From Mongols to Mughals: How a Siberian Theatre Reunites Central and South Asia
- Komal Salman
- 5 days ago
- 12 min read
At Baikal Theatre in Buryatia, Eastern Siberia, a decade-long production follows the cultural threads binding the Steppe to the Subcontinent
Far beyond the Eurasian steppe, in Siberia, the Baikal Theatre has come up with an artistic production we weren’t expecting: From Mongols to Mughals, located in the city of Ulan-Ude.
Ulan-Ude is the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, a federal subject of Russia. Historically, Buryatia was folded into the Mongol world for centuries before Russian expansion in the 17th century. The Baikal Theatre derives its name from Lake Baikal in Buryatia, the deepest and oldest lake in the world.
Badluev Dandar Zhapovich, the writer of the play and the director of the Baikal Theatre, has produced several musical masterpieces rooted in Buryat-Mongol culture as well as in the cultures of South and Central Asia. He has practised ballroom dancing and folk dances of the Siberian region and Mongolia.
As he travelled to different countries and met dancers, performers, and teachers, he constantly felt a certain connection. After all, this was once a shared cultural area. Whilst everyone had beautifully distinct ethnic identities, many a time, who a cultural practice “belonged to” could seldom be pinned down in an “us or them” dichotomy, as we often see in the post-modern world today. This is how the idea took shape: on stage, perhaps borders could be redrawn as they existed prior to the New World Order: fluid, flexible, and forever-changing.
Today, borders are conditionally closed. We live within the modern borders of nation-states. But states change, and borders change too. Yet the culture of values, folk songs, dances, costumes, and symbols doesn't disappear immediately. It lives on in the people for a long time, though it too changes over time, as everything in the world does. Our ethnic identities will always be a part of us, regardless of what religion we choose to follow, and regardless of what passport we hold.
For this project, Badluev drew on his whole life's experience. The artists do not claim to offer a historical reconstruction because they are not historians or scholars. But it is common knowledge that the great Mongol Empire existed under Chinggis Khan, that he had descendants who split into many uluses, such as the Golden Horde, the Ilkhhanate, the Chaghatai Khanate, and the Yuan Dynasty.
The early Mughals, such as Babur, proudly held onto the Chagatai Turkic language and proudly referred to themselves as Timurids. Historical records suggest that Timurid princesses, such as Gulbadan, were regarded with a different stature of respect at the Mughal court, up until the time of Humayun and Akbar. Amir Timur, in turn, was equally proud of his Chinggisid lineage.
Amir Timur, in turn, was equally proud of his Chinggisid ties; so much so that he adopted the title Gurkani, "son-in-law of the Khans," after marrying a genuine Chinggisid princess, to compensate for having no blood claim to Chinggis Khan's throne.
His Mughal descendants continued styling themselves Gurkani on their own coinage and documents centuries later. In the 16th century, Emperor Akbar famously commissioned the biography of Chinggis Khan (Chingiznama). Through it and related dynastic histories, the Mughals traced their direct genealogical descent from Chinggis Khan, pushing that lineage back further still to Alan Goa, the legendary Mongol ancestress who, according to myth, conceived her later sons through a shaft of divine light after her husband's death.
Over time, the cultural sphere became dominated by the norms of Hind (the Indic region) and Faras (Persianate) cultures; al-Hind being everything East of the Indus, and Faras being everything West of the Indus, not just Persia, but all the way to Baghdad.
However, the elite, the aristocracy, took pride in carrying the bloodline of Chinggis Khan. And that's no coincidence: having such a lineage meant belonging, and having a direct connection to something higher, something chosen. The adaptation of the Alan Goa myth was used to argue that the Mughal dynasty's authority was, quite literally, divinely ordained.
Speaking to Zhalsanov Zhargal Zhalsanovich, the Artistic Director of the Baikal Theatre, he said, and I quote, “We too are heirs to this legacy, and we preserve the part of the culture now called nomadic. We — Buryat-Mongols, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz — see that we share many common features of nomadic culture: food, everyday life, way of living, the same yurts, symbols, patterns. We have a great deal in common.”
