and women’s property relations.

Gender and Property Relations

Various studies of post-socialist countries[3] have dealt with the concept of property in terms of relations, morality, and embeddedness. Property relations are embedded in wider social relations and moral values in post-socialist countries. However, there is only limited literature on the intersection of gender and property relations in post-socialist countries.[4] For its part, scholarship on Central Asia has explored historical and contemporary approaches to property—especially land, grazing rights, livestock, and land grabs[5]—while neglecting to look at women’s property relations through the prism of marriage and the kinship system.[6] There are several reasons for this, most of them methodological.

The property regime is so important to gender issues because property is not, as it is often considered, merely ownership. Instead, property can fruitfully be seen as bundles of rights. Not all these bundles necessarily amount to full ownership. Property also manifests itself in distinct layers: the level of ideology; the institutional level, which includes regulations; the level of legal relationships; and the level of actual relationships. It is important to understand why the ideology of protection does not translate one-to-one into actual protection.[7]

In my case, when I was 27 years old, I ‘learned’ that I owned one hectare of land in Kyrgyzstan. Somehow, however, I was not made aware that I was entitled to this land until my brother needed my signature as proof that I had legally rejected the land to which I was entitled. I was surprised that I had inherited land from my family. When I wanted to keep it for myself, my sisters became angry with me and asked, “Why won’t you give the land to our brother? You cannot claim any property from your family members because you are married; and the younger brother is taking care of our parents.” My family had not wanted me to know about my land so I would not use my agency. My case is atypical, but some women might know their property rights even if they don’t claim them.

Central Asia: An Ideal Place to Study Gender

Central Asia is an ideal place to study the paradoxical configuration of women, maintenance of kinship systems, and property in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts and adapting to new realities.[8] The women of Central Asia, with their Soviet and post-Soviet experiences, can offer new insight into feminist anthropological discussions by examining kinship, marriage, and property from a different perspective to ‘White European’ and ‘American’ feminists, or other postcolonial countries.

Central Asia is a good laboratory for the investigation of contradictions because these primarily Muslim societies feature diverse modes of social organization. All of them belong to the Turkic group (Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, Kazakhs), except for the Tajiks, who have linguistic and cultural ties with Iran. There are, however, long-standing differences in kin terminologies between historically nomadic and sedentary peoples. Thus, kinship is a significant domain and source of cultural diversity in regional countries—yet to date it has hardly been examined by a comparative anthropology of kinship.

Anthropologists have long known that Kyrgyz, Kazaks, Tajiks, and Uzbeks trace their ancestry differently—and thus marry according to very different rules. Traditionally, most ethnic Kyrgyz and Kazaks were mobile herders or pastoral nomads; they mainly engaged in livestock breeding. By contrast, ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks were sedentary farmers and urbanites; their main occupations were as craftsmen and traders. Consequently, Kyrgyz and Kazaks resided in mountainous places and Uzbeks and Tajiks in the grasslands. They have different residence rules, descent systems, terminologies, and marriage strategies. Kyrgyz and Kazakhs receive a bride price (kalyng) as compensation for the loss of their daughters’ economic services, while Uzbeks and Tajiks organize a dowry (sep) as a pre-mortem inheritance for their daughters. Through the institutions of dowry and bride price, families negotiate rights in persons and property transmission.

In addition to kinship in the economic and domestic spheres, there are local ideas of kinship related to property. Such ideas differ in their symbolic realm, spatial aspects, the exchangeability of property, and relatedness. I treat these local ideas seriously and explore how they differ in different kinship systems.

Ethnography from Central Asia should be in dialogue with debates on gender and kinship, marriage, and property. Here, there are many similarities between women in Central Asia and their counterparts in Africa and the Middle East, especially when it comes to their strong faith in kinship, property, and power. In general, the feminist anthropology has remained powerful in challenging essentialist theories developed in Western countries,[9] demonstrating that different cultures have different arrangements for kinship, marriage, and property. Applied to Central Asia, this approach would examine Central Asian women’s worldviews through the prism of Central Asian women themselves, thereby proposing alternative approaches to understanding kinship, marriage, and strategies for caring for daughters, as well as matrilocal ideas.

There is a difference between using local people’s own ideas to understand property as a category of analysis and using outside theory. Strathern, for example, avoided the concept of property altogether, although she did deal with other issues related to things and persons, objects and subjects, that contribute beyond European or Euro-American notions of property. Identifying women and local ideas offers new perspectives on ways in which women in Central Asia create and perpetuate relationships.[10] For example, there is a local idea of treating daughters as vulnerable (Uzb. Ojiza) and the associated ideal of providing for a daughter’s “security” in marriage. Ojiza is a strategy of individuals in a patriarchy; through it, women can exert a degree of agency by using it to call for support.[11].

