This paper looks at the embodied experience of painful feeling in the making of political worlds in Iranian modernity. As such, it is concerned with techniques of painful punishment — often termed torture — in the prisons of Pahlavi Iran. The figure of the body-in-pain, as well as the closely related martyr-in-pain, is invoked consistently in the literature of Iranian prisoners and thinkers, not to mention theorists of modernity from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Talal Asad. But what is this specter of the state-disciplined body-in-pain, and what does it do? What does it mean to name pain or torture as such, and to locate that feeling on or in the human body? What kind of political collectivities do these expressions of pain engender? How did the emergence of modern penal practice in Iran produce new and contingent notions of embodied citizenship and rights? This paper will offer readings of a number of early 20th century works by both religious and lay political thinkers, as well as pre-revolutionary prison memoirs (beginning with genre-inaugurating texts by Bozorg Alavi). The paper also looks at the histories of organizations forged in penal institutions, tracks increasingly sophisticated state techniques of policing and punishment, and ends with a discussion of the emergence of global discourses that claim political rights on behalf of prisoners in pain. I argue that the prison is a quintessential political site; it has been a place in which modern political subjectivities take shape. The modern prison—beginning with the building of Qasr Prison the 1920s—has been emergent space in which Iranian state power is enacted, contested, and produced. It is in the prison that the consolidating state came face to face with those challenging its authority on both existential and practical grounds, and it is from this site that nascent questions about rights, sovereignty, and “martyrdom” confronted a regime attempting to consolidate its control. Both dissident discourses and state practices were thus constituted in the shadow of the relationship between the state and its prisoners. Indeed, the newly minted “political prisoner”—whose body was assumed to be enduring profound pain—quickly became one of the most irrepressible and anxiety-inducing presences in the Iranian political sphere. That is to say, the political prisoner constantly evoked the questions: who has the right to be considered a citizen? Is citizenship predicated on (or destroyed by) the suffering of the body?