“We tried to bring all of this together into a theatrical concert, inviting artists from various countries of Greater Asia,” he added. “And on one stage, we, the Buryat ensemble, built a picture of that cultural commonality, so audiences could see something shared. Despite initial differences, there is a great deal in common, and we tried to show this through symbolism.”
Like every good story, there is always one element which ties everything together. In this play, Zhalsanov tells us that the main symbolic sign on stage became the tug. The tug is the sacred banner of the Khan's clan, a pole with circularly arranged horsetail hairs.
Interestingly, when his descendants split apart, this symbolism was preserved in the Turco-Mongol khanates: in the Mughal Empire, in court paintings, we see the same tugs. The descendants of the Mongols spoke a different language by then, they were Muslim by faith, but they preserved the symbolism because they believed one must not forget one's roots.
The Tug, or the Nine White Banners are one of the most sacred symbols of Mongolian statehood, closely associated with the legacy of Chinggis Khan. According to tradition, they were raised when he united the Mongol tribes and was proclaimed Great Khan, with each banner representing one of the major tribes.
Made from the tail hair of white stallions, they symbolise purity, peace, divine authority, and the eternal mandate to rule, while the number nine is cosmologically significant in Mongolian culture. Their counterpart, the Nine Black Banners, served as the Khan's wartime standard, representing strength and the divine sanction for war, together reflecting the duality in the responsibilities of the Khan, as both peacemaker and warrior.
The Baikal theatre has paid meticulous attention to detail. They collaborated with foreign artists to produce the music for this production. For example, there is an Irkutsk folk singing style, and a Qawwali. They sing, interrupting one another, rhythmically. In a manner, they're very similar, despite belonging to people who live very far away from each other, in geographical terms.
Moving onto dances, the play features a Kathak performance, which is popular in North India and Pakistan even today, and the Tatalga, a Mongolian dance form. It was even more impressive to learn that Zhapovich has, in fact, trained in master classes on Kathak himself!
For those interested in scholarship on the subject, Tamara Tanganova has, in fact, written a book in which she examines Persian-Iranian and Turkic roots in the folk songs of the Irkutsk Buryats. Many studies of Mughal court music, Timurid culture, and Indo-Persian musical traditions trace how instruments, poetic forms, and performance practices emerged through centuries of interaction between Persian, Turkic, Mongol, and Indic traditions.
As far as costumes go, we know that Mughal-era fashion originated from Turko-Mongol attire of the Steppe. However, it was then stitched with light, flowy fabrics from the Indian subcontinent, suitable for hotter weather. This gave birth to the dress we now recognise as the angrakha, and to some extent, even the shalwar kameez. The silhouettes were very different from ethnic Indian clothing, such as the Sari. Playing on such nuances of fabrics and folds, the Theatre has tried to show the audience that the cultural space was once very broad. Zhalsanov explained the costumes to us.
“The presence of very expensive, elaborate elements in Buryat costumes preserved in old photographs also speaks volumes. Such costumes don't simply appear out of nowhere; they are very costly. All these corals, stones, ornamentation, and fabrics carry a deep history. These are not costumes of common people but of the aristocracy — complex, specially embroidered. All this intricate ornamentation and structure of adornments on the headdress, the shoulders, temple ornaments, and on the back also tell of connections. We see mother-of-pearl that seems to have arrived from across an ocean, even though we are very far from the sea; Persian fabrics, the finest expensive Chinese textiles, silver, gold, jewellery. All of this shows that the Buryat-Mongols had enormous connections in different periods. This is what we preserve and try to show in projects like this.”
Bringing together artists from around the world together on one stage, Zhalsanov told us that they began with people who were not strangers to the concept of the play. The theatre invited a Hazara artist from Afghanistan. The Hazaras are said to be descendants left behind by Chinggis Khan.
