Peeking under the Asian Iron Curtain: Socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial modes of friendship between Pakistani and Tajik poets

ABSTRACT

While Cold War historiography often foregrounds severed or frayed political ties, this article ethnographically explores unexpected friendships forming across apparent Cold War divides between Soviet Central Asian and Pakistani intellectuals – most notably, Muhammad Iqbal, Mirsaid Mirshakar, Mirzo Tursunzoda and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. These exchanges were initially made possible by Soviet agendas to build anti-colonial relations abroad by sending Soviet Central Asian intellectuals to international, anti-colonial conferences. Progressive communists like the Pakistani poet Faiz attended these forums too and formed rich friendships with Soviet Central Asian writers like Tursunzoda. I show however, that while Soviet agendas facilitated these friendships forming on shared socialist and anti-colonial grounds, their depth must also be attributed to a shared Persianate heritage. At least three modes of friendship were therefore formed between the same sets of people (socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial), which were made possible by the multiple subjectivities these figures inhabited as simultaneously socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial selves. Through this intersubjective affective relation, high-profile intellectuals found ways of connecting across and beyond Cold War divisions. I thus conceptualize friendship as multiple and generative, whereby two people can form more than one mode of friendship, each premised on markedly different social values and conceptions of self and Other. Despite their differences, these multiple, overlapping subjectivities and affective relations were not incompatible, allowing these intellectuals to connect in other-than-socialist ways at the height of the Cold War.

KEYWORDS:

• Friendship
• Cold War
• Persianate
• anti-colonial
• Pakistan
• Soviet Tajikistan

Browsing the densely packed book stalls along Lahore’s Old City streets in 2016, a modest, yellowing paperback book cover with the English-language title Soviet Literature – One Hundred Poets¹ jumped out at me amongst the hundreds of Urdu-language books. Printed in the USSR in 1972, it contained a short essay, The Great Brotherhood of Literatures, by the poet and former Head of the Soviet Union of Writers (1944–1946) Nikolai Tikhonov, in which he describes standing in front of the Gaudan border crossing between Iran and the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, where a sign read ‘Here is the Soviet Union’. Describing the feeling of standing there, Tikhonov writes:

Caravans which had trodden this age-old road found themselves in another modern world. Passing through the gates, they arrived in the Soviet Union. They had passed out of a world of darkness, oppression and coercion, a world that had seen much over the millennia, into a fantastic land building a splendid world … . the Gaudan gates hold a symbolic significance. They represent the awakening of the Soviet East (Tikhonov 1972, 11).

Tikhonov describes the almost enchanting effect that Soviet Asian, particularly Central Asian, writers had on non-Soviet, post-colonial countries. Most notably, he describes the first trip made to Lahore, Pakistan by a Soviet delegation, which he, the Tajik poet Mirzo Tursunzoda, Belarusian-born writer Anatoli Sofronov² and Uzbek poet Musa Tashmukhamedov (known as Aybek) made in 1949 to attend the first All Pakistan Congress of Progressive Writers. As they crossed the border by car into Pakistan, they were invited by a border guard into his cabin for tea where he pulled out a copy of the revered Pakistani poet Muhammad Iqbal. ‘The border-guard chief and Mirzo Tursun-zade began to recite poetry. It was a rare spectacle. Poetry opened up the road to us. Verses sounded out like the highest confidence placed by man in man’ (Tikhonov 1972, 11 emphasis my own).³

This encounter and Tikhonov’s apparent wonder at the way poetry could open the door to cross-border connections, is emblematic of the histories and affective relations analysed here. This article explores the ways in which, throughout the Cold War period, literary figures and other intellectuals from Soviet Tajikistan and post-Partition Pakistan travelled to one another, exchanged ideas and literature, and, crucially, formed complex, multifarious friendships. These histories were collected primarily between 2015 and 2017 during ethnographic research in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a trip to Lahore, Pakistan and in an extended interview conducted in London. I first became aware of these exchanges through occasional mention of them by some scholars with whom I spent time in Dushanbe. They instantly captured my attention, since Pakistan and the USSR had officially been on opposite sides of the Cold War conflict with, most notably, the Pakistani state banning the Communist Party of Pakistan and signing the Mutual Defence and Assistance Pact with the United States in 1954. After some initial conversations and research in Dushanbe, I drafted a short paper on these cultural exchanges, which I was invited to present at a conference in Lahore in 2016. There, I met with Salima Hashmi, the daughter of poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, one of the key figures involved in these exchanges. Through Salima, I also met several other people who participated in these Tajik-Pakistani exchanges, including Ludmila Vasil’eva in London, Faiz’s official interpreter during his travels around the USSR.

To unpack the multiple meanings and motivations behind these exchanges, I identify friendship as a key focal point and concept in the accounts I heard, and several texts produced at that time. From the Soviet side, these were officially sanctioned and supported exchanges, yet their effects on participants were also other-than-Soviet, I show. During the Cold War, political identities and ideologies were considered central to people’s actions and subjecthood, yet this material shows ways in which people could inhabit and act upon understandings of themselves that escaped, perhaps even contradicted, the politics of the moment. I define friendship here as an affective relation between two or more social entities. It is an intersubjective relation between one‘self’ and anOther. In the material examined here, people speak of connections forming between themselves and others, between self and Other.

Through the concept of friendship, I will argue that, even in highly ideologically charged contexts, actors can inhabit numerous conceptions of the self and connect with Others in heterogenous, multiple ways. This is because more than one type of friendship can form between the same set of people, and each type of friendship hangs on particular intersubjective social and ethical values. The friendships I identify in these Tajik-Pakistani Cold War exchanges are socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial. I will show here that these three distinct modes of friendship sometimes worked together, complementing one another, and at other points were in clear opposition. Friendship was something that Soviet ideology harnessed to craft socialist international solidarity, but the idea and practice of friendship could not be narrowly shaped and controlled by socialist ideology, and, ultimately, other-than-socialist forms of friendship (and hence of selves and Others) also played out in Soviet life.

To make this intervention, I am in direct dialogue with scholarship on transregional cultural spheres (Henig 2016; Ho 2006; Marsden 2009), particularly the Persianate sphere (Amanat and Ashraf 2019; Gould 2015; Green 2019; Hodgkin 2023), the socialist ecumene (Applebaum 2019; Bayly 2007), as well as scholarship on twentieth-century international anti-colonial movements (Clark 2021; Halim 2012; Kirasirova 2018). The socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial each hang on particular conceptions of the self (Ibañez-Tirado 2015; Jalal 2005; Kharkhordin 1999; Kia 2020), and the material explored here will make apparent that these three selves were all deployed at various points throughout these cultural exchanges. To do so, I first briefly introduce the Persianate, socialist and anti-colonial spheres, and contextualize the social and geographical relationship between Tajikistan and Pakistan. I then explore several of the key exchanges I heard first– and second-hand accounts on and several texts produced at the time. I conclude by unpacking the heterogenous friendships that were formed, ultimately arguing that friendships afford the ability to act and relate to oneself and the world in multiple, inconsistent ways, making an intervention into the spatial, political and temporal dimensions of affective relations.

