User:Dumelow/Devajammani

Devajammani (right), with other queens of Mysore. At left is Krishnaraja Wodeyar III's first wife, also called Devajammani

Married Krishnaraja Wodeyar III ruler of Mysore in 1805 when she was 12. The British had been key to restoring the Wodeyar family to the throne after 30 years of exile. She was recruited to help promote a British campaign of smallpox innoculation in India. The vaccine method had only been discovered by Edward Jenner in 1799 and was viewed with suspicion in India. The painting of the queens of Mysore was commissioned by the East India Company to encourage vaccination among Indians. Her sari would have been worn over her arms but in the painting she lifts it to indicate where she had been vaccinated. The elder queen Devajammani at left shows discoloration around her face and mouth, showing the result of variolation, an older form of innoculation where pustules from recovered patients were ground up and blown up the nose. Teh vaccination of Devajammani was announced in July 1806 and increased the number of Indians coming forward to be vaccinated. The method of vaccination was by taking pus form the pustule of a recovered sufferer of cowpox and transferring it to the arm of the recipient. The vaccine did not survive well outside a person so reache dmysore by a chain of people from Vienna via Baghdad, Basra, Bombay and other Indian towns. The third person in the painting is though to be the king;s grandmother Lakshmi Ammani, whose husband died of smallpox and is thought to have persuaded the king to permit the procedure be carried out to the two Devajammanis. By 1807 more than a million vaccinations had been carried out in India.

A play focussing on the role playe dby the queens entitled A Picture of Health premiered in Manchester in 2024.