Royals evicted Munshi Abdul Karim days after Queen Victoria’s death

Favours bestowed by Queen Victoria on her Indian servant Hafiz Abdul Karim enlivened gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to the syndicated pen of Marquise de Fontenoy.

Queen Victoria’s Indian servant ‘Munshi’ Hafiz Abdul Karim in 1890.

FAVOURS bestowed by Queen Victoria on her “most intolerably arrogant and troublesome” Indian servant Hafiz Abdul Karim enlivened gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to the syndicated pen of Marquise de Fontenoy.

Karim was “one functionary certain to be sent about his business”, de Fontenoy wrote a week after Victoria’s death in January 1901.

He was right: just hours after the Queen’s funeral at Windsor Castle on February 2, 1901, a small group made their way through the dawn mist to a modern house in the grounds.

They were King Edward VII’s wife Queen Alexandra; Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, and several guards, notes Shrabani Basu, author of Victoria & Abdul: The True Story Of the Queen’s Closest Confidant, in 2010. The movie version of Basu’s book, Victoria & Abdul, starring English actress Judi Dench, opens in Sydney on Thursday.

In 1901, the Royal party was heading for Frogmore Cottage, the house Victoria had built for Karim and his family in the grounds of Windsor Castle.

 

An 1888 portrait of Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim by Rudolf Swoboda.

 

“For 13 years Queen Victoria had taken the young Indian to heart, giving him land, houses, titles and her unquestioning love,” Basu writes. “This was their chance to get back at him.”

After waking Karim and his family, the royals stormed into his house, as his wife ran to put on her burka. The Queen demanded Karim hand over all the letters Victoria had written to him. The assembled letters and postcards were then piled onto a bonfire outside the cottage.

“Victoria used to write to Abdul several times a day, signing her letters variously as ‘your dearest friend’, ‘your true friend’, and even, ‘your dearest mother’. She would put little crosses after her signature,” says Basu, who spent five years researching and writing Karim’s story.

Born into a Muslim family near Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh in 1863, his father was a hospital assistant with the Central India Horse, a British cavalry regiment. Karim was privately instructed in Urdu and Persian, and became a clerk at the jail in Agra, where his father was then stationed. His father arranged a marriage between Karim and the sister of a fellow worker.

As rehabilitation, prisoners in Agra jail were trained and employed as carpet weavers. In 1886, 34 convicts travelled to London to demonstrate carpet weaving at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South Kensington. Karim did not accompany them, but he helped prison superintendent John Tyler organise the trip, and select the carpets and weavers. On Victoria’s visit to the exhibition, Tyler gave her a gift of two gold bracelets, chosen with help from Karim.

Also bearing the title Empress of India, Victoria wanted to employ Indian servants for her Golden Jubilee. She asked Tyler to recruit two attendants to serve for a year. After coaching in British manners and the English language, Karim was sent to England, with Mohammed Buksh, previously a servant to a British officer. The two Indian men were initially assigned to wait tables while learning other tasks.

 

Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim with Queen Victoria in the 1890s. Public domain

 

Strikingly dressed in a scarlet tunic and white turban, the tall, handsome Karim made an immediate impression on the Queen as he kissed her feet and presented her with a gold mohur (Mughal coin). The Queen wanted to know more about him, and also gave instructions for Karim to have extra English lessons so she could have longer conversations with him.

Karim told the Queen he had been a clerk and had never done menial jobs, and wrote to tell her he wanted to return to Agra. She begged him to stay, saying she enjoyed his company. Victoria gave Karim the title of “Munshi”, an Urdu word that translates as “clerk” or “teacher”, and appointed him as her Indian private secretary. Writing that “I particularly wish to retain his services as he helps me in studying Hindustani, which interests me very much, & he is very intelligent & useful,” Victoria also showered him with honours, and obtained a land grant for him in India.

“To the horror of those military officers who have seen service in India, she has placed him ... on the same social level as themselves,” wrote de Fontenoy, the pen-name of Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, in October 1897, noting Karim was “very far from being a high-caste Indian”. Accused of theft, being a spy, and lying by other royals and royal staff, Queen Victoria refused to believe the accusations, and, in memos to her children, reprimanded them for their lack of respect.

Karim visited India in 1892 and returned to England with his wife and mother-in-law, when the Queen wrote, “the two Indian ladies ... who are, I believe, the first Mohammedan purdah ladies who ever came over ... keep their custom of complete seclusion and of being entirely covered when they go out, except for the holes for their eyes.”

Karim was sent back to India in 1901, where he lived on his royal land grant at Agra. He died childless in 1909.