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ABSTRACT
The process of nation building often entails the articulation of communal heroes. This paper argues that the elevation of such heroes is particularly significant for minority nations divided between multiple states. The project of building the Uyghur nation, carried out across the borders of three twentieth-century socialist states, offers a unique opportunity for examining this phenomenon. In particular, the Uyghur case offers insight into the many minority communities whose nation building process was linked to twentieth-century socialism. This paper traces the posthumous reputation of Sadir Palwan, a nineteenth-century resistance fighter against the Qing empire who in the twentieth century was reinterpreted as a Uyghur national hero. Drawing on poetry, fiction, journal articles, and textbooks, the paper demonstrates that the project of articulating a heroic canon allowed Uyghur intellectuals to work across state borders as they shaped an identity for their nation outside the nation-state framework.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Jacobs, “The Many Deaths”; Abramson, “Gender, Uyghur Identity”; and Anderson, “Construction of Āmānnisā Khan.” On the use of local heroes as role models at the level of the oasis community, see Bellér-Hann, “Setting an Example.”
2. On the creation of the Uyghur ethnic category in the USSR, see Brophy, Uyghur Nation. On the development of Uyghur national identity in the ETR, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic of China, see Klimeš, Struggle by the Pen; Bovingdon, The Uyghurs; and Freeman, “Print and Power.”
3. On the Islamic pantheon of heroes long venerated in Xinjiang, see Thum, Sacred Routes.
4. Perdue, China Marches West, 306; and Brophy, Tending to Unite, 29–32.
5. The American scholar and diplomat Eugene Schuyler, traveling in the region in 1873, noted that the Taranchi dialect was most distinctive in Ghulja, Ili’s major city, while the speech of other Taranchi villages bore traces of the residents’ respective ancestral homes in the Tarim Basin. Schuyler, Turkistan, vol. 2, 169–70.
6. The foremost English-language account of the Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang is Kim, Holy War in China.
7. On Shakirjan’s life and involvement in Uyghurist discourse in the early Soviet Union, see Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 183–84, 221–30, 313.
8. Shakirjan, “Istibdad khatiräliridin,” 86–99.
9. See Dautcher, Down a Narrow Road, 168–97.
10. Gabdulgaziz Munasib offered a different etymology, suggesting that “Khangruq” derived from qanqirimaq, meaning to wander without fixed home. Munasib, “Taranchi qizi,” 157.
11. The practice of exiling Xinjiang rebels to inner China reversed the common Qing custom of exiling Han convicts to Xinjiang and deserves further study. See also Waley-Cohen, Exile in Mid-Qing China.
12. On the qoshaq genre in the context of Uyghur oral tradition, see Light, “Uyghur Folklore.” Shakirjan noted that at the time of his writing, Sadir’s son Kerim Quli, then living in Ghulja, could recite all of his father’s quatrains by memory. Shakirjan, “Istibdad khatiräliridin,” 88–89.
13. Ibid., 93–99.
14. Pantusov, Taranchinskiia piesni.
15. Bowskill, Gender, Nation.
16. The definitive treatment of Uyghur nation building in the USSR is Brophy, Uyghur Nation.
17. Ibid., 254–60.
18. See also Svanberg, “Ethnic Categorizations.”
19. Erzin, “Beshiri Zhidesuda,” 62–63. A copy of the play has not yet come to light.
20. Brophy, “Class, Subjecthood, and Ethnicity.”
21. Beshir, Uyghur edebiyatı, 18–23.
22. Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier, 133–40.
23. For a detailed account of the rebellion and the formation of the ETR, see Benson, The Ili Rebellion.
24. Freeman, “Print and Power,” 126–30.
25. Muḥämmäd Oghli, Oqush kitabi, 36–38.
26. Rozi, “Bowam Sadir,” 24.
27. On the longstanding interplay between the oral and the written in Xinjiang’s Muslim communities, see Thum, Sacred Routes, 56–59.
28. Rozibaqi Oghli, Oqush kitawi, 113–18.
29. Qadiri and Äkhtäm, “Uyghur khälqining ataqliq qährimani,” 13–19. For the earlier version of this couplet, see Shakirjan, “Istibdad khatiräliridin,” 98. On p. 15 of their article, Qadiri and Äkhtäm mention having spoken to “old men” in compiling their account, but seventy-five years after Sadir’s death, these old men would likely have relayed second-hand information; it seems safe to regard Shakirjan’s 1924 piece as more reliable. The Struggle article’s novelistic account of Sadir’s youth seems particularly unlikely to represent an unembellished account more than a century after the events in question.
30. Shakirjan, “Istibdad khatiräliridin,” 89; and Rozibaqi Oghli, Oqush kitawi, 38.
31. Rozibaqi Oghli, Oqush kitawi, 117–18.
32. Qadiri and Äkhtäm, “Uyghur khälqining ataqliq qährimani,” 14–15.
33. Barmin, Sin’tszian v Sovetsko-Kitaiskikh otnosheniiakh, 179–85.
34. For a detailed account of the Ili-CCP symbiosis in the 1950s, see Freeman, “Print and Power,” 185–261.
35. Ḥäsänof, Ruziyäf and Ayupov, Oqush kitabi, 318. On early CCP interpretations of the Taiping Rebellion, see Shih, The Taiping Ideology, 449–52.
36. Ḥäsänof, Ruziyäf and Ayupov, Oqush kitabi, 355–57.
37. Qadiri and Äkhtäm, “Uyghur khälqining ataqliq qährimani,” 15; and Äkhtäm, “Béjin.”
38. Rozi, “Dahigha salam.”
39. Rozi, “Bowam Sadir.”
40. Qadir Häsän, “Rizwan’gül.”
41. While this and other poems by Qadir Hasanov were widely reprinted in Xinjiang, Hasanov himself hailed from Soviet Kazakhstan, where the canonization of socialist national heroes was already well underway. See Kudaibergenova, Rewriting the Nation, 37–81.
42. Hasanov, Ädäbiiat: ottura mäktäpning 5- sinipi üchün, 35–37.
43. Mukhlisov, Sadir Palwan: tarikhiy qissä; and Mukhlisov, Sadir Palwan: roman-novella. On Mukhlisov’s activist career, see Kamalov, “Uyghurs in the Central Asian Republics,” 124–25.
44. Keller has likewise shown how Soviet narratives of Uzbek history and heroes were quickly adapted for use in post-independence Uzbekistan; see Keller, “Story, Time, and Dependent Nationhood,” 275–77.
45. Turdi and Sultan, eds., Uyghur ädäbiyati tarikhi, vol. 4, 438–45; and Hadi, “Palwan käldi.”
46. Yasin, Sadir Palwan (roman).
47. Yasin, Bahadir äzimät.
48. Compare Shakirjan, ”Istibdad khatiräliridin,” 97 and Ömär, Uyghur khälq tarikhiy qoshaqliri, 29.
49. Osman, ”Sadir yetim qalghan bäsh balisini izdäp.”
50. Rozi, “Bowam Sadir,” 25.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Joshua L. Freeman
Joshua L. Freeman is a Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University, US. He received his MA in Uyghur literature from Xinjiang Normal University in Ürümchi, China, and his PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies from Harvard University. His research focuses on national culture in the socialist periphery, and in particular the cultural history of the transborder Uyghur nation.