Situating Soviet Tajik-Pakistani exchanges

‘Persianate sphere’ commonly refers to the large geographical expanse where, from eight hundred to early eighteen hundred CE, the Persian language was widely known and used across South and Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau, the Caucasus, Anatolia and beyond – Tajikistan and Pakistan’s territories were, therefore, part of the Persianate sphere. Like Latin and Sanskrit in their own cosmopolises, Persian was a shared literary language that lived alongside the many other languages spoken in these places. Since Persian was spoken by extremely diverse people who understood themselves to be different from one another, but who shared Persian language, literature and social imaginary associated with it, the term Persianate – coined by Hodgson (1974) – refers to a time–space that was independent from, and typically pre-dated, national or ethnic demarcations of people and culture. Through the production and circulation of canonical Persian texts, people of different religious, cultural and linguistic backgrounds shared common ways of speaking and thinking, and so developed some common aesthetic and literary sensibilities (Gould 2015).

Importantly, this ecumene was both real and imagined, meaning that it was a literary sphere that only existed as long as it was imaginatively engaged with through reading, writing, reciting, discussing and circulating of the texts, tropes and ideas that made it up. The more this literary space was engaged with, the more ‘real’ it became and the further and wider this shared literary world existed in people’s lives and minds (Gould 2015; Green 2019; Pollock 1998). Through political domination, commerce, the spread of religious institutions and bureaucracy, the ‘Persianate’ gradually expanded beyond just a literary sphere and into political culture, philosophy, modes of religion and many other dimensions of life. As I show here, the Persianate social imaginary that pervaded these social and literary dimensions of life across places like modern-day Tajikistan and Pakistan became a conduit for politically distant and ideologically separate places to engage with one another, for friendships to form and thus for other-than-socialist and – national selves (and Others) to interact.

Essential to this article’s argument however, the Persianate sphere that Soviet Tajiks engaged with in their exchanges with Pakistani figures was not in conflict with the ‘socialist ecumene’ (Bayly 2007; 2009) that they were also part of. This term, coined by Bayly to describe the shared idioms and social reference points that united socialists around the world across Vietnam, Cuba and the USSR, is useful to describe the network of socialist post-colonial intellectuals that Soviet Tajiks interacted with at forums like the Afro-Asian Writers Association. The types of exchanges documented here were condoned, even facilitated, by the Soviet state, since the socialist agenda at the time made room for cross-border interactions of this kind. Following Stalin’s death and the persecution of Soviet citizens who interacted too much with the outside world (labelled ‘cosmopolitans’), the Khrushchev era (1953–1964) welcomed an active engagement with former colonized nation states across Asia and Africa. The exchanges discussed here primarily began taking place in this moment of rising Soviet internationalist, anti-Western-colonial sentiment.

This change in Soviet foreign policy coincided with anti-colonial movements around the world, notably the influential Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s, and its precursor the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement, which was formed by post-colonial states looking to separate themselves from both sides of the Cold War rivalry (Halim 2012). At the heart of the Movement’s critique was condemnation of both the USA and USSR’s modern-day imperialism. Russian and Soviet colonization of Central Asia was in fact one of the Movement’s main critiques of the Soviet Union (Kirasirova 2011). To therefore distance itself from this imperialist image, it became of central importance that the Soviet Union appear convincingly anti-colonial, build alliances with post-colonial nations and challenge the colonization narrative associated with Central Asia. To do this, Soviet politicians held up Central Asia as a beacon of rapid modernization and liberation under socialism, hoping this would entice post-colonial nations looking to modernize (Kalinovsky 2013; Kirasirova 2011). Tikhonov’s essay introduced at the top of this article vividly illustrates this idea:

The example of our Central Asian republics with their prosperous economies and flourishing culture, is an instructive one [to other nations]. It is not to be wondered at that works by writers in our Asian republics arouse burning interest in other countries, both near and far (Tikhonov 1972, 12).

Here Tikhonov notes the importance of literature, not just modern infrastructure projects, in building these international socialist relations. Kirasirova (2011, 131), Kalinovsky (2013, 202) and Djagalov (2020, 65–73) have shown that Soviet politicians believed Central Asia would not only attract post-colonial states because of its rapid modernization under socialism, but also because of its inherent ‘easternness’ which would act as an important source of connection and attraction for these states. Central Asian diplomats, scholars and politicians were considered uniquely ‘eastern’ within the Soviet Union and so it was expected that they could connect better with other ‘eastern’ countries than any of their counterparts from Moscow. Opportunities therefore opened up in the Khrushchev years for Central Asian intellectuals and politicians in international, cultural diplomacy work.

It is therefore unsurprising that Soviet Tajikistan and Pakistan, two countries officially on opposite sides of the Cold War, came into contact through exchanges between, primarily, scholars and writers. For the Soviet Union, relations with Pakistan fit within their anti-colonial political agenda. The accounts I documented in Tajikistan, Pakistan and London, as well as some of the texts produced at the time, suggest however, that much more than just political friendships were forged, and identities beyond ‘eastern’ ones were leveraged. Friendships of multiple natures emerged between people who identified as socialists, and who often interacted in international anti-colonial forums. Those same people importantly also connected in powerful ways through older Persianate language, literature and values.

One place where the everyday realities of the Persianate sphere were most deeply impacted by colonialism and later socialism is the border regions between Tajikistan and Pakistan. These are Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan, and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan provinces in Pakistan. These very mountainous parts of eastern Tajikistan and northern Pakistan are divided by a narrow piece of Afghan territory known as the Wakhan Corridor, borders which are ultimately the result of late nineteenth-century British–Russian imperial rivalry, commonly referred to as the Great Game. In 1895 the Pamir Convention divided up Badakhshan into separate British and Russian territories, which led to the forced separation of communities and even families. The Russian-ruled side eventually became part of the Soviet Union within the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, and the British side eventually became part of independent Afghanistan. The border between Tajik and Afghan Badakhshan is divided by a powerful river, across from which once closely connected Tajik and Afghan communities, some even related by blood, can still see each other today. Over Afghanistan’s turbulent history in recent decades, millions of Afghans have migrated overland into Pakistan and, in far smaller numbers, Tajik Badakhshanis have also travelled into Pakistan, through Afghan Badakhshan, in times of economic and political instability at home, particularly in the 1990s. Put simply, these communities living across Tajik, Afghan and Pakistani national borders have historically been in close contact, sharing languages, religion, space, identities and ways of life, but have been divided by imperial borders and regimes for over a century now. These national borders, hardened by markedly different political ideologies and the destructive forces of conflict, have meant that people in these three nations live significantly different and separate lives with little real contact with one another.

As Mostowlanski (2019) aptly puts it, ‘the [imperial] establishment of distinction in this “previously borderless” (sarhad nabud) region also signified a new form of connectivity [under socialism] rendering Moscow closer [to Tajik Badakhshan] than Kabul[,] and southern Kyrgyzstan closer than northern Pakistan’ (960). In the era of Cold War anti-colonial internationalism, the unique ethnographic and historical material presented here suggests that Dushanbe was ‘closer’ to Lahore than the Tajik Badakhshani city of Khorog was to places like Chitral just across the border in Pakistan. Despite remaining markedly disconnected since Soviet times, Mostowlansky (2019), Marsden (2008; 2012) and others have shown the ways in which people in Tajik Badakhshan, Afghan Badakhshan and northern Pakistan are continuously aware of their historical connectedness and dis-connectedness. This scholarship is crucial to my argument, both contextually and theoretically. Analyses of cross-border Badakhshani exchanges have played with scales, compellingly showing how these ‘marginal’ regions were central to imperial projects and how these contradictions in scale played out in ordinary merchants, villagers and labour migrants’ lives. In contrast, I examine some of Tajikistan and Pakistan’s best known twentieth-century poets, whose interactions were made possible, at least initially, by politically sanctioned exchanges at large conferences and forums – often Soviet funded. These exchanges led to much more than just socialist bonds forming however, and to friendships that brought out connections between other-than-socialist selves and Others. How these other-than-socialist affective relations unfolded at the height of Cold War tensions is the question that initially drove this research.

