#munshi

The close relationship between Queen Victoria and her young Indian attendant Abdul Karim was deemed controversial and scandalous by the royal court.

After the Queen passed away, the family evicted Karim from the home the queen had given him and deported him back to India.

The unusual friendship between the Queen and her Indian servant began in 1887 and spanned for 14 years.

Mohammed Abdul Karim was born into a Muslim family at Lalitpur near Jhansi in 1863. He was taught Persian and Urdu privately. As a teenager, he traveled across North India and into Afghanistan.

He eventually secured a clerk position at a jail in Agra, one where his father and the brothers of his soon-to-be wife both worked.

It was there that Karim was handpicked to serve the somewhat recently christened Empress of India, Queen Victoria.

The Queen had expressed interest in the Indian territories ahead of her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and specifically requested Indian staff members help serve at a banquet for heads of state.

As such, Karim was one of two servants selected and presented to Victoria as “a gift from India” on the occasion of her 50th year on the throne.

After a journey by rail from Agra to Bombay and by mail steamer to Britain, Karim and the other servant arrived at Windsor Castle in June 1887.

They were put under the charge of Major-General Dennehy and first served the Queen at breakfast in Frogmore House at Windsor on 23 June 1887.

The Queen described Karim in her diary for that day:

“The other, much younger, is much lighter [than Buksh], tall, and with a fine serious countenance. His father is a native doctor at Agra. They both kissed my feet.”

Five days later, the Queen noted:

“The Indians always wait now and do so, so well and quietly.”

On August 3, she wrote:

“I am learning a few words of Hindustani to speak to my servants. It is a great interest to me for both the language and the people, I have naturally never come into real contact with before.”

On August 20, she had some “excellent curry” made by one of the servants.

By August 30, Karim was teaching her Urdu, which she used during an audience in December to greet the Maharani Chimnabai of Baroda.

Victoria took a great liking to Karim and ordered that he was to be given additional instruction in the English language. By February 1888, he had “learnt English wonderfully” according to Victoria.

After he complained to the Queen that he had been a clerk in India and thus menial work as a waiter was beneath him, he was promoted to the position of “Munshi” in August 1888.

In her journal, the Queen wrote that she made this change so that he would stay:

“I particularly wish to retain his services as he helps me in studying Hindustani, which interests me very much, and he is very intelligent and useful.”

Photographs of him waiting at the table were destroyed, and he became the first Indian personal clerk to the Queen.

Buksh (the other servant) remained in the Queen’s service but only as a khidmatgar or table servant, until his death at Windsor in 1899.

According to Karim biographer Sushila Anand, the Queen’s own letters testified that “her discussions with the Munshi were wide-ranging—philosophical, political, and practical. Both head and heart were engaged."

There is no doubt that the Queen found in Abdul Karim a connection with a world that was fascinatingly alien and a confidant who would not feed her the official line.

Karim was placed in charge of the other Indian servants and made responsible for their accounts. Victoria praised him in her letters and journal.

“I am so very fond of him,” she wrote. “He is so good, gentle, and understanding all I want. He is a real comfort to me.”

She admired “her personal Indian clerk and Munshi, who is an excellent, clever, truly pious and very refined gentleman, who says, ‘God ordered it’ … God’s Orders is what they implicitly obey! Such faith as theirs and such conscientiousness set us a great example.”

At Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s Scottish estate, Karim was allocated the room previously occupied by John Brown, a favorite servant of the Queen who had died in 1883.

Despite the serious and dignified manner that Karim presented to the outside world, the Queen wrote:

“He is very friendly and cheerful with the Queen’s maids and laughs and even jokes now—and invited them to come and see all his fine things, offering them fruit cake to eat”.

The queen not only allowed the Munshi to bring his wife over to England, but hosted his father and other family members as well. Karim enjoyed his own personal carriage and the best seats at the opera.

This developing relationship alarmed members of the court. Abdul was a Muslim and a servant, and yet he was closer to the Queen than anyone else in her immediate circle.

Four decades his senior, Victoria brought Abdul with her on all her trips and treated him as a close companion.

They thought she had lost her mind, or at least tried very hard to insinuate she had. But Victoria defended her protegee, even giving him a generous land grant in India.

According to Shrabani Basu, the journalist who uncovered this friendship and wrote the Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant:

“In letters to him over the years between his arrival in the U.K. and her death in 1901, the queen signed letters to him as ‘your loving mother’ and ‘your closest friend.'

On some occasions, she even signed off her letters with a flurry of kisses—a highly unusual thing to do at that time.

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.”

