415
Culture and Power in Colonial Turkestan
citizens
of Russia, i.e., an end to the mechanisms of exclusion that had upheld
colonial difference in Turkestan. The Russian population instinctively resisted
this move. Over the course of 1917, political life developed largely in parallel
“Russian” and “native” streams, until Russian soldiers and workers took power
in the name of socialism and established a settler-dominated regime that sought
wide-ranging autonomy from the centre.
3
The Russian revolution had been
turned on its head by the colonial realities of Turkestan.
4
What was so obvious to contemporaries – that Turkestan was a colony,
directly comparable to overseas holdings of other European empires – was
consigned to oblivion by later generations of historians.
It began with the end
of the Anglo-Russian rivalry after the First World War, which pushed the most
immediate point of comparison to the background. Later in the twentieth cen-
tury, notions of Russia’s own alterity and otherness from “Europe” came to
dominate mainstream thought to such an extent that it became difficult to imag-
ine that the Russians could have been engaged in an exercise common to all Eu-
ropeans. Yet, little about Turkestan can be understood without acknowledging
its coloniality. The aspirations of “native” elites articulated in 1917, as well as
their
modus operandi
, were rooted squarely
in the colonial realities of
Turkestan. The Jadids, the modernist Muslim intellectuals who emerged as
claimants to leadership in 1917, were colonial intellectuals, their trajectory and
their predicament directly comparable to any number of other groups in the
colonial world.
This article, therefore, has three interrelated goals. Firstly, it seeks to define
the ways in which Turkestan was colonial. Secondly, it
seeks to locate the
Jadids in this colonial context. Turkestani Jadidism arose in a colonial society,
and was deeply marked by it. The Jadids operated under constraints and pos-
sibilities defined by Turkestan’s colonial status. Thirdly, this article seeks to in-
vestigate the points of overlap and intersection between the cultural programme
of the Jadids and the “civilising mission” the Russians professed to uphold.
The key vector to be analysed here is that of
exclusion
– the colonial order was
built on the exclusion of the native population of Turkestan from the imperial
mainstream. The Jadids sought
to overcome this exclusion; they sought not
separation from, but
inclusion
into the imperial polity. In the colonial order,
this desire for inclusion was highly subversive, and provoked a great deal of
hostility on the part of imperial authorities.
3 Khalid, 1996;Buttino, 1991;
idem
, 2003.
4 Buttino, 2003.