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Image of the Region in Eurasian Studies IMAGE OF THE REGION IN EURASIAN STUDIES IMAGE OF THE REGION IN EURASIAN STUDIES Edited by Suchandana Chatterjee Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies Kolkata in association with KNOWLEDGE WORLD KW Publishers Pvt Ltd New Delhi 2011 BEST PUBLISHERS AWARD (ENGLISH) The Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIAS) is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. It was set up at the joint initiative of the Government of India, Department of Culture, Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Government of West Bengal. Based in Kolkata, it was registered as a Society under the West Bengal Registration of Societies’ Act of 1961 on the 4th of January 1993, with Prof. Nurul Hasan, the then Governor of West Bengal, as the President of the Society. It is funded by the Department of Culture, Government of India. Presently, His Excellency, Governor of West Bengal, is the President of the Society. MAKAIAS is a centre for research and learning with a focus on social cultural, economic and political / administrative developments in Asia from the middle of the 19th Century onwards, with special emphasis on their links with India, and also on the life and works of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. It operates out of Azad Bhavan in Salt Lake as well as the Maulana Azad Museum located in the erstwhile residence of Maulana Azad at 5 Ashraf Mistry Lane, Kolkata. © 2013, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIS) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The views expressed are of the individual author and do not express the viewpoint of the Institute. ISBN 978-93-81904-58-9 KNOWLEDGE WORLD Published in India by Kalpana Shukla KW Publishers Pvt Ltd 4676/21, First Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110002 Phone: +91.11.23263498/43528107 Email: [email protected] • www.kwpub.com Printed and Bound in India CONTENTS Introduction vii ESSAYS 1. The Kazakh Steppe of the 19th-Early 20th century: The Northernmost End of the Muslim World or the Southern Limit of the Eurasian Space? 3 Svetlana Kovalskaya 2. The Practice of Regional Description in the Military Science of the Russian Empire “Military and Statistical Analysis” and Its Practical Uses Late in the 19th–Early in the 20th Centuries) 19 Sergey Lyubichankovskiy 3. The Soviet Study of India 1917-1947. A Report on the Soviet Archives Project, Calcutta 37 Hari Vasudevan 4. The Soviet Union, Nationalism and the Colonial Question: Revisiting the Comintern Era 57 Sobhanlal Datta Gupta 5. Russia’s Policy towards Central Asia in the post-Soviet period 75 Raj Kumar Kothari 6. Debating Nomadism versus Modernism: Some Reflections on Mongolian Identity Issues 89 Sharad K. Soni 7. The Central Asia Factor in India-Afghanistan Relations 103 Anwesha Ghosh 8. Nation-building or National Revival in Turkmenistan: From Dependence to Independence 119 Lopamudra Bandyopadhyay vi IMAGE OF THE REGION IN EURASIAN STUDIES 9. Post-Soviet Media in Central Asia: With Special Focus on Coverage of Presidential Elections of Kyrgyzstan 137 Mohamad Reyaz 10. Europeanisation at the “Grassroots” Level in Moldova: What Are Effective Ways to Deal with the Transnistrian conflict? 157 Keiji Sato 11. Comparing Post-communism “Big” and “Small”: The Inaugural Elections in Russia and Macedonia 171 Dmitry Seltser 12. The Boundaries of EU Norms: Examining EU’s External and Internal Power Using Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling as Case Study 187 Minori Takahashi 13. Eurasian Economic Union: Opportunities and Challenges 201 R. G. Gidadhubli 14. Silk Road as an Integrative Concept: The Twenty-first Century Scenario 213 Sreemati Ganguli 15. Contextualising Anton Chekhov in the Literary Traditions of His Time 225 Joyshree Roy 16. Representing the Caucasus in Russian Literature: Creative Writings “Then” and “Now” 235 Ranjana Saxena 17. Socialist Realism Architecture and Soviet Cinema: The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV) in The Radiant Path 255 Akiko Honda 18. Presentation and Representation: Subjectivity through History in The Sky of My Childhood 277 Rashmi Doraiswamy vii 19. Reinventing Culture: The Tajik Experience of Post-Soviet Years 289 Nandini Bhattacharya REFLECTIONS 20. Eurasian Culture/Arts of Central Asia: The Case of Tajikistan 305 Munira Shahidi 21. India-Tajikistan Relations in the 20th-21st Centuries: The Evolution of Cultural Ties 321 Umedjon Majidi ANNEXURE Media of Central Asia at a Glance 335 INTRODUCTION The revived interest in the study of Eurasia’s regions is not a sudden occurrence. In global terms, a multidisciplinary approach became the norm for most of the area studies programmes and the scope and span of Eurasian studies widened, combining European Russia and Asiatic Russia. The history of different disciplines of Central Eurasian studies became a research field in itself.1 Hokkaido University’s discourse on “regionology” entailed the study of “meso-areas” of Slavic Eurasia whereby attention shifted from