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Turning Hooligans into Toilers: Satire and Tajik Nationalism in Mullo Mushfiqi (1926-1931)
Abstract
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Persianate literary sphere had undergone a massive transformation; educational reform and technological innovations greatly expanded reading publics, and the socio-political movements in Qajar Iran, Imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire placed new emphasis on literature as a form of social critique. From Calcutta to Istanbul, satirical journals and periodicals became a medium for a rising intellectual class to humorously identify societal woes and to articulate remedies to them. Previous research on satirical commentary in Iranian studies tends to focus on the Azerbaijani journal Molla Nasreddin (1906-17, 1921-31), Dekhoda’s Charand Parand column in the weekly Sur-i Israfil (1907-08), and novels such as Maraghei’s Safarname-yi Ibrahim Beg (1896) and Mirza Habib Isfahani’s translation of Sargozasht-i Haji Baba-yi Isfahani (1886). This scholarship emphasizes the circulation of these texts between the Caucasus and Iran, but very few works explore satirical writing from Russian-administered Central Asia. Adeeb Khalid’s The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform (1999) and Making Uzbekistan (2015) have shed much-needed light on Jadidist print culture in the cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara, but the author has primarily utilized Uzbek language primary sources to address his scholarly inquiries. This paper is a close examination of Mullo Mushfiqi (1926-1931), a Tajik-language monthly periodical printed in Tashkent and Samarkand during the national delimitation of the Soviet Union (razmezhevanie). Using issues housed in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, I will explore the various ways satire was utilized to support the transformative platform of the Soviet Union in regards to national progress, women’s liberation, anti-clericalism, class struggle, and language reform. Furthermore, I will argue that Mullo Mushfiqi’s visual and textual similarities to other illustrated journals in the Caucasus (particularly Molla Nasreddin) reveals a larger network of literary translation and textual transactions spanning the Caspian Sea. In doing so, I wish to geographically expand the scholarship concerning satire in the Persianate world as well as emphasize Farzin Vejdani’s notion of a “Persian republic of letters” traversing the political demarcations of twentieth-century Eurasia.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Central Asia
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries