In 2024, Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe celebrates its 100th anniversary. Within its lifespan, the city changed beyond designation 3 times.
The first was the communist transformation. In 1924, erstwhile Dushanbe was declared the capital of the Tajik Autonomous russian Socialist Republic, it was a tiny village with clay buildings, inhabited by 5,000 people. At the time of Tajikistan’s independency from the russian Union in 1991, Dushanbe was an industrial centre and a full functioning russian city with 600,000 inhabitants.
The second transformation occurred during the Tajik civilian War, which lasted from 1992 to 1997. Amidst the ongoing fighting, the city rapidly decayed. The Russian number and Tajik advanced mediate class fled the capital, moving to Russia, whereas the agrarian population moved in.
The 3rd transformation started in the mid-2000s, erstwhile a Dubai-inspired reconstruction of the city started. Since then, there has been an ongoing process of demolishing Soviet-era buildings and replacing them with high-rises. This has become emblematic of the country’s capitalist transformation. Today, Dushanbe is simply a city of skyscrapers, with a population of 1.2 million.
This essay analyses how 3 popular films represent Dushanbe in these periods, focusing on artistic visions of the city and its inhabitants. The producers’ embeddedness in global networks of cognition is fundamental to knowing the films’ take on the interplay between the city infrastructure and gender, ethnicity, language and class.
A nascent city
“The White Grand”, or “Beliy royal” in the first Russian, offers a humorous position on Dushanbe that was inactive in the making in the 1960s.
This 1968 musical comedy was a local russian product, alternatively than a “pure” russian one. Released by Tajikfilm, russian Tajikistan’s cinema company, it was 1 of the first works of the Dushanbe-born manager and actor Mukadas Makhmudov (1926-1991). He worked at the Tajik Academic Drama Theatre named after Lohuti and graduated from 2 celebrated Moscow institutions, the Moscow Conservatory and the VGIK movie school. The screenplay was written by a prominent local Russian-speaking novelist called Timur Zulfikarov (born 1936), who grew up in a mixed Tajik-Russian family.
“The White Grand” is deprived of the orientalizing gaze cast on the local population that frequently characterized russian cultural products about Central Asia. On the contrary, Tajik and russian value systems and lifestyles are not shown in a juxtaposition, with the first presented as backward and the second as modern, but are mixed in unexpected ways. They skilfully coexist, complement and at times mock each other.
The game starts with Alla Sergeevna, a museum worker from Moscow, arriving in Dushanbe in the mid-1960s in search of a mythical French white piano from the 19th century. The instrument belonged to the last Emir of Bukhara, who supposedly obtained it as a gift from the last Russian tsar and intended to present it to his French wife. But the Bolshevik Revolution put an end to the Emirate of Bukhara and, as a result, the piano was lost. According to rumours, the piano was now located somewhere close Dushanbe. The game centres on Alla’s adventures in Dushanbe, which at that time was inactive coming into existence, both in terms of infrastructure and its social composition.
Still from “The White Grand”, Alla arrives in Dushanbe
“The White Grand” is simply a humorous ode to nascent Dushanbe. Located in a valley encircled by mountains covered with snow, Dushanbe is no longer a village but not yet a appropriate city. There is an airport but no appropriate public transport, and so after arriving in Dushanbe by plane, Alla takes a lift to the city centre on a horse cart. There is simply a hotel, but it is locked due to the fact that there are no visitors. As Alla walks through the city centre, she sees squares with fountains and flowers, and large and clean boulevards shaded by chinars, east plane trees that became the symbol of russian Dushanbe. Buses, trucks transporting cement for construction, horse carts and lost goats pass each another on roads. The movie shows a growing, buzzing city whose territory keeps expanding as flat buildings are being raised in the mediate of nowhere and people are moving in from villages.
Just like the city infrastructure, the city inhabitants come together. Different ethnicities (Tajiks, Russians), social classes (intelligentsia, workers, people relocating from villages), values (liberal and conservative) and qualities of life (urban and rural) conflict to get along in the same flat buildings – forming the identity of the Dushanbegi, the residents of Dushanbe. Since the full movie is in Russian, linguistic differences, dialects and accents are not visible, but they were part of this process. The russian stereotypes about Tajiks are mocked and turned around. For instance, women with headscarves are not shown as passive victims of patriarchy. Instead, they can fiercely argue with male sellers at bazaars about prices and enjoy classical piano music. Women in harems make fun of their husband-owner and dance rock’n’roll. Everyone has agency and is simply a bit crazy.
