The following was written by by Frishta Qaderi, researcher and law student at Stanford University. A Fulbright and Marshall Scholar, she conducted a three-year ethnographic study on law, water governance, and environmental justice in Uzbekistan’s Zarafshan River Basin. All photos taken by author.
I sat cross-legged on a mattress beneath a shaded awning in a village outside Jizzakh in central Uzbekistan, eating slices of watermelon with an elderly couple from the Luli community. The Lulis are a Persian-speaking branch of the Roma people that have lived across Central Asia for generations. The man beside me watched as I awkwardly swallowed the seeds, too shy to spit them into the communal plate like everyone else.
“Where’s that accent from?” he asked. “No, not Bukhara or Tajikistan—I have family there. They don’t speak Farsi like that there.” I admitted I was from Afghanistan, and he simply nodded, as if it were the most natural thing.
With roots in northern Afghanistan’s Perso-Turkic cultural worlds, I have always moved comfortably within Tajik and Uzbek traditions. This linguistic, cultural, and regional fluidity was part of my upbringing and allowed me to navigate Uzbekistan’s multicultural fabric with quiet familiarity. Yet I was often marked as foreign in Uzbekistan—an Afghan—because the post-Soviet frameworks that define identity in the region leave little room for older, more pluralistic affiliations.
Though Tajiks carry Iranic roots and Uzbeks Turkic ones, both are part of a broader Persianate world marked by overlapping traditions of language, literature, and cultural norms that once linked Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and beyond. Yet in the version of Central Asia mapped by the USSR and now bounded by the borders of post-Soviet republics, Persian-speaking communities are often questioned, sidelined, or erased.
Given this context, this exchange in Jizzakh, rooted in a shared language and unspoken recognition, felt radical. There was no need to explain who I was, or how I spoke their language. Nor did I feel compelled to ask the same of the Luli couple, a community long subjected to discrimination and marginalization across the region.
The Luli, also known as the Jugi or Mugat, are part of the wider Roma and Domari diaspora. They are believed to have descended from itinerant groups who migrated from northern India centuries ago, settling in Central Asia gradually and gradually adopting Tajik Persian and Uzbek as their primary languages. Soviet sedentarization campaigns forced them into cotton farming and scrap metal collection, criminalizing their mobility and pushing them further to the margins.
The Luli largely remained on the margins of society due to entrenched discrimination, a fact reflected in their underreporting in Soviet censuses. In 1920, just 3,710 people in the Uzbek SSR identified as Roma, and by 1989, that number had risen to only 16,397. The real numbers are undoubtedly higher. Outside of the post-Soviet sphere, sizable Luli populations also exist in Afghanistan, where their numbers were estimated to be around 20,000 to 30,000 in 2006. Across both Afghanistan and Central Asia, many Luli remain undocumented, excluded from citizenship and formal recognition.
Their histories of displacement, marginal labor, and exclusion render them paradoxically both hypervisible and invisible. They are ubiquitous in public spaces yet excluded from national narratives. Scholarship often casts them as unknowable, cloaked in tropes of mystery and distance. One article on the Luli in southern Kyrgyzstan notes that “few scientific studies” exist on their lives, and that their “unknown aspects” merit further research. The World Society for the Study and Preservation of Uzbekistan’s Cultural Legacy puts it even more bluntly: “Little is known about their origin, time of appearance in Central Asia, or their everyday culture.”
Even attempts to document the Luli tend to do so from afar. Uzbek photographer Anzor Bukharsky’s images of Luli life are visually arresting yet lack the rhythms of daily life. The images are captivating, but strangely empty, appearing more detached than intimate.
As a child in my grandparents’ home in Mazar-e-Sharif, I first encountered the Luli as they swept through the city each evening to collect plastic bottles and stale bread. The plastic was recycled for money, and the bread fed to cows. Our interactions were brief, shadowed by neighborhood rumors of witchcraft and child abduction yet also marked by a kind of guarded affection. In the early 2000s, as Taliban rule deepened ethnic tensions, a quiet sense of solidarity took root. Unlike Balkh’s Pashtun settlers, who some saw as colonizers, the Luli became preferred outsiders: indisputably marginal, yet regarded as distant kin through a shared language.
When I returned to Uzbekistan in 2021 to conduct ethnographic research on rural water access, I once again found myself crossing paths with the Luli. They appeared in nearly every town, street, and village I visited: sorting recyclables, telling fortunes, and lingering outside bazaars. Their presence was woven into the fabric of the places I studied. Yet when I raised the idea of including them in my research, colleagues discouraged me: the Luli were too marginal, too elusive, too foul to approach.
Seeking guidance, I reached out to a well-known Slavic blogger who had developed a reputation for tackling difficult social and environmental issues in Uzbekistan. I asked how best to engage with the Luli. His response was immediate and dismissive: as a foreigner, I should forget about it. The Luli, he warned, were dangerous and unapproachable. “And by the way—they never farm.” What I found was the opposite.
