Using the Oxus River as a topos, this film explores themes of love and loss through the lives and musical poetry of the two most prominent and innovative Wakhi musicians in Central and South Asia: Qurbonsho in Tajikistan and Daulatsho in Afghanistan.
These two poet-singers share a common language, faith, and family network and yet remain separated by vicissitudes of the 19th century ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia. In this struggle for strategic control, the Wakhan homeland of the Wakhi people became a buffer zone between Czarist Russia and the British Empire, and the river Oxus, which became the border, ran right through the centre of Wakhan. After the modern nation states of the USSR and Afghanistan shored up their boundaries circa 1930, the communities living along one side of the river were severed from their counterparts on the other side. The specific condition of being separated by a river in the region has been the basis for poetry about the feeling of separation (firāq) in Persian and Wakhi poetry more generally and thereby grounds the poets’ discussions of love and loss in their own lives as well as in their musical arts.
The ethnomusicologist-filmmaker Richard K. Wolf shot and produced the film over 2.5 years (2012-2020) with the editorial collaboration of both Qurbonsho and Daulatsho, who narrate the film in Wakhi, Tajik and Dari. It experiments with visual editing techniques to suggest possible relations of identity between persons and other persons or animals, and between emotions and landscapes. It also employs translucent overlays of photographs and moving images to evoke multiplicity and ambiguity, inspired by montage and collage in 20th and 21st century film and art.
Two Poets and a River (Documentary Educational Resources, 2021); 75 min
The film screening will be followed by a discussion of the main points raised in the film including:
Presented in conjunction with Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Music Ethnography Forum
Richard K. Wolf is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South and Central Asia for four decades. Author of two monographs and editor of three collections, Wolf has published on social-cultural “style” in South Indian classical music; conceptions of space, time and music among the Kota tribal people in the Nilgiri Hills of south India; drumming, “recitation,” and music in public Islamic contexts in India and Pakistan; and musical and poetic links between South Asia and Persianate Central Asia.
Wolf’s current projects include a monograph on poet-singers entitled The Nightingale’s Despair: Music and Moral Being in Greater Central Asia and a co-edited volume entitled Musical Thinking: Poetry, Improvisation and Theory (Oxford University Press). As an ethnographic filmmaker, Wolf spent ten years making Two Poets and a River (Documentary Educational Resources), a film focusing on the poetry, music, and lives of two Wakhi poets living on opposite sides of the river that divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan. He is currently working on a series of films on the south Indian Kotas, entitled Pots of Millet, Faces of Gold. The first in the series, Transformation, moves from the crafting of musical instruments and pottery, to the use of these and other handmade materials in elaborate, multiday ceremonies. Treating lifecycle time, the body of the film follows the ritual treatment of the dead from initial funerary rites, to a large collective commemoration, with attention to the key role of children.
Wolf holds a 2023 article prize from the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance for, “The musical poetry of endangered languages: Kota and Wakhi Poem-Songs in South and Central Asia” (Oral Tradition 35). From 2012 to 2018, Wolf held a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During the 2018-2019 academic year he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. His most recent book-length publication is Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm (OUP 2019), a volume he co-edited with Stephen Blum and Christopher Hasty. Wolf is also a writer of creative non-fiction and a performer on the South Indian vina.