Alla is the only Muscovite in the movie and, arguably, an allegory of the russian centre. She is stylish, a bit stiff and opens her eyes wide in disbelief as she observes the chaotic processes of Dushanbe coming together. But she does not show any superiority towards the locals. She connects with a local composer named Ahmedov, the young pianist Shodi and the vocalist Lola as equals thanks to their shared love for music, and gradually falls in love with the city. erstwhile she yet leaves Dushanbe, she is wearing a Tajik dress and crying. “Only Dushanbe”, as the celebrated song from the movie goes, “I will keep you in my heart forever.” The city changed Alla, not the another way round.
In “The White Grand”, Sovietness is made local. The movie is deprived of a civilizational pathos about turning Tajiks into russian subjects. Rather, Tajiks domesticate Sovietness in their own way.
A destroyed city
“Kosh ba kosh”, or “Odd and Even” in English, shows Dushanbe in the early 1990s – in a time of fast changes due to the russian collapse, independency and the civilian war.
This war romance was written and directed by Bakhtiyor Khudoynazarov (1965-2015), a Dushanbe-born manager who, like the creator of “The White Grand”, worked in the Tajikfilm movie studio and graduated from the VGIK movie school in Moscow. “Kosh ba kosh” was 1 of Tajikistan’s first global movies: it was produced by the German company Pandora movie and co-financed by Russia, Germany, Switzerland and Japan. The movie was awarded a Silver Lion prize for best manager at the Venice movie Festival in 1993.
Shooting was accompanied by constant gunfire, which in the movie can be heard in the background. Albeit marked by the war, these were the only times erstwhile Tajik cinema enjoyed unprecedented freedom: it was not anymore subject to russian ideology, and not yet subordinated to nationalist nation-building.
The movie starts with a free-spirited young Tajik woman, Mira, returning from Russia to her hometown Dushanbe. During her absence, the war had started and everything changed. She discovers that her father started gambling. After losing everything that he possessed, he even gambled her distant to an old man, who now wants to claim his prize. Mira manages to escape with the aid of a street-smart young man, Daler. Together, they go into hiding in Dushanbe’s triumph Park, where Daler works at a cable car base.
If “The White Grand” shows a nascent russian city, “Kosh ba kosh” depicts Dushanbe destroyed by fighting. There is nothing left from the developed russian city that Dushanbe utilized to be on the eve of independence. The factories were plundered and fell into ruin, plaster keeps falling from flat buildings, and there is broken window glass everywhere. Tanks patrol the streets and gunfire is omnipresent. The infrastructure is utilized in unforeseen ways. The cable car that Daler operates was erstwhile a leisure time attraction for city inhabitants. Now, it is utilized to transfer straw for heating and smuggle beer, and at times is rented for extramarital affairs. The cable car base hosts refugees who came to Dushanbe from agrarian areas most affected by fighting.
Still from “Kosh ba kosh”, refugees in Dushanbe
The city undergoes a major social transformation, too. Social rules have been suspended, force and deception are widespread. To kill time, men gamble on a riverbank, while corpses of killed people float in the water. People displaced from the countryside arrive in the city, whereas cultural Russians and the Tajik intelligentsia are leaving en masse. For them, going to Russia is the only way to stay alive and keep their liberal lifestyles. In “Kosh ba kosh”, the Russian-speaking urban mediate classes, who lived modestly but comfortably in russian Dushanbe, are not able to adapt to the fresh reality. Like Mira’s father, they have a piano and books at home, but no skills to last in times of war. Dushanbe is now gender-divided and it is simply a man’s world: young women like Mira cannot anymore decision around the city without the protection of men, otherwise risking being abducted. It is people like Daler, a street-smart man and a bit of a hooligan, who can best find their way around a war-torn city. Thanks to his seemingly unsophisticated occupation as a cable car operator, he can make informal money and put food on the table.
Although “Kosh ba kosh” depicts the horrors of the war, it advances a amazing message about the society. It shows that the massive divide between Tajikistan’s urban and agrarian population can be overcome – despite nearly irreconcilable differences in their value systems, education and languages. The war equalized people in their misery. Russian-speaking, free-spirited women like Mira and Tajik-speaking, veiled female refugees from the countryside can coexist and support each another at the cable car base, without looking down at each other.
