Writing Travel in Central Asian History

5 “The Rubicon between the Empires”: The River Oxus in the Nineteenth-Century British Geographical Imaginary

135 5 “The Rubicon between the Empires” The River Oxus in the Nineteenth-Century British Geographical Imaginary Kate Teltscher “There are many places, scattered over the world, that are hallowed ground in the eyes of Englishmen,” begins Thomas Kington-Oliphant’s The Sources of Standard English (1873), “but the most sacred of all would be the spot (could we only know it) where our forefathers dwelt in common with the ancestors of the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Slavonians and Celts—a spot not far from the Oxus.”1 It is a measure of the widespread acceptance of racial thinking in 1870s Britain that a history of the English language should start with an invocation of an Aryan homeland. If the precise location of the holy ground was unknown, it was marked by proximity to the river Oxus. To nineteenth-century British writers, the Oxus was one of the most mysterious and evocative rivers in the world; impossibly remote, yet intimately connected through imagined Aryan ties to Britain. What were the multiple factors that contributed to the nineteenth-century British notion of the river? In this chapter, I will examine the intersecting literary, racial, and imperial discourses that combined to make the Oxus a river of texts. In adapting the concept of a “road of texts” that Nile Green outlines in the introduction to this volume, I want to suggest a more fluid mode of exchange and influence. The river of texts is one that dissolves fixed distinctions of genre. British writing on the Oxus draws on multiple sources: a poem feeds into accounts of exploration, racial theories mingle with imperial debate. Like Green’s road of texts, the tributaries are multilingual. A Persian epic provides the source for an English poem; German philologists furnish the notion of an Aryan homeland; British and Russian geographers engage in furious scholarly debate. The river of texts meanders through different time 136 | Kate Teltscher zones: an imagined Aryan past, the heroic age of Persian epic, and contemporary diplomatic negotiation. The writers are diverse yet constantly draw on one another’s work: adventurers and geographers, a major Victorian poet, and two British schoolgirls. The texts that I discuss date from the 1840s to the 1930s, the period that saw a complete transformation in the travel infrastructure of Central Asia. In the 1840s, the journey to the river Oxus was a hazardous horseback affair; by the 1880s, the river could be viewed from the comfort of a Trans-Caspian railway carriage. At the start of the period, British-sponsored travel in the region took the form of clandestine intelligence-gathering missions; by the end of the century, official groups of British and Russian surveyors charted the upper reaches of the Oxus for Boundary Commissions . The river Oxus moved from the inaccessible to the known over the course of the century, but it also accrued a dense mythologizing fog as the supposed birthplace of the Aryan race. The course of the textual Oxus did not run straight, but neither did the actual river. The Oxus was notoriously hard to fix, being one of the world’s great wandering rivers, in ancient times discharging into the Caspian Sea, then into the Aral Sea. But for all its fluctuations, the Oxus paradoxically served as a boundary marker. Persian scholars knew of it as the river that divided Iran from Turan (Central Asia). For the classically educated, the Oxus evoked the exploits of Alexander the Great. According to Arrian, the Oxus was the formidable barrier crossed by Alexander in his pursuit of Bessus, the Persian leader. Undeterred by the width or depth of the river, the absence of boats or timber with which to build a bridge, Alexander ordered his men to fashion rafts by stuffing the skins that covered their tents with hay. It took five days to ferry the army across the river, a feat that awed the Persians into surrender, with Bessus’s own courtiers betraying him to the Greeks.2 For the nineteenth-century British, the Oxus—always known by its Greek name rather than as the Amu Darya—continued to be associated with boundaries and the possibility of military conflict. The Oxus came to prominence in diplomatic negotiations between Britain and Russia in the 1870s over the extent of Afghanistan. From the mid-1860s, Russia’s steady advance into Central Asia had been greeted with alarm in British India. It was the Russian occupation of Khokand (1866) and Bokhara (1867–68) that focused attention on...