At the time of the Golden Jubilee of her reign in 1887, the Empress of India received an unusual gift from an Indian rajah, in the form of Abdul Karim. Initially serving as a khitmagrar (serving at table), he rapidly rose to become Her Majesty’s closest confidants, eventually becoming a trusted member of the Royal Household.

Of late, there have been a spate of reports apropos sources that have come to light about the close, and remarkable, relationship that Queen Victoria shared late in her life with her Muslim Indian servant Abdul Karim. It has made its way to a widely viewed story on the BBC website, “Queen Victoria and Abdul: Diaries reveal secrets”:

“In letters to him over the years between his arrival in the UK and her death in 1901, the queen signed letters to him as ‘your loving mother ‘ and ‘your closest friend’, “ author Shrabani Basu told the BBC ....”it was unquestionably a passionate relationship- a relationship which I think operated on many different layers in addition to the mother and son ties between a young Indian man and a woman who at the time was over 60 years old.”

He taught her Urdu, instructed her in Indian culture and history, and introduced her to Indian cuisine ....she took particularly to curry dishes. The friendship followed on her earlier closeness as a middle-aged widow with a rough-hewn Scottish servant John Brown, famously captured in the film Her Majesty Mrs Brown, starring Dame Judi Dench and Billy Connolly. Abdul Karim, however, was promoted beyond the status of a servant, while John Brown was not. Karim became Queen Victoria’s private secretary and “was bestowed with many honours as the royal party travelled around Europe meeting monarchs and prime ministers.”

The Empress of India and inset Abdul
Karim

Abdul Karim’s writings, hitherto hidden by his family, throw new light on a close and controversial relationship, says Ben Leach of The Telegraph.

"I am so very fond of him. He is so good and gentle and understanding ... and is a real comfort to me"

These were the words of Queen Victoria speaking to her daughter-in-law, Louise, Duchess of Connaught , on November 3, 1888 at Balmoral. Perhaps surprising, though, is who she was talking about- not her beloved husband, Albert, who had died in 1861. Nor John Brown, her loyal Scottish ghillie, who in many ways filled the void left by Albert, since Brown had died in 1883.

Instead, Queen Victoria was referring to Abdul Karim, her 24-year-old Indian servant.

Abdul Karim initially moved to England for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee –the Queen Empress wanted two Indian waiters there to attend to the Indian Princes who would be present. Victoria was instantly charmed by the tall, elegant Karim, and within a year he had transcended from waiting tables to becoming a powerful figure within the royal court. Queen Victoria made Abdul Karim her official munshi (teacher) as well as Indian Clerk to the Queen Empress. This too he notes in his diary: “It was a day I shall never forget and for the same I shall ever thank my God and pray for the long life and happiness of Her Majesty.”

Her relationship with Karim was one that sent shockwaves through the royal court –and ended up being one of the most scandalous periods of her 64-year reign.

Indeed such was the ill-feeling that when Victoria died, her son King Edward VII ordered all records of their relationship, including correspondence and photographs, to be destroyed.

Civis Britannicus Sum
To the memory of the British Empire in India,
Which conferred subjecthood upon us, But withheld citizenship. To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: “Civis Britannicus sum” Because all that was good and living within us Was made, shaped and quickened By the same British rule.

We are unabashed Imperialists. Not of the Glory to the Empire kind, but more of the there-was-some-good-in-the-Empire sort. Nothing in history is more tantalizing than What-if. And nowhere is it truer in Indian history than in relation to the Raj. What if Nawab Siraj ud Daula had taken precautions to cover his artillery from rain at Plassey? What if the French Governor who succeeded Dupleix had even half of his enterprise? What if the Napoleon-Tipu alliance had materialised? What if the Maratha wars had ended the other way? And what if the rag tag sepoys of 1857 had been helped by the Nizam and the Sikhs? Ultimately however, the Company Bahadur and its successor, the Raj did come to stay in India for close to two hundred years and for good or for bad changed us irrevocably.

Lord Louis Mountbatten - The Last Viceroy

“Providence”, wrote Rudyard Kipling, ‘created the Maharajahs to offer mankind a spectacle’. On the night of 28th December 1970, that spectacle was brought to an end by Indira Gandhi, as the President of the Republic of India was roused from his bed to sign an ordinance de-recognising the Princely Order. Although they won a six month stay of execution, this signature effectively consigned the Maharajahs to history, and with them, the institution of Indian kingship enshrined in the word ‘rajah, with its original Sanscritic meaning of both ‘one who rules’ and ‘one whose duty is to please’

As an institution, it was certainly as old as the Mahabharata and probably as old as the early Aryans, being founded on the Hindu notion of kingship as a two-way contract between ‘rajah’and ‘prajah’ or ruler and people. This contract traditionally required the ruler to protect his people, while they, for their part, were expected to reward him with obedience and a share of their cattle, gold, agricultural produce and even their women.

With the advent of the British in India, this ancient concept of kingship received its first body-blow. British Imperial rule in India, established initially by the East India Company, and then in 1858 assumed by the British Crown, froze the borders of innumerable Indian kingdoms, large and small, giving their rulers a security of tenure that their predecessors had never enjoyed. The price was British paramountcy by which the ‘rajah’ became answerable not to his ‘prajah’ but to the British Raj in the person of the Viceroy. In this process, the Indian Kings were demoted to ‘Princes and Native Chiefs’ and their Kingdoms became princely or Native States.

British Crown rule in India lasted just under ninety years – of which the last few decades epitomises the theme of the EMPRESS OF INDIA.

In the halcyon days of the Raj, the Viceroy exercised paramount power over two quite separate Indias. The first, comprising three-fifths of the subcontinent, as governed directly, as British India. But breaking into the uniform pink on the imperial map with a confusion of yellow patches were another 600,000 square miles of what was foreign territory as far as British India was concerned. This ‘Indian India’ was made up of 565 Indian States enjoying direct political relations with the Government of India, who saw themselves as being ‘in perpetual alliance and friendship’ with Britain.

Each had its own ruler who governed his subjects very much as he (or very rarely, she) wished, but owed ultimate allegiance to the Queen-or King’Emperor through the person of the Viceroy.

It is an irony of history that Lord Louis Mountbatten, the great-grandson of the First Empress of India, Queen Victoria, presided over the liquidation of the ‘brightest jewel in the Crown’.