ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular social group called Gardan Koloft, who were the Motreb's principal patrons. The Motreb were also called on to perform at festivities. European travellers described the nineteenth-century luti as magicians and animal trainers, on one hand, and as itinerant Motreb buffoons, on the other. It seems that many people who did this kind of work belonged to the category of luti. If it once had a double meaning, one pejorative and the other entirely positive, the Gardan Koloft retained only the second and disregarded the first. In other words, in the Pahlavi era, the term 'luti' applied only to a Gardan Koloft or Jahel who had the character of an honest man. This is all the more understandable when we consider that the disappearance or gradual transformation of many categories of luti after 1920, due to the modernization of the country, placed them, in the absence of the latter, at the lowest sociocultural level.
