Sart - Modern Meanings

Modern Meanings

Vasily Bartold argues that by the 19th century those described as "Sarts" had become much more Turkicised than had previously been the case. In the literature of Imperial Russia in the 19th century the term was sometimes used to denote the Turkic-speaking peoples of Ferghana, Tashkent, Chimkent and the Southern Syr Darya Province, (also found in smaller numbers in Samarkand and Bukhara). "Sart" was also commonly employed by the Russians as a general term for all the settled natives of Turkestan. There was a great deal of debate over what this actually meant, and where the name came from. Barthold writes that "To the Kazakh every member of a settled community was a Sart whether his language was Turkic or Iranian". Nikolai Ostroumov was firm in his conviction that it was not an ethnic definition but an occupational one, and he backed this up by quoting some (apparently common) local sayings: "A bad Kirghiz becomes a Sart, whilst a bad Sart becomes a Kirghiz". This confusion reached its peak in the 1897 Russian Empire Census: the Ferghana Province was held to have a very large Sart population, the neighbouring Samarkand Province very few but a great many Uzbeks. The distinction between the two was often far from clear. Although historically speaking the Uzbeks were descended from tribes which arrived in the region with Shaibani Khan in the 16th century, Sarts belonged to older settled groups. It seems that, in Khorezm at least, Sarts spoke a form of Persianised Oghuz Turkic while Uzbeks spoke a Kipchak dialect closer to Kazakh. In Fergana the Sarts spoke a Karluk dialect that was very close to Uyghur and is believed to be the earlier dialect of modern Uzbek. In 1924 the Soviet regime decreed that henceforth all settled Turks in Central Asia would be known as "Uzbeks", and that the term "Sart" was to be abolished as an insulting legacy of colonial rule. The language chosen for the new Uzbek SSR was not, however, Uzbek, but Sart.

"“The Uighurs are the people whom old Russian travellers called Sart (a name which they used for sedentary, Turkish-speaking Central Asians in general), while Western travellers called them Turki, in recognition of their language. The Chinese used to call them Ch'an-t'ou ('Turbaned Heads') but this term has been dropped, being considered derogatory, and the Chinese, using their own pronunciation, now called them Weiwuerh. As a matter of fact there was for centuries no 'national' name for them; people identified themselves with the oasis they came from, like Kashgar or Turfan.”"

It is thus very difficult to attach a single ethnic or even linguistic meaning to the term "Sart". Historically the various Turkic and Persian peoples of Central Asia were identified mostly by their lifestyle, rather than by any notional ethnic or even linguistic difference. The Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Turkmens were nomads, herding across steppes, mountains and sand deserts, respectively. The settled Turks and Tajiks, on the other hand, were Sarts, as they either lived in cities such as Khiva, Bukhara or Samarkand, or they lived in rural agricultural communities.