Jerzy Rohoziński
Józef Osmołowski (1820–1881), unlike the entire galaxy of outstanding exiles, made a career in the tsarist administration of his own free will, becoming one of the most outstanding 19th-century ethnographers studying the community of nomadic Kazakhs.
A practically unknown expert
Antoni Kuczyński briefly mentions him as: “a graduate of oriental studies in Kazan (…) His official functions intersected with strictly scientific interests, which is why the results of fieldwork undertaken in various areas of Kazakhstan are filled with a multitude of ethnographic materials. He was an accomplished expert in the customary law of the Kazakhs…”. In fact, he was, but he remains practically unknown in Poland. The task of presenting his achievements (although not in Poland) was only recently undertaken by the Austrian and Kazakh researcher of the history of Islam in Central Asia under Russian rule, Paolo Sartori and Paweł Szablej, who undertook to publish his work Sbornik kirgizskich obyczajew imiejuszczich w Ordie Siłu zakona (“Collection of Kyrgyz customs carrying the force of law in the Orda”). Would it not be worth considering the publication of this collection in Poland, for example, through initiating a series devoted to Polish researchers of Kazakh culture in the 19th century? Especially since it is a work that stands out among others from that period due to its high level of substance.
The forerunner of “participant observation”
Osmołowski, a graduate of the excellent Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Kazan (1844), a polyglot, studied local variants of customary law and did not try to unify it by force. Well acquainted with the Muslim legal literature of the Hanafi school, he asked expert questions of the bijas [respected and wealthy Kazakhs from notable families who held court] and mullahs. He tested and verified the collected material on the most wide-ranging and diverse audience possible. Long before Malinowski, he used the “participant observation” method. He was perfectly aware of the social context and dynamic nature of the object of his research. Delegated in 1848 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Orenburg Border Commission, he quickly learned Kazakh and Chagatai (Uzbek). A year later, he received an order from the Commission to collect material on the Kazakh judiciary. The period 1849–1851 would therefore be spent on his travels in the steppe. In the process, he would probably be tasked to carry out various diplomatic and espionage missions. He received clear instruction: to make a comparative analysis of the work of his predecessor Lev d’Andre and the collection of the Sultan of Trans-Ural Kazakhs Dzhanturin, and to also supplement both. Osmołowski finished preparing his report in December of 1851. Its first part, somewhat less original in comparison to other works on the subject, is – as Sartori and Szablej assess – “an ethnographic scientific aid aimed at filling gaps in the knowledge of local law to the maximum extent” rather than a practical code for use in the courts. The second, fully original, referring to Muslim legal texts, contains ambitious attempts to capture the relationship between adat and sharia, i.e. customary and Muslim law, a description of the evolution of the former under the influence of Muslim jurisprudence, which – in his opinion – played an increasingly important role among the Kazakhs.
So as not to harm Russia
The Commission considered the collected material satisfactory upon the first reading, but the work was never published. Why was this so? First of all, Osmolovsky himself wanted to supplement the material with observations of prevailing customs among the Kazakhs roaming the banks of the Syr Darya River, which he collected in 1853. Secondly, the idea arose to use the collection to codify the law of the Russian Empire, which involved long, bureaucratic procedures. Meanwhile, in 1854, the new head of the Orenburg Border Commission was the orientalist Vasily Grigoriev, who was opposed to the publication, on the grounds that it attributed too much importance to Sharia at the expense of “native” Kazakh customs. Furthermore, he not only opposed it, but upon leaving office he took its manuscript to St. Petersburg in order that “it would not fall into the wrong hands and cause harm to Russia”. In this way, he made Osmolovsky’s valuable legacy inaccessible to other researchers.
Is Russia enough for Asia?