Accessing one-self through an Other

In Tikhonov’s account of the interaction between Tajik poet Tursunzoda and the Pakistani border guard, Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry is recited. Regarded as the ‘Spiritual Father of Pakistan’, Iqbal (1877–1938) was a poet, philosopher, barrister and politician, who became one of the main influencers of the Pakistan Movement. He predominantly wrote in Persian, is considered one of Pakistan’s most important literary figures, and also had a profound influence on the development of Afghan modernism (Green 2011). In my conversations with scholars in Tajikistan, Iqbal was regularly mentioned as a key twentieth-century Persian poet. Trying to understand when and how Iqbal’s works became known in Tajikistan, I was told repeatedly that the Tajik Pamiri poet and playwright Mirsaid Mirshakar (1912–1993) first published Iqbal’s works in the Soviet Union in their original Persian language in the magazine Sharqi Surkh (The Red East).⁴ My initial curiosity was around how Iqbal’s works could be published within the Soviet Union, since his works encouraged a personal and national way of life guided by Islamic principles. For instance, Iqbal penned the poem Lenin, Khuda Ke Hazoor Mein (Lenin in God’s Presence), very popular with the Pakistani left, in which Lenin is in dialogue with God. I was told, however, that despite debate within the Tajik Union of Writers over whether or not to publish his works, Mirshakar did eventually manage to publish some of Iqbal’s poems.

While Iqbal’s works became widespread and even popularized in song lyrics in Tajikistan, his political messages, a strong feature of many of his works, did not always align with Soviet ideology. In our meeting in London in 2017, Ludmila Vasil’eva, Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s official interpreter around the Soviet Union, recounted once meeting a Tajik merchant selling dried fruits in Moscow who was singing a popular song from Tajikistan. She instantly recognized the lyrics, which came from Soorat Na Parastam in Iqbal’s 1923 Payam-e-Mashriq (Message from the East) that he had written as a response to Goethe’s 1819 West-Eastern Divan. In this work, Iqbal explains,

the East, and especially the Muslim East, has opened its eyes after a centuries-long slumber. But the nations of the East should realise that life can bring about no revolution in its surroundings until a revolution takes place in its inner depths and that no new world can take shape externally until it is formed in the minds of men (Iqbal 1977, xvii–xviii).

Ludmila told me that the merchant was not aware that these were the lyrics to Soorat Na Parastam of a Pakistani poet, Muslim internationalist and politician, and that when she pointed this out to him he did not seem to care much, only interested in the catchiness of the tune, which presumably originated in Pakistan, where it was most famously sung by the Pakistani ghazal singer Mehdi Hassan. At first glance, the image of Soviet citizens singing verses taken from a book that discusses revolution, God and destiny clashes with most established narratives of life in the Soviet Union. However, given the political climate and aspirations under Khrushchev’s leadership, a fine line could be trodden in Soviet Central Asia between reinforcing socialist cultural policy and allowing socialist policies to be open to interpretation in order to attract alliances with the non-Soviet world.⁵

While Iqbal’s works were clearly revered and celebrated in Soviet Tajikistan, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that, I learnt, Iqbal’s poetry came most powerfully to life there. One afternoon, I went to visit a scholar in his sixties whose daughters I was friends with and with whom I frequently discussed my ongoing research. Within moments of beginning to tell him that I had recently learnt about Iqbal's presence in Soviet Tajikistan, he interrupted me to recite the opening of Iqbal’s poem Eii Javononi Ajam (Hey, Youth of the ‘Ajam)⁶

Chun charoghi lola suzam dar khiyoboni shumo,

Eii javononi Ajam, joni manu joni shumo

Employing the rich imagery of the Indo-Persian literary tradition, this poem is not easily translated into English. In these verses, Iqbal describes his work as a burning oil lamp (charoghi lola suzam, literally ‘I burn like an oil lamp’), which brings light to the lands (khiyoboni, literally ‘streets’) of the youth of the ‘ajam, and invites this youth to accept him as one of their own (joni manu joni shumo, literally ‘my soul and your soul’). ‘Ajam is an Arabic word originally used to refer to non-Arabic speaking Others in a derogatory sense, but the term later became appropriated by Persian speakers to refer to themselves and mark a cultural distinction between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Persians’ (Gould 2015). The poem thus acts as a rousing, rallying call to the youth of the Persianate world.

The scholar then explained to me that these poems were widely recited during the early years of Tajik independence protests in the run up to the Tajik civil war of the 1990s. Surprised at this, I wanted to ask more, but we were soon interrupted by several of his colleagues. A few days later, we met again for a walk through the gardens behind Opera Ballet Theatre, surrounded by people on their afternoon progulka (Russian for ‘stroll’ or ‘promenade’). Before this second encounter, I had gone to the local book shop and found a 1958 edition of Iqbal’s poems with a preface by Mirshakar, printed in Dushanbe (then called ‘Stalinabad’) - three thousand copies were printed. Flipping through it, I soon found the poem he had recited for me in his office. I could only remember the phrase ‘eii javononi Ajam’, which had stuck with me because of its reference to ‘ajam.

As we walked through the gardens, I asked him to tell me more about Eii Javononi Ajam. He began by reciting it again, then went on to tell me that while these poems were important in Soviet times, they became far more popular and socially significant among the local intelligentsia during perestroika. ‘They were sitting in the [city’s] square and reciting this and other [Iqbal] poems’, he explained. The poems spoke of freedom and independence, ‘the idea of a cultural and political renaissance’, he explained, which was an idea circulating there at the time. He then immediately began to recite another Iqbal poem for me, Az Khobi Garon Khez (Awaken from Your Heavy Sleep), which became one of the main chants in Shahidon Square in Dushanbe around the time of independence:

Me’mori haram! Boz ba ta’miri jahon khez,

Az khobi garon, khobi garon, khobi garon khez,

    Az khobi garon khez!

Roughly translated, Iqbal says ‘Architect (me’mor)⁷ of the sanctuary (haram)⁸! Rise (khez) again to repair the world (ta’miri jahon). From your heavy sleep (khobi garon), heavy sleep, heavy sleep awaken, awaken from your heavy sleep!’ Here Iqbal points out the imperialism that Muslims have lived under without fully realizing it, and agitates Muslims to rise against imperialism, to wake up from this deep sleep of living under oppression.

