Introduction
In recent years, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel diaries covering a pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj) have been published in Iran.Footnote 1 Among these texts—released from manuscripts that, so far, were virtually inaccessible for readers—we can find three prose accounts written between 1880 and 1901 by the high-born ladies connected, in one way or another, to the royal court of Nāser al-Din Shāh (r. 1848–96): Mehrmāh Khānom ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh, the anonymous high-born lady from Kerman called by the editor of her travelogue, Rasul Jaʿfariyān, Hājiyeh Khānom ʿAlaviyeh Kermāni, and Sakineh Soltān Vaqār al-Dowleh Esfahāni Kuchak.Footnote 2 The aim of this paper is to outline the functions and functioning of those early women’s writings.
I would argue that for the Qajar women diarists, writing travel (the act of writing forced and formed by the circumstances of travel) and travel writing (the travelogues-as-texts) created a rather unexpected opportunity for textual self-expression and self-representation. According to Farzaneh Milani, for an Iranian woman to write was, traditionally, to make an act of transgression similar to that of a public unveiling: “Writing, with its potential for public communication, for entering the world of others, could be considered no less a transgression than unveiling. In both, a woman expresses/exposes herself publicly. Through both, an absence becomes a presence.”Footnote 3 Furthermore, as Milani observes, textual self-expression by and large, let alone that of women, was problematic in a culture valuing “a certain sense of humility, a shyness about one’s importance and accomplishments.”Footnote 4 Although in the 1800s quite a large number of women would compose poetry, it seems that the power of a literary convention, combined with the wish to be taken seriously as a poet, usually discouraged the female poets from speaking with a more personal, feminine voice.Footnote 5 Apparently, it was prose (significantly gaining in importance in the 1800s) rather than poetry that emboldened the Iranian women writers to communicate their selves more freely. The well-known examples of early modern “autobiographical transgressors” are Bibi Khānom Astarābādi (1858/59–1921), whose early feminist treatise-pamphlet Maʿāyeb al-Rejāl (The Vices of Men) from 1894 is interwoven with autobiographical passages, in which Bibi Khānom conveys anxiety and disappointment resulting from her marital crisis,Footnote 6 and Tāj al-Saltaneh (1884–1936)—a daughter of Nāser al-Din Shāh and the writer of the famous, unfinished memoirs from 1914, the first known woman-authored autobiography from Iran. The newly discovered travelogues from the Nāseri and Mozaffari periods demonstrate that the women travel diarists would also make use of the self-revealing potential of prose—although in diverse ways and to various extents.Footnote 7
The Hajj narratives (in Persian referred to as hajjnāmeh-hā or safarnāmeh-hā-ye hajj) constitute a subcategory of safarnāmeh (travelogue), a genre highly popular in nineteenth-century Iran, particularly under the reign of Nāser al-Din Shāh.Footnote 8 Without a doubt, Nāser al-Din Shāh’s personal interest in travel literature was an important factor that determined the development of safarnāmeh-nevisi (travel writing) in Qajar Iran. Apart from being fascinated by descriptions of his homeland made by foreign travelers—and his role in translating and disseminating these texts among the upper classes of Iranian society seems crucial—he was himself a writer of several travel accounts relating his trips inside and outside the country.Footnote 9 Importantly, Nāser al-Din Shāh was the first Iranian monarch to make an official trip to Europe in 1873, a venture repeated by him twice, in 1878 and in 1889. His son and successor to the throne, Mozaffar al-Din Shāh (r. 1896–1907), also visited Europe thrice (in 1900, 1902 and 1905)Footnote 10 and published the accounts of these travels.Footnote 11 It must be noted that mechanical printing that emerged in Iran in the 1800s allowed for producing books cheaply and in large quantities, and thus “helped to create a much larger reading audience as well as exciting the vanity and self-importance of traveler-authors.”Footnote 12 The Qajar safarnāmehs, real or fictitious, were among the first texts read not only by a narrow circle of courtiers, but also by a rapidly growing new class of educated urban citizens.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, during the Nāseri and Mozaffari periods safarnāmehs still were, for the most part, intended to be disseminated in manuscript form; it can be said that safarnāmeh-nevisi emerged as yet another expression of a literary practice of the court and aristocracy, next to a traditional activity of the Iranian high society: writing, performing and dissemination of poetry.Footnote 14
The burgeoning popularity of safarnāmeh-nevisi in the 1800s should be associated with an unprecedented increase of contacts with the West, partly forced by its colonial, imperial policies, and partly due to the curiosity and admiration of Iranians for technological, social and political advancement of Europe and, to a lesser extent, America.Footnote 15 It was in the nineteenth century when the newly emerging Iranian intelligentsia, similar to their counterparts from the Arabic countries and other parts of the Islamic world, became mobile on a global scale.Footnote 16 The new means of transportation, such as steamships and railroads, deeply transformed the global dynamics of travel; a revolutionary change that had to affect the Hajj as well.Footnote 17 Whereas in past centuries the pilgrimage to Mecca remained out of reach for the vast majority of Muslims, starting from the 1800s even the pilgrims originating from distant areas of the Muslim world began to participate in the Hajj.Footnote 18
One of those who benefited from those newly emerging modes of transport was Sikandar Begum (r. 1844–68), a semi-autonomous ruler of the princely state of Bhopal in central India, who in her native country was celebrated as the first Muslim ruler in history to have made the Hajj.Footnote 19 In the context of the female-authored Hajj narratives, it is worthwhile to mention her pilgrimage account, originally written in Urdu, and then translated to English and published in 1870.Footnote 20 On the pages of A Pilgrimage to Mecca, Sikandar presents herself as a self-confident ruler, not afraid of formulating critical remarks about the socio-political situation in Mecca. Her self-consideration as a reformist monarch capable of managing both secular and religious matters certainly was, as stressed by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, to a large extent shaped by the “imperial” ideals instilled in the Indian ground by the British; “her ongoing critique of Arabia’s officials—depicted in this narrative as corrupt and decadent as any ‘Oriental despot’ of the British imagination—demonstrates the degree to which she had internalized these ideals and become active in their reproduction.”Footnote 21
Sikandar stood out from the Iranian women diarists in many ways. Not only was she a Sunni from India, but also, more importantly, she was endowed with actual power and authority (albeit limited by the colonial British authorities). On the contrary, the Qajar ladies, although belonging to the high(est) ranks of aristocracy, lived, and traveled, in seclusion and could not develop official contacts. Whereas their male traveling companions would obtain more or less detailed information about history, geography, culture and demographics of the visited places by talking to the local officials, guides or ordinary people, they were, for the most part, deprived of such possibilities. For Sikandar, even religion and religiosity had its distinctive political context. The Qajar ladies, in turn, would not raise political issues in their narratives. Sikandar might have seen her work as a “means of extending her renown from Hindustan to England.”Footnote 22 The Qajar ladies, whose accounts were not written with the aim of being published, wrote for different purposes—although, as we shall see, they might have also been motivated by the wish to emphasize their high social status through writing and leaving behind the accounts of their pilgrimage, which at that time was still an expensive and dangerous venture.
