Exiting my flight from Delhi, I stood at the immigration desk, where the officer asked whether I was “with them”, gesturing with his chin towards the raucous gang of Indian men waiting in line behind me. “No” I said. He stamped my passport. As I loaded my single suitcase into the back of one of the taxis waiting outside, I asked the driver who was assisting me whether he saw many other Indian travellers. “Many” he said “looking for entertainment”. As the conversation went on, I learned about the well-known and well-frequented sex-tourism route between Delhi and Tashkent: the horny male youth of India’s middle-class would travel, scoping out sex-workers who were deemed fairer-skinned than those back home. This explained the suspicious and judgemental glances that would be flung my way in every city by everybody. I was neither the correct kind, nor the right quality, of visitor. Any Silk Road charms began to unravel quickly.
Turquoise-tiled domes, lofty minarets, and regal iwan-squares in Samarkhand, cool madrasas in Bukhara, the mighty walls of the old city of Khiva. After a life spent in Delhi, its environs dotted with the reminiscent architecture of the Mughals, descendants of the 16th century Uzbek warlord Babur, the impact of such quintessential central Asian monuments diminished quickly. The cavernous Soviet buildings that housed the wet-markets were a novelty, but their cacophonous hum, the jostling of bodies, and most products, were familiar too. And yet, it was melon season: late autumn in a country culturally enamoured by the fruit. Every market I entered sold dozens of varieties, in greens and yellows, small and many times the size of my head, smooth, striated and knobbly, watermelons, musk-melons, winter melons. Little wonder that Babur complained in his autobiography of Hindustan that “there are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, no musk-melons or first-rate fruits…”
Around two weeks into my journey, field research completed documenting the mud-brick Khorezmian fortresses of the last centuries BCE and first centuries CE, I had decided to drive for three hours further northwest, deeper into the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, to the city of Nukus. Here, the Savitsky Museum, founded in 1966 by the Ukrainian archaeologist and collector Igor Vitalyevich Savitsky, is well-known among art-historians and hipster tourists for its vast collection of avant-garde Soviet artworks that were rescued from censorship at the metropoles. At the edges of empire, works of Constructivism, Cubism, and Expressionism, especially those produced either in Central Asia or by Central Asians, were gathered, hidden, and eventually displayed. And it was my first encounter with Soviet Orientalism. Remarkable paintings with well-worn tropes: Uzbeks working in fields and marketplaces, women in bright traditional clothing, textiles and thick-carpets with floral designs, and all the produce of the land, especially grapes and watermelons. Kipling and Thackeray, the paintings of John Frederick Lewis, of Eugène Delacroix, I saw them all.
One painting in particular struck me: on a dark yellow background, was the portrait of a gaunt old man, with sunken eyes, dark wrinkled skin, and a wispy grey beard, all consumed under the shadow cast by his enormous brown and white cloth turban. His shoulders are draped in a plain crimson garment and he holds up his two hands sideways, their long spindly fingers cradling a thin slice of yellow-green melon. Enfeeblement and exotica entwined. A tour guide told me that the painter was one German Jeglov, born in 1935 in Baku, graduating from its art institute in 1963, then from the Moscow printing school in 1969, before returning to central Asia, and passing away in 2010. I looked up again: the man’s face is dour as he stares down at the meagre fruit. His frown accentuated by his prominent furrowed brow, crows-feet, deep “smile lines”, and the taut sinews in his neck. This time I saw the aftermath of Soviet imperialism: desolation, destitution, and despair. Proud Socialist Realism, the celebration of workers, industry, the Union, carefully replaced by a resistive Expressionism, with its chaotic and feverish brushwork summoning the anguish of its subject. Shaped by empire, embodying it, and even replicating its practices, an artist tries something different. That day I moved away from the painting wondering whether this troubled act of defiance, this complicated attempt to reshape the narrative, was a success. Now I appreciate that even the attempt to see differently is enough.