Lyuli Erotic

The Lyuli have been named by everyone except themselves. Russian sources say Lyuli, Tajiks say Jugi, Persian usage gives Luli and Ghorbat, and neighbors across the region collapse all of it into "Central Asian Gypsies." The word they use among themselves is Mugat. They live mostly in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, in settled quarters on the edges of Samarkand, Bukhara, Kokand, Dushanbe and the towns of the Ferghana Valley, with communities in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and northern Afghanistan, and a large seasonal presence in Russian cities since the 1990s. Their origins lie in India. Persian tradition explains this with a story: the Sasanian king Bahram Gur, wanting music for his subjects, sent to India for thousands of Luri players who afterward scattered. The harder evidence is linguistic. Most Lyuli speak Tajik, an Iranian language, laced with an in-group vocabulary outsiders cannot follow, while the closely associated Parya community still speaks an Indo-Aryan language stranded far to the northwest of every other member of its family.

They are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, and demonstratively so: fasting, shrine visits and pilgrimage carry weight in a way that answers, in part, the standing local suspicion that they are not really from here. Soviet policy tried to fix them in place from the 1920s onward with settlement schemes and collective farms, and it half worked. Many families became sedentary and took wage work, and many registered as Uzbek or Tajik on their documents, which is why every population figure for the group should be read as a floor rather than a count. Their trades ran to horse dealing, sieve making, tinsmithing and the carving of wooden bowls, the specialty that gave the Tavoktarosh their name. When the Union collapsed and Tajikistan fell into civil war, those trades went with it, and the visible edge of the community became women and children asking for money on city streets. That is the image most outsiders now carry, and the pretext for periodic police round-ups. Marriage stays inside the community, kin groups are large and cohesive, and Lyuli women never took up the paranja that once covered their settled neighbors. They move and talk in public with a directness that was long read as scandalous, and is simply theirs.