BANGALORE: If etiquette is anything to go by one would expect that the days after Queen Victoria’s funeral would have found the royal household in mourning in the Windsor castle. But early on a cold February morning in 1901, the new queen of England, Queen Alexandria, was somewhere else — at the head of a raiding party knocking at the doors of Queen Victoria’s trusted Indian servant Abdul Karim.
This is the moment from which London- based author Shrabani Basu takes off in her latest book ‘Victoria and Abdul’.
After inheriting the largest empire in history, King Edward’s (VII) greatest concern, strangely enough, was not military or political. It was to destroy the hundreds of letters his mother had sent to her beloved munshi — the Muslim servant from Agra who was given to the queen as a gift on the golden jubilee of her reign.
The snobbish British political class wanted the queen’s favourite, from whom she even learned how to read and write Urdu, deleted from history. After all, the intimate relationship Victoria shared with the ‘lowly’ Abdul was an embarrassment to them.
When the royal family watched flames devour the ‘Dear Abdul’ letters that Victoria had variously signed ‘your dearest friend’, ‘your truest friend’ and even ‘your mother’, they must have thought the job done.
It is from the embers of history’s bonfire that Basu wants to rescue Abdul.
“Abdul has been painted as a rogue by the British. When I became interested in this almost-forgotten character, I was just curious to know more about him.
As I researched more, I realised he was no rogue,” says Basu, who was in Bangalore for the launch of her book on Thursday.
Inside the royal archives of Windsor castle, Basu pored over the Hindustani (Urdu) journals that Abdul and Victoria wrote in, together, for 13 years of the elderly queen’s life. From its long-forgotten pages, from Victoria’s correspondence, and from the accounts of people like James Reid — the queen’s personal physician — she evokes the ghost of Victoria and Abdul’s secret life.
“The queen’s defence of her beloved munshi and the patronage she gave him made the royal staff hate him. Abdul, who started as a mere waiter, was soon Victoria’s Indian secretary. She gave him the highest honours short of knighthood, and that too only because the Prime Minister himself stepped in,” Basu said.
The book is an attempt to understand the tenderness of an unusual relationship that transcended its times, and could find utterances only in the secret nooks of history.
It is also a valuable peek into a Victoria who is more real than the embalmed caricature that the Victorians painted for themselves. It is also worth reading just to imagine Queen Victoria sitting in the Osborne House saying aloud what she had written in her Hindustani journals, “Osborne mein chai hamesha kharab hai”.