Jangar and the Singers of the Oirats

The Jangar is the epic cycle of the Oirat Mongols, sung by specialists called jangarchi, and it is built as a set of independent chapters rather than as one continuous story, so a performance takes up a chapter and finishes it. Its setting is Bumba, a country without death, old age or want, ruled by the orphan hero Jangar with a body of companions each defined by a distinguishing gift, and the cycle turns on the defence of that country against invaders. The material is heroic rather than doctrinal, but it sits inside a Buddhist world: the singers were often attached to monasteries or to noble households that endowed them, the chapters open with formulas of blessing, and the cycle absorbed Buddhist cosmological vocabulary without becoming a religious text.

Kalmyk itself is the vernacular of a people who migrated west from Dzungaria in the seventeenth century and settled on the lower Volga, which made Kalmykia the only Buddhist majority territory in Europe. The whole population was deported to Siberia and Central Asia in 1943 and permitted to return in 1957, and the loss of speakers and of monastic institutions in those years is the reason the language is now classified as endangered and the epic is carried by a small number of performers.