These poems became key political slogans of the time, particularly for the Rastokhez (Resurrection) political group from 1989 onwards, he explained.⁹ What stands out from this recollection is that through the words of an Other, Iqbal, powerful ideas were stirred in the minds of some Tajiks. Iqbal popularized the concept of khudi (literally, ‘the self’), proclaiming that ‘awakening and strengthening of the Muslim (man)’s khudi [w]as the prerequisite to the Muslims’ return to glory on the world stage’ (Toor 2011, 211). As will become apparent through other examples, I contend that Iqbal’s encouragement of a revolutionary, free self was a message that, on the dawn of Tajik national independence, would not have resonated as powerfully with people in Tajikistan had it not been in their national language, Persian. To return to Tikhonov’s reflections on the Iqbal poetry recital he witnessed between Tursunzoda and the Pakistani border guard, ‘poetry opened up the road to us. Verses sounded out like the highest confidence placed by man in man’ (Tikhonov 1972, 11). Here I believe we can interpret that Tikhonov is – likely unknowingly – referring to the power of shared Persianate poetry, which involves shared language, idioms, aesthetics and even social values. Iqbal’s poetry was powerful in Tajikistan because it was in Persian and about Persianate khudi (self) and self-determination. This account therefore begins to etch out the ways that other-than-socialist selves were expressed and made accessible to Soviet Tajiks through the Persian verses of a Pakistani poet.

Faiz and Tursunzoda – a meeting of minds

When I asked various scholars in Dushanbe about interactions they personally had or were aware of between Tajiks and Pakistanis during Soviet times, I was told numerous times about Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911–1984), one of Pakistan’s most prominent intellectuals, revered poets, and a Marxist. He was a leading member of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), which was closely affiliated to the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). Since the post-Partition Pakistani state saw the PWA and CPP as a threat to the nation state, Faiz was imprisonment numerous times for his involvement with them and later went into self-exile. Internationally recognized for his activism and poetry, he was nominated four times for a Nobel Prize in Literature, travelled over many years in and out of the Soviet Union and received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962. His engagement with the Soviet Union has been the focus of several recent scholarly works (Faiz, Zaitseva, and Anjum 2021; Vasilʹeva 2002; Zaitseva 2021), but, despite his first ever visit to the Soviet Union taking place in the Uzbek capital Tashkent – rather than somewhere more ‘central’ like Moscow – for the first meeting of the Afro-Asian Writers Association in 1958, his interaction with figures in Soviet Central Asia has been almost totally overlooked, perhaps owing to its limited documentation.

At this meeting, he met with various Central Asian writers and poets, thereafter travelling to Samarqand and Bukhara, to Dushanbe to attend a celebration of the Persian poet Rudaki’s thousandth anniversary, and to Baku, Tbilisi and Moscow. One of the writers he formed a strong friendship with was Mirzo Tursunzoda (1911–1977), the poet that Tikhonov travelled to Pakistan with in 1949 – he and Faiz likely met there for the first time. In Dushanbe, in one of my regular conversations with the scholar of comparative literature Munira Shahidi, she told me what she knew of their friendship. A young woman when the two of them would meet in the 1950s and 60s, her family was good friends with Tursunzoda’s and she once briefly met Faiz in Dushanbe. She remembers hearing about the two poets’ friendship and told me that this relationship blossomed into a collaborative effort to bring literary thought and style from both countries into contact. These efforts manifested, for instance, in a literary circle in Dushanbe where literature from both places was read and discussed, encouraging an expansion of ‘creative consciousness’ from both sides.

Having travelled to Lahore to present my conference paper, I was put in touch with Faiz’s eldest daughter Salima Hashmi. Despite being amidst the chaotic final preparations for the Faiz Festival, a regular festival dedicated to celebrating humanism and Faiz’s fight for social justice, she invited me to Faizghar, the house museum dedicated to her father in Model Town, a leafy Lahori neighbourhood where many Pakistani intellectuals have lived. As people fluttered around the house preparing for the festival, Salima showed me around the space, which was filled with old photographs, awards and memorabilia, several from his time in the Soviet Union. She recounted various anecdotes about her father’s eventful life, which included four years in prison in Pakistan from 1951 to 1955, then again from 1958 to 1960, and long stints abroad in exile from Pakistan. As she put it, Faiz had a vision and desire for relations between countries emerging from colonialism, and Central Asia was part of that envisioned network. He wanted to get as many countries and individuals as possible into forums and discussions with one another. One such setting for these exchanges was the Afro-Asian Writers Association, which supported and published poetry and prose in their original languages alongside English and French translations. From 1978 till his death in 1984, Faiz edited the Association’s multi-lingual literary magazine Lotus, which was, importantly, financed by the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Egypt as part of ongoing Cold War strategies.

As we sat down for tea in a quiet room away from the festival commotion, Salima recalled her father regularly speaking of his experiences in Central Asia, the impact they had on him and the closeness he felt to particular people, including Tursunzoda. For her, the depth of connection that her father had formed with people in the region became most apparent a year after he passed away on her first trip to the Soviet Union. In his honour, she and her mother Alys were invited by the Soviet Union of Writers to visit three places of their choosing: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Armenia. While in a bazaar in Uzbekistan, a man there asked their guide where the women were from. Upon hearing they came from Pakistan, he recalled once attending a poetry reading by a Pakistani poet in Tashkent: ‘his name was Faiz’, she quoted the man saying. Clearly moved by the serendipity of such an encounter, for Salima this exchange was symbolic of the widespread exposure her father had to people there during his visits and to the relations, both literary and personal, he formed. Despite being part of the Soviet Union, Central Asia ‘felt different’ from the rest of the USSR to Faiz, Salima told me, recounting that her father preferred visiting Central Asia over the rest of the USSR.

After our meeting, Salima put me in touch with the journalist and human rights activist Ibn Abdur Rehman (1930–2021) who had been a close friend and colleague of Faiz. I went to visit him in his office, where he sat at a large wooden desk covered in papers, books and documents. Having warmly welcomed me, he began to tell me of his early journalistic days working with Faiz at The Pakistan Times, which Faiz established and was editor-in-chief of from 1947 till his arrest in 1951. Rehman’s knowledge of Faiz’s relationship with the USSR not only came from his personal relationship to Faiz, but importantly also from his own travels to Soviet Central Asia as a journalist in 1973.

When I asked him to describe the interactions between Central Asian and Pakistani delegates at conferences, he recalled the 1949 All Pakistan Congress of Progressive Writers¹⁰ in Lahore, attended by Tursunzoda and presided over by Faiz – the same trip Tikhonov recounted travelling on with Tursunzoda.¹¹ Rehman described ‘great bonds’ forming between the Tajik and Pakistani parties there, including between Tursunzoda and Faiz. This was not only because the two parties were brought together by socialist, anti-imperial agendas to promote peace and progress, Rehman noted. The ‘warm’ sentiment between them, as he put it, was most strikingly spurred by a palpable sense that delegates were engaging in a ‘process of discovery’ of old relations and shared points of connection, leading to a sense of renewed friendship at the conference.

