Stella talked to me a number of occasions of Osh. She did in order somebody who had by no means visited the metropolis, though it is only one hour by bus southwest of Uzgen, the city the place she lived in the Fergana Valley. She would converse the metropolis’s title in a whisper, prolonging the “sh” after which pausing for a beat. The impact was to make “Osh” sound like a harmful hex.
Osh is the largest metropolis in the Kyrgyz portion of the Fergana Valley. Because of its comparatively superior medical amenities, it was the place her mother Lola Freud – now desperately unwell – had gone for checks in December of 1943. She had required particular permission from the Soviet authorities, as was then customary, to set foot exterior the Uzgen district. Lola didn’t inform her daughters about the exact motive for her journey. But Stella realised that it had to be for one thing severe, as Lola was gone for per week.
When Lola returned, she regarded like a shadow of herself. She smiled wanly at Stella, murmuring feebly that she was effective. But she additionally informed her that she was feeling very drained and wanted some relaxation. All Stella knew was that her mother’s well being was worsening, and that the go to to Osh was ultimately linked to her situation.
The very title of the metropolis of Osh started to purchase a malign energy in Stella’s thoughts, as if it was a spirit possessed of an influence to hurt those that stepped in the metropolis. “Osh” would later metamorphose for Stella right into a full-blown angel of loss of life, answerable for taking her mother away from her.
Lola will need to have seen little of Osh throughout her week there. Given her situation, she most likely went straight from her bus to the hospital. But it might have been unattainable for her not to discover from her bus window a big, four-peaked stone promontory in the metropolis centre, hovering 200 metres above it. Lola couldn’t have recognized that this stony mass had as soon as been a significant landmark on the Silk Roads: it was virtually actually the Lithinos Pyrgos, or “Stone Tower”, that the Greek-Roman geographer Ptolemy described in 120 CE as the mid-point on the overland caravan route to China. The locals name the promontory by two names. The Kyrgyz refer to it as Sulaiman-Too, or Sulaiman Mountain; for the Tajiks, it’s Takht-e Sulaiman, the Throne of Sulaiman.
Sulaiman is, of course, the Arabic and Persian title of the tenth-century BCE King of the Israelites, Solomon, son of King David. In addition to constructing the First Temple in Jerusalem, Solomon supposedly wrote the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Proverbs and the lovely Song of Songs. He is revered equally by Jews and Muslims: Jews cherish Solomon as Shlomo, a mannequin of justice in addition to knowledge, whereas Muslims ascribe to Sulaiman uncommon supernatural powers – specifically, magical management over the wind, demons, and djinns.
My mother by no means knew the title of the stone promontory in the Fergana Valley that had been named for an Israelite king. But she would have been fascinated to study that his title has had appreciable energy all through the territories connecting Osh to the Gangetic plains. For Solomon-Sulaiman’s cross-faith djinns have lengthy haunted the Fergana Valley–India route of the Silk Roads, significantly since the time of the Mughal Empire.
The Fergana Valley and the Indian subcontinent have been culturally and commercially linked for over two millennia. From the third century BCE to the third century CE, the Kushan Empire – a syncretic, Sanskrit-speaking, Yuezhi-Zoroastrian-Buddhist-Shaivite Hindu successor to the Indo-Greek Bactrian kingdoms that had emerged in Central Asia after Alexander the Great’s conquest – prolonged from simply south of the Fergana Valley all the method to Bihar in northern India. Indeed, the title “Fergana” could itself have a Sanskrit origin courting again to the Kushan Empire: in historical Sogdian information, it was generally written as “Pargana”, Sanskrit for “small region”.
Local legend claims that Solomon visited the Fergana Valley and died in Osh; his grave is alleged to be at the summit of Sulaiman-Too. The legend most likely dates to the arrival of Islam in the Fergana Valley, although Jews – there’s a long-standing neighborhood in Osh – can also have contributed to it. But the title of Solomon had travelled additional south by the former Kushan Empire territories: it’s related to a number of summits between the valley and India. The Sulaiman Mountain vary extends from the Khyber Pass on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to the city of Jacobabad in Sindh. One of its highest peaks is understood, like the Osh hill, as Takht-e Sulaiman; it’s revered by Pashtuns as the resting place of their founder. Kashmiris likewise declare that Solomon visited their area. A neighborhood legend maintains that Solomon erected a stone temple on a hill overlooking Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital; the hill, which the Mughal chronicler Abul Fazl referred to as Koh-e Sulaiman (Solomon’s hill), is also referred to as Takht-e Sulaiman.