“There was a very touching moment when a Hazara man watched the show and was deeply moved, because Hazaras in their own country don't have a single professional ensemble; there isn't even the possibility of creating something like this,” he reflected.
This comment makes me particularly sad because both Pakistan and Afghanistan have let down their people of Hazara ethnicity. Hazaras have historically been identifiable by their East Asian or Mongol-associated physical features, which makes them a target of racial discrimination. It is not uncommon to hear "illegitimate children of the Mongols" used as a slur for them. Between 1891 and 1893, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan of Afghanistan carried out a series of massacres against the Hazaras, after which there was a large-scale migration to British India, especially Quetta.
After America announced the War on Terror, Pakistan was unfortunately embroiled in violence once again. Over 70,000 civilians were martyred in attacks across the country. The Hazara adhere to the Shi’ite sect of Islam, which is why they have repeatedly been targeted in acts of sectarian violence and terrorism post 2000s. Sadly, we have failed to protect them.
Badluev staged a Hazara dance based on folk movements, folk costume, and surviving folk vocabulary, and it became the first professional staged dance for the Hazara people, who unfortunately have no ensemble and no theatre at all. This was a while ago. The project came out in 2013. When the theatre uploaded it to YouTube, the views went through the roof. It wasn't fans of the Baikal Theatre watching; it was the Hazaras themselves. They passed the recording around to each other, wrote comments and words of gratitude that they now had such a dance.
The Indian artists who worked with Baikal Theatre came from traditional families of performers. One of the dancers who visited them, Anuj Mishra, had parents, a grandfather, and a grandmother, who were all Kathak dancers. According to their accounts, the lineage traces back to the era of the Khans, the age of the Mughals, when Kathak was in high demand. At that time, it was called the court Kathak; it was the most beloved court dance of the Mughals.
With Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia premiering earlier this month, lately, people have become very interested in how the Mongol and Persianate spheres collided and overlapped in more ways than one.
Jana Zuray, a Buryat-Mongol artist and designer, has helped me find this play by the Baikal Theatre and kindly offered to interview the production team for me, as I unfortunately happen to speak neither Mongolian nor Russian. Yana and I think it would be wonderful to create a collaboration inspired by this project. It's a unique project, nothing like it exists elsewhere.
Zhalsanov also mentioned that no such ensemble exists in Mongolia, nor in any other Central or South Asian country. Yet artists and directors have come to Baikal from everywhere: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. A project like this should be fostered at the state level.
“We understand that a republic isn't a state in the full sense, but forging cultural ties matters greatly, both for the state and politically,” he said. “But we made it ourselves, and it remains an independent production. The response from ordinary people has been overwhelmingly warm. While it hasn't yet received much attention at higher levels, unfortunately. Perhaps that recognition will come in time; maybe it will not, but we do hope that it does.”
He also mentioned that many who come to watch the show leave the Theatre with a somewhat broader horizon: "Who could have thought that there is a deeper historical connection between us all? This is all worth reflecting on."
Zhalsanov fondly mentioned that many scholars wrote to him to convey their regards, their interest in the project, and their appreciation for how wonderful an idea it was. The ensemble was first performed about a decade ago, and since then, the team has been “trying to add new layers to the project, each one reflecting a different culture.”
One particular aspect of the production I was extremely invested in was whether there were any historical figures whose portrayal sparked debate within the group during development. For instance, we know there were many difficult moments in the history of the Mongol Empire. In some regions of Central Asia, for example in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, people still react painfully to the Mongol legacy. It often slips through the cracks in conversations on the subject, not only in collective memory, but also in state ideology.
Zhalsanov explained that he and his team did not encounter anything like that among the artists they incited. He did, however, clarify that they wrote the project in a way that such conflict can be avoided. “We understand that no conquest in the world unfolds beautifully or comfortably; it’s not all sunshine and roses. Any conquest of one people by another is always accompanied by killing and destruction.”