Reading of the Qajar hajjnāmehs demonstrates that the Hajj itself usually did not constitute the main topic of interest for their authors, who would often raise religious or spiritual issues in a rather marginal way. Hence, content- and form-wise the nineteenth-century hajjnāmehs did not differ greatly from the “secular” travelogues: they were treated “as a means of information gathering and reporting on general conditions, both at home and abroad.”Footnote 23 However, as observed by Daniel, while in the hajjnāmehs dating back to the earlier Qajar period—such as the well-known Safarnāmeh by Mohammad Hoseyn Farāhāni of 1885/86—“the narrator [was usually] relegated to the background,”Footnote 24 the writers of the later diaries tended to demonstrate more concern about their “individual experiences and sentiments.”Footnote 25 This “subjective turn,” as it was called by Kamran Rastegar, who referred to safarnāmeh-nevisi in general, proves the variability of the genre over time and the fact that it was gradually becoming more “autobiographical.”Footnote 26
This paper uses this “autobiographical potential” and examines the female-authored hajjnāmehs from the late 1800s and early 1900s at the interface between textuality and performativity. I claim that one of the most interesting and distinctive features of these narratives, especially those written by Hājiyeh Khānom ʿAlaviyeh Kermāni and Vaqār al-Dowleh, is their dialogicality; not only do the women diarists turn to their readers but they are also in dialogue with themselves as writers and as women.Footnote 27 Characteristically, very often the women diarists express their subjectivity through its entanglement in objectifying practices of men, and not, as many male travel writers (and Sikandar Begum) would do, “around a narration of the subject’s emergence into a world defined by a new economy of social relations defined by intercultural transactions.”Footnote 28
In the next section, I present the writers’ biographies—not an easy task due to scarce sources, or even a complete absence of them—as well as the known manuscripts that served as a basis for printed editions. Apart from its obvious value consisting of the social and historical contextualization of the texts, the biographical and bibliographical outline is also important for further inquiry into such issues as the circulation of the manuscripts and their “life” among the readers. In the second section, I examine the purposes for which the women writers decided to keep their diaries. Did they become travel writers “by choice” or rather “by force”? What were the possible implications of their motivation to write? In the following section, I raise the interrelated issues of textuality (as a tradition and as a practice) and of authorial authority.
Specifically, I pose the question of what the early women writers’ attitudes toward the masculine areas of textuality and authority were. Was their gender an important factor influencing their understanding of the writer’s role in which they found themselves? I also address the issue of the relationship between the writers and their readers in an endeavor to demonstrate to what extent the diarists’ imagined, or assumed, readerships shaped their writing. These considerations lead to the final observations of how women diarists formulated their subjectivity as discursive-performative subjects: that is, in their pilgrimage accounts (if we look at them as texts) and through or thanks to them (if we regard them as performative practices).
Bio- and Bibliographical Background
The oldest known female-authored Hajj narrative from the Qajar era was penned by Mehrmāh Khānom ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh, the eldest daughter of the uncle of Nāser al-Din Shāh, prince Farhād Mirzā Moʿtamed al-Dowleh (1818–88), and Jahān-Ārā Khānom (d. 1883/84).Footnote 29 This account covers the pilgrimage to ʿAtabāt-e ʿĀliyāt, Mecca and Medina made between 24 Ramadan 1297 and 9 Rajab 1298AH (31 August 1880–7 June 1881). It should be noted that Farhād Mirzā was himself a writer of a famous Hajj travelogue covering a pilgrimage undertaken in 1292–93AH (1875/76) in the company of his wife.Footnote 30 The fact that not only her father but also her imperial relative, Nāser al-Din Shāh, penned their own travelogues beforehand suggests the positioning of ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh’s writing within a courtly-familial context. Also the intended readership of her manuscript account must have consisted of the members of the Qajar elite.
According to Gholām-ʿAli Diyānati, ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh was married three times.Footnote 31 Her first husband was a high Qajar official, Mirzā Mohammad Mostowfi Qavām al-Dowleh (d. 1873/74).Footnote 32 At the time of embarking on the Hajj, she was remarried to a military official (vazir-e lashkar Footnote 33) Mirzā Musā Āshtiyāni (d. 1881), who died during her stay in Shiraz on her way back to Tehran after the pilgrimage. Her last husband was Mirzā ʿAbd al-Vāheb Khān Shirāzi, also known as Nasir al-Dowleh, Āsaf al-Dowleh and Nāyeb al-Vazāreh (1826/27–86/87).Footnote 34 Diyānati claims that ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh had children from the first two marriages, yet no offspring was born from her last marriage with Nasir al-Dowleh.Footnote 35 Apparently, nothing more is known about her life, and the dates of her birth and death remain obscure.