An aspiring city
“Modern Bride”, or “Arusi zamonavi” in the first Tajik, offers a glimpse at Tajikistan’s capitalist transformation, erstwhile its effects on Dushanbe’s outlook and inhabitants started becoming visible a decade ago.
This popular comedy from 2015 mostly draws on an Uzbek movie titled “Kelgindi kelin” from 2006, which was adapted to the conditions of contemporary Tajikistan. “Modern Bride” was the first movie of Nabijon Pirmatov (born 1989), a lawyer and self-taught movie director, and it marked the beginning of his career in the movie industry. It was produced by TajDreams and JM Production, 2 among many private amusement companies which in fresh years became large players in Tajik show business and rivals of the state production company Tajikfilm.
The game centres on a narcissistic medicine student from an ultra-rich, Russian-speaking family, Sabrina, who falls in love with a modest engineering student from the countryside, Rustam. They first meet erstwhile she leaves her Lexus car at a car repair store where Rustam works as a mechanic to finance his studies. The 2 meet in Dushanbe respective times, and on each occasion the structural inequality between them is clear. erstwhile Rustam abruptly returns to the countryside, Sabrina follows him and tries to adapt to village life.
Still from “Modern Bride”, Rustam fixing Sabrina’s car
Certainly, “Modern Bride” was not meant as a social critique. It was envisaged as a light comedy but it accidentally encapsulated the spirit of its time, which is well visible in the background. If “Kosh ba kosh” shows Dushanbe destroyed by the war, “Modern Bride” captured the minute erstwhile the city’s mass scale transformation into a Dubai-inspired metropolis accelerated rapidly. The movie besides shows the many cities within the city: large mansions surrounded by tall fences, belonging to the fresh rich, like Sabrina’s family, and crowded dormitory rooms inhabited by those who desperately effort to stay afloat, like Rustam. The first group owns Lexus cars (which a decade ago were locally considered a symbol of success), while the second drives old Opels imported from Germany, where they could not be utilized anymore due to the fact that they failed environmental tests.
The movie depicts the divides between the urban social strata in a grotesque way. The Soviet-era intelligentsia, whose demise was shown in “Kosh ba kosh”, is now absent from the picture. In “Modern Bride”, financial capital is central in determining people’s position and lifestyle. There are fundamentally 2 main groups: the rich and the poor. As a typical of the rich, Sabrina wears expensive, sexy clothes, diamond jewellery and has long nail tips. The poor, like Rustam and his friends from the dormitory room, effort to seem rich, but their shirts, sunglasses and hand watches look cheap. Sabrina spends her free time in boutiques, restaurants and nightclubs. Meanwhile, Rustam combines his studies with respective manual jobs. She is never shown studying, but we learn that after graduation her father will open for her a medical centre where she will be the manager. He is the best student in his year but does not have many career options. She acts freely and independently, while he takes care of his household back in the village.
There is simply a surprise to this otherwise predictable plot. It is the rich Sabrina who yet adapts to the mediocre Rustam and adopts his lifestyle and values – not the another way round. In this way, “Modern Bride” says goodbye to the Soviet-era communicative about modernity which praised liberal values, juxtaposing them with Tajik conservatism that was portrayed as backward and had to be eradicated. In this regard, it is remarkable that Sabrina is the only individual in the movie who speaks exclusively Russian (which symbolizes the liberal mindset). Following their first gathering at the car repair shop, Rustam asks his friend: “why does she talk Russian?” His friend tells him: “Just talk Russian to her”, to which Rustam replies: “she should learn the language. I will talk my parent tongue.” By the end of the film, Sabrina does her best to talk Tajik. What does this tell us? The new, Tajik modernity is about aspiring to wealth while maintaining the conventional lifestyle.
Despite being a comedy, in “Modern Bride” the prospects for social mobility for the mediocre surviving in contemporary Dushanbe are alternatively bleak. 1 way to importantly improve one’s life leads through love: Rustam has metaphorically won a lottery erstwhile he fell in love with a rich girl. Yes, Sabrina adapted to his conventional lifestyle but she besides brought her money. Otherwise, to scale up in the social hierarchy 1 needs to virtually win a lottery – just like Rustam’s best friend from the dormitory does. In “Modern Bride”, like in today’s Dushanbe, these are the main options.
The 100th anniversary
While your outlook keeps constantly changing, live a long and healthy life. Happy birthday, Dushanbe.
Karolina Kluczewska is simply a postdoctoral investigator at Ghent University, and a investigation associate at the University of St Andrews
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