Razia Sultanova (2nd from left) with women during her field research in Uzbekistan, 1990s

This episode of the first English language podcast on Central Asian culture is dedicated to the International Day of Women.

To read the FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW scroll down.

Some update from the host Janyl Jusupjan, independent filmmaker and author (Kyrgyzstan):

Early March I was supposed to be at the Eurodoc workshop for film producers in Italy’s French Aosta region. Because of coronavirus it got canceled but they proposed a skype consultation with tutors. They gave valuable insights and advice for the People of the River film project by Christian Lelong and I (Cinedoc Films production).

Also I started preparation for a new film project in Russia. It is at an early stage so I can only say that it will be centered around a big musical personality. I am also working on my book projects.

I received very good news from my former employer, that I can go ahead with publishing a collection of my articles from the Pamirs, which I will,most likely, self-publish. I did receive a publishing proposal from a university, but as a self-publisher, I will have no constraints translating it into other languages.

Now I have to decide whether I should publish it in Kyrgyz and then translate it into English, or go straight to the translation work, which would take more time, and I would have to understand how much it will cost to edit. Then I would have to raise money somewhere. Perhaps Patreon.com may be a good place. It is a website where people can support independent creators with small contributions.

I am also working on another book project tentatively called Breakfast Talks with Christian Lelong, where I am interviewing the producer of my “Letters from the Pamirs” feature documentary. Christian produced or made dozens of documentaries some of which were at Cannes, Berlinale and other exciting places for film. So the talks are wealth of knowledge, but we learn also about Christian as a person.

There are some 25 interviews so far, and more are on the way. I’ll send a sample interview in one of my next emails, so watch out for that.

I continue to receive nice messages. For example, Edward Lemon tweeted: “What a fantastic initiative, well done, Janyl Jusupjan, for putting this podcast together! I look forward to listening on my commute”. Thank you Edward, it is very much appreciated, and safe driving!

Despite all the work, we manage to go to the countryside. Recently we went back to La Drôme region in southern France, which is famous for its lavender fields. You may remember them from some Van Gogh paintings.

We came to love a certain crêperie, a place where they serve French pancakes, in one of the small towns. They have a meal called La Tête De Le Vol (The Head of a Cow). It is quite simple, so simple that it reminds me of my mom’s boiled meat dish in our childhood. She was a nomad and knew only that type of cooking. But with some nice wine and homemade Spanish desert, La Tête De Le Vol is a Celebration!

This podcast is supported by volunteers – Stephen K. Vincent from the UK and Damon Kutzin, Saint John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. They edit and proofread my texts and interviews.

Having an English language podcast is a big responsibility and I am very happy to have Stephen and Damon in my team. Merci beaucoup, my friends!

If you are subscribed to my email updates through my website, then you probably received my email with the video clip (https://youtu.be/_dMA3IQG4VQ) of this new podcast with Dr. Razia Sultanova, the author of the groundbreaking research publication «From Shamanism to Sufism, Women, Islam and Culture in Central Asia». Subscribers sometimes get earlier content like this clip, before the episode is available to everyone.

As it is mentioned in the episode, I met Razia in London almost 10 years ago, I interviewed her, in Russian, in front of the School of Oriental and African Studies where she used to work. Here is that interview: https://youtu.be/Re8hL0Jo4Uo.

From an email list I am subscribed to, I found out yesterday (what a counsidence!) that Razia Sultanova has left her position as Chairperson of the Music of the Turkic Speaking World Study Group, due to organizing and leading a new Group on the Global History of Music. Congratulations to Razia!

Share this story and tag me as Janyl Jusupjan on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram – I will be delighted to hear from you! If you want to know how you could support this podcast, find me on patreon.com/janyljusupjan.

The next show will be with Daniel Prior, an American researcher who deciphered the tape of an epic story by a little known Kyrgyz epic teller and musician Kenje Kara. The tape was recorded by a Russian traveler more than a century ago! And yes, you will be able to hear that tape!