These old relations stemmed from what Rehman identified as a shared legacy of Persian literature, culture and language. At the time, many educated Pakistani intellectuals of Faiz’s generation knew Persian, which would have facilitated their interactions. In fact, Faiz’s interpreter Ludmila did not even accompany him to Tajikistan because he had studied Persian in school and learnt to speak it from his Afghan stepmother. The effect of this still-shared language between Tajikistan and Pakistan’s educated elite is recognized by Tikhonov too: ‘in Pakistan all the intellectuals know Farsi and when Mirzo Tursun-zade recited his own verses, everyone understood him and listened with absolute delight’ (1972, 11). This passage refers to the Persianate sphere, to a form connection that stemmed from other-than-socialist and other-than-anti-colonial interests.¹²

From the Soviet Tajik side of these exchanges, Mirzo Tursunzoda was a powerful and influential cultural diplomat, serving as Director of Tajikistan’s Union of Writers for 30 years, and was founding chairman of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee (Kirasirova 2011, 123; Kalinovsky 2013, 207). His poetry became well known in India and other postcolonial nations, in great part owing to substantial efforts made through official Soviet channels to publicize his work abroad, exemplified by the 1972 edition of Soviet Literature, which translated Tursunzoda and other Soviet poets. It is thus unsurprising that Faiz should meet Tursunzoda on his travels through Soviet Central Asia.

As I was told repeatedly in both Tajikistan and Pakistan however, Faiz and Tursunzoda’s relationship became a friendship beyond the formal settings they met at. In one of his most famous poems Joni Shirin (1959), Tursunzoda makes direct reference to his time spent with Faiz in Tajikistan.

Yod dorii az muboriz shoiron,

Faiz bud dar khonai mo mehmon.

Az Vatan gap sar kunii dar megirift,

Dar misoli hezumi tar megirift.

Do you remember among the resistance poets,

Faiz was a guest at our house.

From the motherland talk caught fire,

Like wet wood [wet with lighting agent] catches fire. – Tursunzoda 1959

Published the year after Faiz’s first visit to the USSR, in these verses Tursunzoda refers Faiz’s anti-colonial politics through the term ‘resistance poets’ (muboriz shoiron). As discussed, there were clear and important incentives for Soviet Central Asians to host and make connections with Soviet sympathizers elsewhere in Asia, and Tursunzoda played a key role in this by helping forge a ‘friendship among literatures of the East’ (Tikhonov 1972, 11). Besides the clearly socialist and anti-colonial bonds between them however, according to the accounts of Salima, Rehman, Munira and Ludmila – the latter two I introduce more fully shortly – the two poets also strongly bonded over their shared Persian language and love of literature by Persianate greats like Bēdil, Ghalib and Iqbal, to mention just a few.

Re-discovering close, but distant Others

One of the most vivid first-hand accounts I heard of this form of Persianate re-‘discovery’ (to borrow Rehman’s words) between South and Central Asians was by Munira Shahidi. As we sat one evening in her home, sipping tea and eating our favourite shirini sweets filled with sour cherry from Arka bakery on Rudaki Avenue, I asked her about her first visit to India in the 1960s organized by the Komsomol. A highlight of her trip was when she was invited to participate in a mushāira¹³ poetry competition. Played for centuries across the Persianate sphere, players take it in turns to recite by heart a poem from the literary canon, but each participant can only recite a poem that begins with the final letter of the final word of the previous competitor’s poem (Ali 2012). This requires players to think fast and possess a rich mental repository of poetry – a skill that is developed from a young age across much of the Persianate sphere in school. As we sat together in her apartment, Munira recounted how the man before her ended his poem with the letter ‘sh’. With a reminiscent smirk on her face, she recalled quickly following his poem with a Bēdil one beginning with ‘sh’. The man’s jaw dropped in amazement, she remembered, and once the whole mushāira ended, he approached her and asked how she knew of Bēdil. To Munira, the subtext of this question was the assumption that Soviet citizens, especially Central Asians, were isolated and unaware of the outside world – even of ʿAbd al-Qāder Bēdil, the celebrated seventeenth century, Indian-born Sufi and poet who wrote in Persian.

Munira and I discussed this interaction numerous times thereafter as I learnt more about Pakistan’s relationship to Soviet Tajikistan. As an exercise in cultural diplomacy, she explained, the mushāira was an ideal exercise for bringing Indian and Central Asian delegates closer together and finding common cultural ground. When she explained to the man next to her, for instance, that Persian poets were well known and highly revered in Soviet Tajikistan, she was invited to give several media interviews and presentations on Tajik culture. For Munira this diplomatic exercise revealed that shared Persianate language, literary practices like mushāira and literary figures like Bēdil were still recognisable to parties across political divides, despite years of colonialism and socio-political change. Since active, organic and regular literary exchanges between Central and South Asia had not taken place for nearly a century by this point, delegates were connecting over the visible traces of the Persianate ecumene that they were each intimately familiar with through their education and training in Persianate literature. This is commonly referred to as adab, a Muslim concept used to describe correct social etiquette and comportment, as well as proper ethical forms of acting, speaking and thinking (Kia 2020). Within Persianate adab, emphasis is placed on having a strong command of the Persian language and literature, and strong linguistic skills in articulating ideas – often through eloquently referencing the Persianate literary canon. These Indian and Tajik mushāira competitors valued adab, and Munira’s evident adab left an impression on her counterparts.

This sentiment of discovery – or rather, of re-discover – that Rehman and Munira described, echoes the interaction described by Hopkins and Marsden (2011) between Chitrali villagers in rural northern Pakistan and Tajik and Afghan migrants there in the early 1990s – Chitral is part of the Tajik-Afghan-Pakistani nexus discussed earlier. As Chitralis hired Tajik and Afghan men to work in their fields, Chitralis learned Persian from them, as well as how to read Sufi Persian poets like Sa’di, Hafez and Shirazi. Later on, some of these Chitralis embarked on journeys to northern Afghanistan to visit their ancestors’ homelands. As Hopkins and Marsden elucidate, these cross-border interactions highlight the ways in which Chitral, eastern Tajikistan and Afghanistan were ‘deeply connected yet also discontinuous settings’ (174–175): while Persian was no longer present in Chitral due to British colonial and post-Partition socio-political transformations, various Persianate cultural forms, such as vocabulary, literature and forms of exchange were still familiar to them. With the arrival of these Afghan and Tajik ‘doers of Farsi’ (farsi-korak), these older points of connection ‘leaked into daily village experience [in Chitral] and were rendered into a shared focus of identification’ (162).

Iqbal believed that through travel and mobility, the self is formed and cultivation through relations with others encountered on the way (Majeed 2007; Marsden 2009). Travelogues (safarnāmeh) are an important genre in Persianate literature, in which figures recount their journeys across different social milieus. The encounters between Chitralis, Tajiks and Afghans were documented by some in notebooks, which is reminiscent of safarnāmeh. This ‘bear[s] the imprint … of older influences, such as Persianate practices of travel’ (2011, 175), evidencing how, in their interactions, ‘older collective memories of migration are redeployed’ (137) – or re-‘discovered’. In this vein, while the travels of Faiz, Tursunzoda, Munira and others mentioned here were clearly driven by modern-day socialist internationalism and cultural diplomacy, I contend they were also simultaneously tapping into older experiences of mobility that were familiar to many people in Central and South Asia. The accounts of Tajik-Pakistani exchanges I heard were ones in which each was interacting with a ‘deeply connected yet also discontinuous’ Other. Faiz himself also penned a travelogue of his time spent in the USSR, no less titled Months and Years of Friendship: Recollections (Mah o sāl-i-āshnā’i: yādon kā majmūʻah).

