Exile, Diaspora, and Agency in Inner Asian Folk Narratives

Research Questions and Goals

Within my upcoming three blog posts, my aim is to present two narratives of exile present in folk oral traditions in Inner Asia. After discussing the Urkun in my previous post, I realized that I had largely forgotten the issue of individual agency within such significant historical circumstances. To rectify this issue, as well as to expand upon my previous work, I went into my research with several questions:

• How can individual migration stories be recognized in historical migration events?
• What do oral narratives reveal about individual experiences within these events?
• How do these narratives portray agency in the face of forced migration and exile?
• How does the memory of these events, or the memory of these narratives, influence modern migration policy?

In order to answer these questions, I will use this and the subsequent two blog posts to introduce and discuss historical narratives of migration, exile, and diaspora from Central and Inner Asia Each found in the oral folk traditions of various cultures. As of now, I am aware of two specific narratives which will allow me to answer the questions I am investigating. These narratives, in my opinion, provide a profound insight into individual responses to large scale diaspora-creating political events.

The purpose of this post is to introduce these sources and present questions for future analysis. The subsequent posts will provide more in-depth look at the circumstances under which each narrative was recorded, as well as a comparison between them. Finally, I hope to analyze the themes and attitudes present in each narrative to better understand the personal experiences of those who were involved in these events.

Shildey Zanggi: A Buryat Folk Song

The first narrative I will analyze is a Buryat folk song with several variants. Versions were recorded and published by N. Poppe, A. Pozdneev, and S. P. Baldaev.¹ It describes in alliterative verse the story of Shildey (Shildei, Šildee, Siledei) zanggi (district commander, captain) and his imprisonment and execution at the recently defined Russo-Manchu border. This story is also described in prose in Shirab-Nimbo Khobituev’s Khori Buriat Chronicle of 1887.²

In 1727, the Russian and Qing Empires signed the Treaty of Kyakhta, which, along with regulating trade, established a border between the two polities.³ This border, according to the story, left Captain Shildey and his herds stranded on the Manchu side, while all of his relatives and pastures were on the Russian side. As the song goes, the headstrong Shildey attempts to cross the border without permission, and is subsequently captured, held for some time, and finally executed by beheading. According to the Khori Buriat Chronicle, it was Manchu border guards that executed Shildey, while Pozdneev attributes the deed to the Russians.

Shildey was not the only person impacted by the sudden barrier created between previously traversable lands. The border implemented in the 1727 treaty effectively created a Mongol diaspora overnight, separating huge communities and causing problems well into the 18th century. As late as 1771, a group of 90,000 Torgut Mongols requested and received permission from the Qing Emperor to cross the border and “return” from the Russian Empire back to their territories.⁴

Regardless of the specifics, the many variants of this folk song along with its relative longevity indicates that its themes resonated with Buryat singers and audiences. In my future posts, I hope to discuss the personal narrative aspects of this song and how it may indicate the attitudes of those who experienced this constructed diaspora.

The Kyrgyn: A Kyrgyz Verse Narrative

The second source which I plan to analyze illuminates the details of individual actors within the events of the 1916 Central Asia Revolt and the Urkun. The events of the Urkun were memorialized by the Kyrgyz in several oral poems composed during the years of exile in China.⁵ For the purposes of these blog posts, I will be analyzing one of these compositions which has been transliterated from Arabic to Latin script and subsequently translated into English.

This narrative, simply titled “Kyrgyn” (“The Slaughter”), was composed by the bard Musa Chagatay uulu between the years 1918 and 1927. It consists of 427 lines of texts and has a meter that is reminiscent of the Kyrygz epic tradition. It describes the events of the 1916 Revolt in four parts: “The uprising,” “The fight,” “The flight,” and “The people’s return from their flight.”⁶ These descriptions of the stages of the Urkun will provide new insight into the circumstances the Kyrygz people experienced and the decisions they made within these circumstances. Hopefully, by analyzing the agency which he attributes to the Kyrgyz population described in this poem, some of my research questions will be answered.

Final Thoughts

In reality, both of these oral folk narratives are works of fiction. We will never truly be able to know the personal experiences of every person in Inner and Central Asia who experienced some type of exile or forced migration as a result of imperial political maneuverings. However, it is my hope that this oral literature will provide a small window with which we can better understand these experiences and their relation to the modern memory of migrants today. As my research progresses, I hope to find both more examples of this literature as well as better ways to analyze the content of said literature to understand the lived experiences it describes.

Notes

1. N. N. Poppe, Buri͡at-Mongolʹskiĭ Folʹklornyĭ i Dialektologicheskiĭ Sbornik, Obrazt͡sy Narodnoĭ Slovesnosti Mongolov, Tom V (Moskva: Izdatelʹstvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1936); Aleksej Matveevič Pozdneev, Obrazcy narodnoj literatury mongol’skih” plemen” (Tip. Akad. Nauk., 1880); Sergeĭ Petrovich Baldaev, Buri͡atskie Narodnye Pesni: Dorevoli͡ut͡sionnye (Ulan-Udė: Buri͡atskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1961).
2. Chronicle of the Khori Buryats. (1935). Chronicle of Shirab-Nimbo Khobituev. The text was published by V.А. Kazakevich. / Proceedings of the Institute of Oriental Studies. T. IX. M.-L.: Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 2, 125 p.
3. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
4. G. Patrick March, Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996).
5. Jipar Duishembieva, “From Rebels to Refugees: Memorialising the Revolt of 1916 in Oral Poetry,” in The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)
6. Daniel Prior, “A Qırghız verse narrative of rebellion and exile by Masa Chagatay uulu,” in The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)