Enjoy Chaï Latte with Salt!

Full transcript of the Interview with Razia Sultanova

Janyl Jusupjan: Where were you born, in which village or city and how did you become who you are?

Razia Sultanova: That’s a very good question. Because of my father’s military service, I was born near Vladivostok. He was married, so together with his wife he came to the then Soviet Far East to complete his military service. It was a place he was sent to and I was born there. But once his military service was over, he wanted to go back to his native Uzbekistan and to his home village Asaka, which is in Ferghana Valley. Asaka is not a village, it’s actually a town. At that time, it was very small town. My mother, who was a teacher, couldn’t find a job as she was originally from Orenburg, on the banks of the Ural river. For her it was very difficult to come to live in Uzbekistan, and it was quite a challenging experience. She insisted on them moving to the nearest city, which was Andijan, which became the city I grew up in. Andijan was also very small in Soviet terms, a city with around two hundred thousand people, but there were nice schools, there were proper institutions there, so my mum was quite happy. She spent her life there working as a schoolteacher and even becoming the Head of school, so me and my siblings – my sister and brother were brought up as teacher’s children. But my father was otherwise occupied, working up to the rank of colonel by the end of his career, he was known as Colonel Sultanov. Although he moved in different circles, he was a real music lover. His LP collection of traditional Uzbek music performers, with recordings of the best and the most famous Uzbek singers performing classical Uzbek music, was a rare and unique collection because he had spent many years collecting it. (00.03.00) It laid the foundation for my future profession, so I’m very grateful that my father knew Uzbek music very well and encouraged us to study it. My sister Goulnara Sultanova is a professional pianist and she is working as Piano Professor in Luxemburg Conservatory where she has been teaching for the last 20 years. So, geographically, it was very different for us once we moved to live here in the UK, as you can see, and I always like pointing out that I was born on one side of the huge Eurasian continent only to move to the other side of the same continent. Now my life and destiny has brought me to the opposite side of the Eurasian continent, to the United Kingdom, to London, where I’m living and working.

Janyl Jusupjan: Because of the Soviet background and since the independence, Uzbekistan remains pretty much secular, but it was not typical for a girl to go studying music. You play a national instrument, but you know, it’s better than being a dancer in Uzbekistan for a girl, isn’t it? Was it for you difficult to go into this field or there was no issue?

Razia Sultanova: It is a well-known fact that for families with educated parents it was very commonplace for all children to go to music schools, whether they were girls or boys. My brother also learnt playing the violin, for example. My sister is a pianist and I’m originally a qualified pianist also. I leant to play the traditional instrument – Dutar – much later, when I moved to the UK or let’s say first of all, to Europe. It was Western Europe: we first came to France, followed by Germany and then to the UK. I was one of those many girls, many children, who went straight into studying music and piano which was the most popular instrument at that time. I can’t remember anyone in my class (and I went to the best city school No1 in Andijan) who didn’t attend the music school at that time. Everyone went there or, perhaps, at least the vast majority of my classmates, they all went to study music. It was seen as a sign of academic accomplishment. Lots of music schools were opened for children and if your child passed the entrance exam, he/she would be accepted there. It was completely free of charge for parents, so that was the reason many children went to music schools and had music qualifications.

Janyl Jusupjan: You were growing up in marvelous Ferghana Valley. I have been in Osh, on the Kyrgyzstan side, but I know Ferghana is beautiful, fertile land with rich history, and Andijan is very historical town too – it is where Babur lived. Ferghana’s history is also connected with Europe, because of the October Bolshevik revolution, many prisoners of WWII who were Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, ended up in Andijan. They opened cafes and theatres in the town. You were a young lady growing up there. How was the environment for you? Were you a privileged Russian-speaking child, as you grew up alongside the daughters of farmers?