Looking to Moscow, looking to Dushanbe

The final key person I learnt about these Tajik-Pakistani exchanges from is Ludmila Vasil’eva, Faiz’s official Soviet interpreter between 1967 and 1984 and a scholar of Urdu language and literature in Russia. After being introduced via email by Salima, I met Ludmila in London where she came to speak at the Faiz Peace Festival in 2017. Between her presentation and other performances that day, we spoke briefly in the venue hallway, standing to one side as we balanced biscuits on our tea saucers to exchange some initial words of excitement at finally meeting. As she listened to how I had come to learn of Faiz’s fairly unknown Central Asian travels, she nodded and smiled as I listed the names of other Pakistani intellectuals I had heard also travelled to the region – figures I have not had the chance to discuss here. She knew most of them personally and shared anecdotes about several of them, evidencing the close friendships she had formed with these figures.

Once the festival ended, we met again in her modest hotel room in north London to continue our conversation. As we sat round the desk in her room, she told me about her years working and travelling alongside Faiz, which she spoke warmly and nostalgically about. Regardless of changing politics, people across the USSR consistently consumed South Asian culture, she said: ‘the main thing was Indian films, sometimes Pakistani [ones], and Faiz. All the country was crazy about Faiz’. She recalled that in 1983 a translated collection of his poems called Posvyashcheniye (Russian for ‘Dedication’), of which 100,000 copies were printed, was sold out so quickly in Moscow and Leningrad that a copy had to be sent to her from Tashkent.

As both Ludmila and Salima explained to me, Faiz believed Soviet Central Asia was an important part of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement’s envisioned network of post-colonial states. Central Asia was moreover for Faiz a point of connection that helped him escape heightened nationalism in Pakistan at the time. In a revealing analysis of Faiz’s (1979) travel memoir of the USSR, Zaitseva (2021) observes the subtle ways in which Faiz used Perso-Arabic literary tropes of friendship to distinguish between people there with whom he merely had a ‘friendly acquaintance’ (dostānah) and people in the Soviet Union who he formed ‘deep friendship’ (yārānah) with or for whom he had ‘great reverence’ (nayāz mandī) (46). Faiz did this to foreground ‘the like-minded people he met during his travels, while simultaneously paying just enough homage to the superpower (metonymically designated in his text by the name “Moscow”) that made such encounters possible’ (46–47).

As noted at the outset, the points of connection and experiences of friendship between selves and Others in these exchanges were not only socialist or Persianate, but also anti-colonial. One of the main forums through which South and Central Asian intellectuals first interacted in the Cold War years was the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement. The Soviet Union was banned from attending the Movement’s first international meeting in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 because of the perception of Central Asia as a former Russian colony within the USSR. To fight this negative image and build alliances with the Movement, shortly after the Bandung Conference, the USSR invited India’s Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru to Moscow and then to Uzbekistan. Nuritdin Mukhitdinov, the Uzbek politician and first secretary of the Central Committee of Uzbekistan, accompanied Nehru on this trip (Kirasirova 2011). In his memoir, Mukhitdinov notes that Nehru criticized official Soviet discourse for not properly highlighting the historic links between India and Central Asia. As Nehru said:

some speakers said that [this] friendship began in the 1950s, after the declaration of independence of India … but in fact there is a rich history of friendship between the peoples of India and Central Asia, and to ignore that is to destroy the foundations set by our ancestors (in Kirasirova 2011, 113–114).

According to Mukhitdinov’s memoir then, Nehru acknowledged both the relationship that the Soviet Union, through Central Asia, nurtured with independent India, and the far older relations between South and Central Asia. The Soviet Union soon overcame its negative colonial image enough to become an active member of the Movement, hosting the Movement’s first Writers’ Association meeting in Tashkent in 1958.

Given Faiz’s staunch anti-colonial stance, I asked Ludmila how Faiz accounted for the USSR’s inconsistent approaches to sovereignty, culture and national identity, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She told me that she had once similarly asked Faiz why, as an influential ‘freedom fighter’, he never openly criticized the mistakes of the Soviet government. Faiz’s response was in the form of a poem he composed, which Ludmila recited for me:

Misal-e zina-у manzil ba kar-e shouq aya

Har ik maqam ki tuti jahan janan pe kamand

As she explained, it described the holes one leaves behind on a rockface when one’s metal climbing rod slips. These dents should not be seen as failures or detractions, but as the mistakes one must make and learn from when striving for a high goal. Faiz’s message was, Ludmila interpreted, that as the pioneers of the path towards communism, the Soviet government would inevitably make mistakes, having no one before them to learn from.

As Zaitseva (2021) notes, Faiz’s relationship to the USSR, ‘what the USSR meant to [Faiz’s] postcolonial imagination’ (58), and to anti-colonial groups like the Progressive Writers’ Association, was intentionally ambiguous. Faiz’s anti-colonial values and communist politics sometimes aligned and other times were at odds as the Soviet Union’s approaches put its anti-colonial image into question. He was also, more fundamentally, motivated to make connections abroad by a personal resistance to growing nationalism across the newly partitioned Indian subcontinent in which Arabo-Persian and Sanskrit legacies were being removed from national idioms. Faiz actively promoted an Urdu literary community that was not confined to Pakistan’s national borders, instead affirming an Urdu literary community with a shared Indo-Islamic heritage and South Asian literary idiom (Toor 2011, 71–72; Asdar Ali 2015, 151).

During the post-Partition period, questions of self and Other, of the similarities and differences between, for instance, Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis, became deeply significant in the literary works of numerous South Asian writers (Jalal 2005). For Faiz, these intersubjective, relational questions were not only of concern within Pakistan, but also spilled out into his engagement with the wider world, including Persianate ‘Others’. Gould (2015) vividly shows this through the poems Faiz penned while in prison, which stylistically and thematically made clear reference to older Persianate prison (habsiyyat) poetry by Ghalib (1797–1869), Khāqānī (1120–1190) and Mas’ud Sa’d (1046–1121):

Faiz’s literary appropriation indicates that … he was unwilling to participate in the reduction of the geography of Persian to the restricted domain of modern Iran … . Faiz was on intimate terms with earlier Persian prison poetry … [and] turned to [as far as] a distant Caucasus geography [where poets like Khāqānī were originally from] to underscore his conceptual embrace of religious plurality in post-partition Pakistan (Gould 2015, 115).

The depth of Faiz’s engagement and connection with the Persianate world helps explain why he felt so at home in Central Asia over other parts of the USSR.

Friendship: re-discovering selves through Others

Across the accounts presented here the theme of friendship comes up repeatedly. What these friendships were based on, what they meant and what they produced are the questions that made this material so compelling to pursue ethnographically. Friendship has often sat tangentially to the analysis of much anthropology, taken for granted or underestimated for its powerful abilities to shape or bypass social relations, structures and obligations. However, the friendships explored here are ethnographically, historically and analytically engaging. These friendships were founded on multiple forms of sociality and social values, which overlapped, but were at points also in tension. Socialist values were not always anti-colonial ones, and Persianate cosmopolitanism was inevitably at odds with communist national identities promoted through ‘national poets’ like Tursunzoda. And yet, these exchanges between Pakistani and Soviet Tajik figures have been repeatedly described as friendships in the accounts and texts examined here.