Osh’s promontory, then, was not simply the halfway level in the buying and selling route between Europe and China. It was additionally half of a constellation of mountainous landmarks for retailers, troopers, and pilgrims travelling between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
Sulaiman-Too was the launching level for one of the most consequential invasions of India. At the tender age of eleven, a younger Chagatai prince named Zahir-ud-Din turned ruler of Fergana upon his father’s loss of life in 1494; Uzgen was one of his possessions. He spent his teenagers and his twenties embroiled in countless battles and mutinies, throughout which he was thrice put in and thrice deposed as ruler of Samarqand. By 1510, Zahir-ud-Din was terribly worn out. So, like Lola, he went to Osh.
Legend tells us he climbed to the peak of its stone promontory, prayed to Sulaiman for reduction and inspiration, and obtained a divine message. It directed him to invade Afghanistan, cross the Indus, and conquer India. Although he was a Chagatai Turk, the imperial dynasty Zahir ud-Din based in India was named after his mother’s Mongolian ancestors – the Mughals. He is understood to us now as Babur, the first Mughal emperor of Hindustan.
In his memoir, the Baburnama, Babur talks about constructing a hajra or retreat on Sulaiman-Too at the website of his revelation. It nonetheless exists; though renovated lately, the Hajra Sulaimani boasts the distinctive tilework and hexagram patterns that distinguish generations of Mughal structure from the Fergana Valley, by Afghanistan and Pakistan, to northern India. Babur remarks in the Baburnama on the hajra’s ‘porch’ and its wonderful view, “the whole of the town and the suburbs being at its foot.” The hajra serves as a signpost promoting the Fergana Valley–India route taken by Babur – and the Israelite king’s presence alongside it, into the Gangetic plains.
Ayodhya is positioned at what have been as soon as the crossroads of Silk Roads tributary routes operating west to east and north to south. Its vigorous markets have been for hundreds of years the stopping level for travellers, pilgrims, and merchants from throughout the world. The metropolis was dwelling to folks of many religions: the visiting Chinese monk Faxian described Ayodhya as a Buddhist centre in the fifth century; 100 years later, his compatriot Xuanzang was impressed by its Deva temples; and in 1226, following Ayodhya’s annexation by the Delhi Sultanate, it turned the Muslim-ruled capital of the province of Awadh, a Persianized model of Ayodhya.
In 1500, the Hindu poet Kalyana Malla wrote a story referred to as Sulaiman Charitra (The Story of Solomon). He did so at the request of the son of Ahmad Khan, the king of Ayodhya. Remarkably, this story about an Israelite king, produced for a Muslim ruler, is in Sanskrit: in the story’s prologue, Prince Lad Khan instructions Malla to make use of the “language of the gods” – Sanskrit, the language of most Hindu scriptures – to inform the life story of “the wise and learned Sulaiman”. Malla’s story is written in what Sanskrit calls the shringara rasa or erotic flavour; Malla makes use of it significantly to narrate the affair between Solomon’s mother and father, David (whom Malla calls by his Muslim title, Dawood) and Bathsheba.
The Sulaiman Charitra’s essential love affair, nonetheless, will not be between a person and a lady. It is between completely different cultures and faiths.
Malla says that Sulaiman – Solomon’s title in Muslim custom – is “in heroism[…]like an Arjuna” (the archer who’s the shut companion of Krishna in the Hindu epic Mahabharata), “in beauty another Kamadeva” (the Hindu god of love), and “learned in the eight branches of yoga.” Malla’s Sulaiman, due to this fact, is Islamicized by title and Hinduised by nature. As if to emphasise this syncretic union of cultures, Malla renders the title of David’s lover Bathsheba as Saptasuta –Sanskrit for “seventh daughter”. It is a placing contact: the names Malla gave the lovers, Dawood and Saptasuta, sign a bond between Muslim and Hindu.
Yet hidden in Saptasuta’s title is proof of Malla’s data of a 3rd spiritual custom. He clearly had some consciousness of Hebrew: her Sanskrit title is a literal translation of the Hebrew “Bathsheba” which derives from “bat”, which means daughter, and “sheba”, seven. The sources of the Sulaiman Charitra, then, are Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish. Ayodhya’s crossroads location, with retailers passing by it from Afghanistan in the north and Sindh in the west, meant Jewish in addition to Muslim and Hindu merchants will need to have frequented its bazaar and traded tales with Malla there.
We usually hear of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, the pluralist Hindu-Muslim ethos that sprang up in India’s Gangetic plains from Delhi to Bengal alongside the banks of the intersecting Yamuna and Ganges rivers. The Sulaiman Charitra makes clear that this Hindu–Muslim confluence additionally included Jewish tributaries, suggesting the extent of north India’s connection to the pluralism of Osh and the Silk Roads. But that confluence has been forgotten. And Solomon-Sulaiman has turn into powerless to cease the violent division of Indian communities that after shared tales of the Israelite king.
Excerpted with permission from The Girl from Fergana: Secrets of My Mother’s Chinese Tea Chest, Jonathan Gil Harris, Aleph Book Company.