Razia Sultanova: It’s a good question and you’ve actually asked several questions at the same time. Andijan was a very special city, because, as you know Ferghana Valley has three main cities: Andijan, Ferghana and Qoqand. Andijan was, I believe the biggest one. We had a medical academy, and agricultural and other institutions, which means that it was a big city for students to come and to study there. Andijan was also a very green city. At the time, I was studying in School No1, which by the way was a Russian school, since Russian language schooling was predominant at that time. Certainly, parents of all nations wanted their children to go to the best school. That’s how we ended up having representatives of many nations in our class. For example, we had Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians, Russian, Korean and Bukharian Jews and Greeks and would you believe it, only six Uzbeks in our huge class! So, we were a minority, can you believe it, studying in a Russian school in the very heart of Uzbekistan! So every year in the month of May one of the days would be dedicated to making a journey by foot to the Park named after Alisher Navoyi. It would be a day long journey, because Andijan school No1 was at the far end of the Navoyi Avenue and we would walk with the entire class to attend the Festival of Roses – a celebration of roses that took place every single year in the Alisher Navoyi Park, where farmers from different parts of Andijan district and other parts of Ferghana Valley used to bring all different kinds of local roses to exhibit. The Rose Festival lasted just one day a year and we kind of served as voluntary jury members who compared the appearances, colours, sizes, and scents of roses finding the best ones. It was a real honour for us to judge the competitions! Unfortunately that was the time when we had no photo cameras or smart phones to take any pictures. It all still lives on in our minds, as a memory of our happy childhood. We had lots of amazing memories from our childhood, because we had festivals and various competitions to participate in. In our school for example there was a very nice choir where we used to sing at our regular annual city competitions. We also used to participate in city competitions in Maths, in Physics, in English language skills, etc. It was really fun was to be involved in class marching contests. However, apart from school curriculum subjects we also were involved in various music competitions and our No1 School’s choir, in particular, had always been the best among other city schools.

Janyl Jusupjan: So, you were a minority at school, but I imagine it was not traumatic because the culture surrounding you was your native Uzbek one.