Existing anthropological scholarship on the concept of friendship does not define it in one cohesive way, but instead focuses on, most notably, how friendship affects and is affected by power; the distinction between love and friendship, kinship and friendship; friendship as an expression of social independence versus solidarity; friendship as part of the private or the public sphere; and personal versus political friendships (Byler 2021; Dyson 2010; Jackson 2023; Mains 2013; Modell 2001; Pritchett 2007; Pulford 2021). Edited volumes on the anthropology of friendship focus on how it manifests differently in different parts of the world, emphasizing the local specificities of this social relation (Bell and Coleman 1999; Desai and Killick 2010). In this article however, I have unpacked several different types of friendship among the same set of people, rather than across different people and places. The friendships in these Cold War Tajik-Pakistani exchanges are, at the very least, simultaneously Persianate, socialist and anti-colonial, I argue.

Friendship is a powerful trope across each of these spheres, but each is grounded in markedly different sets of values and objectives. The figure and trope of the friend has historically been a key one in much Persian literature. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the self – what Kia (2020) calls the ‘Persianate self’ – in much Persian literature was not understood in relation or contrast to external Others, as something abstract or interiorized within an individual person. Rather, the self was relational, cultivated and defined through social interaction in the world. Friendship was in fact fundamental to self-cultivation, typically exemplified, for instance, by narrators being in dialogue with a friend or beloved – a very popular narrative style in Persian poetry (Kia 2016, 398). As noted at the outset, the Persianate ecumene is characterized by the interaction of people and texts across the wide breadth of places and societies that made it up, which shaped people’s conceptions of self and Other within it (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007; Kia 2020). In her analysis of late nineteenth-century modernist Persian texts, in which the Iranian narrator is in dialogue with an ‘Indian friend’ – a Persian-speaker from the Indian subcontinent – Kia (2016) shows that the shared Persianate cultural constructs and points of reference between them allowed them to co-construct notions of the self: they were at once ‘Other’ to one another, and yet mirrors through which to see them‘selves’. This resonates strongly with Munira and Rehman’s recollections of friendships forming between South and Central Asian intellectuals. As much Persianate literature dealt directly with the theme of friendship itself and those interacting with it shared the concept and practice of adab – strong knowledge and command of Persian literature and language – they also shared specifically Persianate understandings of this affective relation. This is notable in Tursunzoda and Faiz’s mode of relating, which was clearly drawing on shared Persianate adab as much as communist or anti-colonial comportment and values. Most of the writers attending the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent in 1958 were unfamiliar with each other's literature – cut off from each other by colonial history, they only shared in-depth knowledge of Western European literature – and struggled to communicate with one another through a common language (Djagalov 2020, 70). Figures like Faiz and Tursunzoda however could connect through Persian and its vast shared literary and social imaginary.

The concept of friendship also had significant symbolic and political weight in the Soviet Union, which promoted the ‘friendship of peoples’ and ‘friendship of nations’ within its borders, funded friendship societies abroad and promoted socialist internationalism (Applebaum 2019; Edgar 2007).¹⁴ In the early Soviet years, friendship between, for instance, border guards and local villages was seen as a crucial tool for attaining allegiance to the Soviet project and securing borders in remote areas, particularly Central Asia’s borders with Afghanistan and China (Shaw 2011). While friendships in everyday life took many more forms and held different meanings beyond this, I am mostly concerned here with official forms of socialist friendship that the Soviet Union recognized and endorsed with the outside world, as that is the form these Tajik-Pakistani relations were supposed to take. These socialist friendships with Others recognized bonds between distinct ethnic groups, nations and states. Friendship here was meant to respect, even reinforce boundaries between different groups, whilst encouraging common socialist causes and relations of trust between different entities. In contrast, Persianate friendships conceptualized friendship as a relation that looks past ethnic, national and linguistic identities, neither asserting nor dismantling them. In this way, even after national partitions and during geopolitical cold wars, the Persianate imaginary can still today play an affective role across places that are – to paraphrase Hopkins and Marsden – culturally deeply connected, but politically discontinuous.

While Tursunzoda and Faiz, like Munira and her mushāira opponent, were deeply connected by Persianate histories, knowledge and imaginaries, they were also discontinuous Others to one another, separated by borders, national identities and divergent colonial histories. With these Persianate conceptions and productions of the self and friendship in mind, the very ability of figures like Tursunzoda to be ‘representatives of a successful form of Sovietness’ (Kirasirova 2011, 130) – of a successful socialist self – in international forums like the Progressive Writers’ Association was dependent upon their other-than-Soviet self, an ‘eastern’ or, in this instance, a more specifically Persianate self that could relate to Persianate Others.¹⁵

Finally, these friendships were also anti-colonial. While the anti-colonial politics of the Pakistani progressive left were different to those of Khrushchev-era Soviet figures, international anti-colonial agendas allowed for these individuals to meet. In Byler’s (2021) work on close male friendships, or jan-jiger dost (life-and-liver friendships), in Xinjiang, China men become aware of their subjectivity and experience as colonized people through everyday exchanges and storytelling among friends: ‘the anti-colonial friendships I found among Uyghur migrant men demonstrate that colonized men … can define significant aspects of their subjectivity through friendships’ (162). Reflecting on their intersubjective effects, ‘these relations call into being the way one ought to care for the self and the other’ (163). Employing Gandhi’s (2006) Affective Communities, Byler reaffirms the point that ‘anti-colonial friendships produce a shared affective comportment and politics that invites the stranger to the self … [and] produce a self-reflexive methodology for engaging with colonized others as an accomplice in their grief and rage’ (164). Soviet Central Asian attention was most focused on the colonial struggles of non-Soviet Others rather than their own experiences of colonialism, but they were nonetheless attuned to the oppressions of colonization. As Faiz’s daughter Salima reminded me, Tursunzoda and Faiz connected over their interest in giving voice to society’s marginalized and unrepresented in their writing. There was a lot at stake for Faiz in these interactions with Soviet intellectuals and diplomats, since he was representing dissident communist interests, rather than those of Pakistan.

By identifying these three modes of friendship between these Pakistani and Soviet Tajik figures I intend to emphasize the generativity and abundance of these exchanges, pushing back on a limited, agenda-driven understanding of them. Thelen (2011) argues that personal relations in (post)socialist contexts are often treated as the result of necessity, a means to an end – particularly an economic one in, for instance, informal exchange networks, corruption and patronage. These instrumental social relations are treated as ‘different from the supposedly interest-free friendships possible in Western democracies’ (48). This biased perspective is made possible by, not least, the superimposition of ‘Western economic theory and relational concepts [on]to socialist societies’ (Thelen 2011). By engaging in Persianate, socialist and anti-colonial subjectivities and affective relations, this article allows for alternative accounts of the Cold War.

Conclusion

In Tajikistan and Pakistan, where vast and fundamental changes to people’s lives and societies took place numerous times over just a few generations, it is unsurprising that individuals understood themselves and related to Others in multiple, different ways. As Jackson (2023) argues, friendship ‘emerges in the subjective-in-between … [and is] one of the many ways we create worlds we call our own within the wider worlds to which we belong and are beholden’ (187). Friendship has a paradoxical relationship to social reproduction, having both ‘the capacity … at some moments to generate critique and novel practice and at other moments [to] mirror and reinforce dominant structures’ (Dyson 2010, 484). Building on this, friendship is not a ‘pure’, free-floating affective relation formed and sustained independently of politics, economics and social values, but neither is it completely produced by or working in service of these systems and values. As affective relations, friendships can form among, and reveal, a diverse range of social values and positionalities between selves and Others.

