Dorzhi Banzarov

The dissertation Banzarov defended at Kazan in 1846, published as The Black Faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols, is a short book with a large claim. Russian and Chinese observers had treated Mongol religion as a residue, a disorder of superstition left behind by Buddhism or degraded from it. Banzarov argued that it was a religion in its own right with its own structure: heaven, Tengri, at the centre; the earth and its masters; the ancestral and clan spirits, the ongon; and a specialist whose work was defined by relations with all three.

He built the argument from Mongolian and Chinese written sources and from what he knew directly, and the phrase black faith is itself internal, the term used in Mongolian against the yellow faith of the Gelug monasteries. Working from a vocabulary the tradition used about itself, rather than from the categories of the observer, is what makes the book unusual for its date, and it is the reason it is still cited rather than only mentioned.

Parts of it have not aged well. The comparative framework is that of the middle of the nineteenth century and its evolutionary assumptions are visible on the surface. What survived is the basic move, that a religion should be described in terms it recognises, and later Buryat and Mongolian scholarship dates itself from him.

He was born in 1822 in Transbaikalia into a Buryat Cossack family and was sent to the Russo-Mongol school at Troitskosavsk on the Chinese frontier, then to the gymnasium at Kazan and to Kazan University, where he read oriental languages. He was the first Buryat to take a Russian university degree, and by the time he finished he worked in Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, Turkic and Sanskrit as well as several European languages.

His teachers expected him to continue in the university. He was not appointed. The obstacles were his estate, since he was formally a Cossack and owed service, and his religion, since chairs in the imperial system were effectively closed to a man who was not Orthodox and who declined to convert. After a period in St Petersburg he was posted to Irkutsk as an official for the affairs of the peoples of eastern Siberia under the governor general.

He kept working in the margins of the job, publishing on Mongolian inscriptions, on the figure of the White Old Man, and on an inscribed stone of the Chinggisid period. He died at Irkutsk in 1855, aged thirty-three, and the circumstances are recorded only sparsely. He is now a figure of national importance in Buryatia, with the state university at Ulan-Ude named after him, which settles a debt the empire declined to pay in his lifetime.