Sarts (Asian people)

Sārt is a term historically used to refer to certain categories of the settled population of Khwarazm (from the 17th century onward) and the Fergana Valley. In different periods and localities, the term could refer to Persian-speaking populations, certain Turkicised Persian-speaking groups; artisans, broadly corresponding to the urban petty-bourgeois estate; while among the inhabitants of Samarkand Oblast in the 19th century, the word "Sart" was used in a derogatory sense. Sart is a term encountered in the history and ethnography of Persian-speaking and Central Asian societies. In the 16th century, the nomadic Uzbeks who conquered Central Asia distinguished themselves clearly from the conquered settled population, which they referred to as "Sarts" regardless of linguistic or ethnic affiliation. This designation remained in use until the 19th century and was used in the Kokand and Khivan khanates. Following the Russian conquest of Central Asia, the term "Sart" came to be used by the administration of the Turkestan Governor-Generalship, and subsequently by the Soviet authorities until 1926. Later, the term disappeared from both official usage and everyday speech. In the 1897 Russian Empire Census, respondents were asked about their native language. According to the census results, nearly one million people identified the Sart language as their native language. The Turkestani Jadids, followers of the ideology of Islamic modernism, opposed the use of the term "Sart". Orientalists and ethnographers of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries had no consensus or clear understanding of what the ethnographic construct of the "Sart" represented. Some held that "Sarts are Tajiks", others that "Sarts are settled inhabitants", while still others regarded them as a "mixed nationality".