Taj al-Saltaneh

Taj al-Saltaneh (1884–1936) was a daughter of Naser al-Din Shah whose memoir, written around 1914, is the most personal account we have of life inside the Qajar royal harem. Married at about thirteen, she later divorced, took part in the women’s circles of the constitutional period and wrote openly about the veil, marriage and the education of women.

A childhood in the andaruni

Zahra Khanom was born in Tehran in 1884, a daughter of Naser al-Din Shah by one of his wives, Turan al-Saltaneh. Like other royal children she grew up in the women’s quarters of the palace, the andaruni, cared for mostly by a wet nurse and nannies rather than by her mother. Her memoir describes the routines of that world: the crowds of wives and servants, the rivalries between their households, the eunuchs at the doors and the visits of her father, whom she remembered with affection. The institution itself is described on the page on the Qajar court and harem.

She was engaged as a child, a common arrangement in elite families, and her education was the usual one for a princess: reading, Persian poetry, religious instruction. She later blamed this upbringing for leaving her, as she saw it, unprepared for life, and she wrote of how she later left behind the folk beliefs of her nannies.

Marriage and divorce

In 1896 her father was assassinated at the shrine of Shah Abdol-Azim (see the assassination of Naser al-Din Shah). At about thirteen she was married to Hasan Khan Shoja al-Saltaneh, son of a senior Qajar military official. The couple had four children. The memoir portrays the marriage as deeply unhappy and speaks of her husband’s affairs and her own loneliness.

Over the following years she is said to have adopted European dress, and under the influence of a tutor she came to question religion; her mother accused her of having “turned Babi”, a common insult for any unconventional idea at the time. She eventually divorced her husband, a rare and scandalous step for a woman of the royal family.

A princess in the constitutional era

The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 brought a new language of rights and reform, and Taj al-Saltaneh welcomed it. She is said to have been among the founders or early members of a women’s society known as the Anjoman-e Horriyat-e Nesvan, the Society for Women’s Freedom, which met in Tehran during the revolutionary years. The wider story of women’s societies and schools at this time is told in women in the Constitutional Revolution.

The memoir

Around 1914, at about thirty, she wrote an account of her life up to that point. It moves between memories, regret and argument. Among its main themes:

• The harem from inside: the daily life of the royal women, their quarrels and pleasures, and the effect on children of growing up among them.
• Her father’s court: a portrait of Naser al-Din Shah as a loving father but a ruler surrounded by flatterers, and a critical account of the waste and misgovernment she saw around him.
• Women’s position: criticism of the veil and seclusion, of early marriage and of the lack of education for girls, which she saw as a cause of Iran’s weakness.
• Slavery and servants: sympathetic and critical passages about the enslaved and servant women of the household.

The manuscript stayed unpublished for decades. A Persian edition, prepared by the historians Mansoureh Ettehadieh and Cyrus Sa’dvandian, appeared in Tehran in 1982, and an English translation by Anna Vanzan and Amin Neshati, edited with an introduction by Abbas Amanat, was published as Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity, 1884–1914 in 1993.

Later life and legend

Little is known of her last two decades. The fall of the Qajar dynasty in 1925 ended the privileges of the royal family, and she is generally said to have lived in reduced circumstances until her death in Tehran in 1936.

In recent years photographs of Taj al-Saltaneh, often mislabelled, have circulated widely online with claims that she was the “ideal beauty” of her age and that young men killed themselves for love of her. These stories are not supported by her memoir or by other sources from the period. Her importance lies elsewhere: as Amanat argues in his introduction, she was one of the first Iranian women to write about her own life with such candour, and her memoir gives a rare woman’s view of the last decades of the old Qajar court. She also appears on the page on Qajar art, photography and society.