Is “Culture” the Main Cause of Both Women’s Victimization and Their Empowerment?

Should local society, “culture” or kinship be blamed for women’s situations? On the one hand, claims about women being men’s “property” may be being used inappropriately and in contexts far removed from any system of local/kin-based checks and balances. At the same time, it is an inescapable fact that when a woman’s kin and her husband’s kin work together to force her to stay married, she may have nowhere to go.

Women often stay in such relationships because they are dependent on their husband—not because they are seen as their husband’s property, but because a woman alone would not be able to earn sufficient income to support herself (and possibly her children). In many cases, a woman’s position in society and the family is her choice: she wants to remain married despite challenges and occasional domestic violence in order to maintain access to a certain income. Then again, it may be that patriarchy prevents women from getting jobs, making them dependent on their husbands for income. In such a context, women must use patriarchy to exercise their agency. This is exactly what Kandiyoti argued decades ago in her work “Bargaining with patriarchy”[12].

Despite the efforts of international organizations to improve the condition of women, women themselves maintain the patriarchy (even its violent aspects), engage in bride kidnapping and arranged marriages, and encourage tradition in invisible ways. Local voices of women help to illuminate their vision of the world, explaining how they envision the kinship system, marriage rules, work, and property relations.

New media, the Internet, and social media platforms have opened new ways for women to express their visions of the world, even if their voices are controversial and different from those of experts, international organizations, and activists. There is, of course, a need for greater protection and regulation of virtual environments to support those who use them.

Economy and Culture Intersect

In this context, it is important to look at the intersection of property, work, and family relations (specifically, the economic contribution of wife and husband, parents and children, to the household). Individual families can be understood as single economic units. Each member makes a complementary economic contribution, such that the sum of several members’ efforts makes up the total household economy. In other words, the hypothesis of “labor and inheritance” can be applied, meaning if one contributes to household labor, one is entitled to inherit. In families, labor is organized on the basis of kinship relations, age, and gender.

Nevertheless, the value of women’s economic and social contribution can vary between ethnic groups. In some ethnic cultures, women who look after children and help in the household are very valuable; others, such as the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, encourage women to engage in paid work. Intergenerational transmission of property and marriage payments (dowry and bride-price)[13] are also linked to family economic transactions and compensation. The combination of identity and indebtedness is at the root of bride price and dowry.[14] Depending on the economic basis, contribution, and change, different identities face changes. These lead to a change in the values and status of women and their economic contribution.

The Western notion of patriarchy does not apply to Central Asia, as in many cases women choose their position in their societies and families. Women want to stay in a marriage despite pressure and occasional domestic violence, as they want to have access to certain income. At the same time, it may be that patriarchy prevents women from getting jobs and generating income, making them dependent on their husbands for money. Economy and culture intersect.

[1] Kandiyoti, Deniz (2007) ‘The politics of gender and the Soviet paradox: neither colonized, nor modern?’ Central Asian Survey, 26:4, 601 — 623.

[2] Patrick Heady and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann, “Implications of Endogamy in the Southwest Eurasian Highlands: Another Look at Jack Goody’s Theory of Production, Property and Kinship,” History and Anthropology 31, no. 2 (2020): 257–281.

[3] Chris Hann, “Property, Neoliberalism and Rural Privatization. Overview,” in Property Relations: The Halle Focus Group, 2000-2005 (Halle/Saale: Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologische Forschung, 2005); Chris Hann, “The State of the Art. A New Double Movement? Anthropological Perspectives on Property in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Socio-Economic Review 5 (2007): 287; Katherine Verdery, “Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization,” in Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, ed. Michael Burowoy and Katherine Verdery (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 53-82; Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey, eds., Property in Question. Value Transformation in the Global Economy (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare. Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

[4] Exceptions are Frances Pine, “Reproducing the House: Kinship, Inheritance and Property Relations in Southern Poland,” in Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in Changing Europe, ed. Hannes Grandits and Patrick Heady (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2003), 279-295; and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann, “Remembering the Dead and the Living of the Kolkhoz and Sovkhoz: Past and Present of Gendered Rural Life in Azerbaijan,” Ab Imperio 2 (2005): 425–440.

