Uvaysiy

Jahon Otin Uvaysiy (born Jahonbibi; also known as Jahon Otin) was born in 1781 in Margilan into a modest but educated family. Her father introduced her to the secular sciences and the particulars of Uzbek versification.

Widowed early, Uvaysiy left her home town with her two children and moved to Kokand, the capital of the Kokand Khanate. There she became the confidante and mentor of the poet Nodira, wife of the ruler Umar Khan, teaching noblewomen the rudiments of the sciences and the art of poetry.

Her personal life was tragic: her daughter Quyosh died in her mother’s lifetime, and her son was sent to Kashgar as a soldier. Uvaysiy gave the love she had for her children to her pupils, for whom she wrote many riddles in verse — the chiston, a genre in which she was an innovator.

Uvaysiy’s legacy includes a divan of lyric ghazals of great technical accomplishment, in which notes of protest against the subordinate position of women in the East are often heard. She also wrote the dastan “Karbalonoma”, about the Shi’a imams Hasan and Husayn, and an unfinished verse biography of Muhammad Ali Khan of Kokand, the son of Umar Khan and Nodira.

The tragic circumstances of her life are reflected in her lyric poetry, which is why she is often called the poet of sorrow. She died in 1845, aged over sixty; the manuscript of her divan and dastans is kept at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan.