Hikmat Rizo and the Gurguli Epic in Soviet Tajikistan

• In Event: Building (and Resisting) Nation and Empire: Folklore, Oral Tradition, and Cultural Heritage as Usable Pasts

Abstract

This paper discusses Soviet-era research on the Gurguli epic in Tajikistan and its most famous performer, Hikmat Rizo (1894-1990), drawing on materials from the archive of the Folklore Fund at the Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature in Dushanbe. When folklore research began in earnest in the Tajik SSR during the post-war period, researchers directed the preponderance of their efforts toward cataloguing epic traditions—traditions which Orientalists like Braginskii had already identified as dying by the early 1930s. Rizo, the reciter of more than 126,000 lines of epic verse, became the republic’s most celebrated performer. However, by the mid 1970s interest in the Gurguli epic and Rizo had waned. I argue that taken together the Gurguli epic and Rizo offer a productive case study of folklore’s role in Soviet nation building projects and suggest the continued utility of folklore as an instrument of cultural heritage in Central Asia.

Author

• Benjamin Gatling, George Mason U