In Tashkent, I made my way to a Luli neighbourhood in Eski Shahr, the old city. I greeted a man washing his car outside the gates of his house in Persian and introduced myself as a hamzaban—someone who speaks the same language. Though initially bewildered, he returned the gesture, hand to heart. We spoke about the Persian-speaking families in the area, and he explained that his family referred to themselves as Mugat. A neighbor, overhearing our conversation, offered a different account. According to him, they were native to Tashkent and to that neighborhood in particular.
As more neighbors joined the conversation, some traced their lineage to Multan, a city in modern-day Pakistan. Many preferred the term “Mugat” to “Luli,” which they saw as a Russian imposition. Their oral histories echoed existing scholarship: they had arrived from northern India during a time when Persian was the dominant lingua franca of Central Asia.
That pluralism fractured in the twentieth century. With the arrival of the Soviet Union, nomadic communities like the Lulis were forcibly settled and the Persianate world they were part of was violently divided. Persian splintered into national variants—Farsi became tied to Iran, Dari to Afghanistan, and Tajik to Tajikistan. Soviet reformers promoted Turkic languages like Uzbek as modern and socialist, while Persian was seen as feudal and suspect. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the monarchy constitutionally established Persian as Dari in 1964, a move interpreted as an attempt to assert cultural independence from Iran. What had once been a shared cultural and linguistic domain became a patchwork of politically defined identities.
In my exchanges with the Luli, those divisions collapsed. Speaking to them required no translation. We shared cadence, vocabulary, and cultural orientations, reminders of an older Persianate continuity that cut through the geopolitical boundaries of post-Soviet space.
This continuity, however, is increasingly under assault. Pan-Turkism, an ideology envisioning a unified Turkic world stretching from Anatolia to Central Asia, minimizes the existence of Persian-speaking communities. From the creation of the Organization of Turkic States in 2009, an intergovernmental organization comprising all Turkic-majority Central Asian republics, to Turkey’s decision to refer to Central Asia as “Turkestan,” in its school curriculum, these symbolic gestures and geopolitical alignments flatten entire cultural worlds in service of a singular Turkic narrative.
Though I encountered institutional barriers to including the Luli in my research, I continued to stop and listen to the Lulis I encountered over the three years I spent in the region. Over time, these brief encounters revealed a more textured picture of Luli life across Uzbekistan.
East of the capital, in the mountain town of Angren, Luli families offered a complex portrait of livelihood—one shaped by mobility, informal labor, and adaptation to Uzbekistan’s economic landscape, all in the absence of formal recognition or integration. Many had relocated from Kashkadarya in the south, citing better weather, more work, and less stigma. They lived in makeshift homes near residential trash bins, sorting recyclables into neat piles: glass, tin, plastic, food scraps.
Though stigmatized, this labor was essential to the area’s informal economy. I had seen similar set-ups across the country, in Soviet-era micro-districts where Luli families lived in informal housing near communal trash bins, sorting recyclables for apartment blocks.
One man, newly arrived from Kashkadarya, paused while sorting cans to gesture towards his home. “There’s more opportunity here,” he said. His words, like many I heard in Angren, were not born of nostalgia or grand narratives but practical assessments of survival.
Farther south, in a small village near Jizzakh, I encountered another reality. A colleague had shared coordinates to a Luli village her father, a retired agronomist, once serviced. It wasn’t on most maps, but his memory was right: Luli families lived there, farmed there, and had done so for decades. One elderly couple welcomed me with watermelon and sent their son to fetch ice cream from the local amusement park.
When I asked if Uzbeks also live in the village, the woman pointed to the children playing together in the courtyard. “Those are my grandkids playing with the neighbors’ kids. They’re Uzbek,” she said. “There’s no issue between Lulis and Uzbeks. We live together.” The couple presented a strikingly different image of Luli life, one rooted not in marginality, but in agriculture and everyday coexistence with Uzbek neighbors.
As I left, two Luli girls began following me. They beckoned me to their house. I declined, but another female relative noticed us and suddenly claimed I had been cursed. She said she knew someone who could lift it—for a price. Curious, I handed her a crumpled bill and followed as she led me inside their house. I was sat beside an elderly woman with white hair and a deeply lined face—the presumed matriarch. Women in floral dresses, their hair tied with handkerchiefs, gathered to observe, their young daughters perched on their laps. The matriarch confirmed that I had been struck by a very serious curse.
Suddenly, she tugged my ears in one swift motion and slapped my back several times. Then, she grabbed my face, brought hers close to mine, and blew sharp bursts of air around my cheeks—“chuff chuff chuff.” Satisfied that the curse had been lifted, the matriarch smiled and instructed me to take photos. “Take a photo of me. Of all of us. I want to see myself in the papers.”
Interactions like these made it impossible to sustain a single stereotype or category. The Luli lifted curses and told fortunes, yet they also farmed land and became university professors.
Our exchanges slipped past the rigid categories of language, nation, and identity that have come to dominate Central Asia. In their cadences, gestures, and stories, I heard the afterlives of a Persianate world that has since been fractured, renamed, and politically bounded.
That world survives in fragments: in a phrase of recognition, in the cadence of a conversation, in the solidarity of sharing watermelon. Listening to the Luli is to hear echoes of a Persianate world unsettling the tidy narratives of modern nationalisms.
