CHAPTER 1
Who Are the Lyuli?
Names, Identity, and the Problem of Classification in Central Asia
From the proposed monograph:
The Lyuli (Mughat) of Uzbekistan: Language, Ritual, Memory and the Search for South Asian Connections
Dr. Manish Kumar C. Mishra
1.1 Introduction: a community hidden behind many names
The history of the Lyuli of Central Asia begins with a problem of naming. The population conventionally described in Russian, Soviet, Central Asian, and international scholarship as Lyuli has not always called itself by that name. Depending upon geographical region, historical period, neighbouring population, and scholarly tradition, apparently related communities have been referred to as Lyuli/Luli, Jughi/Jugi, Multoni/Multani, Mughat/Mugat, and occasionally Ghorbat/Gurbat. At the same time, several other communities of Central Asia have sometimes been placed under the broad social category of “Lyuli” despite maintaining identities separate from the Mughat.
This is not merely a terminological inconvenience. It is fundamental to reconstructing the community’s history. An ethnonym can preserve a memory of geographical origin, occupation, religion, social status, or an outsider’s perception. Conversely, it can conceal history by grouping together communities whose linguistic and genealogical backgrounds are different. In the case of the Lyuli, both processes appear to have operated simultaneously.
Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov’s comparative scholarship provides an especially useful starting point. Their classification places Lyuli/Jughi/Multoni/Ghurbat/Ghorbat together as a principal community whose self-appellation is Mughat, but distinguishes them from intermediate communities such as Mazang, Tavoktarosh and Agha and from more clearly differentiated “Gypsy-like communities” including Parya, Chistoni, Kavol and Balyuj. Crucially, their classification is presented as historically dynamic rather than immutable.
The first methodological principle of this study is therefore that Lyuli must be investigated as a historically changing social designation, whereas Mughat requires investigation as a community self-identification. The distinction between what a community calls itself and what others call it will remain central throughout this book.
1.2 Lyuli, Mughat, Jughi and Multoni: one community, several historical lenses
Specialist scholarship records Mughat as an important self-appellation, while surrounding populations have used Lyuli; Jughi occurs especially in Tajik contexts and in some parts of Uzbekistan. Of particular significance is Multoni or Multani, historically recorded in some regions of Uzbekistan, including Samarkand and Surkhandarya. Marushiakova and Popov relate this designation to Multan in medieval India, now Pakistan, while also recording an older internal distinction between sedentary craft-associated Kasib/Kosib and more mobile Multoni/Multani.
These names should not be treated as interchangeable labels stripped of historical content. Each must be examined for who used it, where, when, and with what social meaning. The nomenclature itself becomes evidence only when it is corroborated by independent historical, linguistic, or oral-traditional material.
1.3 The Multoni problem: does the name remember Multan?
The designation Multoni/Multani is potentially one of the most important clues connecting the community with the Indian subcontinent. Multan historically occupied a strategic position between the north-western subcontinent, Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia. Yet resemblance of an ethnonym to a place-name cannot by itself establish migration.
The equation Multoni → Multan → India → therefore Lyuli originated in Multan would be methodologically premature. Four questions must first be answered: Was Multoni a self-designation or an outsider designation? How early can it be documented? Did people identified as Multoni preserve a migration tradition from Multan? Does their specialised vocabulary independently point towards the Multan–Punjab–Sindh linguistic region?
The working hypothesis is therefore cautious: the ethnonym Multoni may preserve a geographical memory of South Asian migration, but its evidential value depends upon independent linguistic, historical, and oral-traditional corroboration.
1.4 “Central Asian Gypsies”: a useful but dangerous category
The expression “Central Asian Gypsies” has a long scholarly history, but the broad category has encompassed populations that do not constitute a single homogeneous ethnolinguistic community. This matters because European understandings of “Gypsy” are strongly associated with Roma. The demonstrated South Asian ancestry of Romani populations does not mean that every Asian population historically labelled “Gypsy” belongs to the same migration stream.
Similar occupations, mobility, marginality, entertainment, craft specialisation, itinerant trade, or begging likewise cannot establish common ancestry. Social categories can converge while genealogies remain separate. This book therefore uses “Central Asian Gypsies” principally when discussing the terminology of previous scholarship, while preferring Lyuli/Mughat for the focal community.
