Devoted servant or Victoria’s Rasputin?
He brought the Queen joy in her dotage – but jealous courtiers despised his mesmeric influence. Now a new film about ‘Munshi’ raises the question...
A s the 20th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, looms ever closer, and fresh suggestions emerge that she might well have gone on to marry her Muslim boyfriend Dodi Fayed, a new film tells the story of a far more controversial love between a Muslim man and a very senior female member of the Royal Family.
Queen Victoria was almost 70 when she first set appreciative eyes on 24-year-old Abdul Karim, in her Golden Jubilee summer of 1887. It happened after she sent word that, as empress of India and with various Jubilee celebrations planned, she wanted some young Indian men added to her retinue of servants.
Among those chosen was the lowly assistant clerk from his native Agra.
Victoria approved the choice of tall, slim, handsome Abdul the instant she saw him attending her dinner table, at Osborne house on the Isle of Wight.
their subsequent relationship is chronicled in the forthcoming film Victoria & Abdul, which stars Judi Dench as the Queen and comes 20 years after she played the same role in the acclaimed Mrs Brown. that, too, was the real-life tale of the mutual devotion between the Queen and a servant, in that case her cherished scottish ghillie John Brown.
But Brown died in 1883 and evidently left a void in Victoria’s life, which Abdul enthusiastically filled. there was no physical relationship as there was between Diana and Dodi, but it was a form of love affair nonetheless. Besides, it was Abdul’s sleek, physical beauty that first attracted the ageing Queen.
‘Queen Victoria was not immune to good looks,’ says Michael hunter, curator of Osborne house. ‘she loved the company of attractive people. John Brown was a striking and very masculine man. And she was just as admiring of good-looking women. For example, eugenie, empress of France, a famous beauty and fashion icon, was a great friend.’
The
man the Queen knew as her beloved ‘Munshi’, or teacher, became the transcendent love of the latter years of her long life. she even signed notes to him: ‘Your loving mother’. however, Victoria’s actual children, and senior courtiers, duly despised him. Where she saw a wise and loyal adviser, they saw an obsequious upstart who was determined to enrich himself.
Clearly, they were motivated in part by a poisonous cocktail of social snootiness and racial prejudice. But they were not all the ridiculous snobs they are made out to be in the new movie, which portrays the then Prince of Wales in particular (played by the comedian eddie Izzard) to be almost sociopathically vindictive.
Nor does the film, while immensely enjoyable, quite tell the truth about Abdul (played by the Bollywood actor Ali Fazal).
For the fact is that the Munshi was far from the paragon of sweetness and decency he appears to be. Indeed, his growing arrogance and vaulting ambition troubled Indians in the Royal household as much as it did the fustier British.
But it was the senior courtiers who grew so agitated by the rise and rise of the Munshi that a new word was coined: Munshimania.
Munshiphobia might have been more accurate.
But there were sound reasons for their antipathy.
It was ironic that despite her fascination for India, which she ruled, she had never seen the country.
Instead, at her Osborne home, she employed Rudyard Kipling’s father, Lockwood Kipling, to design a richly ornate Indian-style dining-room, known as the Durbar Room, which is still impressively majestic and was where much of the filming for the new movie took place. For Victoria, the Munshi, even more than her Durbar Room, came to symbolise India’s most beguiling qualities.
she romanticised him just as she romanticised his country, and he was not slow to exploit the fact. he gave her lessons in hindustani every day, and the list of phrases she had to learn included, ‘the tea is always bad at Osborne’ and, shamelessly, ‘You will miss the Munshi very much’.
In 1889, she settled on awarding him the official title Munshi hafiz Abdul Karim and gave him important secretarial duties, while ordering that all pictures of him waiting at table be destroyed. Victoria wanted no reminders of his humble beginnings. And yet, others were plotting to show exactly how humble he was.
the Munshi had always claimed that his father was a doctor back in India. But in 1894 the Queen’s own doctor, sir James Reid, reported that this was a lie and that the Munshi’s father was a lowly apothecary in a prison. Victoria was not amused. ‘ to make out that the poor good Munshi is low is really outrageous,’ she thundered, pointing out that she had known two archbishops who were, respectively, sons of a butcher and a grocer.
Despite the Queen being blindly gullible in the case of her Munshi, in this era she was unusually socially and racially enlightened.
Yet the anti-Munshi campaign didn’t stop. sir James told the Queen (truthfully, it seems) that the Munshi was riddled with the sexual disease gonorrhoea.
then, during her 1894 visit to Florence, the Queen’s doctor compiled a long list of Munshi misdemeanours.
these included Munshi’s highhanded complaint that the newspapers covering the Queen’s holiday weren’t giving him enough attention. When this was passed on to Victoria, her response was swift and unequivocal.
she gave instructions that the Munshi was to be mentioned in the papers more often.
By 1897, the Munshi had grown even bigger for his boots.
he travelled in ‘semi-regal’ style with his own highland servant and two further companions, a cat and a canary. And he had even taken to bullying the Queen, demanding money and honours.
still smitten, Victoria rewarded him with his own set of rooms in Osborne’s main wing, as well as a cottage on the estate, and another at Windsor. In her own private sitting room at Osborne, she kept a miniature painting of him on the wall, above one of her beloved John Brown.
More than 120 years later, it is still there, as are two much bigger portraits of him, in pride of place outside the banqueting Durbar Room.
It is clear what Abdul got out of Victoria: not least, in the last year of her life, the staggeringly lavish salary of £922 (the equivalent of £113,000 today). Less clear is what she got from him.
We
KNOW that she was susceptible to clever flattery, that she was smitten by the notion of India, and that she liked a pretty face.
But, despite all his faults, he was also able to offer her simple friendship, which was something that the formidable Queen-empress found hard to find.
Certainly, it was a sad day in more ways than one for him when she died, on January 22, 1901.
Munshi hadn’t only lost his friend, confidante and benefactor but also his protector.
he was powerless when the new king, edward VII, demanded within hours of Victoria’s funeral that all the Munshi’s many letters from his mother be found and burnt.
‘It was a holocaust of materials,’ says curator Michael hunter, in view of the hoard of intimate details that was lost to future historians.
‘And Princess Beatrice, Victoria’s youngest daughter and literary executrix, spent decades rewriting her mother’s diaries before they were published. so it’s reasonable to assume that certain references to the Munshi were removed.’
the Munshi was removed bodily, too — sent back to India where he died eight years later, aged only 46.
But in 2010 his own long-lost journals surfaced, enabling author shrabani Basu to update her book Victoria & Abdul, on which the film is based.
It might not be a balanced or especially accurate account of what happened, but it is fascinating, all the same.
It is directed by stephen Frears, who in 2006 made the Queen (starring helen Mirren), about a turbulent chapter in the life of another monarch, Victoria’s great-great granddaughter.
It was set in 1997 in the aftermath of the death of Diana and Dodi, whose relationship, even before the fatal crash in a Paris underpass, was causing great consternation in royal circles.
Of course, Diana was no Victoria, just as Dodi Fayed was no Abdul Karim. But there were striking parallels, all the same. In many ways, very little had changed in 100 years.