The only known copy of ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh’s account which served as the basis for the printed edition was prepared in 1299AH (1881/82) after the autograph manuscript (as claimed by the copyist).Footnote 36 According to the general rule of referring to women as daughters, wives, or sisters and avoiding mentioning women’s actual names, the information included by the scribe on the last page of the manuscript was limited to providing the titles of the writer’s father and current husband.Footnote 37 Even the account of ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh’s uncle, Morād Mirza Hosām al-Saltaneh, who made the Hajj simultaneously with his niece and also left behind a pilgrimage diary,Footnote 38 did not turn out to be helpful in ascertaining her identity.Footnote 39 Although both pilgrims mention each other in their accounts, Hosām al-Saltaneh consequently conforms to the convention and calls his niece “the daughter of Moʿtamed al-Dowleh” (sabiyyeh-ye navvāb-e mostatāb-e Moʿtamed al-Dowleh) or “the military official’s spouse” (ʿayāl-e vazir-e lashkar).Footnote 40 Fortunately, ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh’s identity was finally discovered by Diyānati.Footnote 41
As for the identity of the writer of the second account, covering the period between Ramezān 1309 and Safar 1312AH (April 1892–August 1894), it remains as yet unknown. In her extensive travel journal, the upper-class lady from Kerman—tentatively called Hājiyeh Khānom ʿAlaviyeh Kermāni—describes a pilgrimage to ʿAtabāt-e ʿAliyāt, Mecca and Medina, followed by an eighteen-month sojourn in Tehran. As we learn from the Tehrani part of her diary, thanks to her host’s daughter, who was one of the numerous temporary wives of the shah, she would regularly visit the imperial andarun in the Golestān palace. Next to the memoirs of Tāj al-Saltaneh, her account provides a unique description of the Nāseri harem written by a woman.Footnote 42
The latest narrative belongs to Sakineh Soltān Vaqār al-Dowleh Esfahāni Kuchak, the widow of Nāser al-Din Shāh. The dates of her birth and death are obscure,Footnote 43 but we know that at the time of composing her account—about four years after the assassination of Nāser al-Din Shāh by Rezā Kermāni—she was young,Footnote 44 childless,Footnote 45 and married to her second husband, Mirzā Moʿtasem al-Molk Āshtiyāni (b. 1860/61), “a high ranking agent”Footnote 46 of Soltān Abd al-Majid Mirzā ʿEyn al-Dowleh (1845–1926), the then governor of the provinces of Lorestān and Khuzestān, who in later years became the prime minister of Iran.Footnote 47 She started her pilgrimage to Mecca, Medina and ʿAtabāt on 1 Rajab 1317AH (5 November 1899) and returned to Tehran on 4 Dhu l-Hijja 1318AH (25 March 1901), having spent almost a year in Borujerd, where she joined her husband “who was living there at the time on a government assignment.”Footnote 48
It must be said that Vaqār al-Dowleh is also the writer of another safarnāmeh from 1905.Footnote 49 It covers a journey from Tehran to Shiraz undertaken in the company of her second husband in order to bring a bride, Anis al-Dowleh, cousin of ʿEyn al-Dowleh, to the Shirazi house of her groom, Malek-Mansur Mirzā (Shoʿāʿ al-Saltaneh), son of Mozaffar al-Din Shāh and governor of Fars. Interestingly, another woman-authored safarnāmeh from this period, namely the account by Khāvar Bibi Shādlu written in 1320AH/1902–3, describes a similar journey performed to accompany two brides: one from Bojnurd to Tehran and another on the way back from Tehran to Bojnurd.Footnote 50
The release of Vaqār al-Dowleh’s account was based on the only known copy of the autograph manuscript, which is now part of a private collection.Footnote 51 It should be noted that, in contrast to the previous two, this manuscript was signed with the writer’s name. Therefore, Vaqār al-Dowleh was the only writer among all three whose identity was known at the time her travelogue was published. Probably, her name was provided by the scribe due to the fact that she was the widow of Nāser al-Din Shāh and the wife of a high official under Mozaffar al-Din Shāh. It is important to note that her laqab Vaqār al-Dowleh—meaning “Dignity of the State”—was bestowed upon her by Mozaffar al-Din Shāh.
Reasons/Motivations behind Writing
ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh did not specify why she decided to keep her diary. The only self-referential, albeit strictly conventional, remark appears in the first sentence of the account: “This is a diary of the travel to the House of God [Beyt Allāh al-Harām], which I write with the help of the Almighty [beh yāri-ye hazrat-e qāder-e motaʿāl], insuring that I am in good disposition [beh shart-e salamāt-e mezāj].”Footnote 52
Interestingly, at the beginning of the travelogue describing his first official journey to Europe undertaken in 1873, Nāser al-Din Shāh provides a very similar statement:
This is a diary of the travel to Europe [Farangestān], which I write with the blessing and by the will of the Almighty, the Unmatched, the Compassionate, the Merciful, insuring that I am in good disposition [beh shart-e salamāt-e mezāj].Footnote 53
Of course, these kinds of introductory phrases containing greetings to God were customary in the Persianate literary tradition. Given the almost identical wording of the two excerpts, however, it cannot be ruled out that ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh took the shah’s account as a pattern. Her diary informs us that she read the Hajj account of her father.Footnote 54 She must have been familiar with the then-ruling monarch’s travel writings as well, especially since Nāser al-Din Shāh was also her relative. If our assumptions that she effectively copied the quoted wording from her royal relative’s account are correct, it would not only indicate her conforming to the orthodoxy of safarnāmeh (which also includes the formal and linguistic reticence: hers is the most concise and “stylistically elaborated” among all the narratives discussed here) but also, perhaps more importantly, to the power of masculine literary authority, in this case additionally enhanced by the authority of a ruler and of a male relative.
