The Bukhara Project-Cosmopolitanism and the City

This project looks at the ancient city of Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan. Cities are spaces where differences are often manifested in particularly overt and divisive ways. It is all too easy to forget that cities are also spaces where people live and work together in close proximity. How do these complex entities, cities, work? What makes cities ‘work’? The ethnic and religious diversity of the Central Asian city of Bukhara makes it particularly interesting in this regard. A repository of an urban polity for centuries, this city has been, and indeed continues to be, a site of harmonious interaction of diverse peoples who conceive of themselves as similar, yet separate. It is critical to see the negotiations that the city represents for its citizens as an entity that encompasses processes that exist at various levels, not only that of the different ethnic / religious groups but also within and between persons and selves. (Humphrey, Saxena, Marsden, Skvirskaya)

 Dr. Saxena has used the experience of Bukhara to propose the idea of Projected Commonality to garner insight and answer the question - how cities ‘work’.  This idea articulates the view that in Bukhara the nature of cosmopolitanism is constructed not by the usual means of creating a hybrid society through inter-ethnic and inter-religious mixing, but through building of trade, education, community, and cultural and ritualistic institutions.  This Projected Commonality creates spaces for interaction where Bukharan’s have achieved not just mere tolerance but a way to celebrate the differences and to coexist peacefully.

He contrasts this locally readable plurality with the case of the Muslim Jews, Chala, who converted to Islam. The Chala tag is a derogatory one, as it refers to something that is in between or incomplete.  This is how these hybrids, who had transgressed religious and ethnic lines, were viewed in the local social landscape. However, for the purveyors of soviet kosmpolitanism such groups were ready made and ideal Soviet citizens. They were the ones to be celebrated, to be turned into role models to bring ‘tolerance’ and civilisation to these oriental backwaters!

The experience of Bukhara helps to articulate both a quintessential and practical example of an eastern notion of cosmopolitanism as well as its limitations. It is a model of coexistence which the world has much to learn from and this understanding could be the key that will unlock the door to integration in Europe, America, and perhaps even Japan of the ever increasing migration from the east and the south.