[5] Paolo Sartori, “Introduction: Dealing with States of Property in Modern and Colonial Central Asia,” Central Asian Survey 29, no. 1 (2010): 1-8; Sarah Robinson, Chantsallkham Jamsranjav, and Kramer Gillin, “Pastoral Property Rights in Central Asia: Factors and Actors Driving the Reform Agenda,” Études rurales 200, no. 2 (2017): 220-253.

[6] Except a few scholars by whom I am inspired, including Deniz Kandiyoti (2007).

[7] See Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s work on bundles of rights and Judith Beyer’s work on social protection. Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber (2006) ‘The properties of property’. Changing properties of property. Ed. Franz von Benda- Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber. New York: Berghahn Books; Judith Beyer (2016) The force of custom. Law and the ordering of everyday life in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

[8] Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Politics of Gender and the Soviet Paradox: Neither Colonized, nor Modern?” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4 (2007): 601-623.

[9] Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

[10] Marvin Harris’ -emic/-etic distinction; Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris. 1990. Emics and etics: The insider/outsider debate (Frontiers of Anthropology). SAGE Publications Inc: Newbury Park

[11] Ismailbekova Aksana. (forthcoming 2022) ‘Daughters as Ojiza: Marriage, Security and Care strategies for Daughters among Uzbeks in Southern Kyrgyzstan’. In Féaux de la Croix, Jeanne and Madeleine Reeves (eds.) Central Asian Worlds. The Routledge Handbook. Routledge.

[12] Kandiyoti Deniz. 1988. “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” Gender and Society 2: 274–290

[13] Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

[14] Heady and Yalçın-Heckmann, “Implications of Endogamy.”

For the last few years, Professor Cholpon Koichumanova has been working on a project studying the role and place of women in modern Kyrgyzstan.

The project has been implemented with the support of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

In this interview, Dr. Koichumanova talks about some of her findings and shares her views on how to expand women’s prospects in Kyrgyz society.

Interview with

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Cholpon Koichumanova

Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic. Author of more than 50 scientific articles, 5 monographs and 2 recommended textbooks. Head of the “Center for Humanitarian Research in Central Asia” of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic.

What does the life of a rural woman in Kyrgyzstan look like today?

As younger people in Kyrgyzstan move to urban areas or abroad, rural areas in Kyrgyzstan are increasingly left to women.

More than half of women—65 percent of the total female population—currently lives in rural areas. They cope with aging and poorly maintained countryside infrastructure, a lack of water and other resources, and the overall deterioration of living conditions. In addition, the life of a rural woman is defined by family, social, and cultural values that sometimes threaten this group of the population.

What are the specific problems?

In Kyrgyzstan, about 1.5 million people living in 396 villages do not have access to clean drinking water. This problem holds special gender significance since, first, it directly impacts housekeeping and other forms of life of the population, and, second, it is one of the main factors affecting human health. The insufficient provision of safe drinking water to the rural population, along with unsatisfactory sanitary conditions, causes epidemiological tension, increasing the incidence of acute intestinal infections, helminth infections, and typhoid fever. About 30,000 cases of acute intestinal infections are registered in Kyrgyzstan every year; per Ministry of Health reports, treatment of diseases transmitted through dirty water costs the country more than 4 billion soms per year. Solving the problem of access to clean water is therefore paramount.

This is just one example of the health care issues that women living in rural areas face. Since medical services are provided here through feldsher-obstetric stations (FAP), it is necessary to carry out major repairs there and provide residents with proper health care services, including psychological health services. We need a full-time psychologist in every village, since it is rural women and girls who are most exposed to domestic violence and are left alone with their problems, which subsequently lead to murders, suicides, etc.

Violence against women remains one of the main problems in Kyrgyzstan, and this problem is only getting worse. Unlike urban women, rural women typically do not seek help from law enforcement agencies. They either distrust law enforcement agencies or are prevented by a certain mentality from filing formal accusations against relatives, neighbors, and fellow villagers.

There has been a catastrophic increase in abduction for the purpose of forced marriage. According to research data, 60 percent of marriages in mono-ethnic rural areas happen after bride kidnapping (ala kachuu), of which two-thirds occur without the consent of the girl. According to various studies, between 22 and 35 percent of the victims of ala kachuu did not even know their kidnapper. The kidnapping of a woman for marriage occurs twice as often in rural areas as in urban ones and is associated with physical, mental, and often sexual violence.