But perhaps there was yet another motif behind copying of the shah’s wording by ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh and subsequent copying of her text. It seems worthwhile to look at the last sentence of the account: the copyist states there that the original autograph was rewritten so that “Her Ladyship’s” account “become honoured” to stand out from “among [its] counterparts” (beyn al-aqrān).Footnote 55 It would indicate that at least one of the reasons behind copying, and perhaps also writing of the narrative would have been to emphasize ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh’s high social status and esteemed position at the royal court. Maryam ʿĀmeli Rezāyi points to a similar motivation when discussing the “secular” travelogues of Vaqār al-Dowleh and Bibi Shādlu: “both women belonged to the upper and ruling classes, so perhaps they penned the accounts on their travels because they felt proud and honored to accompany a [high-born] bride.”Footnote 56
When it comes to Hājiyeh Khānom, she indicates two reasons for writing a diary. The first is to leave a (small) book or “booklet” (ketābcheh) and a “souvenir” (yadegār), while the second is to find solace through writing. It is the feeling of loneliness and nostalgia that she presents as a primary reason for writing:
no member of this humble person’s family [ʿayāl-e khod-e in khāksār] was present as a fellow traveler and hajji, and we were very nostalgic and homesick because of loneliness, so we did not see any better occupation than to write down, in the form of a diary, after arriving to each halt and relaxing, a description of every halt, a number of farsakhsFootnote 57 [between them], the villages and the fields seen along the way, in order to compose a book and to have a souvenir left from this page of time [ke ham ketābcheh shavad va ham yadegāri dar in safheh-ye ruzegār bemānad].Footnote 58
It is noteworthy that in the passage quoted above Hājiyeh Khānom employs a first-person plural narration. In doing so, she “disappears” within the text, conceals herself behind the community and adopts a common perspective of the whole group of fellow pilgrims. The account begins as a “communal work”—as the individual writer speaks with “our” voice—yet “we” remain anonymous. Does she mean herself and two other women mentioned earlier by her, who strikingly do not reappear on the following pages of the travelogue,Footnote 59 or other people she is silent about at this stage of composing the diary?
It should be stressed as well that the use of some specific language forms can serve as a means of self-belittlement in the framework of the community. When Hājiyeh Khānom provides information concerning exclusively herself, she twice uses the self-deprecating term khāksār (lit. “dust-like,” i.e. “worthless,” “ignoble,” “humble”).Footnote 60 Other linguistic strategies of self-belittlement, to which Hājiyeh Khānom and other writers regularly resorted, included, inter alia, the common use of the first-person pronoun bandeh (“captive,” “slave”) in place of neutral man (“I”). Importantly, however, the diary of Hājiyeh Khānom demonstrates how the narrator gradually separates herself from the community and the I-narration comes to the fore.
The words of Hājiyeh Khānom are interesting because, in contrast to ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh’s reserved conventionality and despite the seemingly impersonal nature of her remarks, she shares a personal confession that refers directly to the emotional sphere. Importantly, she perceives the very act of writing, in its performative dimension, as a means to attain, as one could say today, an auto-therapeutic effect. Her remark about a “souvenir” is also significant: not only does it speak about the purpose of this particular travelogue, but it also prompts the question of how often the Qajar safarnāmehs served a similar purpose.
As for Vaqār al-Dowleh, in the introductory parts to her diary she does not share her motivations to keep it. In further parts, however, we do come across some remarkable comments that shed light on what could have prompted her to write and whom she imagined her readership to be. As she relates, shortly before departing for the Hajj she visited and was visited by female aristocrats related to the Nāseri court (which confirms that the former wives of the “martyred shah” maintained contact with one another during his successor’s reign). Among several ladies—including Akhtar al-Saltaneh, probably one of the wives of Nāser al-Din Shāh known to Hājiyeh Khānom from her visits to the royal andarun Footnote 61—she was paid a visit by Vajih al-Saltaneh and Delbar Khānom, who most likely were also the widows of Nāser al-Din Shāh:Footnote 62
On Saturday, 26 Jumada l-Ula of the year [1]317, on the eve of the day when I was about to depart toward Arabian Iraq [ʿErāq-e ʿArab],Footnote 63 Her Ladyship [hazrat-e ʿalliyyeh] Vajih al-Saltaneh and Her Ladyship Delbar Khānom came to see me. Delbar Khānom told me: “Since you are one of those who intend to go to ziyārat, note all of your expenses during this travel and acquaint us with the facts [va haqiqatesh rā be mā-hā beguyid].” So, for the sake of Delbar Khānom, I have been writing down all expenses to the letter since the day I have left Tehran.Footnote 64
Were Vajih al-Saltaneh and Delbar Khānom planning to go to Mecca (and/or to the ʿAtabāt) themselves? If Vaqār al-Dowleh’s quotation is to be believed, Delbar Khānom did not address her request exclusively in her own name. It is very likely that she meant a larger group of women (perhaps some other co-widows of Nāser al-Din Shāh). But would Vaqār al-Dowleh have decided to keep her diary without having been asked by Delbar Khānom to do so? Was Delbar Khānom’s request therefore the main stimulus to write? The answer, whatever it may be, is most probably complex. Certainly, Vaqār al-Dowleh and her text still functioned in a rather pre-modern framework in which the writer had her patron (or matron) and her writing was occasional. Yet what needs to be emphasized is that the situation related by Vaqār al-Dowleh demonstrates that in the Qajar era women travel writers happened to be commissioned to compose their accounts by other elite women—much the same as was the case with poetry. Therefore, it can be said that women travel writers would participate in what Dominic Parviz Brookshaw called (referring to women’s poetry production and patronage) “a female-centered literary tradition, one that was in dialogue with (and often intersected) the dominant male tradition.”Footnote 65
Other information that can be inferred from the passage quoted above is that Delbar Khānom requested a sort of a guide for future pilgrims. Nonetheless, the diary we know certainly goes beyond practical information and contains descriptions of the writer’s inner feelings, thoughts and dilemmas. If Vaqār al-Dowleh deliberately surpassed the generic determinants of a “guidebook,” what was the purpose of such transgression? Can we say that we deal with “two texts in one”? Did different passages of the same diary serve different purposes? Perhaps only when the diarist took up her pen did she discover the “autobiographical potential” of keeping a diary and realized that writing gave her the opportunity of self-expression. I shall come back to these questions in the final section.
Establishing Women’s Agency and Authority through Travel and Travel Writing
In the opening part to her safarnāmeh, Hājiyeh Khānom reveals that initially it was her male traveling companion, Vali Khān, who was supposed to keep the diary.Footnote 66 What is more, it seems that the first page of the account was written by his hand (although the text was supposedly dictated to him by Hājiyeh Khānom).Footnote 67 Very soon, however, Vali Khān was “overcome by laziness,”Footnote 68 so Hājiyeh Khānom continued to write the travelogue instead of him:
After a lot of insistence he [Vali Khān] wrote a few lines on the first page. [So] I describe what is going on with this evil and misshapen script of mine [beh in khatt-e nahas-e najes-e khodam], so that the souvenir [yadegār] remains.Footnote 69
Interestingly, Vaqār al-Dowleh expressed similar doubts regarding her handwriting:
Only today it came to my mind that I cannot write nicely [bad-khattam], so the readers of my scripture will surely say: “O, the writer! For God’s sake, tell someone else to write, or write in such a way that it could be read, or take your writing along [to read it aloud].” What I can say in response is that during this trip I was not accompanied by anyone who could write nicely [ādam-hā-ye khosh-khatt]. Although my brother is present, he is so busy that I cannot say to him to write this safarnāmeh as well, [but] I cannot write it either. The simplest solution would be to go with my writing, so that I could see them [the readers] and read my own scripture. May God allow me to read it to them by myself after I reach my destination.Footnote 70
It is worth looking closer at the gender aspect of the women’s uncertainty. Hājiyeh Khānom stated that not only could she not “write nicely and compose well” but also did not know the honorary titles and nicknames [enshāʾ va elqābi] of the members of the Qajar aristocracy.Footnote 71 We have reason to believe that, indeed, her knowledge in that matter was not as grounded as Vali Khān’s. Elaborate handwriting and familiarity with public functions and lineages required experience and practice that could be gained by holding an office and by maintaining contacts with the ruling and administrative class, in Qajar Iran composed exclusively of men.
What is also striking is that, apparently, for both diarists it was not that important who was the actual writer of a travelogue. Both of them seem to have treated themselves as (unskilled) scribes rather than proper authors, scribes who were forced to write because this was what the situation required. And neither of them took into account such matters as the writer’s individual influence on their text. On the other hand, while considering themselves less competent vis-à-vis their male travelling companions, they found it problematic precisely from the perspective of the text’s quality and its content. Where could this inconsistency come from? I would argue that, since in Iran literature traditionally was a masculine area of activity, the early women writers would inevitably juxtapose themselves and their works with the masculine models: of a scribe, of a writer and, finally, of a text itself.
It appears significant in this context that at least two female-authored pilgrimage accounts from the Qajar era were written by women whose close male relatives had penned their own safarnāmehs beforehand (Nāser al-Din Shāh in the case of Vaqār al-Dowleh and Farhād Mirzā as regards ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh; with respect to Hājiyeh Khānom, her text is virtually stripped of any context). The same applies to Khāvar Bibi Shādlu, mentioned earlier: her brother, Sahām al-Dowleh Bojnurdi, was the writer of three travelogues, two of which were created before his sister’s. Did these women “dare” to write because they felt that their male family members legitimized them doing so? Since women did not have their own literary tradition, perhaps they perceived the act of emulating or following the path of their male relatives as authorizing them to write. But maybe they “dared” to contribute to a new, fashionable genre of safarnāmeh simply because they belonged to elite families in which writing could have been practiced regardless of gender.
What is also remarkable is that the only intertextual references we encounter in the accounts by ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh and Vaqār al-Dowleh are to the travelogues written by their male relatives. Neither of the women referred to other sources than those by Nāser al-Din Shāh and Farhād Mirzā.Footnote 72 Did they acknowledge only those authors whose authority was exerted over them in their private lives as well? Did they associate knowledge, together with the process of its transfer and absorption, with private male authorities (that is, with their maḥram relatives such as fathers, brothers and husbands), whereas for men knowledge, transferred by public male authorities, was of an “impersonal” nature?
Finally, it must also be noted that the diary of Hājiyeh Khānom demonstrates how men could have constituted a serious obstacle to women writing. The autothematic remarks in which the diarist complains about difficulties and hardships of travel hindering her from keeping her diary on a regular basis are particularly numerous in the narrative of the lady from Kerman. As she declares, Vali Khān’s constant presence interferes with her writing:
Since I left Kerman, I’ve been picking up this book to describe nicely and with humor [beh khubi-o khoshmazzegi] the circumstances of travel. There were some good stops, they weren’t bad, [so] I was writing. Then, there were many reasons that there was no opportunity to write. […] When I’m alone and I have a little peace I write a few words. As much as remains in my memory from what we did and where we went. I’m so distracted and disheartened [Bas ke havāsam parishān ast va owqātam talkh]. Today I’ve been alone for about one hour, [because] Sarkār Hājji Khān went to a bazaar, otherwise day and night he doesn’t leave the tent. If he’s riding, [he sits] in the kajāveh, if he’s dwelling [somewhere], [he stays] in the tent [all the time]. Sometimes I secretly [dar posht-e panāhā] write in the night, sometimes during the day. In a hurry [dast pācheh], so that I don’t know what I’ve written and what I’m writing.Footnote 73
By God, if I have a chance to write down these two words. In the presence of Sarkār Khān one should do nothing, [one should] be sitting quiet and silent [sāket-o sāmet], polite.Footnote 74
As we shall see in the final section, the ambivalence of women writers with reference to men would manifest itself in manifold ways. Hājiyeh Khānom’s attitude toward Vali Khān was ambiguous. On the one hand, she presumed that he would be more suitable as a writer of safarnāmeh. On the other, she tended to be sarcastic and openly critical about him. Not only did she complain about his controlling attitude and mock his laziness, but she also ridiculed his dependency on others: “If there were someone who could give him bread and feed him during this journey, it would not be bad. Sarkār Navāb-e ʿĀli Āqā-ye Hasan-ʿAli Khān is missing to look after him. I [bandeh] am not the one to look after one’s needs.”Footnote 75 Although she might outwardly seem self-deprecating, her remarks reaffirm her position as a high-born lady, perhaps older than Vali Khān, with whom she is greatly exasperated.
