Writing in 1872, Sir Alfred Lyall, Governor of the North-Western Provinces of British India, was talking about the reluctance amongst many of the old Muslim scholarly class of North India to embrace the modern, enlightened learning of the West. For Lyall, to be an “Orientalist” was to be one of those Anglo-Indian advocates of state support for “Oriental Learning”—the study of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit—in the tradition established by Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who had been worsted by the “Anglicists” led by Lord Macaulay in 1835. To adopt the meaning popularized by Edward Said, we might say that while Lyall makes a classic “Orientalist” judgment about the value of Eastern civilization, he is also making an observation about the relationship between knowledge and power that still resonates today. Lyall is consciously echoing Macaulay's notorious statement, “A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia,” which has often been taken as a byword for the arrogance of Europeans confronted with an Orient to which they felt themselves superior. The obvious point is that Macaulay had no interest in Oriental knowledge or knowledge of the Orient: he was not an Orientalist at all. Perhaps this is why Said dealt with him only tangentially.
This is why, on questions relating to the "mood" of the natives, Russian power felt itself to be entirely helpless. It was the main source of that panic which followed as a result of the Andijan uprising. This also explains why, notwithstanding the absolute calm in the region throughout the 1880s and 1890s, right up until the first flashes of the Andijan uprising, the authorities never ceased to repeat that, they may say things are quiet, but… anything might happen.' 1 The Bolshevik activist and historian Pyotr Galuzo published these lines in 1926, ten years after Tsarist authority in Central Asia had been rocked by a widespread revolt against the conscription of local Muslims into labour battalions, and almost thirty years since a Sufi spiritual leader called Muhammad Ali Sabyr, better known as the 'Dukchi Ishan', had led 2,000 of his followers in an attack on the Russian garrison of Andijan, a town at the eastern end of the Ferghana valley in modern-day Uzbekistan. For Galuzo these events were linked, not simply because they represented the most significant attempts at violent resistance to Russian rule in Central Asia before 1917, but because of their effect on official thinking. He argued that it was the Tsarist regime's panicked overreaction to Andijan which accelerated the distribution of firearms amongst Turkestan's small but growing population of Slavic settlers. This in turn allowed the latter to exact a terrible revenge on the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz of Semirechie for the 2,500 or so Europeans who were killed in the 1916 revolt, as thousands of nomads were massacred or driven into exile whilst their land was seized. 2 Galuzo's is one of the earliest historical judgements on the origins, significance and impact of the Andijan uprising, an episode which has generated more debate than almost any other event from the fifty years of Russian colonial rule in Turkestan before the upheavals of the revolutionary period. His assessment was typical of early Soviet historiography which criticised Tsarist colonialism as brutal and exploitative, and he would later publish a still more polemical work denouncing the pre-revolutionary regime. 3 Russophone historians of the Soviet era made little effort to establish the deeper motivations and causes of the Andijan uprising, instead interpreting it to suit whatever The research for this article was funded by the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and the British Academy. I would like to thank
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.