Initially Vasily Grigoryev (1816–1881) was even delighted with Osmolovsky and his linguistic abilities. This orientalist, and head of the Orenburg Border Commission in the years 1851–1862, was undoubtedly an interesting and unusual figure. Although he left a black mark on Osmolovsky’s legacy, he was by no means an enemy of ethnographic knowledge and research. In Orenburg, he was deeply involved in the creation of a scientific library that contained the most important works on the history of the peoples of Central Asia, and its organization was undertaken by another of our compatriots, Bronisław Zaleski, who attained great recognition in the eyes of the governor. Due to his efforts working in the library, Zaleski was able to gather considerable material for his two (published status unknown) works: Wygnańców polskich w Orenburgu [Polish Exiles in Orenburg] i Szerzenia się Rossyi w Azyi [The Spread of Russia in Central Asia], where he describes the conquered territories in geographical and ethnographic terms, devoting most of his attention towards the Bashkirs. Grigoryev was an ideologist of the empire, but the ideas he professed were quite specific. As his biographer Nikolai Veselovsky (1848–1918), an archaeologist and orientalist, later wrote, “Vasily Vasilyevich did not count himself among the supporters of our conquests in Central Asia. He saw no sense in it (…) but he claimed: ‘I am certain that sooner or later we will have to take over the whole of Central Asia – whether our government wants it or not – by virtue of the law that better educated nations inevitably subjugate their less developed neighbours in spiritual and material terms'”. He shared Osmolovsky’s objections to the prospect of Slavic agricultural colonization on the banks of the Syr Darya River. He treated Russia’s conquest of the Kazakh steppes as “unification with its former brothers.” No, this was far from being some far-fetched imperial ideology. Grigoriev was sincerely convinced that the Russian administration should learn about the culture and traditions of the peoples under Russian rule. This conviction was not only about how to govern them well, but also to better understand Russia’s place in the world. He himself wrote a lot about the Kazakhs, the Orenburg and Ural Cossacks. It also irritated him that Russian oriental studies and ethnography overly imitated their Western counterparts, and yet the West colonized conquered peoples in a completely different way to the Russians. There is a greater distance between the conquered population and the metropolis there. Of what use is European civilization to Asia? Russia, which acts as a bridge between the East and the West, is enough for it. He probably also believed in the far-fetched arguments that Russia had to conquer Turkestan to “protect” “its” Kazakhs. He had a great weakness for the Kazakhs. He considered them “backward,” but for that he placed the blame on nature. They are backward, but open, susceptible to cultural processing – he claimed. They could be moulded into good subjects of the Tsar by guiding them toward “the beacon of education,” as in the case of the Russian peasantry, who also required a huge amount of work.
Nobody listened to the Orientalists
By expressing such views however, he came to be considered as somewhat of an oddball among officials. As it turned out, the tsarist administration was not open to listening to scholars, orientalists. And nobody was interested in learning Kazakh. And yet 130 years had already passed since the first Kazakhs had accepted Russian subjection! In the end, Grigoriev gave up and in 1862 resigned from the position of governor. He decided to educate the Russian elites in the hope that they would not uncritically imitate the Western, Enlightenment model of the “European civilizing mission” and “savages”, so as not to deprive Russia of its “uniqueness”. He aspired to give a voice to the “Asians” themselves. An admirer of both the Kazakh ethnographer and Russian intelligence officer, Shokan Shyngysuly Walikhanov (1835–1865), Grigoriev adopted the pseudonym “Sultan Mendali Piraliyev” and began to write. He published in the Slavophile newspaper “Dzień” [“Day”], in the “Dziennik Ministerstwa Edukacji Narodowej” [“The Journal of the Ministry of National Education“], “Orenburgskie Wiadomości Gubernialne” [“The Orenburg Governorate News”] and “Północna Pszczoła” [“The Northern Bee”]. He demanded that Kazakhs stop being called “Kirgiz-Kaysaks” or “Kirgyz”, and finally that they should be referred to by their own name – “Kazakhs”. He also claimed that “Asians understand only the language of force” (as a matter of fact he was probably not alone in expressing such a “scientific” outlook); so for their own good one must act towards them as a “stern father would. He ultimately cursed the Tatar translators in the steppe, who had monopolized the Russian state’s contacts with the nomads, at the same time praising the publication of a Russian self-instruction manual for Kazakhs by the Orthodox missionary Nikolai Ilminsky (1822–1891), author of a special alphabet for baptized Tatars (so-called krashens), with whom he shared many common views. It was in such an intellectual environment that our compatriot Józef Osmołowski operated, and it was also through the very judgement of that environment that he was condemned to oblivion. It is worth rescuing him from it today.
Translated by Sylwia Szarejko