The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini

by Sadriddin Ayni, John R. Perry (Translator), Rachel Lehr (Translator)

The first volume of Aini's unfinished Reminiscences is a first-person account both of a traditional Iranian-Islamic society on the eve of a fateful transition, and of a precocious boy's rites of passage to literary preeminence. The two autobiographical novellas included here, "The Village School" and "Ahmad the Exorcist," detail Sadriddin's chaotic schooldays and his brushes with homemade fireworks, superstition and irrational fear. In his panorama of rural life in Bukhara of a century ago, his parents and neighbors dig themselves out of a choking sandstorm, plan and excavate a new canal, and are decimated by a cholera epidemic. The expected class lines of Marxism are heretically blurred--noble peasants and artisans are offset by cruel and greedy tradesmen, oppressive officials by cultured and generous aristocrats. Lenin is never mentioned, but the Persian poet Sa`di is invoked at several junctures. Aini's mood ranges from humor through satire to pathos, and his critical and didactic ends are served more often in the narrative itself than in overt sermonizing. An extensive introduction, notes, glossary and bibliography, as well as, two maps and 11 plates complete the work.

Genres: Nonfiction, Asia

275 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Sadriddin Said-Murodzoda. He was an outstanding writer in Tajikistan. With his "March of Freedom", composed on the world-famous motif of the "Marseillaise" in 1918, the history of Soviet Tajik literature begins.

Sadriddin Aini was born in the village of Soktar, Gijduvan fog of the Bukhara Khanate (now Gizhduvan district: Bukhara region of the Uzbek SSR) into a dekhkan family. His father, a great lover of poetry, managed to plunge, into the soul of the future writer, who was just beginning to master reading and writing, a love of literature and knowledge. His mother came from the village of Mahalai Bolo, Shafirkan fog (now the Bukhara region of the Republic of Uzbekistan). In 1890, during a cholera epidemic, father and mother die almost simultaneously. Sadriddin leaves his native village in Bukhara (September 1890), and the madrasah, a religious institution traditional for Muslim countries, enters, as it were, combining high school and high school. While studying in a madrasah, he earns a living by washing, serving in rich houses, cleaning, student cells.
Aini was closely acquainted with prominent Bukhara intellectuals: Sadri Ziyo, Damullah Ikramcha and others.
Aini’s life was changed not by the Russian state as such, but by the Russian Jadids-Tatars, whose community arose both in Bukhara and in its railway station New Bukhara (Kagan ) Sadriddin Aini was a member of the Jadid Enlightenment movement. He embarks on the path of enlightenment - takes an active part in organizing the first new method schools for Tajik children in Bukhara, writes textbooks, poems, and stories for them, arguing in favor of secular knowledge as a counter to religious Muslim theology.
The persecution of the authorities forced S. Aini in 1915-1916. hiding outside Bukhara. He has been working as a weigher for about a year at a ginnery in Kizil Tepp. In April 1917, during a rampant reaction caused by the provocative Jadid manifestation in honor of the hefty reforms announced by the emir, S. Aini was punished with 75 stick strikes and thrown into prison. Together with other political prisoners, he was released from prison by Russian revolutionary soldiers, and after almost two months of treatment at the hospital in Kagan, he moved permanently to Samarkand. In 1918, the emir of revenge executed his younger brother S. Aini.
Since 1918, he unequivocally sided with the opponents of the emir regime, and together with the left wing of the Jadids of Young Bukhara he drifted towards the Bolsheviks. In 1920, he supported the revolution in the emirate and the creation of the Bukhara people's Soviet republic.
On June 15, 1926, Aini became a literary employee of the Tajik State Publishing House, an office opened in Samarkand. There were no other literary employees in it then.
Some time after the creation of the Bukhara People’s Republic, he was elected a member of the CEC of the republic, and after the creation of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, he worked for several years in the Tajik office in Samarkand, in the Samarkand branch of the Tajik state publishing house. With the creation of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic in 1929, he was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Tajik SSR.
In 1934, at the I All-Union Congress of Writers, he was also elected a member of the Board of the Union of Writers of the USSR.
S. Aini was repeatedly elected deputy of the Dushanbe and Samarkand city councils, twice (1937, 1947) as a deputy of the Supreme Council of the Tajik SSR.
In 1940, S. Aini was awarded the title of Honored Scientist of the Tajik SSR for great services in the field of literary studies. In 1943, he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, and later he was awarded the title of Honored Scientist of the Uzbek SSR. In 1949, the Academic Council of Leningrad State University.

Reviews

[Harry Rutherford · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sands of Oxus is my book from Tajikistan for the Read The World challenge. Which is a bit of a cheat, in fact. Aini’s Tajikistan credentials would seem to be impeccable: according to Wikipedia, he ‘is regarded as Tajikistan’s national poet‘. He wrote the first Tajik novels and a Tajik dictionary. He was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Tajik SSR, the president of the Writer’s Union of Tajikistan, and the president of the Tajikistan Academy of Sciences. However, rather annoyingly for my purposes, he didn’t actually live there. He was born, and spent his whole life, in what is now Uzbekistan. He was ethnically Tajik, but not geographically.

This seems rather typical of Central Asia; my book from Uzbekistan, The Railway, was written by someone who was actually born in Kyrgyzstan. The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years is book from Kyrgyzstan, but it’s set in Kazakhstan. I guess it’s partially because the Silk Road historically created a mixed, mobile population; and more recently because it was all part of the Soviet Union, and people moved from one SSR to another for all kinds of reasons, sometimes by choice and sometimes under duress.