In the account of Vaqār al-Dowleh, in turn, particularly present are self-irony, uncertainty and hesitation, and the questioning of authorial authority they entail. Vaqār al-Dowleh conforms to the convention and interweaves her prose account with poems, including one she composes and dedicates to Sharaf al-Saltaneh. Underneath the poem of twenty bayts she notes with self-irony that her poetry is weak, but she cannot write it better: “No other poem I’d write would be better than that. What can I do? I wrote it for fun at sea, hopeless about life, in intense heat.”Footnote 76 In the same vein, she calls her poem “lacking harmony, taste and sense.”Footnote 77 She stresses that it is “good to laugh and to read/recite” and asks the “wise men” (ʿoqalā) for forgiveness.Footnote 78 She also refers to herself as being thoughtless and foolish: “Because [from] the first day [of my life] my reason/mind was small [ʿaqlam kam bud], so today [in] intense heat, during the long days at sea I wrote [it], distracted.”Footnote 79 On another occasion, she explicitly links her stupidity with the female sex, comparing herself, again, to the “wise men”: “The wise men [ʿāqelān] have written books. Me with no reason [bi-ʿaql], what could I say, a woman deficient in reason [zaʿifeh-ye nāqes al-ʿaql], to match those great men?”Footnote 80 It is worth noting that she clearly implies that her travel journal is not a book: in her eyes it is certainly something (what exactly?) much less valuable.
Female travel writers adopt various strategies of questioning their own authorial authority. On a private level, both Hājiyeh Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowleh juxtapose their own abilities, judged insufficient and inadequate, with those allegedly fully represented by the men they knew and were related to (Vali Khān and the brother of Vaqār al-Dowleh). On a general level, Vaqār al-Dowleh gives voice to an internalized sense of inferiority on account of being a woman, resulted from belonging to a patriarchal culture that perceives ʿaql (reason, mind, rationality, intellect) as a masculine quality.Footnote 81 This gendered understanding of reason (or the lack thereof) largely originated in religion, which is, by the way, demonstrated by Vaqār al-Dowleh herself: the phrase zaʿifeh-ye nāqes al-ʿaql she provides comes from Sermon 79 included in Nahǧ al-Balāġa, collection of sermons, short sayings and letters attributed to imam ʿAlī.Footnote 82 It should be noted that the widow of Nāser al-Din was not the only early modern female writer from Iran who referred to the alleged lack of ʿaql in women. Nonetheless, the same religious references and quotations might have served different purposes. A good example is Bibi Khānom Astarābādi who in Maʿāyeb al-Rejāl draws from theological argumentation in order to define women’s position in the world: “God created you, women, for men, so that you could be their field and give birth to numerous offspring, and there is no other task for you.”Footnote 83 Quoting the same sermon from Nahǧ al-Balāġa, she calls a woman “deficient in mind and faith” [nāqes al-ʿaql wa al-imān], while referring to a man as a “complete [being] of this world” [kāmel-e jahān].Footnote 84 Nevertheless, as was observed by Afsaneh Najmabadi, in Bibi’s argumentation these statements become subversive and ironic.Footnote 85 Certainly, she recognized the subordination of women to men inasmuch as she believed that it was the natural destiny of a woman to get married. However, she approached the institution of marriage as a contract, according to which a woman commits herself to serve a man in exchange for just treatment based on love and respect.Footnote 86
Quite paradoxically, by questioning their authorial authority both Hājiyeh Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowleh would form a bond with their imaginary readers—a problematic one, since they found it difficult to emerge precisely because of the allegedly imperfect nature of their texts. Their emphasis on being imperfect, and therefore on producing an imperfect work, went beyond conventional strategies of self-belittlement so often employed by the pre-modern Persianate writers vis-à-vis their readers.Footnote 87 In the case of these women diarists, their remarks were, first, gendered—which most obviously would not apply to the male writers—and, second, directly referred to their biographies. The autobiographical nature of their self-critical statements humanized and at the same time “feminized” them in the eyes of their readers as well as allowing them to emerge as singular writing subjects rather than depersonalized “authors.”
A prior discussion concerned mostly the women writers’ relations with textuality and their own writing(s). In the following part, I shall focus on the dynamics between the diarists and their intended or imagined readers. Both Hājiyeh Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowleh would formulate the remarks in which, while addressing their readership, they would express their inability to describe phenomena and events their readers did not personally observe. By doing so, they would create a “problematic community” with their readers on a different level than that mentioned earlier.
