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Paper abstract:

A written history of Central Asia for the most part is the history of men who were privileged by birth, wealth, or education. Very little is said or heard, by contrast, about people of humbler birth and more marginal status. One notable marginalized group are Central Asian women, who are generally neglected both in contemporary sources and in modern historical scholarship.

The challenge in writing any historical account of the social life of women in pre-revolutionary Turkestan is that women in Russian Central Asia rarely came into direct contact with the colonial state and thus left few traces in written sources. There existed a category of women, however, who were closely monitored by the authorities and were the subject of extensive documentation. Prostitution was officially regulated in the Russian Empire from 1843 on, and after the conquest of Central Asia, this regulation spread to the territories controlled by the Tsarist authorities. In an attempt to regulate and control prostitution, Russian officials generated vast amounts of documentation, while their policies elicited strong and sustained responses from their Central Asian subjects. I intend to write an account of Russian colonial rule in Central Asia and its impact on the lives of these women. By using colonial records stored in the Central State Archive of Uzbekistan, I aim to explore a much wider range of Russian colonial practices that have not been studied before.

This project contributes to scholarship on colonial politics in the Russian Empire’s periphery. Russian Turkestan and the Tsarist authorities’ attempts to control and regulate prostitution serve as a representative case study. I focus on the prostitution control exercised by the colonial administration and the interplay between colonial authorities and local societies. This focus serves as a starting point to analyse and understand various aspects of the region’s social history in the nineteenth century.

In my paper, I focus on dual language documents: petitions from the local populace to the Russian authorities which were ‘translated’ and dealt with according to the ‘translation’. However, very often these ‘translations’ rarely matched the actual content of the petitions. Interpreters abridged, distorted the actual texts of the pleas, excised important information, tweaked the arguments and created a new text which was delivered to decision-makers. This discrepancy between what was asked and what was understood is a potentially fruitful line of research in understanding ‘dialogues’ between colonised and colonisers.