Rural women today make up 60 percent of the migration flow abroad, often leaving their children with elderly parents and other relatives. In this regard, it is necessary to strengthen control over children whose parents are working abroad, since it is they who are most often subjected to psychological, physical, and sexual violence by adults. It is necessary to officially register the guardianship of relatives who are caring for the children of migrants. Also, if a child is entitled to benefits and payments from the state, then a guardian has the opportunity to receive them. In the absence of a legal representative, a minor is not able to receive benefits on his own. Guardianship makes it possible to identify migrant children and regulate this process.

In recent decades, owing to the difficulties of the transition period, there has been significant destruction of the network of preschool institutions in rural areas, and it is necessary to restore them. According to the most recent data, on average, a little over 22 percent of kindergarten-age children in the republic attend one. In other words, only one child in five goes to kindergarten. Moreover, the proportion of children not enrolled in preschool education is almost twice as high in villages as in cities.

An equally urgent problem for any region of Kyrgyzstan is the poor condition of roads. If in cities they are still trying to rebuild them, then for rural areas this remains unrealistic. It is necessary to improve the condition of roads between villages in order to improve communication between members of the rural population. School buses should be introduced in areas where children have to walk long distances to get to school. Unfortunately, comfortable public transport is not yet available to residents of rural areas of our country.

Generally speaking, there is a lack of jobs for rural women. In addition to taking care of children, women in villages are usually busy with housework: cleaning, cooking, washing, raising livestock, milking cows, tending gardens, and even cultivating the land. It is urgent to create jobs for them. The opening of small businesses will provide an opportunity to embark on new professions and develop entrepreneurship, as well as to combine family and work responsibilities through the growth of home-based jobs using modern information and communication technologies.

We need more women at the political level—in rural keneshes as well as in senior positions in district and regional administrations and other state structures. After all, it is the political power that determines and controls the life of the entire society. The active legal education of rural women should also be organized, empowering women to access economic resources and basic services; own and dispose of land; and understand other forms of ownership, inherited property, the division of property after divorce, and receiving alimony.

Does the government offer protection to rural women and what is the state of the gender laws in Kyrgyzstan?

During the post-independence years, a very solid legislative base has been created in the republic to determine and regulate gender policy. In 1996-2000 we had a specific program, Ayalzat National Program, that incorporated the priorities of the Beijing Platform for Action and was aimed at improving women’s status in the country. When summing up in 2000 the results of the implementation of Ayalzat, it was recognized that women and men lacked equality of opportunity in the sphere of public service. The priority goal set in this program—to achieve 40 percent female participation at the decision-making level—has not been achieved, and the state, represented by its political institutions, is not sufficiently striving to establish a gender balance in power structures. Decrees of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, such as “On Further Improvement of the Personnel Policy for Attracting Women Leaders to the Public Administration of the Kyrgyz Republic” (2002) and “On Approval of the Regulations on the Commission for Gender Expertise of Normative Legal Acts under the Secretariat of the National Council for Family Affairs, Women and Gender Development under the President of the Kyrgyz Republic” (2004), as well as the provisions of the Law of the Kyrgyz Republic “On State Guarantees for Ensuring Gender Equality,” have become important documents aimed at implementing the constitutional principle of equal access to state and municipal service.

Yet despite the fact that during the years of independence in Kyrgyzstan important laws proclaiming gender equality have been adopted and quotas introduced for women’s representation in parliament and other representative state bodies, in day-to-day life gender equality is being promoted only through the efforts of civil society and with the help of international organizations. The state develops programs and strategies without supporting them with the resources necessary for practical implementation. For example, almost no resources were allocated from the state budget for the implementation of the state’s national strategy for achieving gender equality until 2020.

Kyrgyzstani women actively unite in women’s non-governmental organizations. Initially, women’s NGOs arose in the cities, which can be explained by the relatively high political culture of city-dwellers compared to the rural population. But NGOs are appearing in rural areas too. However, these NGOs exist only thanks to foreign grants, and some rely on funds from subsidiary farms and assistance from international non-productive organizations.

The women’s movement in Kyrgyzstan still lacks consolidation. First, it is a challenge to train women leaders from among the younger generation, as the women’s movement has not seen the influx of young people into its ranks. Second, the state does not provide support to women’s organizations, even those that protect the rights of women and provide them with social support. Third, in the context of the growing influence of religion in the socialization of the younger generation, women’s organizations and groups acting under the auspices of religious and so-called traditional values are becoming more active. Fourth, over the past two years, public opinion has formed a negative view of NGOs as biased by the ideas of the West, which has of course had a negative impact on women’s organizations.