Before taking a ship to Jeddah, Hājiyeh Khānom and her travel companions spent a couple of days in Mumbai, where they were hosted by the Ismaʿili descendants of Aga Khan I (1804–81) who made sure to show the highlights of the city to the pilgrims.Footnote 88 The first place they saw were Victoria Gardens (or Queen’s Gardens: Rani Bagh), a zoological and botanical garden established by the British colonial authorities in 1861.Footnote 89 Both parts of Rani Bagh impressed Hājiyeh Khānom with their scale and diversity. In an undated entry to her diary—apparently written after a few days, like the rest of descriptions of Mumbai’s attractions—she gave voice to her admiration and amazement at the sight of different species of unknown plants gathered in the garden:
One day we went to the English queen’s garden [bāgh-e malake-ye Englis]. I am not able to write how big it was. The trees of any kind, we have not seen even one of them [before]. The colorful flowers, but none of them did smell. There were also lilies and some yellow flowers. But how could I describe the leaves? All flower chalices look like leaves and the flowers don’t have [bear] fruit. What leaves! Of any shape and color! [One would say] that they print them on cotton, or rather color them on printed cotton [chit], [as] all leaves are of all colors. It is beyond human comprehension. I am not able to find words to express it [Bandeh keh qavveh-ye neveshtan nadāram keh beh cheh tour ʿenvān konam]. It must be seen in person to be understood [Tā khod-e shakhs nabinad nemifahmad].Footnote 90
She lacks qavveh-ye neveshtan—“power to write”—on other occasions as well: when mentioning her visits to the museums, a weaving factory, the municipal water supplyFootnote 91 and the zoological garden, the last recapitulated with the words: “a man [ādam] remains astonished. We [just] watched.”Footnote 92 Vaqār al-Dowleh, in turn, shares the following remark while traveling on a raft along the Tigris to Samarra (clearly indicating that her diary is destined for a female group of readers): “The problem is none of the ladies [khānom-hā] had seen the things I have seen. [Even] if I would like to describe them, it is impossible. Unless some of them would come to see [these things] by themselves.”Footnote 93
What problems arise from the quoted remarks by Hājiyeh Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowleh? Firstly, both women give voice to the limitations of a written language as well as to their struggle to adopt the requirements of a written text. Secondly, they judge themselves unable to convey what their readers did not experience in person, precisely because of the imperfect and inadequate nature of their descriptions. Can we assume that the same problem of inexpressibility of experience was behind Vaqār al-Dowleh’s desire to read her account aloud in front of the ladies? If the textuality were overcome in favor of orality, would the limits of expressibility of personal experience shift? As we may suppose, her oral reading would be accompanied by improvised comments (perhaps provoked by her audience’s questions) and supported by appropriate voice modulation and gestures. Can we, then, read her text as a notebook made for herself with the aim to use it as a basis to tell the story of her journey? Although she seemingly preferred this option, she could not be certain that she would have such an opportunity. However, her remarks would indicate that to organize the women-only gatherings during which women would read aloud their writings was a usual custom. We know that women would perform poetry for single-sex audiences.Footnote 94 They would also discuss books they were reading, and lend them to one another.Footnote 95 The narrative of Vaqār al-Dowleh suggests that reading aloud of travel writings during the female gatherings constituted yet another form of social-literary life of elite women in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Nonetheless, does orality not appear already within these texts? Let us have a glimpse at the language employed by the diarists. In all accounts the lexis is contextualized and depends on the language register required by the situation or topic (for example, when the pilgrims relate their visits to the holy places they use the verb mosharraf shodan instead of neutral raftan). Yet in the “secular” moments none of them avoids colloquial, sometimes even vulgar expressions. In this respect, Hājiyeh Khānom stands out from other diarists. Especially in her account, the structure of sentences tends to be borrowed from spoken Persian and very often the verb appears in the middle and not at the end of the sentence. One can assume that Hājiyeh Khānom’s non-royal background and provincial origin—and, therefore, a supposed lower level of education—were behind the particular straightforwardness and simplicity of her language.Footnote 96
Even though the above analysis may indicate that the textual expression could have been problematic for the Qajar ladies, it would not be legitimate to conclude that they could not “write nicely and compose well.” It rather seems that the key to understanding the discrepancy between the “textual” and “oral” language that co-exist in their texts might be found in the “non-literary” (that is, personal and unofficial) content they often convey—the content for which no appropriate literary (that is, public/impersonal and official) language existed.
Early Women Writers on their Path toward Self-expression
Prior analysis has revealed that the diarists’ gender and their constant referring to men was a significant factor in shaping the interactions between them and textuality in general, their own texts, and finally their (imagined) readers. On the one hand, men were present in these texts as a model of author and authority. On the other, as we have observed with Hājiyeh Khānom, in a patriarchal and sexually segregated society of Qajar Iran, men and their authority could constitute an obstacle to women’s writing. A woman performing the act of writing had to perform a simultaneous act of transgression: she had no choice but to enter a foreign, masculine space of textuality and literature. In the accounts examined here we come across numerous proofs of how the antagonistic male–female dynamic was both problematic and of salient importance for women diarists.
Traditionally, women relatives accompanying male travel writers were passed over in silence, since they belonged to the private sphere—both jealously protected and considered insignificant. On the contrary, Hājiyeh Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowleh devote a lot of space to their complicated relations with male traveling companions. They reveal, often with discontent and protest, how the control of the maḥram relatives over Iranian aristocratic women extended beyond the domestic sphere and endured throughout a pilgrimage journey, affecting both secular and religious areas of women’s lives.
