The forbidding Ark (citadel), and the infamous Kalan Minaret, Bukhara. Both played less than savoury roles during the rule of Bukhara’s notoriously bloodthirsty Emir Nasrullah in the 19th century. In the preceding seven hundred years, though, the tower served as a lighthouse for caravans homing in across the vast, unforgiving Kizil Kum desert. Curiously, when Genghis Khan sacked Bukhara in the 13th century the minaret was the only structure spared his depredations, while the entire oasis and its fortifications were reduced to rubble: somehow he was daunted by its sheer size, and he left it alone. In Nasrullah’s time, it found an entirely different calling: thieves, bandits, criminals of other hues, and just about anybody who displeased him - such displeasure being decided on pure caprice - were thrown from the top of the Kalan Minaret to their deaths. But two Englishmen who didn’t find favour with the Emir were treated differently, though scarcely less less gorily. A large part of the fascination of the Silk Route for the enthusiast is its inextricable twining with the ‘Great Game’, the highly romanticised 19th century cold war between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. That this ‘Tournament of Shadows’ (the corresponding Russian term) was played out in mountains, remote valleys and deserts between rival agents like lonely heroes of some desolate Asian Ragnarök was, and still remains, not the least of its attractions. One of the two Englishmen mentioned above was Captain Arthur Connolly of the Bengal Light Cavalry - who in retrospective irony coined the phrase ‘Great Game’ in a letter to Sir Henry Rawlinson, the famous Orientalist and political strategist. His visit to Bukhara in 1842 though had little if any political purpose: he had come looking for his compatriot, Lieut. Col. Charles Stoddart, rumours of whose incarceration in Nasrullah’s notorious vermin-infested dungeons had reached India, and to have him freed. The young, romantically inclined Connolly had also heard that Stoddart - an example of obstreperous Anglo-Saxon arrogance, and contempt for Eastern custom which in large measure was responsible for the Emir’s behaviour towards him - had purchased a limited freedom by disavowing his faith and converting to Islam under threat of death. What the luckless Connolly didn’t bargain for was the Emir’s perversity, of which the Khans of Khokand and Khiva had already warned him before he set out. Reasoning that two Englishmen were better than one, Nasrullah now threw both into his dungeons. On 17th June 1842 the two Indian Army officers were led into the main square in front of the Ark, with their hands tied. Stoddart - his conversion to Islam notwithstanding - was beheaded first. Connolly was offered his life in return for a similar conversion, but Stoddart’s severed head on the sand told him how much that assurance was worth. Besides, he was something of a militant Christian, and made of a very different mettle from Stoddart. He refused, and soon his head too joined Stoddart’s in that baking desert square. In many ways the Stoddart-Connolly double murder adrenalised the Great Game, but the end result was the one thing that the British desperately but vainly wished to avert. By the end of the century all of Central Asia was firmly in Russian hands, the three Khanates now subsumed into the tsar’s empire as protectorates. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 sparked a few brief flashes of independence, but these were brutally smothered, and the Khanates settled down to new lives as Soviet Republics with Stalin’s crazily drawn borders. Today, in Bukhara Emir Nasrullah is very pointedly never mentioned. Instead it is the last Amir, who fled to Afghanistan in 1920 when the Soviets bombed Bukhara who holds the stage, effacing his entire ancestry. His summer palace on the city’s outskirts - a classic example of imperial Russian colonial architecture, set prettily among gardens and fruit trees and peacocks on the edge of the Kizil Kum - is the tourist’s first stop. There is nothing here to even remotely suggest the sinister. As for the Ark, and the Kalan Minaret, they make for excellent photography, if you’re any good with a camera. They pose well, even if youre not. *** JJ.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 16:23:08 +0000
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