Mongol

When I got an invitation to the premiere of “Mongol-Part One”, the new film about Genghis Khan playing in theaters everywhere as they say, I jumped at the opportunity since it would give me exactly the excuse I needed to read Jack Weatherford’s 2004 “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World”. After seeing the film, I can happily report that even if the movie was not a joy to watch (which it is) it jibes with the Weatherford’s version of the great Mongol conqueror.

Weatherford, an anthropologist at Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota, has devoted himself to challenging prejudices about the “savage” and showing their contributions to historical progress. Arguably, Genghis Khan is the most stunning example of this ever seen. As Weatherford puts it in the introduction to his book:

The only permanent structures Genghis Khan erected were bridges. Although he spurned the building of castles, forts, cities, or walls, as he moved across the landscape, he probably built more bridges than any ruler in history. He spanned hundreds of streams and rivers in order to make the movement of his armies and goods quicker. The Mongols deliberately opened the world to a new commerce not only in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge. The Mongols brought German miners to China and Chinese doctors to Persia. The transfers ranged from the monumental to the trivial. They spread the use of carpets everywhere they went and transplanted lemons and carrots from Persia to China, as well as noodles, playing cards, and tea from China to the West. They brought a metalworker from Paris to build a fountain on the dry steppes of Mongolia, recruited an English nobleman to serve as interpreter in their army, and took the practice of Chinese fingerprinting to Persia. They financed the building of Christian churches in China, Buddhist temples and stupas in Persia, and Muslim Koranic schools in Russia. The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors, but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.

The movie, the first installment in a trilogy, was directed by Russian director Sergei Bodrov. It covers the period from Temudjin’s boyhood to the first great military victory that sealed his control over the Mongol homeland, a territory previously divided by petty clan feuds. (Genghis Khan’s birth name was Temudjin. Like another great nation-builder, Mustafa Kemal, he was renamed at his ascension to power.)

Although it takes liberty with the biographical material found in “The Secret History of the Mongols”, an account of Genghis Khan’s life written by Mongol scholars and discovered in the 19^th century, “Mongol” does retain some of the more important details, especially the death of his father at Tatar hands, his family’s consequent ruin, his marriage to Börte–a woman he chose as his wife when he was nine years old, and the rivalry between Temudjin and his blood brother Jamukha.

But far more important than such details in terms of establishing authenticity is the way that Bodrov and screenwriter Arif Aliyev capture the essential social relations that governed life on the steppes in the early 13^th century. The Mongols were a semi-nomadic pastoral people who raised horses, yaks, camels and other animals for transportation and food. They lived in gers, which were tents held up by poles and covered with hides. They were master horsemen and relied heavily on bows and arrows for both hunting and raids on their adversaries. Class divisions did not run as deep as they did in urban-based agricultural societies but there was an aristocracy that required tribute from vassals, usually taking the form of ceremonial gifts.

In other words, the Mongols were socially not that different from the great tribes of the American Plains, including the Lakota, the Blackfoot and the Comanches. By analogy, imagine if you had a relatively advanced indigenous society in Canada that was structured like the Aztecs or the Incas. Further, imagine the Plains Indians united across tribal lines and conquering the more advanced societies to the north and to the south. Finally, under the rule of somebody like Sitting Bull, all of the Americas were joined through commercial ties over trade routes protected and maintained by the Lakotas. That was the achievement of the Mongols.

The world of young Temudjin is filled with constant threats from warring clans and an unforgiving environment. He appeals to the gods and to his extended family in order to survive slavery, warfare and betrayal. His ability to surmount these difficulties and rise to the level of Khan, or king, is a tribute to his own talents and also to the traditions of the Mongol people that has successfully adapted to a brutal environment.

“Mongol” describes a series of obstacles that Temudjin meets successfully, starting with the death by poisoning of his father. Rivals to his father within his own tribe seize this opportunity to steal his family’s herd, drive them from camp, and take Temudjin into captivity. Played by a young Japanese actor named Odnyam Odsuren (the older Temudjin is also played by a Japanese actor named Tadanobu Asano), Temudjin shows no fear of or deference to his captors.

One of the major complaints of some reviewers is that Odsuren and Asano’s performances are forgettable, a function no doubt of Bodrov and Aliyev’s refusal to make the characters in “Mongol” more recognizable to contemporary audiences. It is to the credit of the creative team that they have not created characters bent on chewing up the scenery like Mel Gibson in “Braveheart”. The world of the Mongol warrior was undoubtedly inhospitable to the kind of histrionics that mark nearly all the best-known historical epics and thank goodness for that. The audience, at least its smarter members, will understand that it is not being patronized.

This is not to say that drama is lacking in “Mongol”. For those who have seen and enjoyed recent Mongolian films such as “The Story of the Weeping Camel” and “Mongolian Ping Pong”, “Mongol” conveys the mixture of stoicism, good humor and bawdiness that makes life at such extremes for such peoples possible.