Razia Sultanova: You know, that was the time in the Soviet Union when the whole education system and curricula, schools’ curricula and universitity ones were based on Russian language, so that looked normal to us. I remember whenever my father’s family members would come from Asaka and nearby villages to Andijan to visit us for celebrations or for weekends I could hardly communicate with them in Uzbek. Perhaps, it was also my age, you know, because I was busy with my school studies, homework and piano playing and preparing myself for my next solfeggio lesson etc. Now as equal members of the same large family we can properly communicate in Uzbek. My musical and professional interests have brought me back. I mean while as a migrant from the former Soviet Union I was moving further to the West, to finally settle in UK, an island off the Northwest coast of the Eurasian continent, my interests and my professional research focus was becoming more and more concentrated on the place of my origin. Because as you said, Andijan was the native place of residence of Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Babur, who was the founder of the great empire of Moghuls. Babur name is still very famous and well-known. In India, if you mention “I am from the same city as Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Babur”, people are very pleased, because everyone has heard and knows about Babur since childhood. It’s taught as part of their school curriculum that Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Babur was the founder of the great Moghul empire. It was a real privilege to have come from Andijan. I was lucky to have had a chance to grow up in such a famous historical city.
Janyl Jusupjan: It is amazing, I read Babur’s book, he wrote diaries. He was a highly educated, multitalented enlightened man in his own terms. When I read there the name your father’s village Asaka, I thought it was a Japanese name. Asaka sounds a bit different than local names of towns or villages.
Razia Sultanova: You are right, that could be explained by the close placement of Andijan to the Chinese border. Andijan is a city on the Great Silk Road and it had very strong links particularly with China. For example, after the Great October revolution in 1917 in Andijan you could still find some Chinese banks. In my childhood, I remember, we lived in a huge block of flats, where one of the parts belonged to the Uygur families, which means we had Uyghur population living in our city. That was the norm, we used to have such a multinational environment that we thought the world, you know, also consisted of a very multinational population. Janyl Jusupjan: Very interesting. I was thinking of your travels, as you mentioned from Vladivostok, Central Asia and Europe and back. You went back in a sense of your research, but it’s interesting for me how you ended up in Europe in the first place?
Razia Sultanova: When the Soviet Union had collapsed, many families, many professionals, faced a challenge trying to find jobs abroad. They went to different countries. Our way, my family’s way of coming abroad was through receiving research grants. You know, grants for research, grants for translation of books, like it happened with my husband, who is a very famous Uzbek writer, and who received a grant in Paris to translate together with Jean-Pierre Balpe the poetry of Navoiy and Mashrab. That’s how we moved to France. In my case, and the reason why we later moved to Germany, was the fact that I received a DAD grant from Bamberg university in Bavaria. I was invited there to help with musical transcription of old Uzbek songs from Afghanistan. You might remember, during the Soviet Union’s war with Afghanistan, we didn’t know the reality about that country, we had no information, we couldn’t get a proper picture of what was going on, because media didn’t reflect the true situation. It was forbidden to know the life and culture of Afghanistan and only through the study of Afghani-Uzbek songs, conducted by the very famous German philologist Professor Ingeborg Baldauf, who had gone to the North of Afghanistan during her two year-long fieldwork, and recorded a huge number of Uzbek songs from among the large Uzbek population living there, one could learn the reality. By transcribing those songs I discovered that it’s another very little known part of the Uzbek culture, from another highly important location and a most appropriate place for studying the old Uzbek culture. That marked the beginning of my long involvement with the study of Uzbek music in Afghanistan, in particular in the North of Afghanistan.
That’s why I produced a documentary film and the book which is about to come out about the songs of Uzbeks and their neighbours from Kazakh, Turkmen and Kyrgyz communities, living in the north of Afghanistan. Music became my magnifying glass for discovering the world. Through music I learned about the present, the past history of countries and people I was studying. I also learned more about social involvement, because different levels of society, the cream of society or village people – they like, support and perform different kind of music. It opens your eyes that music is a powerful phenomenon which shows you how the life of society has been established and how it has developed. It’s interesting that even now in our times one could observe this ongoing phenomenon around the world, as for example is the case with migrants – they don’t travel to different countries bringing along only their family members. They bring with them, as far as they are able, their musical instruments, musical recordings, they bring with them songs, languages, cultural habits and so on. (00.18.00) It’s a very interesting phenomenon to work on it and it’s precisely what my latest, my current research project is focused on: Central Asian migrants and their life within Russia. By the way, migration is a huge phenomenon, you know. Whether we look back years or five centuries, we will always see that people had been migrating. Look at the great phenomenon we all know well called The Great Silk Road, it’s also a phenomenon, a historical, geographical, political phenomenon for us, scholars and musicologists, to study, to learn about how people, neighboring people, could collaborate, could live in agreement about everything from their economic relationship to their cultural relationship without any wars and without any political problems. They knew how to co-exist in agreement back in the medieval times and many things from medieval times can be learned by people of today, but unfortunately our world is a very difficult place nowadays. Migration is a really exciting phenomenon to study and in today’s world where so many migrants are coming from different places and the entire globe has become a small place because of migration, I think that it is our scholarly duty is to pay increasingly more attention to the migrant phenomenon.

Janyl Jusupjan: Absolutely. You and your road as a migrant interest me too. You mentioned once that it was difficult for you, a difficult journey – you had to learn French. What was it about?