It is one of the many cold, harsh facts we often forget to account for whilst writing stories set in historical time periods, regardless of what format we tell the story in. Time plays by its own rules: no empire is eternal. The accounts we read are heavily impacted by who recorded them, rather than by an objective reality.
He went on to share an interesting anecdote:
Lately I've been glad that even historical interpretation is changing. In Russia, when I was in school, we were taught: "the Tatar-Mongols came, attacked our country, burned villages and towns", even though we ourselves are Mongols, Buryat-Mongols, and that's how we studied history. My teacher would later quietly say in Buryat: You understand that these Mongols are us.
At university, they already discussed the complexity of how to view our shared history: was it a 300-year yoke, or was it actually more about connections? When Zhalsanov studied at GITIS (the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts), his professor of Russian history — he had a Kalmyk friend at the time, and they were all fascinated by this history — stated clearly: there is historical evidence of very close ties between princes and khans. Mongol and Russian troops fought on different sides of various conflicts: Mongols could be found on either side. In other words, it's not as simple as "the Mongols came and burned everything"; that's not exactly how it happened.
And this project, in its own way, promotes this kind of understanding. There have always been wars, and unfortunately, there always will be. If you look at human history, war in one form or another is a constant presence. Victors write history, and something is preserved in sources and chronicles. But no war was ever a joyful moment.
“Is it right for us, for humanity, to keep holding onto such heavy feelings and to be emotional about them today? To what extent are we entitled to blame a German passerby: "You attacked us, my grandfather died in that war, you scoundrels"? What consequences would that have, for me, and for that passerby, who might also feel burdened and uneasy because of it?”
Whatever happens, whatever wars occur, culture and art remain, and they inspire people. No matter which civilisation prevails, it brings, among other things, something good too: the development of culture, art, painting, music, and costume. The Mughal Empire is still known today: the Taj Mahal is their legacy, cherished and loved by everyone, along with the palaces, and the greatest library in the palace of Akbar the Great, where he gathered artists and musicians. This too is a legacy that remains in memory.
This legacy deserves to be valued and talked about, perhaps even more than the conquerors themselves, because conquerors always exist. What matters is what conclusions we draw afterwards. We wanted our conclusion to be that we should turn toward the cultural side of things.
“The Buryats are a very small people by global standards, but we have a rich, deep history as part of different countries and peoples. Our entire culture is made up of these meanings, this symbolism, these costumes, songs, and dances; of what has survived, because we don't have great libraries or chronicles preserved the way, say, Chinese civilisation does. So these fragments that we do have become the very things that inspire us and shape the creative work of the Baikal Theatre.”
Their other project, "Bargudjin Tukum", tells the story of the shores of Baikal. In the 8th–9th centuries, there was a Khanate here, and tribes lived bearing the same names that survive to this day. “People still remember their lineages, their roots. In our various projects, we try to tell precisely about this cultural dimension, how important it is, and how it has carried through the centuries. That, essentially, is our mission.”
Speaking about "The Splendour of Asia" - another one of the shows at the Baikal Theatre - Zhalsanov told us that it was based on the culture of Southeast and Far East Asia, countries such as Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Whilst they once seemed very distant to people, he explained, “Through this project we reminded Buryats how close we actually are to Asian culture.”
It was like looking in the mirror: Buryats are not Slavs or Russians. “Whilst it's important to value Russian culture, we mustn't forget that for a very long time we were also part of Asian culture. This is something worth knowing and exploring.” Zhalsanov elaborated.
Now, eight centuries after Chinggis Khan's assembly of leaders declared him ruler of the Mongol steppe, the world his empire once stitched together by force is being re-stitched by other means. Communities across Central Asia, the Caucasus, South Asia, and beyond are re-examining their genealogies, histories, and cultural ties. We can hope that this new reclamation, undertaken by the descendants themselves, on their own terms and by their own intention, ushers in an age where we find more in common than apart and go on to create beauty together.
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