1.5 Parya is not Lyuli: an essential distinction
Parya is particularly important because it has sometimes been swept into broad outsider classifications. Specialist comparative work, however, distinguishes Parya among “Gypsy-like” communities rather than treating it as a synonym for Mughat/Lyuli. This distinction is indispensable.
Parya provides a valuable linguistic control because its language is demonstrably Indo-Aryan. Lyuli/Mughat, by contrast, have a different documented linguistic ecology, involving Tajik and Uzbek use together with specialised in-group vocabulary. Comparison between them can therefore test two potentially different historical trajectories: Indo-Aryan language maintenance under Central Asian contact in Parya, versus a possible history of language shift and lexical retention among Mughat. The latter remains a hypothesis to be tested, not a conclusion.
1.6 Regional identities and internal social organisation
The community should not be imagined as internally uniform. Scholarship records regional identifications and social organisation through patronymic clans and extended-family units. Such internal geography may be historically important. Regional subgroups can differ in vocabulary, marriage traditions, oral histories, migration narratives, rituals, clan names, and occupational histories.
Future linguistic fieldwork must therefore record not merely “the Lyuli word” for a concept, but who supplied the form, from which settlement and regional network, in what communicative context, and whether it is used by different generations. Without such metadata, an apparently old word cannot safely be interpreted historically.
1.7 Endogamy and the preservation of boundaries
Community boundaries can survive even when language changes. Comparative scholarship stresses differentiation among Lyuli and neighbouring minority communities, including through marriage boundaries. This provides an important anthropological principle: language shift does not necessarily imply ethnic assimilation.
A community may abandon an ancestral everyday language while preserving identity through marriage networks, clan organisation, occupational specialisation, ritual knowledge, and restricted vocabulary. This possibility is highly relevant to the later linguistic investigation of Mughat in-group speech.
1.8 Public language and community language
The linguistic situation cannot be reduced to the statement that Lyuli speak Tajik or Uzbek. Those descriptions concern everyday communicative competence; they do not necessarily exhaust the community’s repertoire.
The critical distinction for this study is between an external/public repertoire—principally Tajik, Uzbek, and in some contexts Russian—and an internal repertoire consisting of community speech, specialised vocabulary, argot, or restricted register. The terminology itself remains unresolved. Is this internal repertoire an autonomous language, a Tajik-based ethnolect, an argot constructed partly for secrecy, a lexical residue of an earlier language, or a historically layered combination of these processes?
The book deliberately postpones the answer. The working term will be “Lyuli/Mughat in-group speech” until its structural properties can be established from primary linguistic data.
1.9 Why the in-group vocabulary matters
Specialised vocabulary may represent the most important evidence in the investigation of South Asian connections. If the Mughat underwent language shift from an earlier South Asian language to Tajik, ordinary conversation could lose most traces of the ancestral language while selected lexical fields survived. Potentially conservative domains include kinship, body terminology, numbers, food, animals, basic actions, marriage, sexuality, birth, death, money, occupation, taboo, and terms for outsiders.
But specialised vocabulary can also be borrowed from regional argots. Consequently, an unfamiliar word is not automatically an ancestral word. Three hypotheses must remain open: an Indic substrate; predominantly Central Asian argot formation; or a stratified formation in which an older Indic residue became layered with Iranian, regional argot, Turkic, and later Russian material.
1.10 Identity is not a fossil
The search for origins must not reduce contemporary people to surviving fragments of an ancient migration. Specialist scholarship explicitly treats these identities and boundaries as historically changing. Lyuli/Mughat are contemporary Central Asian communities embedded in Tajik and Uzbek linguistic cultures and Sunni Muslim social worlds, while also maintaining family, regional, and community identities.
An Indian or South Asian connection, even if ultimately demonstrated strongly, would constitute one historical layer of their identity rather than its complete definition. This distinction is ethically important and analytically necessary.
1.11 A four-level model of identity
For the purposes of this monograph, Lyuli/Mughat identity can provisionally be studied at four interacting levels: self-identification; neighbour classification; scholarly/administrative classification; and historical reconstruction. Confusion occurs when evidence from one level is used to prove another.