Razia Sultanova: First of all, it was in France, where my husband got a scholarship for translating the classical Uzbek poets like Navoyi and Mashrab into French. I was traveling with my husband, but like most Soviet people, I didn’t speak any foreign languages and for me it was a terrible challenge. Every time people around the table or at the exhibition or in a museum, or in the poetry club started speaking French… although I loved the language because of its particular musicality, its musical intonations, I didn’t understand anything, so I had to learn the language while I was in France. (00.21.00) Our life faced an unexpected turn, in that I had applied for grants everywhere and received one in Germany, so coming to Germany, to Bamberg from Paris to Southern Germany, I then had to start learning German. I mean, it was not difficult with German people because their foreign language education is very good, which meant it was easy to speak with them initially in French, because people would understand you, but then, slowly, slowly I learned German and that was a good experience, so by then I had already had two languages, foreign languages in which to communicate. Then my husband got a job in the UK, in London, and the whole family moved there and that was a real challenge, because English people didn’t like someone speaking French or German to them. They expected everyone to speak English. My English was minimal. I mean, it consisted of a few years of learning it at school, in the comprehensive school and I didn’t have any speaking experience whatsoever. I had to drop my French and German and start learning English because it was the only way to communicate with people around me. That was not at all an easy experience, but I like the country and I like the people who helped me with this task, to get over those difficulties. Slowly, slowly I got accustomed to this culture. I found the British to be similar to Central Asian people in that they also very much like drinking tea and take their tea with milk, just like I am used to since childhood. There are many other common features found between the culture of Central Asian people and the British, which I discovered with time. It helped me to enjoy learning the English language.

Janyl Jusupjan: You came to London, speaking a few words in English. You tried to find your way and you now you wrote book in English and you teach at one of the most prestigious universities in UK. What a journey!?

Razia Sultanova: I’m very happy, it’s a privilege and I’m very lucky to be in this country, because not only am I teaching in English, I supervise PhD students who are writing their theses, the highest level of research projects for the universities around the world. They are writing these in English, so certainly it’s a great and huge responsibility and it’s a challenge, but my students are so talented and I would like to say that because I come from family of a teacher, my mother was a teacher and my grandmother was a teacher, for me, it’s a real pleasure, I like it. It’s a joy and it’s a huge experience. Doesn’t matter in which language, just teaching and helping students is always a great pleasure. It’s my duty first of all, but it’s also a pleasure. Students, they bring you such a stimulus, you know, teaching you as you teach them. It also stimulates you to do your own research and in a way presents many kinds of opportunities to approach the same subject from different angles coming from this teaching experience and fresh perspectives brought by good students and I certainly do have very good students! Students really help you to get this kind of inspiration for your future work. I’m very lucky in this sense and I am grateful to my destiny that I’m continuing teaching this musicology program and it’s not at all easy, but it’s real privilege, so I’m very happy about that.

Janyl Jusupjan: Where did you start your teaching career? I remember you used to work for the School of Oriental and African Studies and now you teach at Cambridge, don’t you?

Razia Sultanova: Yes. At the beginning of my teaching career I taught in Tashkent and then in Moscow conservatories, but here, in London, I started at the London University which has different institutes and colleges and Goldsmith college was the first place I taught at. I was very happy to be involved in the teaching process and I worked with John Baily, the main expert on music in Afghanistan. He is a great musician who plays the Afghani Rubab. The advantage of John Bails’s career and his studies lay in the fact that he has always worked together with his wife – Veronica Doubleday. She is a singer and a musician and together they have performed Afghan music all over the world. They work mostly on Kabul and Herat districts, which means their study focuses on the main cities of Afghanistan. They have worked with the most famous musicians in Afghanistan and they learned plenty of music which they also performed and they are great and very inspirational people.s(00.27.00) Later I moved to SOAS, which is School of Oriental and African Studies, belonging to the London University. SOAS is an institution which focuses on the study of Asia and Africa and the music department there presented quite a special place, because only ethno-musicologists work there, which means they are all dealing with the study of traditional music from different parts of the globe. I have always wanted to be involved in study of the general subject of music and society, music and culture, music and history and so on. That was my reason for moving to Cambridge University, where I met world-famous scholars like Nicholas Cook, John Ring and other famous people, It’s a real privilege to work with them, to be near them, to behold how much they have achieved, to see the fire in their hearts towards the study of music, and to teach my students, to encourage others to follow in their footsteps, so it’s a real blessing to be involved with Cambridge.