Faiz and Tursunzoda’s relationship exemplifies the ways in which two people can simultaneously inhabit several markedly different forms of friendship and, in the process, how different sides of them‘selves’ can interact with one anOther. The actions, motivations and political views of Faiz and Tursunzoda were inevitably more complex than their public images portray, and it is perhaps this inconsistent multiplicity of the self that allowed these three modes of friendship to blossom between the poets. Acknowledging the multiplicity of Faiz’s political agendas, driven too by his political precarity within Pakistan, helps break down one-dimensional accounts of why he and Tursunzoda formed a friendship. Just as Tursunzoda deployed multiple selves in these exchanges, Faiz too harnessed and instrumentalized multiple selves, not least an Indo-Persian (or Persianate) self, a ‘self in partition’ (Mufti 2007, 211), an anti-colonial self and a socialist self.

While this interaction and others analysed here were made possible by Soviet foreign policy and official anti-colonial ambitions, I argue these interactions were also fuelled by and had consequences that were other-than-Soviet, since they led to a re-discovery of deeply connected, yet politically discontinuous Others on both sides of these exchanges. Rehman and Munira’s first-hand accounts illustrate this perhaps most vividly, whereby through these kinds of interactions familiar aspects of oneself emerge in unfamiliar Others and vice versa.

The material explored here shows the ways in which Persianate, socialist and anti-colonial selves were deployed and friendships formed in these exchanges. Recent scholarship on former Soviet Tajikistan has shown the significant ways in which ‘being Soviet’ was never part of vernacular realities and identities for all: many ordinary, often rural citizens never considered themselves ‘Soviet’, let alone ‘post-Soviet’ today (Ibañez-Tirado 2015). This research helps show the nuanced ways in which even people at the very heart of Soviet power and culture felt other-than-Soviet or acted in ways that reflected other-than-Soviet subjectivities (O'Connor 2023). As I have shown here, these other-than-socialist selves were not at odds with the Soviet state, which is perhaps what makes these histories difficult to grapple with. They do not generate binaries between Soviet patriotism and anti-colonialism, national boundaries and expansive Persianate identities, or real and imagined selves and relations – hence challenging popular approaches to the anthropology of affective relations and (post)Soviet subjectivity.

Acknowledgements

My sincere gratitude to Salima Hashmi, Ludmila Vasil’eva, Ibn Abdur Rehman, Munira Shahidi and several others anonymized here. They each shared important personal memories that are nearly undocumented anywhere else. I am also very grateful to those who commented on earlier iterations of this work: Ali Lotfizadeh, Aslisho Qurboniev, Alex Pillen, Bruce Grant, Caroline Humphrey, Jagjeet Lally, Martin Holbraad, Ana Carolina Barreto Balthazar, Daniel Sherer, Nicholas Lackenby, Timothy Carroll, Rik Adriaans, Rosalie Allain, Isaac Scarborough, Malika Bahovadinova and Karolina Kluczewska. I also received feedback at the Institute of Historical Research, a ‘Communism in the Vernacular’ workshop at UCL, the UCL South Asia Centre Early Career Researchers Workshop and the Associazione per lo Studio in Italia dell’Asia Centrale e del Caucaso conference. Final thanks to the anonymous History & Anthropology reviewers for their generous and insightful comments, and David Henig for his support and guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research and writing were supported by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP-AHRC) and ESRC (ES/V012681/1).

Notes

1 Soviet Literature was a regular subscription-based publication sold internationally. It promoted Soviet progress, friendship of nations and socialism. This issue featured twenty Central Asian poets, of which three were from Tajikistan: Loiq Sherali, Mirzo Tursunzoda and Abdolqasem Lohuti (Lohuti was originally from Iran). In the late 1940s, the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) sold copies of Soviet Literature and other Soviet publications in Karachi to raise funds for the CPP (Asdar Ali 2015, 103).

2 Sofronov served as deputy head of the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with Africa and Asia and secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union.

3 Drawing from his memoir, Hodgkin's (2023) recent monograph quotes Tursunzoda's brief description of the same encounter: 'poetry was our password' (Tursunzoda 1977, 12 in Hodgkin 2023, 1).

4 Given the focus on Tajikistan, I transliterate Persian from its Tajik Cyrillic sources (for example, surkh rather than sorgh, or shumo rather than shomā). I do this also for Iqbal’s Persian works below, which I have transliterated from Tajik Cyrillic, rather than their original Perso-Arabic script. This again foregrounds the Tajik circulation of these texts, which is my focus here.

5 See Shaw (2011, 338) for another example of how early Soviet secular policies were contradicted in order to form and maintain relations with non-socialist neighbours in Central Asia, and incentivise people to stay within its newly formed, porous borders.

6 There is no ‘ayin in ajam in Tajik Cyrillic, hence variation in how I write it here.

7 Me’mor likely refers to God, but could perhaps also refer to revolutionaries fighting oppression.

8 Here ‘sanctuary’ likely refers to the Kaaba.

9 Scarborough (2023, 85–86) and Epkenhans (2016, 50, 151) also briefly mention the use of this poem by Rastokhez.

10 The Progressive Writers’ Association was an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist group established in British India in 1936 to combat social inequality and injustice. After Partition, the movement splintered off into All Indian and All Pakistani Progressive Writers’ Associations (AIPWA and APPWA), the latter of which was made illegal in 1954. The Associations’ earlier iterations were committed to anti-imperialism and taraqqi-pasandi (literally ‘love of progress’), welcoming progressives of various political inclinations, not just communists. As the PWAs communist politics came under attack from the ruling elite however, the Associations became more rigid in their views, making less room for an all-inclusive definition of taraqqi-pasandi. They became more critical of other progressives’ views and literary works, the APPWA even denouncing the works of Muhammad Iqbal. Faiz thereafter stopped attending APPWA meetings for their overly dogmatic stance (Toor 2011, 59; 210).

11 Interestingly, ‘this delegation of Soviet writers on its way to Lahore was denied Indian entry visa to attend the All-India Conference of Partisans of Peace in Calcutta on 24 November 1949’ (Jalil 2014, 367).

12 This point ties in well with the argument made in Hodgkin's (2023) new book that 'the Persianate literary idiom had provided the basis of a new internationalist idiom for a new geopolitical formation: the communist East' (3).

13 Across Tajikistan and Pakistan, various terms are used interchangeably for this poetry competition: mushāira, bait bozi (verse game or play) and bait barak.

14 See Pulford (2021) for how different conceptions of friendship interact in cross-cultural friendships on the Russo-Chinese border today, and Bulag (2010) on the perceived negative constraints of inter-ethnic friendship on the Chinese-Mongolian border.

15 For possible parallels, see Clark’s (2011) description of ‘cosmopolitan patriots’ (30), in which she describes the ways in which intellectuals could be both staunch Soviet patriots under Stalin’s rule, but simultaneously also encourage cosmopolitan cultural life.