In her narrative, Hājiyeh Khānom repeatedly complains about the fact that Vali Khān limits her mobility and does not let her leave the kajāveh or the tent alone:
I wish I could take a camel for myself, not to be in one kajāveh with Hājji Khān. But I am afraid that it would hurt him. One must endure all these tragedies. May God find a solution. I do not go out anywhere.Footnote 97
Ultimately, the situation becomes unbearable for this remarkable woman. On her way back to Iran, in today’s Iraq, she decides to leave Vali Khān, taking with her a girl called Fātemeh, who probably was a temporary wife of Vali Khān whom he abandoned when it turned out that she had become pregnant with him.Footnote 98 She soon gives expression to her sense of liberation, subversively self-deprecating herself vis-à-vis her “master” and imbuing her confession with an ironic hue:
From Kerman to Najaf I have neither seen any place, nor gone out/made a trip [na man jāyi rā didam va na gardesh kardam]. Since the day I became discharged from the service of Khān [az khedmat-e Khān morakhkhas shodam], thanks God, I have seen everywhere and eaten everything. Al-ḥamdu lillāh, finally I am at ease!Footnote 99
The account of Vaqār al-Dowleh corroborates the descriptions of Hājiyeh Khānom from the time before her split with Vali Khān. As we learn from it, she basically did not leave her kajāveh and her brother informed her about the prices of various products in the places they were passing through.Footnote 100 Therefore, it comes as no surprise that, as with Hājiyeh Khānom, she tended to complain about the lack of freedom (ekhtiyār). For instance, when the caravan was driving along the Euphrates, she noticed that she would like to have a horse of her own, so that she could admire the beauty of the meadows more closely instead of looking at them from her kajāveh.Footnote 101 Another situation when she felt suppressed and bereft of agency took place in Mecca. After the Hajj, when the pilgrims were to be divided into two groups, one of which was to follow the Syrian or Damascus route (rāh-e Shām) and the other was to return through Aleppo, she expressed the wish to choose the first option. Her preference was dictated by the desire to make a pilgrimage to the mausoleum of Zaynab in Damascus. However, her brother did not take her wish into consideration and decided to return through Aleppo. Quite significantly, in his sister’s diary we do not find any information about why he did not accede to her request. It must be assumed that he was guided by financial or security reasons, but apparently he neither consulted his sister nor justified his decision: “At night I cried a lot because of my unhappiness [ʿadam-e saʿādat]. Why cannot they take me for the ziyārat to Hazrat-e Zaynab, peace be upon her?”Footnote 102 Characteristically enough, from the information given later by Vaqār al-Dowleh we learn that the guide of the caravan, Hājji Majid, was not informed at all that she wanted to go through Damascus. It would suggest that either her brother hid her request from Hājji Majid or the latter lied (most probably under the dictation of the former).Footnote 103
This event made her aware of the fact that she was treated unjustly precisely on account of being a woman. As she wrote: “A poor woman is a man’s captive”Footnote 104 and “Whoever a woman would be, men will [always] get it all their own way.”Footnote 105 Surprisingly, however, at other times she expressed gratitude for living in such a state of captivity: when her brother had to pay customs in Jeddah, she “thanked God” that she did not have to “wrangle” with Arabs.Footnote 106 One could recognize her as a representative of one of many generations of women who, to quote Silvia Bovenschen, lived “in a state of accepted passivity,” which made them “masochistic/narcissistic and identify[ing] with the object of the masculine representation.”Footnote 107 In the moments of feeling suppressed, deprived of agency and unheard she could not do anything except lament. These contradictory feelings and attitudes reveal her complicated and hesitant identity: she visibly tussles between the sense of superiority derived from her status of a high-born lady (and a royal widow to boot) and the internalized sense of inferiority that would, as we remember, make her belittle herself for being a “stupid woman.” Importantly, Vaqār al-Dowleh is the only diarist among all three who surpasses the limits set by the form of a travel journal and writes about herself not only in the context of current events; in her autonarration, it is the past that plays a very significant role in having constituted her ruptured subjectivity.
The relationality of female selfhood that emerges from the accounts examined here can be observed in other women’s writings from the Qajar era. Bibi Khānom Astarābādi’s Maʿāyeb al-Rejāl is a harsh replica directed against an anonymous misogynistic treatise: the antagonistic male–female dynamic is therefore at the root of this text.Footnote 108 As for Tāj al-Saltaneh’s memoirs, the complicated relations with her father and husband are at the core of her self-narration. To quote Farzaneh Milani, the memoirs of Tāj overflow with “anxiety, anger and ambivalence”Footnote 109 and the same might be said about Vaqār al-Dowleh’s persona emerging from her hajjnāmeh, in spite of all differences dividing these two texts and their writers.Footnote 110
Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that the “selfdiscovery of female identity,”Footnote 111 to quote Mary G. Mason, does not always occur through the expression of the conflicted dynamics between a female writer and her male other(s). Throughout her narrative, Vaqār al-Dowleh repeatedly gives voice to her deep emotional attachment to the “martyred shah” as well as to her brother (despite the crisis in their relationship) and her absent nephew. Hājiyeh Khānom, in turn, continually expresses serious concern in the face of a severe illness of Vali Khān’s spouse, who apparently was the diarist’s closest travel companion. She also mentions spontaneous friendships with some high-born ladies she encountered after Sarkār Khānom eventually died on the road from Mecca to Medina.Footnote 112
The occurrence of outspoken, self-revealing and often critical remarks in the accounts of Hājiyeh Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowleh lead us to ask the question about the writers’ power over their texts. Do these passages prove that the diarists tended to “forget themselves” (and the initial reason to write)? Could Hājiyeh Khānom presume that Vali Khān would not read her account? And what about Vaqār al-Dowleh? As we know, it can be assumed that the expected readership of her travelogue consisted of some of co-widows of Nāser al-Din Shāh. Is it possible, however, that her intention was not to show her travel diary to her brother and/or husband? Could she even refuse to show it to them? After all, the autograph of her manuscript was copied, similar to that written by the hand of ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh. Who were the copyists and for whom did they copy these accounts?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, I would argue that these are precisely those “moments of forgetfulness” that constitute the most interesting layer of the analyzed narratives. What is striking is that they appear to happen as if by chance. The remarks of Hājiyeh Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowleh, both focused on a technical aspect of writing and ready to give away the initiative over the texts they finally wrote, prove that their original intention was not to “express themselves” but to conform to the expected function of a Qajar safarnāmeh by providing a factual description of travel. Their writing was contingent—occasional and situational—and “coerced,” because written on request or with the urge to leave a “souvenir.” Nevertheless, especially in the account of Hājiyeh Khānom, one can observe a significant shift from the intended impersonal content toward the personal narrative distinctly marked with the writer’s individuality. Perhaps, as suggested by Maryam ʿĀmeli Rezāyi, we should treat the female-authored Qajar travelogues as first “drafts” in which early Iranian women writers began to seek for their own modes of literary expression.Footnote 113
ORCID
Piotr Bachtin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9418-6923
