Credit: Ministry of Culture of the Republic Of Buryatia

Dr Jonathan Ratcliffe will present the next ANU Mongolia Institute lunchtime seminar to discuss the epic legacy of Shono Baatar.

This is an online event held via Zoom. Please register at Eventbrite.

Abstract

Compared with other epic heroes popular throughout Inner Asia such as Geser, Shono Baatar is fascinating because his legends stem from a determinable and relatively recent historical basis – the rulers of the Dzungar Khanate in the early 18th c. Shono Baatar is based on the Dzungar prince Louzang Shunu, who, due to conflict with his brother Galdan Tsering fled around 1725 with a small handful of retainers to seek asylum in the Russian Empire. While legends and short songs about Louzang Shunu’s flight are widely attested from Kazakhstan and Kalmykia to Xinjiang and Mongolia, among the Buryat Mongols these legends became a full-length epic tale of tragic conflict between brothers and heroic virtue.

In this talk Dr Ratcliffe discusses the legacy of the Soviet Era study of Shono Baatar today. During the Soviet Era Louzang Shunu’s historical flight and virtues celebrated in the Buryat epic were frequently taken to symbolise the historical necessity of Inner Asian peoples to become brave and virtuous subjects of the Russian Empire so that they would later become part of the USSR. Nonetheless, the only complete Buryat language oral epic of Shono Baatar, that which was taken down from the reciter Shagadar Shanarsheev in 1936 was only translated and published in Russian in 2015. Due to its popularity a dual-language audiobook soon followed. However, this particular text is only “complete” because, in keeping with Stalinist Era assumptions about the need to “improve” and produce a definitive version of epics, the folklorist Khamgashalov combined it with several other fragmentary variants from other reciters and amended it to his taste. Khamgashalov absurdly then threw out the only records of Shanarsheev’s original oral version of the story.

While in recent years there has been renewed interest among Russian scholars in the figure of Shono Baatar due to the discovery of short “flight songs” still being sung about him in Mongolia and Xinjiang, no Buryat fragments of the epic of Shono Baatar nor Buryat “flight songs” have been found since the 1960s. Indeed, since the 1960s Buryat languages have rapidly been declining in favour of Russian and it is increasingly being warned that they well we be extinct within 25 years. Could attempts to revive a new, living, Buryat Shono Baatar tradition, as has been attempted with the national epic hero Geser in recent years, help to turn this around?

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Read more about the ANU Mongolia Institute’s 2020 online seminar series here.

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