Laughter as the Language of the Landless Satire, Power, and the Poetics of Colonial Injustice in Muqimiy's Tanobchilar

This essay examines Muqimiy’s satirical narrative poem “Tanobchilar” (“The Land Measurers”) as both a work of aesthetic brilliance and a document of social resistance. Drawing on classical Uzbek literary traditions, colonial history of the Kokand Khanate and Russian Turkestan, and postcolonial literary theory, the essay argues that Muqimiy’s laughter is not an escape from politics but its most precise instrument. The poem encodes an entire sociology of extraction — corruption, complicity, and peasant suffering — within a surface of comic grotesque. To read “Tanobchilar” carefully is to hear, beneath every punchline, the quiet devastation of a world being measured and found disposable.