Janyl Jusupjan: I understand what an exciting environment you may have in life. You mentioned Veronica Doubleday, she wrote about the women of Herat, I read this book. I remember very clearly how she went to a hammam first time with Herati women. Over there, women were only allowed to go to hammam without accompaniment of the men. They would spend a lot of time in the hammam and she felt like she was a poor woman, because she didn’t have this culture of going to hammam, because the local women had different things to put on their skin and the hair. Such women as Veronica Doubleday were inspiration for me. Now I am holding in my hand your book “From Shamanism to Sufism”, which I read with great pleasure and interest. It’s a beautiful book, which puts music and cultural rituals of women in a proper frame. For you, writing a book is an important part of your creativity, I believe, but I wanted to know, how long it takes to write a book, because when we met, I remember asking this question, when we met now 7-8 years ago in London.

Razia Sultanova: Thank you for this question. Really, this book which took such a long time for me to complete is one of the most important books in my life. I’m very pleased that now there is a second edition of this book in London and Korean people have translated that book and it was published in South Korea. It’s also getting translated and published in Serbia and in Germany, so really, that book was something crucially important for me, because it served to demonstrate how the culture, tradition and religion issues were developing in Central Asia
from a female perspective. It was a very important research question to me. The book took, I know it sounds strange, about 20 years to finish, because it covers a huge geographical area, it covers different republics like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and then I went further because I had a very interesting research data from Tatarstan, on the same questions ofsIslam and music. My grandmother Fstima-obi, I mean from the Tatar side, my mother’s side, was as abystay which means in translation a religiously educated woman. It’s kind of a female Imas. She was giving her lessons of the study of Islam to girls, so she was a kind of a teacher in a domestic setting. During the times of the Soviet Union, as you can guess, there wasn’t any chance to teach Islam openly and there wasn’t any institutions to study it at. Particularly for girls, you know, that girls in Islam cannot study Islam in the same class with boys. That’s why girls are supposed to have a female teacher and that phenomenon was spread even further, because in my book I also introduce some examples from Azerbaijan and from Turkey and Afghanistan, which means that unique phenomenon of how women are taught in Islam and how they carry on this knowledge from the older generation to the younger generation, from seniors to youngsters, covers a huge geographic area. That was a real challenge for me, because it concerned not actually purely music, but the sound, the sound of Islamic prayer, or Mavlids recitations. (00.33.00) I mean this recitation of collective communal singing, when women and their daughters, and their mothers, grandmothers, they are all gathering together in the evenings to observe their religious holidays or just in their free evenings and recite either Suras (chapters) of Quaran or some Mavlids or some stories about the history of Islam, some legends and some very interesting educational reciting for little girls: how to behave, what is the right way to live,, how a woman should be dealing with her family, with her husband, with her children, how to respect the elderly generation and so on. Everything was quite well reflected in this kind of religious females singing and nobody could do this research except for another woman.
At the 1990’s I was involved in this kind of field recordings, getting in touch with these religiously educated women in Ferghana Valley, because Ferghana Valley is also not only very historical place in Uzbekistan, but it’s also the main area for religious education: for the old, classical, traditional poetry and the most beautiful Uzbek language. The most classically correct Uzbek language comes from the Ferghana Valley. It’s also the most religious area. Historically it has been the home of very famous spiritual leaders called otinoy. It was my luck that I had a chance to meet those women and to make recordings with them and what I heard, what I recorded was an absolutely astonishing discovery that, in fact, female performers manage to preserve the most unique religious heritage connected to Sufism, which is a mystical development in Islam, having preserved it through the Soviet times. So, everything to do with religion was banned during the Soviet times, but female communities just kept gathering together and performing for themselves. Out of public eye and outside of men’s involvement. They managed to preserve a huge level of religious culture, traditional culture (00.36.00) and that was my discovery, which I tried to bring together and to realise as a book. I am very lucky that I managed to do it. I am very lucky to witness the level of interest it inspires in other scholars.

Janyl Jusupjan: It is amazing for me. It is exceptionally important, because we know there were so many researchers of Central Asia for a long time, especially 18-19 centuries and they were all men, obviously. They didn’t have the necessary access to the world of women, especially in more religious areas like Ferghana, because they were hidden behind the wall, so to say. You had this unique opportunity to enter these ichkari – inside of private houses where outsider men have no access, so it is “inside, inside”. You’ve spent twenty yearst in order to write this book, you’ve traveled around a lot, so that you bring all that information in front of you. Please, tell us how you wrote this book?

Razia Sultanova: First of all, the story is simple because in the last eight years of living in the Soviet Union, we lived in Moscow, because I did my PhD degree, I got my PhD degree from the Moscow State Conservatory and then I had a lucky chance to have a job. While talking about music and religion, which was an absolutely little-known and actually a forbidden subject, with one of the musicologists, I was advised to concentrate or to produce kind of small article on this subject and that was not easy. While I was thinking how to make it, an editor from the publishing house “Znanie (“Знание” which translates as “Knowledge”), had approached me and said: “It would be nice to have a book on the subject of music and religion and how it all developed in Central Asia and Uzbekistan where you are from. Why don’t you go to collect some data for the research subject and bring us a manuscript for a possible book?” That was an amazingly interesting proposal! So, the next time I went to see my family in Uzbekistan, I travelled deeper into the area where I had spent my childhood and had grown up. Arriving in Andijan and having asked my colleagues and friends about possible recordings of local religious ceremonies involving singing, my dear former coursemate Valia Asanova told me: “Oh, it’s very simple. We can find for you such performers. In our neighbourhood there is a lady who performs only songs related to the origin of Islam and everything about the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammed”. (00.39.03). I was surprised! While we started to look for that woman-singer, we found another completely different one and even more – an entire female community specialising in performance of such genres. For that I had to go to various villages around Andijan. Hearing that I was someone coming from Moscow, first of all, they got afraid of me and their first questions when we met were: “Are you going to write about us to local newspapers, media, or broadcast about us in the Uzbek radio programs?” I said: “Don’t worry, I’m just an academic, a boring musicologist. I’m writing scholarly articles, I won’t tell anyone in Uzbekistan that I met you, that I had a chance to meet you and make recordings, because I’m living and working in Moscow, don’t worry.” Then, those
ladies, otinoys, they told me: “Can we gather all together for your recording sessions?”. That was the most interesting moment in starting the new research, because when there of them came over and started to sing, to recite, it became obvious that it was the most interesting, the most moving and beautiful in my understanding old historical recitations I had ever had a chance to observe. They sung as a trio, three of them. They were of different age, of different strength of the voice and so on, but their love and their devotion to this genre, their knowledge of this genre was amazing. It took place in a village called Dur-Dur. I understood that that it was in a way a parallel world, we had never heard about it, we had no knowledge about this singing, nor had we ever had a chance to meet someone who will tell you about this. It was singing, but without musical instruments. It was beautiful, but without any kind of embellishments or any resemblance of opera-style singing called Bel canto, whatsoever. Every performance was so emotional, deeply expressive with dynamic development, but it was a domestic female art, not known to the audience outside of their houses. I had difficult times trying to specify the style and meaning of that phenomenon, translating those singing pieces, analysing these recitations. To get some help I even went to the most famous medieval poetry scholars, members of the Academy of Science of Uzbekistan. What I learned however was: none of those Uzbek men, the members of the Uzbek Academy of Science or those among my musicologists-colleagues knew anything about those genres of songs. (00.42.00) So, I was surprised that it has existed for centuries, despite the Soviet-imposed bans. It remained an orally transmitted form of art from grandmothers to their granddaughters, and it was still alive, but only within female communities. How this genre could have been completely ignored in their study and why nobody knew where it was, what part of traditional culture it occupied, how to classify it, what was the niche of this cultural genre… That was my surprise, which brought me to this realisation of the necessity to write books about it. First of all, just in Russian, with Uzbek translation, with accompanying musical transcriptions, I published it in a very small format, I think it was with a kind of private publisher, just some transcriptions of those rituals and of those recitations. That was an already striking experience, but it’s a small, very tiny book you can fit in the palm of your hand. Upon coming abroad, and once I already had a job and became an established ethnomusicologist, I looked around and found a publisher which was IB Taurus, a very famous publisher, whose main field was Middle East, Central Asia, Sufism, Islam and so on. I then faced another challenge, because the Commissioning Editor who was excited about the project said: “We need to know how Islam came to central Asia”. I said: “I’m just a musicologist, I personally don’t know this subject”. To which the Editor, Dr. Lester Croo, replied: “But you will learn about it and write about it”. So, the whole part of the history of Central Asia related to Islam, Sufism, and Shamanism, which developed in the area within Islam, I had to study first and to reflect on it in my book manuscript. As a result, I had to come up with a title which brought together Islamic and Shamanic features within music and particularly female performance. It was a long way to go, but I am very happy that I have accomplished the task.