Most of Bodrov’s movie focuses on the personal drama of Temudjin as he escapes from slavery, reunites with his wife and begins his rise as a supreme military tactician. There are some indications of what would finally allow him to emerge as Genghis Khan, the unifier of the Mongol people and conqueror of the largest territory in history.

In a bid to build an army that was capable of defeating his old enemy Jamukha, Temudjin declared that loyalty to the group and to its leaders was paramount. A people that had been divided by shifting loyalties based on immediate gains could never become powerful. When two of Jamukha’s men seek Temudgin’s favor by turning over their master to him, he has them executed. If they would betray Jamukha, they would betray him just as easily.

Currently I am studying the history of the Apaches and the Comanches as part of a project to answer Cormac McCarthy’s version of the Texas-Indian wars of the 19^th century found in “Blood Meridian”. Anybody who studies the defeat of the Indians will be struck by their inability to unite against their common enemy. If it would have been impossible under any circumstances for a non-industrialized people to fend off the more technologically advanced land thieves, they could have at least dictated a more favorable outcome if they had been united. Instead the Comanches betrayed the Apaches and both groups fought among themselves for momentary advantages. If a Genghis Khan had emerged from the American indigenous peoples, our history would have had a different outcome.

Just some parting words on the movie itself since this is supposed to be a movie review.

“Mongol” is one of most visually spectacular movies I have seen in a long time with breathtaking vistas of the mountains and steppes of Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan. Some locations were so remote that Bodrov had to build roads to get to them. The film score is also first-rate with references to Mongolian throat-singing used to great effect.

Finally, some words on the irony of a Russian director taking on a project like this. In a June 1, 2008 interview with the L.A. Times, Bodrov stated: “Genghis Khan’s name was forbidden in Mongolia for 70 years because of the Communists and because he was a Russian enemy.” Of all the stupidities associated with Stalinist rule, this vies for the most egregious.

In a 2000 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Weatherford described the lengths to which the Kremlin sought to suppress any recognition of Genghis Khan’s role in history:

Our team’s attempt to do a scholarly assessment of Genghis Khan is not the first one. The 1961 admission of Mongolia to the United Nations came almost 800 years after Genghis’s birth, in 1162. Tumurochir, then the second-highest-ranking official in the Communist government of Mongolia, sponsored a national scholarly symposium on Genghis Khan. To commemorate the occasion, he appropriated cement to allow people to build a historical marker at Genghis’s birthplace.

For the crime of promoting the study of Genghis Khan and thus promoting Mongol nationalism, the Communists removed Tumurochir from office and had him chopped to death with an ax.

The Communists’ wrath also descended on Mongolian scholars of Genghis Khan, many of whom were killed or jailed. Perlee, a respected archaeologist, was imprisoned in extremely harsh conditions merely for having been Tumurochir’s teacher. Even the relatives of scholars lost their jobs, were expelled from their homes in the harsh Mongolian climate, or were sent into exile. The purge destroyed a whole generation of linguists, historians, archaeologists, and any other scholars who specialized in topics even remotely connected to Genghis or the Mongol Empire.

Happily, the collapse of the Stalinist system has made it possible for Mongolians and foreign scholars like Weatherford to once again examine the historical record and put Genghis Khan into the proper context at odds with Voltaire’s demonization of him as a “destructive tyrant”.

Unfortunately, Stalinism has been replaced by a system that appears to rob the Mongolian people of their material welfare at the same time it is providing new freedoms. In an article aptly titled “The marketization of Mongolia” by K.L. Abeywickrama that appeared in the March 1996 Monthly Review, we learn about the impact of neoliberal reforms:

The dismantling of large-scale agricultural cooperatives and state farms has also led to the contraction of agriculture. By breaking up farms into small units owned by former cooperative members or workers, farming has been denied the capital resources, machinery, and technical services that existed earlier. Farmers are reverting back to subsistence agriculture. Food shortages have occurred and will become more frequent as subsidized imported grain replaces locally grown wheat.

Though stabilization was slated to be in sight by 1994, both agriculture and industry declined even in 1993. Livestock declined by 2 percent, industrial production by about 13 percent. The Consumer Price Index was 109 percent in 1993, down from 154 in 1992. Real average household incomes fell 28.2 percent. The trade deficit has been con trolled and inflation is declining due to a tight money policy. But there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Beggars and the homeless are now on the streets in freezing winters that reach minus 40 degrees. Though restaurant waiters and hotel staff may proudly decline service tips, and rural herding families in their ghers (traditional dome-shaped tents) still offer free meals to passing travellers, pickpockets now haunt buses, prostitutes line the karaoke bars, and some children live in sewers. And the Western NGOs, churches, and charities have joined the armies of aid-workers to perform their good deeds in Mongolia.

Clearly, the proud descendants of Genghis Khan deserve better.

“Mongol” trailer