Thus, Multoni as an ethnonym cannot alone prove Multan ancestry; “Gypsy” as an outsider or scholarly label cannot prove Romani ancestry; Mughat as a self-name cannot alone establish ancient ethnogenesis; and Tajik as a contemporary everyday language cannot prove that the community always spoke Tajik.
1.12 Evidence hierarchy for this book
The monograph will distinguish levels of evidence rather than presenting all similarities as equally probative. Regular linguistic correspondences across basic vocabulary and grammar, and securely dated historical documents, will carry the greatest weight. Multiple independent sources converging on the same migration route, or kinship, terminology, endogamy and oral memory converging independently, will be treated as strong evidence. Distinctive ritual complexes may provide moderate-to-strong support when they include diagnostic terminology. Ethnonyms suggesting a geographical origin are suggestive but not decisive. Isolated similar words, dress, appearance, occupation, or the outsider label “Gypsy” are weak or non-genealogical evidence by themselves.
1.13 Conclusion: the research problem emerging from the names
The evidence reviewed in this opening chapter permits several conclusions. Lyuli is not an uncomplicated self-name for a single immutable population. Specialist scholarship records Mughat as a central self-appellation and Lyuli, Jughi and Multoni among names used in different regional settings. The broader category has also been capable of obscuring distinct minority communities.
Parya must remain analytically separate from Lyuli, even though comparison between them is exceptionally valuable. The historical use of Multoni/Multani in Uzbekistan creates a legitimate South Asian research question, particularly because specialist scholarship associates the designation with Multan. But this connection must be tested independently through language, historical records, and oral evidence.
The linguistic question therefore emerges as the central unresolved problem: if contemporary Lyuli/Mughat communities principally operate within Tajik and Uzbek linguistic environments, what is the historical origin of their restricted in-group speech, and does its oldest recoverable lexical layer preserve demonstrable evidence of a South Asian language?
The next chapter will move backwards in time—from contemporary identity to India, Multan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia—in order to reconstruct the migration problem before the linguistic chapters test those narratives against the vocabulary itself.
Table 1.1. Principal names and their analytical status
Table 1.2. Evidence hierarchy used in the monograph
References cited in Chapter 1
Marushiakova, Elena, and Vesselin Popov. 2016. Gypsies of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marushiakova, Elena, and Vesselin Popov. 2014/2015. ‘Migrations and Identities of Central Asian “Gypsies”’ / ‘Central Asian Gypsies: Identities and Migrations’. Comparative work on Lyuli/Mughat and neighbouring communities.
Ozierski, Przemysław. 2014. ‘Central Asian Gypsies – Lyuli: The Overview of Current Socio-Economic Problems’. Przegląd Narodowościowy / Review of Nationalities, 3.
Source note: This chapter is a working scholarly draft for the proposed monograph. Historical claims concerning names, classification, Multoni/Multani, and the distinction between Mughat/Lyuli and Parya are based primarily on the cited specialist literature. The later linguistic chapters will require direct analysis of primary Mughat vocabulary and Oransky’s corpus before making etymological conclusions.
Visual Documentation for Chapter 1
The following visual sources have been verified as specifically depicting Lyuli/Luli people. They are listed with source and reuse status so that the monograph does not use generic Central Asian portraits as if they were evidence about the Lyuli community. Historical and contemporary images are treated as contextual ethnographic documentation, not as proof of ancestry.
Figure 1.1 (recommended historical plate)
Figure 1.2 (recommended contemporary plate)
Additional visual source
Additional visual source
Additional historical visual source
Recommended Caption Form
Figure 1.1. Lyuli people, Zaravshan, Central Asia, c. 1885–1890. Photograph: F. Orden. Source: historical album on the Caucasus and Central Asia; Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Figure 1.2. Lyuli woman with two children, Samarkand, Uzbekistan, 10 September 2009. Photograph: Peretz Partensky. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Flickr. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Editorial Note on Photographic Evidence
Photographs in this book should never be used to infer Indian ancestry from physical appearance. Their evidentiary function is limited to documented historical presence, social setting, dress, material culture, family/community context, and change over time. Where a photograph was produced under older ethnographic categories such as “Gypsy”, the historical caption should be preserved and critically contextualised rather than silently modernised.
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