Janyl Jusupjan: Now you are writing another book. You have, I think, several books now already published. How do you manage to teach, to cope with family responsibilities in an Uzbek household incorporating it with writing, which requires a lot of time and focus?

Razia Sultanova: A very good question! Yes, I grew up in Central Asia, in the very heart of Uzbekistan in Ferghana Valley, in Andijan. I am lucky to have had supportive parents, I’m also lucky to have a husband who was always encouraging me to accomplish the project, to finish a book, to finish an article, to find the publisher and so on. He is my main adviser. With children it was also a huge challenge, because I wanted them to know our culture, not only in the way of family education, not only in knowing our languages, but also our music. Both of them, our daughter and our son, have music qualifications, so we tried hard to make them musical. But none of them became professional musicians. They found their own professional ways, but it’s always fun to be together, to try to perform together something just for fun or pleasure. But while they were growing up, I used to perform some things together with them and we had a few international experiences in the process, because I performed together with my daughter in Paris, and it was a very interesting experience. I also went with my son to Ireland , to Limerick to perform and that was very interesting, because my son, – a cello and piano player, – was accompanying me on the Uzbek drum called doyra while I was playing Dutar and singing an Uzbek Ghazal-poem by Mashrab, a Sufi poet of the 17th century. With my children we had different experiences in performing together many times for various occasions, but now my children have grown up, they have other professional interests and we don’t play together as often as we used to, but perhaps in the future we will find another chance to cary on.

Janyl Jusupjan: It is another challenge, of course, to help your children to understand your culture, because you feel how they drift away from you and there are a lot of fears connected with that. Of course, I know it as well. Book publishing now is going through huge transformation, because of all these changes in technology, especially artificial intelligence. I know that some of your books are in electronic form, paperback, hard cover or Kindle form, but what about, perhaps, audio format? A number of people who listen to audio is growing very rapidly thanks to the possibilities smart phones offer.

Razia Sultanova: It’s a good question about the opportunity technology brings to our current life, but I don’t think it’s a question for me because it’s more of a question for the publishing houses. It’s an excellent idea, you are right, to have the book in audio format, but most probably it will take some time, because academic books – they are books for specialists, for students, for professionals and that’s why, probably, so far there haven’t been any audio versions. But, let’s hope there will be some in the future.

Janyl Jusupjan: maybe some of your students will take over such tasks. I would like to ask you if people want to contact you, how they can reach you? How will they find your books?

Razia Sultanova: Well, Amazon.co.uk is the best place to find my published books, because the book, which is going through the publishing process, you know, the last stages on the publishing process, it’s my book number 10. Other books are easily available on Amazon or to find me, I’m still on Facebook. I think it’s the best way if someone is seeking advice or needs a consultation. Thank you very much for inviting me. I wish to you and your website a very successful, prosperous year. Thank you, Janyl.

Janyl Jusupjan: Thank you dear Razia, I am wishing you a wonderful year ahead!