Right royal big screen event
VICTORIA AND ABDUL: CELEBRATION OF FRIENDSHIP AND CULTURE
Story from hidden archives now nuanced film.
ost of the world well knows Victoria, the iconic leader who ruled an empire spanning the world, but who was Abdul? “She was the Queen of England and he was a humble clerk from India,” recounts author Shrabani Basu.
“Their friendship would shock the palace and lead to a near-revolt against the Queen.”
The story of their friendship, deliberately hidden for a century, is now told for moviegoers in Victoria and Abdul.
In 2001, Basu was researching a book on the history of curry. She learnt that Queen Victoria enjoyed eating curries. Basu visited Osborne House, Victoria’s Isle of Wight residence, and was most intrigued to see two portraits and one bronze bust of a regallooking Indian man. In Victoria’s dressing room, she spotted another portrait of the Indian man, situated directly beneath that of Victoria’s beloved John Brown. On a larger scale, Osborne’s Durbar Room, crammed with treasures from India, was a monument to Victoria’s fascination with “the jewel in the crown”; even though she was the empress of India, she never visited. Basu notes, “For safety reasons, she couldn’t go to India, so she had India come to her.”
The queen’s son Bertie, later King Edward VII, had destroyed all correspondence between his mother and the Munshi – but had not thought to touch her Hindustani journals. In those journals, Basu discovered the story of Queen Victoria and her beloved Munshi, Abdul Karim. Handwritten by Victoria in Urdu, the journals had sat in the Royal Archive, entirely left out of any and all Western versions of Victorian history because none of the historians read Urdu.
Filmmaker Beeban Kidron of Cross Street Films read a newspaper article about the book in 2010 and was immediately taken with the tale. She remarks: “What intrigued me was that here was a previously untold history, a gem hidden away for over a century. It was a revelation that Queen Victoria had a very close relationship with not only a servant but a Muslim servant. The reaction within her royal household was quite telling and relevant to what’s going on now in the world – about acknowledging tension between cultures and having open-mindedness.”
Kidron’s Cross Street partner, Lee Hall, the screenwriter of Billy Elliot, heard Basu on the radio and was equally intrigued. So the two arranged a meeting with her. By this point, Cross Street was not the only production company interested in optioning Basu’s book for a movie version. But their response to the story resonated with the author.
Kidron remembers, “What interested Shrabani was how we saw Victoria and Abdul as a story of an outsider; it was a clash of class and culture and we felt it would be invigorating to see Victoria’s world from the vantage point of an ordinary young man from Agra who made it to the top of a n empire.
“We saw this as a film that could play in the multiplexes, something funny and entertaining – a story about the royal family that audiences haven’t seen before – while also having something to say about prejudice.”
Basu granted Cross Street the rights and it developed the project with Christine Langan at BBC Films, who was excited by the prospect of a mainstream film with a message. The producers set out to make a film with the sumptuous interiors, epic landscapes and lavish costumes audiences expect from a historical drama, while giving them a story of friendship and loyalty that they might not expect.
The film opens nationwide today