the omnipotent centre to krais and oblasts of the post-Soviet space. An Asiatic gaze connecting the Islamic world also became popular in the Islamic Area Studies project of Tokyo University that focused on Islam as a religion and civilisation that spread beyond the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia in the east and the Balkans and Africa in the west. The idea that gained ground within the revised format is not only how Eurasia’s regions positioned themselves in the context of post-Soviet political transition but also how these regions reinvented themselves through a re-envisioning of spatial categories like Slavic Eurasia, Central Eurasia, Central Asia, Inner Asia, etc. with centuries-old and millennia-old time scales. As new research directions opened up, there were fresh insights about historical time frames. The significance of historical interludes was emphasised and there was an urge to study Eurasia’s Slavic, Turkic, Persian and Mongolian historical legacies. Some of these ideas echoed in India too but the ways in which the study of Eurasia developed were rather uneven. Prior to 1991, more particularly in the 1960’s, 1970’s and the 1980’s, the study of Eurasia developed as a Soviet studies programme, with emphasis on the understanding of Soviet projects on education, planned economy, linguistics and nationality. There seems to have been an overall inclination towards the study of the Soviet bloc whereby East European studies were “combined” with Russian studies. x IMAGE OF THE REGION IN EURASIAN STUDIES The result of this mixed study was a tendency to move towards European studies rather than pursuing a discreet Slavic studies programme. In the post-1991 period, Eurasian studies in India followed a completely different course. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the general assumption was the collapse of the Russia-centric Slavic superstructure. Hence, there was an urgency to disconnect from the Slavic component and concentrate more and more on the non-Slavic regions of the Soviet Union. From this emerged an interest in alternative insights, say a South Asian gaze of Central Asia, for instance looking northwest and exploring connected histories as Bactria and Sogdiana in ancient times, Balkh, Khorezm, Badakhshan, Mawarannahr and Mughalistan in medieval times and as Transoxiana during Tsarist and Soviet times.2 The zeal to study interactive moments in early modern Eurasia (e.g., the Great Mongol moment) was also noticed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam has worked on a vast space of Asia—from Safavid Iran, Ottoman Empire and South East Asia to the Mughal dispensation in Bengal via Transoxiana to establish his argument about the significance of the model of integrative history and what he himself prefers to call “connected histories.” Over the years, he has reworked the history of South Asia into a larger Eurasian space of conjunctural movements.3 Such ideas are a pointer to the “sprawl” in Eurasian studies, reflecting a deepening interest in theories about “spatial scales” which essentially means alternative spaces cutting across national and cultural boundaries.4 This has led to a re-imagining of margins of Asia and beyond. The framework of research about a spatial surrounding has been modified substantially with scholars trying to argue about a variety of human settings that qualify this spatial surrounding. In the 2000s, Ansi Passi spoke about “constituents of the life-world” as integral to the study of regions.5 More recently Prasenjit Duara has argued against the hypothesis of “spatial production” and identifies a region such as Southeast Asia as an area of interdependence and interaction.6 The gaze has also shifted to cultural tropes and narratives of the Himalayan region that has an Asian individuality and was pitted against the imperial power of the Chinese, British and the Russian. Reappraisals about the Himalayan borderlands INTRODUCTION xi offer fresh insights about alternative geographies—reflected in research about “zomia and beyond.”7 The spatial category “zomia”—sometimes called a trans-area, was rendered peripheral in conventional area studies categories of East Asia, South and Central Asia. Comparing the case of the eastern Himalayas with other cases as Burma, ocean spaces of the Mediterranean, Atlantic or the trans-Saharan desert spaces, van Schendel and James Scott and others have pointed out that area studies have conventionally been studied through the lens of power. The discourse about the “zomia” tends to open up blind spots and limits, and there has been a commitment to study both distant and near places and the connections between them.8 The India connection has gained prominence in “decentred area studies” that take into consideration a series of glocal tropes, one of which is categorised as “trading powers and colonial endeavours: passages to India: golden triangles, silk roads.”9 A major component of this Himalayan link is the journeys across this Buddhist space with tangled histories and cultures.
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