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The Road to Oxiana

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Robert Byron
Robert Byron

Robert Byron was an English writer known for his interest in and descriptions of Eastern cultures. His works include travel literature, novels, and critical articles, with his most famous series being 'The Road to Oxiana'. more

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“In Lenin's view, such changes were positive: nations, as products of capitalist economic relations, fitted into classic Marxist stage theory of development. Even Stalin, who differed on the implications for Soviet policy, agreed that nations were an inescapable phase through which all humans communities must pass. Ultimately, they (like, capitalism) would be superseded, but for precapitalist societies national development and nationalist movements were treated as progressive. Lenin drew a further distinction between great-power nationalism, which oppressed others, and small-power nationalism, which formed in response o it. In places - such as Russia - that had been responsible for national and colonial oppression of others, nationalism was to be combated without mercy and torn out by the roots. Among groups that had been victims of national or colonial oppression, by contrast-such as in the tsarist imperial periphery, where Russian power had created deep economic, political, and social resentment-the Leninist approach was to build socialism while encouraging indigenous development and national differentiation.”

NationalismUssrStalinLeninCentral AsiaUzbekistanNational Question
Book:Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia
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“Deprived of their direct ties with Central Asia -- and with it their access to Turkish slaves, mercenaries and war horses -- the later Ghaznavids lost their wider, imperial vision an acquired the character of a regional, North Indian state. They were certainly not seen as menacing aliens who might have posed a civilzational threat to Indian culture. Contemporary Sanskrit inscriptions refer to the Ghaznavids not as Muslims but as 'turushkas' (Turks), an ethnic term, or as 'hammiras', a Sanskritized rendering of 'amir' (Arabic for commander), an official title. For their part, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Ghaznavid rulers in India issued coins from Lahore bearing the same legends that had appeared on those of their Indian predecessors, the Hindu Shahi dynasty (c.850-1002). These included Śiva's bull Nandi and the Sanskrit phrase 'śri samanta deva' (Honourable Chief Commander) inscribed in Devanagari script. Such measures point to the later Ghaznavids' investment in establishing cultural and monetary continuity with North Indian kingsdoms. Moreover, despite the dynasty's rhetoric about defending Sunni Islam, religion posed no bar to military recruitment, as Indians had always been prominent in Ghaznavid armies. In 1033 Mahmud of Ghazni gave the command of his army stationed in Lahore to a Hindu general, and in Ghazni itself Indian military contingents had their own commanders, inhabited their own quarter of the city, and were generally considered more reliable soldiers than the Turks. Crucially, the Ghaznavids brought to the Punjab the entire gamut of Persianate institutions and practices that would define the political economy of much of India for centuries to come. Inherited from the creative ferment of tenth-century Khurasan and Central Asia under the Samanid rulers of Bukhara, these included: the elaboration of a ranked and salaried bureaucracy tied to the state's land revenue and military systems; the institution of elite, or military, slavery; an elaboration of the office of 'sultan'; the courtly patronage of Persian arts, crafts and literature; and a tradition of spiritually powerful holy men, or Sufis, whose relations with royal power were ambivalent, to say the least.”

HistoryIndiaSufisTurksCentral Asia
Book:India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765
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“This type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges, in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet [. . .] If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a re-introduction to the culture of past traditions but is a tour through a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reading of them would reading of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as the "Judeo-Christian tradition" and sometimes as "Western values." The writings of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives [. . .] turn out to be one more stage in modernity's cultural deformation of our relationship to the past.”

TraditionConservatismWestern ValuesGreat BooksJudeo Christian
Book:Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
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