I come across a book which is a more perfect fit for Tajikistan, I might read that as well, I suppose. But The Sands of Oxus will do for now. It is the first volume of Aini’s autobiography; it covers his childhood in rural Uzbekistan — in what was then (1878-90) the Emirate of Bukhara. The book ends with him leaving to study at a madrasa at the age of twelve.

It’s a straightforward chronological autobiography told, at least in this translation, in fairly plain prose, but I found it very interesting; mainly for what you might call historical/ethnological reasons. It’s a vivid portrayal of life in a small village in Central Asia in the 1880s; the farming, the food, the customs. It’s occasionally a bit didactic — there are a few incidents which carry a suspiciously neat message — but not annoyingly so. The broadly political stuff, about venal magistrates, ignorant village mullahs, ruthless tax collectors and the arrogant aristocracy, might I suppose be influenced by his revolutionary politics as an adult and indeed the fact he was writing in Stalin’s USSR. Not that any of it is inherently implausible.

Reading it, it seems like an incredibly timeless world: the cycle of planting and harvest, Ramadan, a summer festival, circumcisions, marriages, funerals. There is no mention of any modern technology at all, not even the telegraph or the steam engine. It must have already seemed ancient by the time this book was written in 1949.

Here’s a fairly random sample:

Each year when the mulberries began to ripen, my father used to move us from Mahallayi Bolo to Soktaré. The year that the Shofirkom canal was choked with sand and Mahallayi Bolo was left without water, we moved to Soktaré early, even before the mulberries began to fruit.

In Soktaré my brother and Sayid-Akbar Khoka began to study with the village khatib, and I played in the many streams and canals with other boys my age. My father decided not to move back to Mahallayi Bolo that winter, since drinking water was scarce there and had to be drawn from a village well and carried to the house. Accordingly, he demolished our tumbledown living quarters and built a new house of mud brick, with a storeroom, a kitchen porch, a cattle stall and a barn for hay. Usto Khoja assisted him with the construction, and Ikrom Khoja and Muhyiddin helped as far as they could in mixing the mud; but despite his father’s pestering, Sayid-Akbar refused to help, claiming that he wanted to be a calligrapher and if he soiled his hands with mud and bricks they would be spoiled for the pen.

That year I and my playmates Haid Khoja, the nephew of Ibrohim Khoja, and the daughters of Usto Khoja, spent most of our spare time with Tūto-posho, who would tell us strange and wonderful tales. She knew by heat the stories of Rustam, Isfandiyar, Siyavush, and Abu Muslim, and would repeat them for us endlessly. We would each bring her bread, mulberry raisins, or some other delicacy to entice her to talk. She would lie back with pillows under her head and legs, and tell us stories.

Certainly worth a read.

[Westward Woess · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. I didn't know anything about Tajikistan before reading and it was a great starting point. It was especially interesting when you consider that Aini is considered the father of modern Tajik literature (and even the father of modern Tajik culture) and this book is very much a love letter and tribute to his own father.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ayni was born in a peasant family in the village of Soktare in what was then the Emirate of Bukhara. He became an orphan at 12 and moved to join his older brother in Bukhara, where he attended a madrasa and learned to write in Arabic.

In the early 1920s Ayni helped to propagate the Russian Revolution in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In 1934 he attended the Soviet Congress of Writers as the Tajik representative. By purporting national identity in his writings, he was able to escape the Soviet censors that quieted many intellectuals in Central Asia. Ayni survived the Soviet Purges, and even outlived Stalin by one year. He was member of the Supreme Soviet of Tajikistan for 20 years, was awarded the Order of Lenin three times, and was the first president of the Academy of Sciences of Tajik SSR. After 1992, his writing helped to bind together a sense of Tajik nationalism that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ayni gave indigenous Tajik literature in Tajikistan a boost in 1927 by writing Dokhunda, the first Tajikistani novel in the Tajik language.[citation needed] His main work is the four-volume YAddAshthA.

Ayni's early poems were about love and nature, but after the national awakening in Tajikistan, his subject matter shifted to the dawn of the new age and the working class. His writings often criticized the Amir of Bukhara. Two recognizable writings include The Slave and The Bukhara Executioners.

Ayni died in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where a mausoleum stands in his honor. According to RFERL Tajik Service, Ayni's house in Samarkand is under threat of demolition by the government of Uzbekistan

[Nipun · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Sands of Oxus and other works by Sadriddin Ayni survived the Soviet sensors who, in their time, quietened many an intellectual in Central Asia. Whether due to Ayni’s less hostile relationship with the Bolsheviks (they had saved him from the previous Emir’s prison) or something else, these works were instrumental in keeping the Tajik identity alive in the brutal paranoia of the Stalin era. No wonder Ayni is considered Tajikistan’s national poet. https://theworldincultures.com/369-th...

[Michele Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tajikistan. Just as the title says this book is the author telling stories of his boyhood. It was like sitting next to a great-uncle at Thanksgiving and listening to his stories of the “olden-days”. There is a glossary at the end to help with all the unfamiliar words. The stories focus mainly on what he learned from his father, but there is a lot of information about village life, the role of women, and the way education was perceived.

[Val]

Tajikistan