Music, Gender Segregation, and the Pamir-Kush: a look at some artifacts and music videos.By Kevin Patrick Fitzgerald, Mnoty Press, Naawan, Philippines. October 2026.
In this essay, I consider two artifacts in the Dunhuang archaeological assemblage in relation to musical practice and gendered segregation in the Pamir and Hindu Kush Mountains (a region I call the Pamir-Kush). My argument is that the Silk Road culture was steeped in the exploitation of women as sexual entertainers with musical accompaniment, and that the conservatism of the people in the mountains provided for a counter-cultural movement whereby women were excluded from participating in public musical practices.
The archaeological complex associated with Dunhuang, and broader the Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang, China, is famous for its evidence of Silk Road culture. At the heart of the complex are a group of Buddhist libraries established in caves from around the first to the 8th centuries CE. These libraries had manuscripts, paintings, and a wide variety of other material.
Among the other material are a few artifacts associated with music and a bunch of paintings of women dancing. The first artifact I consider here is a clay figure of what appears to be a monkey playing a lute. The other is a piece of a lute that includes the neck, the head, and part of the body.
Pictures of these artifacts can be found here. Monkey and instrument.
The monkey is sitting cross-legged and looking up while strumming the strings and grips the neck. The instrument is made of wood; has pegs for three strings and a thick neck that flares out roundly to accommodate a wide resonant body.
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I found a few videos on youtube by searching for music of marginalized languages of the region. I was not actually looking for evidence of gender segregation, but it became clear that gender was a very important part of what I was looking at.
For the monkey figure, several of the videos played a lute that looked like the lute played by the monkey: especially further south. For all of the videos, a lute of some sort was the principle instrument. All of the videos showed the lute player, with their heads mostly bowed; as opposed to the monkey who's head was lifted hight.
For the lute neck artifact; none of the instruments were shaped like it, some have three pegs, none had the pegs lined up as the artifact. Further north there were a wider variety of lute body shapes, and the furthest from the shape of the artifact was the lute associated Uyghur language, which was the majority language in the Tarim Basin until the recent Chinese occupation..
The main thing was that there were, as far as showed in the video, no women present at any of the videos. This is in stark contrast to the images of dancing women in the libraries of the Tarim Basin, where dancing women in flowing, loose, colorful garments were depicted as the center of a bevy of entertainment.
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Here are the videos with a brief structural analysis:
1. Kashmiri: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsVQLQmiQgo)
The lute has six strings and the head and body are shaped similarly to the one played by the monkey.
The lutist is part of an ensemble, and not the lead. The singer is the lead. The singer occasionally lifts his head to view the audience, but for the most part looks either toward the floor or toward his accompanying musicians. He does not lift his head as high as the monkey.
All four musicians appear to be male. They are all sitting with their legs crossed. The video does not show the audience. There doesn't appear to be any dancing.
2. Uyghur:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU-tC4tcgVg
The two musicians with lutes are sitting on a bench. Both appear to be male, and it looks like everyone in attendance (about thirty) is male as well. The lead player is looking at the instrument the whole time, and the rhythm player is watching the lead player.
The instruments are narrow in body; with a rounded, tapered transition from neck to body, practically the opposite of the artifact, and with a much longer neck. When the camera pans around, no-one is dancing, even in their seats.
It's hard to tell from the video, but I think both have five strings. The smaller one played by the rhythm player might have three. The pegs are different from the artifact, but might be a similar design to the one played by the monkey.
3. Nuristani: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9B3ZbIInnY
The ensemble consists of three percussionists, a singer, and a lutist. The lute has six strings with a bunch of sympathetic strings; the body is shaped like the lute in the Kashmiri performance and the one played by the monkey.
The performance, in a very small room with maybe twenty people. It also sounds like there might be a woman in the chorus sometimes (the music is a call and response format with many in the audience singing), but I don't see anyone who looks female in the video.
4. Nuristani: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sX8YZoWoE)
Recorded outside with a lute that is similar to those used by the Uyghur musicians. It has three strings with pegs similarly set up to the Uyghur musicians. The lute has a narrow body and a very long neck.
The lead singer is playing the lute, and there is a call and response, along with prolonged instrumental interludes. There is no audience shown. There seem to be no women present, but we can't see who's holding the camera.
5. Yadgha:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOjloVa0DMw
This shows another long three stringed lute. The lead singers take turns with a microphone. Some members of the audience are clapping, and occasionally vocalize. It looks like around forty people packed into a small space.
All those present appear to be male. The singers look down or at the people around them. The lute is shaped like the one played by the monkey, with six strings.
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Between the five videos, I see no evidence of a woman. There might be some there who are not on camera, and I thought I might have heard a female voice, and women might be having similar parties elsewhere while the men are having these parties; and those female-centered parties are not being filmed, or at least not posted on youtube.
Still, the fact that I wasn't even looking for gender segregation and still found it so prevalent shows that it's a big issue, and that it's related to musical performance. Also, it seems worth mentioning that these are traditional settings, and it does not suggest that people who speak these languages do not watch pop videos and attend disco clubs.
