A Museum Moment Comes to Colonial Tashkent: Displaying the 1898 Andijan Rebellion and the Rise of the Muslim Visitor, 1898-1904

• In Event: Museums, Memory, and Violence: From Colonial Turkestan to Soviet Estonia and Post-Socialist Poland

Abstract

Near the Central Asian city of Andijan in May 1898 a Sufi īshān led a rebellion against the Russian colonial regime. This rebellion led to 22 dead Russian military personnel, a heavily repressive military campaign conducted by Russian forces on the native Central Asian population, and, I argue, a changed museum, and changed museum politics, in the nearby city, and colonial capital, of Tashkent. Following this uprising, the Turkestan Public Museum in Tashkent acquired large numbers of confiscated manuscripts and weapons, and became increasingly marketed towards Tashkent’s Central Asian population via the publication of museum-related articles in the local state-run Central-Asian-Turki language newspaper. Additionally, it was at this time that Arif-Xodja Aziz-Xodjinov became the first Muslim member of the Turkestan Public Museum’s observatory committee. My paper examines how a moment of anti-colonial violence in Andijan shaped the Turkestan Public Museum in Tashkent to offer two distinct arguments. First, I show how the Russian colonial administration following 1898 utilized museums in an effort to enact a “proper” understanding and memory of the events of this uprising. Second, I show how the messy and contradictory process of memorialization enacted by the Russian colonial regime ultimately created opportunities for its displays to be read in a variety of ways against the regime’s explicit interests, and for the space of this museum to be appropriated by Tashkent’s Muslim museum-going public. Following 1898, it was this Muslim museum-going public that became, much to the consternation of Russian colonial elites, the majority of this museum’s visitors.

Author

• Albert Charles Cavallaro, U of Michigan