The modern reality is that the formal equality of women and men—enshrined in the Constitution and a number of other legislative acts, as well as in international documents signed by the government of the Kyrgyz Republic and ratified by the Jogorku Kenesh—does not at all guarantee their practical equality. For women, only horizontal movement is really available; vertical movement—to the highest echelons of power—is the prerogative of men. The gender component is also very poorly reflected in the activities of political parties, which everyone knows are the main lever of influence on state power. Women are seen as an object whose life can be improved from outside without developing their own civic initiative.

For example, if in the Jogorku Kenesh of 2016, 26 percent of deputies were women, the level of their representation has now decreased to 17 percent. The most recent local-level elections also show negative trends in women’s political leadership: whereas in 2013 women made up 12-13 percent of local keneshes, they now make up only 10 percent. If earlier there were 70 ayil okmotus in the country that contained no women at all, there are now 80. Today, women are included in the ranks of political parties only because there is legislation on quotas and because it is necessary for the image of political parties. Women are used only as a resource; their political subjectivity for the leaders of the party remains in last place. Consequently, the opportunities for women to gain power and participate in big politics are fraught with difficulties. On the other hand, although the women of Kyrgyzstan show interest in politics, only about 8-10 percent of them believe that political means should be used to protect rights. Notably, among the leaders of non-governmental organizations, the percentage of women who hold such an opinion is much higher: 35 percent.

What is the court of aksakals and what is its role in the social status of women?

In the Kyrgyz Republic, a new public institution for the protection of the rights of victims, the court of aksakals, has gained legitimacy. These are elected, self-governing public bodies that consider materials sent to them by the court, the prosecutor, and other law enforcement agencies that have the right to consider criminal cases, as well as cases of property and family disputes between citizens, in order to achieve reconciliation. Courts of aksakals can be established by decision of a meeting of citizens, local keneshes on the territory of ayil aimaks, and cities where aksakals enjoy respect and authority. It works like this: 5 to 9 people aged 50 and over listen to both sides and make a decision on your issue. They consider issues not only according to the law, but also according to their conscience and personal convictions. Of course, this method is faster than the courts, where proceedings can drag on for many years. There are often gaps in laws, and some issues really need to be resolved “according to conscience” and not according to the letter of the law.

At the same time, as practice shows, the courts of aksakals have not become an effective support for working with the population. One way to increase their activity could be to involve women in their work. Unfortunately, however, according to established tradition, only men are elected to the courts of aksakals; indeed, their very name implies older males. In this regard, it is necessary to consider changing the Law “On the Courts of Aksakals” to the Law on “Courts of Elders.” This would reflect the basic principles of gender equality, protect women from discrimination based on sex, and thereby establish progressive democratic relations. The name “courts of aksakals,” meanwhile, restores a medieval logic according to which wisdom is inherent only in men. This is despite the fact that our studies have shown that in the difficult 1990s, it was women who endured all the hardships of the transition and solved the most difficult problems, showing wisdom, patience, and perseverance. In our opinion, the involvement of women with authority in these courts—accompanied, of course, by a change in their name—would raise the form and method of their activity to a new level.

Are there any signs that rural women are playing an increasing role in the Kyrgyz economy?

As you know, women tend to work in traditionally “female” areas—education, science, health, culture, and art—where wages are low, but without which the development of the country is impossible (women make up 85 percent of all school personnel in rural areas and 90 percent of the staff of nursing stations) Recently, they have become increasingly involved in the system of entrepreneurial relations, forming typical “gender niches” of modern economic activity. Women are seen as more responsible in doing business than men. They traditionally work in trade, consumer goods, services, and education.

In addition, in recent years, women have turned to the traditions and skills of needlework inherited from their mothers and grandmothers—carpet-weaving, embroidery, making products from felt, etc.—to alleviate poverty and unemployment. At first, women worked individually, but in recent years, societies of craftswomen and needlewomen have mushroomed in each region. Some of them number 200 people. Thus, the revival of folk art and handicrafts has been brought about by women from all regions, 90 percent of whom are from rural areas. Needlewomen try to preserve good traditions and pass on their skills to the younger generation. Many of them have their own sewing workshops where young girls practice and even earn money. In order to develop this type of activity, many women apply for small grants from international organizations and receive support. They purchase sewing machines and other necessary equipment and materials, creating jobs and providing financial assistance to their families. No less importantly, needlewomen in the villages pass down their knowledge and skills to younger generations, preserving and increasing the richness of their national culture. The proportion of women who want to engage in business is constantly growing, thereby increasing women’s role in the development of the country.

All photos by
Cholpon Koichumanova, “Daily life of rural women” series from “Женские судьбы: времена не выбирают“, Bishkek, Turar, 2021