APRIL 9 - APRIL 10, 2022


Medical Humanities in the Middle East Online

Amanda Caterina Leong

ABSTRACT

 

How Qajar Iranian Princess Taj al-Saltana Saw a 19th Century Global Pandemic

Amanda Caterina Leong

University of California, Merced 

 

Persianate cultures have been greatly influenced by the “mirror for princes” genre, which offers monarchs advice on how to treat their subjects justly and methods of being an ideal ruler. While scholars have chosen to study this genre from a male-centered perspective, how royal women shaped this genre has remained under-examined by current scholarship. This article argues that Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity (1884-1936), one of the only female-authored memoirs written during the Qajar period of Iran by Princess Taj al-Saltana, offer new ways of seeing how women used memoir writing to challenge the dominance of their male counterparts during times of pandemics.

Princess Taj al-Saltana, apart from being the daughter of Naser al-Din Shah, was a prominent intellectual and pioneering activist who fought for constitutionalism, freedom, and women’s rights in Iran. She wrote her memoir as she watched a cholera pandemic devastate Iran, one of many in the late nineteenth century. Despite having been written more than a hundred years ago looking specifically at the cholera epidemic in Iran, by analyzing the ways Taj al-Saltana challenges genre conventions, specifically the strategies she uses to criticize the failure of Iran’s Qajar government to control cholera, indicting patriarchy and corruption for the malaises facing the country, while also educating female readers on methods of being an ideal female ruler for a better and healthier Iran, this article aims to show the way Crowning Anguish functions as a “mirror for princesses” and how we can come up with better strategies of resistance especially in the age of COVID-19 with the failures of patriarchal governments to stop pandemics.

 

BIO

Amanda Caterina Leong is a third-year Ph.D. student from the University of California's Interdisciplinary Humanities program with a focus in Middle Eastern Studies and a secondary field in Medical Humanities. Her research interests are looking at the way early modern women from the Mughal, Safavid, and Ming Empires contributed to notions of power, ethics, and kingship central to the definition of the Persianate as well as the way public health and pandemics were articulated during the Qajar period.