Lakai Erotic

The Lakai are horse people. Among the Uzbek-speaking tribes that settled the hills and river valleys of what is now southern Tajikistan, they have held on to a tribal name, a genealogy and a reputation: breeders of tough mountain horses, hard riders at kopkari (the goat-carcass game known elsewhere as buzkashi), and, in the 1920s, the core of armed resistance to Soviet rule in eastern Bukhara. Most live today in the Hisor valley and the low ranges of Khatlon south and east of Dushanbe, with smaller communities across the border in Uzbekistan's Surxondaryo region and in northern Afghanistan, where many families fled when that fight was lost.

Their speech is a Kipchak-type dialect of Uzbek, the kind that says j where literary Uzbek says y. It marks them off audibly from the settled Uzbek of the towns, and entirely from their Tajik neighbors, whose language is Iranian, though most Lakai get by in Tajik as well. Ethnographers place them among the steppe tribes of the Dasht-i Kipchak who moved south in the wake of the Shaybanid conquest of the sixteenth century. The tribe is reckoned in four main branches, Esankhoja, Badrakli, Bayram and Turtuul, each split into lineages that people can still name. They are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, with the familiar Central Asian layer of shrine visits, amulets and life-cycle feasts on top of mosque practice.

Until the early twentieth century the Lakai were semi-nomadic, wintering in villages and moving flocks and horse herds to summer pasture. Collectivization ended that. Before it did, Ibrahim Bek, a Lakai of the Esankhoja branch, led the Basmachi war against the Red Army through the 1920s, first from the hills of eastern Bukhara and then from exile in Afghanistan, until his capture in 1931. The memory cuts both ways: pride inside the community, and decades of official suspicion outside it. In the civil war of the 1990s Lakai militias fought on the side of the Popular Front that brought the present government to power. Tajikistan's censuses of 2000 and 2010 counted the Lakai separately from other Uzbeks, at about 51,000 and then 65,000 people. Some welcome that as recognition; others read it as a way to shrink the Uzbek total.

Outside the region the name travels on two things. One is the Lokai horse, a small, sure-footed breed still raised in Tajikistan. The other is Lakai embroidery: small silk-stitched hangings and bags worked by women in bold, off-kilter motifs, nothing like the orderly floral suzanis of Bukhara and Samarkand, and now chased by textile collectors worldwide.