Orozbakov’s Manas (Kyrgyzstan)

The images are of a manuscript, numbered 208 (formerly 1794), held in the Collection of Rare Manuscripts of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic. In addition to the cultural, ethnographic, and literary value of the text, the item is significant for how it is the product of variant, seemingly competing, traditions meeting at a particular historical moment. The object is a negotiated meeting point between orality and literacy, local traditions and reformist movements, and indicative of the relationship between Soviet ambitions and the emerging ‘national’ cultures.

The pages shown are part of a volume contributing to the first ‘complete’ variant of the epic Manas, presenting the life of the titular hero, produced 1922-26. The metrical lines are the product of the oral performer Sagımbay Orozbakov (1867-1930), a famed jomokchu (bard) of the turn of the twentieth century. The text is the product of an oral culture, a Kyrgyz versified storytelling tradition, in which Orozbakov was immersed. Orozbakov could be regarded as representative of pre-Soviet culture. He was trained in the traditional manner, by learning from a respected predecessor (Tınıbek Japıy uulu), and had a reputation of being a talented performer. Seismic social changes following the Central Asian Revolt of 1916 (Ürkün), from which he fled to Xinjiang, and the Russian Revolution, had made him financially destitute. Supplying the first linear biography of Manas would, it was hoped, provide him with a source of income and additionally restore his reputation.

The Arabic script recording the oral culture, likely by Ibırayım Abdırakhmanov (1888-1967), a Jadid-educated Kyrgyz schoolteacher, is reflective of another social element present at the moment of production: the pre-Soviet literary class. Under the guidance of another Jadid-educated schoolteacher, Bashkir folklorist Kayum Miftakov (1882-1948/1949), Kyrgyz-language cultural materials were being collected, collated, and catalogued. The pan-Turkic, pan-Islamic Jadid movement committed vernacular texts to paper and disseminated them in print for educational purposes and for social reform. This cultural milieu appears to have provided a new framework for engaging with material such as Manas, and Orozbakov’s text may be even tailoring for this worldview. The text, presenting the entire biography of the hero from birth to death rather than individual episodes,  contains the label tarıkh (history), a difference from the earlier Kyrgyz-collected Manas material labeled qissa (story). The hero’s ethnic identity is changed from Nogoy to Kyrgyz. Pan-Turkic and pan-Islamism elements appear. These may be instances of Orozbakov, in the traditional manner of an oral performer, altering the material to please a patron in order to secure financial support. The handwritten Arabic script, an arduous and labour intensive activity given the scale of the work, records the lengthy mediation between the written and the oral, the performer and the scribe.

The manuscript itself, a compendium of small school exercise books (22.5 cm x 17.9cm), with their original covers removed (remnants of which are visible in the staples), seemingly glued together, and all bound within a now faded floral-motif cardboard binding, shows another layer: one of these booklets, noticeably less faded than others, visible in the photograph, features an embossed CCCP hammer and sickle logo in the top corner. This material indication of the Soviet presence on which the Kyrgyz culture is recorded in Arabic script (sometimes written perpendicular to the printed ruled lines) is a reminder of both the complex relationships between different ideologies and worldviews and of the role of the Soviet Union in the creation, continuation, recording, recasting, and reception of localized cultures and traditions. The Orozbakov material received ideological criticism, and, subsequently, little official financial support. In addition to complaints about its religious and nationalistic features (and the impression it was an outdated relic of feudalism), the enterprise was marked by the period in more physical ways. Other sections of the transcription appear to have been lost when the intellectuals circulating the manuscripts disappeared in the purges. The manuscript under discussion was kept with other folkloric material held at the Institute of Cultural Construction (later, Study of Kyrgyz Language and Writing and later still, the archive of the National Academy of Sciences). Though presented as field transcriptions, the cleanness of the presentation, and seeming interruptions by the scribe to remove problematic elements and to ‘Kyrgyzify’ the language, suggests a later copy answering to contemporary Soviet-orientated ideological concerns.

The archive containing the object charts the changing values ascribed to Manas. The early cataloging reveals the separation of Manas from other epics, and, subsequently, the creation of a distinct subject, Manasology, from folkloristics. Work on the material similarly reflected contemporary concerns (such as transliteration into Latin script, and then into Cyrillic) and the impact of technology (the role of the typewriter, the increase in sound recordings). Treatment of this material illuminates how it was regarded firstly as a source for linguistic and cultural scholarship, and then as a literary monument (albeit one frequently at odds with the living oral tradition). Transcriptions could be mined, altered, revised, (and ignored) for some purpose supposedly greater than the text itself. The complex, and arduous, route to print, similarly reflective of contemporary politics, plots the emergence of a Kyrgyz national identity sometimes in support of, other times against, Soviet ideas. (A variant by Orozbakov’s predecessor, Tınıbek, collected around c. 1900, was printed first in Moscow in 1925 soon after Soviet Kirghizia was created, and later reprinted by Central Asian exiles in Nazi Berlin in 1943.) Purges of academic intelligentsia resulted in both fluctuations in attitudes to the material and to the delays in work. Post-Stalin attacks on national epics, resulted in a spirited defence of Manas, led to a compromise facilitated by the Kazakh academic Mukhtar Auezov: the creation of a ‘harmonized’ edition that could be the subject of scholarship while agreeing with contemporary ideological attitudes. Focus on the output of individual performers, such as that of Orozbekov, appeared later, only to be matched again with ideological complaints (and financial constraints given the size of the material). The collapse of the Soviet Union saw Manas being used for nation-building, and China’s UNESCO-supported claim of custodianship of the Manas epos, resulted in further interest and drives to publish the material with regards to questions of ownership and heritage. Just like the manuscript itself, whose condition statement ‘requiring attention’ can be expanded beyond the issue of conservation, the partial digitalization and online availability of MS 208 is a product the difficult context in which it was desired, created, and used.
 
Further Reading
MS 208 is part of the archive of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic, and is partially available online. The ‘harmonized’ edition was published by Kyrgyzmambas (1958-60). Editions of Orozbakov include those published by Kirghizstan basmasi (1978-82), Kyrgyzstan (and later Sham) (1995-2014), and Khan-Teŋir (2010). An English translation by D. Prior of a section of Orozbakov's text, the Memorial Feast for Kökötöy Khan, published by Penguin is forthcoming. For collections of scholarship on the epos, see Fomenko, ed. Манас гэроичэский эпос киргизского народа (Фрунзе: Илим, 1968) and Aliev et al’s Энциклопедический феномен эпоса «Манас» (Бишкек: Главная рэдакция Кыргызской Энцнклопедии / Науцно-пропагандистский дэловой проет «Мурас», 1995); for recent studies, see D. Prior, Patron, Party, Patrimony: Notes on the cultural history of the Kirghiz epic tradition (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asia Studies, 2000), S. Jacquesson, ‘On Folklore Archives and Heritage Claims: the Manas Epic in Kyrgyzstan’ (2021), and J. Plumtree ‘A Telling Tradition: Preliminary Comments on the Epic of Manas, 1856–2018’, in Medieval Stories and Storytelling: Multimedia and Multi-Temporal Perspectives, ed. S. Thomson, pp. 239-301 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021).

James Plumtree (PhD CEU) is Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia.