A 'foreign' princess in the Siamese court: Princess Dara Rasami, the politics of gender and ethnic difference in nineteenth-century Siam

The reign of Siam's King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) is possibly the best-studied period in Thai history: a watershed era when Siam undertook its transformation from kingdom to nation-state within a context of intense European imperialist competition in Southeast Asia. Yet the roles played by women in this period -- particularly the women of the Siamese palace -- remain largely unexamined. The deployment of a patriarchal dynastic model in Thai historiography, as well as an Orientalist tendency to exoticize it as a "harem," discount Siam's all-female "Inner Palace" as a purely domestic space and thus outside the arena of legitimate political activity.;This project aims to restore the domestic arena of Siam's Inner Palace to our understanding of traditional Siamese power structures. It does so by focusing on the life of a woman who functions as the exception that proves the rule: a "foreign" consort named Chao (Princess) Dara Rasami, who came to the Siamese court from the neighboring kingdom of Lan Na in the mid-1880s. Using her nearly thirty-year career as a royal consort as a lens for looking into the lifeways of the Inner Palace, I examine the crucial political and social roles played by consorts in the Siamese palace. As an ethnically different woman from a neighboring kingdom, Dara herself acted in two important capacities. Firstly, Dara Rasami functioned as both a hostage and a diplomat for her home kingdom in Chiang Mai, ultimately earning a somewhat higher status for her home region under Siamese rule. Secondly, as a representative of cultural difference within the palace, Dara's performance of Chiang Mai identity was encouraged as part of Siam's "modern" discourse of "siwilai," or a hierarchy of civilizations of which Siamese culture was seen as the pinnacle. As such, Dara Rasami's story provides a fresh perspective on both the socio-political roles played by Siamese palace women, and Siam's responses to the intense imperialist pressures it faced in the late nineteenth century.