Another thing that comes to mind is that the Taliban hostility toward women participating in public is extreme, yet did not come from nowhere. The post-colonial view from the West, carried forward in India and China, is either that the Taliban are like this because Islam allows it, or because the people are stuck in some pre-modern uncivilized state of being.
Both explanations are superficial, racist, and inaccurate. The fact that these arguments are used by officials in China and India to justify persecution of Muslims shows how colonial ideology has influenced those officials, and the discourse of elites within those countries.
The argument I'm presenting here is that the gendered segregation of the people in the Pamir-Kush is rooted in a movement to protect women that pre-dates the birth of Islam by centuries. The Silk Road was not only about trafficking in silk; it was also a place for trafficking people.
Women being exploited in the urban centers might have looked pretty in the paintings, but the reality was surely violent, harsh, and sad. Women could be easily kidnapped from their mountain homes and forced into sex slavery. The intense gendered segregation in the region likely has roots in this reality.
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In the 1970s, before Afghanistan was invaded and bombarded by the Soviet military, the people of Afghanistan were moving toward a kind of popular culture similar to that of the West; with music videos showing scantily clad women performing erotic dance. Religious revival movements that targeted such art as evil had a broad conservative base from which to recruit.
I'm not defending the Taliban. They came to power not by defending women from Western exploitation; they came to power by murdering, torturing, and terrorizing people. They should be overthrown, arrested, and given fair trails for their excessive violence.
What I am suggesting is that their hostility toward the sexual objectification of women, and their appeal to gendered segregation, has deep roots in the region that relate to how conservative people in the mountains reacted to Silk Road sex slavery and debauchery practiced in the urban centers; and that musical culture is at the heart of how this regional gendered segregation has been understood and practiced.
Musical culture and gendered segregation are still connected. Among the reforms the Karzai regime tried was to bring about a popular music industry that included women singers. I suspect the goal was to convince the West to send more money by claiming the regime was civilizing the people.
These singers did not dance as erotically as their neighbors in Tajikistan and Pakistan, but it was enough to likely concern many of the more conservative population: especially in the rural mountain regions. As such, these policies helped bolster support for the Taliban and other reactionary organizations.
It's not only the people in Afghanistan who practice such gendered segregation around musical performance. The fact that all five of the videos I chose for other reasons had such rigid gendered segregation shows that it's part of something very widespread, and likely with very conservative, traditional roots.
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The conversion of the people of the Pamir-Kush to Islam happened while those people had already been reacting to the sexual exploitation of the Silk Road for centuries. Islam offered them a non-flashy, grounded alternative to the flourishing religions of the time.
Islam also has some doctrines of patriarchy and gendered segregation that might have appealed to the conservative values of the people of the rural mountain regions. It is important that we don't assume, as many do, that such conversions were top-down movements. Maybe on some vague political level the leaders made a difference, but people convert by choice or their conversion does not stand the test of time.
It is important to note that the people of the Pamir-Kush were not isolated when the silk road was replaced by maritime trade. They were soon surrounded by competing colonial forces: first the British, Russians, and Chinese, later the Chinese, Indians, and US. The actions of these colonial forces have intensified the anxieties of the people in the mountains, as have market pressures related to neo-colonial investment.
Such pressures intensify stress in all facets of life, and people who try to preserve a sort of counter-cultural practice in the face of such colonial tension are at an extreme disadvantage. This does not explain the continued practices of gendered segregation on its own, but it helps understand the intensification of such traditions.
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For the monkey figurine, perhaps part of the Muslim conversion was to not look up to the heavens like an entertainer showing off among dancing women. Perhaps they differentiated such behavior before the conversion along similar lines. Maybe the maker of the figurine was not good at showing faces down, or had the monkey looking up so they could show its monkey face.
The lute in the monkey's hand looked a lot like the one in Kashmir. It could be that this was a popular instrument form among the Kushan Empire, which controlled much of the territory under discussion here. It's a widespread instrument form, and the craft is a complex one.
As for the lute neck artifact, I think it did not come from the Pamir-Kush region, nor the traditions of the region. It looks like it might have come from Mongolia, or from a Mongol tradition, but most of the Mongolian lutes I've seen have two strings, and there is a tradition in Kyrgyzstan of three stringed lutes, but they're much smaller. It might be that the instrument was made among the Turkic-Mongolic speaking cultural sphere that largely connected with the Silk Road from the North.
I'll wrap this up with two women from Afghanistan singing a song of liberation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw4kqY6U6mw). The emotion in their voices speaks of a tremendous struggle and tremendous courage. My prayers are with the women of Afghanistan today.
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Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter for now. Thank you very much for reading. I hope you are healthy, free, and full of love and respect for the people in your life. If you are a singer, I hope you will keep singing. Please take good care of yourself and of them.
Power to the People.
Freedom of the Soul.