An English Queen and her Indian love

Random Thoughts

S. Pathiravitana

Had Queen Victoria developed the same affections for Ceylon as she had done for India perhaps the course of history may have taken a different turn for us Ceylonese?. Historians don’t seem to think that her love for India began after she met Abdul Karim, her groom, whom she promoted later on to be her teacher.

At the same time she instructed her Ministers to call him Munshi, the Indian term for teacher, for teaching her to speak Hindustani. She didn’t quite master that language though, but she continued to relish the curries Karim prepared for her now and again.

Her Ministers were getting rather worried or may be even jealous of the special privileges that the former groom was enjoying. Even before getting to know Abdul Kareem, the Queen was strangely drawn towards India.

Greatest wish

The Mutiny had taken place not so long ago; and it was during the reconciliation period that began soon after with the closing down of the East India Company that the Queen’s interest got turned towards India. She informed the Minister in charge during the reconciliation period that the “Indian people should know that there is no hatred towards a brown skin, none; but the greatest wish on their Queen’s part was to see them happy, contented and flourishing.”

When the Ministers drew up a formal statement explaining to the Indian people the circumstances that had made the government change its attitude, she was taken aback with the tone of the proclamation and “insisted that certain parts of it must be altered, and one passage in the final document was clearly and importantly all her own work.” And this was that passage:

“Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity and acknowledging with gratitude the solace of religion, we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose on any of our subjects...

We do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they may all abstain from interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.”

Now, I seem to understand from where the current Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, has inherited his tolerance of other religions and particularly at this moment of time his attempt to build bridges between Islam and the West.

But let us return to the role his strong-minded ancestor Victoria played a little over a century ago. She did enjoy being Queen. She didn’t baulk at the idea when her Prime Minister, Disraeli, proposed a decade or two later that she be called Empress of India and be officially known as Victoria Regina Imperatrix.

Once she pulled up one of her Prime Ministers for identifying Indians as ‘black men.’ And knowing what a bureaucracy can turn out to be, “The future Viceroy,” she warned, “must really shake himself more and more free from his red-tapist, narrow minded Council and entourage.

Empire

He must... not be guided by the snobbish and vulgar overbearings and offensive behaviour of many of our Civil and Political Agents...” It seems a pity that she overlooked some of her subjects elsewhere in her empire compared to the special interest she took over India.

Had she taken a look across the Indian ocean and down below to Ceylon she would have found how places of Buddhist worship had been robbed of their lands and the special interest that the British promised to take over the position of Buddhism in the Island was being ignored by the self-same ‘red-tapism’ and the ‘overbearing’ that she condemned in her officials in India.

Was Abdul Kareem and his cultural background the reason that kept her from taking an equal interest in the condition of her other subjects elsewhere in her empire? Abdul Kareem came into her life after 1887, three decades after the Indian Mutiny. The tussles she had with her officials took place before that date.

1887 was the year he was appointed a groom after her Scottish groom died four years earlier. His elevation to that post from being a servant in the royal household incurred the charge from its senior members that he was an “upstart with a tendency to lie for his self advancement.” Earlier he had been a junior clerk working in the Agra jail and was 24 at the time he entered Her Majesty’s service.

He let it be known that his father was a Surgeon-General in the Indian army when he was not. But by the time it was discovered that he was lying it was too late. He had become a firm favourite with the Queen.

It has been said that when the court officials brought this falsification charge to the notice of the Queen, she turned on them and accused them of being a prejudiced lot. She had also told them that she knew of two Archbishops one who was a butcher’s son and the other a grocer’s. So much for Britain’s class- consciousness!

Abdul Kareem continued to enjoy the special patronage of the Queen. On her part she noted in her diary after one of her lessons in Hindustani that her teacher, Munshi, the Indian name by which he was known, “was a very strict Master,...a perfect Gentleman” She also got a portrait of her Master done in oils.

He was also a constant companion on her journeys to Scotland for Braemar Highland Gatherings or to the theatre. So close was Abdul Kareem to the Queen that her ministers were soon worrying about state policy being revealed to unauthorised persons. Even the Hindus among her Indian subjects were beginning to fear, it was alleged, of a Muslim being so close to the British throne.

Confidential

She dismissed such warnings as further examples of the ‘racial and social prejudices of her ministers’ until one day when the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton told the Queen that he may have to stop sending confidential material if she continued to share that information with the Munshi.

She had to comply. But what she gave with one hand she took back with the other. She told Lord Hamilton that henceforth the Munshi must be known as her Indian Secretary.

Once Her Majesty’s Indian Secretary, Munshi sent at his personal expense Christmas cards to the Governors of Bombay and Madras. They had a cold reception and were returned to the sender.

The ‘racial and social prejudices’ as the Queen identified these acts infuriated her but there was nothing she could do about this on-going ‘cold war.’ Meanwhile, the officials in the India Office annoyed by the position Kareem enjoyed exchanged their own little private jokes. The Keeper of Her Majesty’s Privy Purse once wrote to the Viceroy, “I have now got to think it lucky that the Munshi’s sweeper does not dine with us.”

What exactly the relations between Victoria and Abdul Kareem were, may never be known. Whatever papers there were to throw light on this strange relationship were destroyed when Edward the V11 ordered Kareem to burn them when he succeeded to the throne on the death of the Queen.

Her interest in Indian affairs never flagged and she maintained them right up to her death in 1902. She urged the Viceroys to pay attention to what the ‘respectable native people had to say.’

Above all it was, as she called it, red-tapism that they must try to avoid - “Red-tapism is, alas, our great misfortune and exists very strongly in the India Office.” She was in close touch with India and telegraphed Lord Curzon regularly until a week or so before her death.

At her funeral procession Abdul Kareem was given a special position of honour as requested by the Queen before she died. Soon after that Kareem returned to India.

In the year 1909 Abdul Kareem passed away. His widow was asked to burn any papers Kareem had left behind. There were a few letters in the handwriting of the Queen. The widow was allowed to keep back some for sentimental reasons.