Though Victoria and Karim did spend a night alone at Glassat Shiel—the remote cottage in Scotland the queen had shared with John Brown—Basu does not think that the two, separated by decades in age, had a physical relationship.

Karim’s descendants similarly believe that the relationship was platonic and maternal at best.

In her final wishes before passing away, Queen Victoria was quite explicit:

"Karim would be one of the principal mourners at her funeral, an honor afforded only to the monarch’s closest friends and family."

Victoria could not control what happened to the Munshi from beyond the grave, but she did everything in her power to mitigate the harsh treatment she presumed her family would inflict upon him.

Upon her death on 22 January 1901, Victoria’s children worked swiftly to evict their mother’s favorite adviser. Edward VII sent guards into the cottage Karim shared with his wife, seizing all letters from the queen and burning them on the spot.

They instructed Karim to return to India immediately, without fanfare or farewell. Karim subsequently lived quietly near Agra, on the estate that Victoria had arranged for him, until his death at the age of 46.

Until the publication of Frederick Ponsonby’s memoirs in 1951, there was little biographical material on the Munshi.

Scholarly examination of his life and relationship with Victoria began around the 1960s, focusing on the Munshi as “an illustration of race and class prejudice in Victorian England.”

Mary Lutyens, in editing the diary of her grandmother Edith (wife of Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India 1876–80), concluded:

“Though one can understand that the Munshi was disliked, as favorites nearly always are … One cannot help feeling that the repugnance with which he was regarded by the Household was based mostly on snobbery and color prejudice.”

Victoria biographer Elizabeth Longford wrote:

“Abdul Karim stirred once more that same royal imagination, which had magnified the virtues of John Brown … Nevertheless, [it] insinuated into her confidence an inferior person, while it increased the nation’s dizzy infatuation with an inferior dream, the dream of Colonial Empire.”

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / British Public Archives / Vanity Fair / BBC / Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant

Updated on: December 9, 2021

By Kristin Hunt, Smithsonian.com, September 20, 2017

As part of the festivities to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, celebrating 50 years on the throne, the Queen hosted dozens of foreign rulers at a lavish banquet. She led a grand procession to Westminster Abbey in open carriage, escorted by the Indian cavalry, greeted screaming crowds on her palace balcony, and enjoyed fireworks in the garden. But of all the jubilee’s memorable events, it was the queen’s encounter with Abdul Karim that became the most significant. The young man had arrived in the United Kingdom as a “gift from India,” one intended to help Victoria address the Indian princes at her banquet. Karim would quickly prove to be the queen’s most trusted confidant, and the most despised member of the royal court.

Queen Victoria’s unusually close friendship with her Indian servant began at the 1887 celebration and spanned 14 years, a period captured in the new movie Victoria & Abdul, starring Judi Dench as the titular queen. Karim was the queen’s beloved munshi, the teacher who gave her daily Urdu lessons, educated her on Indian affairs, and introduced her to curry. Queen Victoria in turn showered him with gifts, titles and honors, much to the resentment of the royal family. When the queen died in 1901, her children burned every letter she sent Karim, whom they unceremoniously deported back to India. Yet his record lives on, thanks in large part to his diary, preserved by generations of descendants.

That diary was only recently unearthed by Shrabani Basu, the historian who wrote the movie’s source text. As Basu recounts in her book of the same name, Karim was born near Jhansi, the second-oldest child of six. His father, Haji Wuzeeruddin, was a hospital assistant, a skilled position that required some medical qualifications. While this occupation did not place Wuzeeruddin in the upper class, it was a good job, one that allowed him to hire a Maulvi, or Muslim scholar, to tutor his son. Under the Maulvi’s tutelage, Karim learned both Persian and Urdu. He eventually secured a clerk position at a jail in Agra, one where his father and the brothers of his soon-to-be wife both worked. It was there that Karim was handpicked to serve the somewhat recently christened Empress of India, Queen Victoria.

The jail superintendent, John Tyler, offered Karim the opportunity. Tyler had recently escorted 34 inmates to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in London, where he showed off the carpets they had woven as part of their rehabilition program. Queen Victoria was impressed, and had asked Tyler during his trip about selecting two Indian attendants to assist her at her Golden Jubilee. The men would facilitate communication with Indian dignitaries and wait on the queen. Karim was paired with Mohamed Buxshe, an experienced servant who ran the household of a British general. Compared with Buxshe, Karim was woefully unprepared for his new duties. But before he departed for London, he received a crash course in palace etiquette and the English language, as well as a brand-new wardrobe.

Queen Victoria’s first impression of Karim was recorded in her diaries, where she deemed him “tall with a fine serious countenance.” After their jubilee duties concluded, Karim and Buxshe traveled with the queen to her summer home on the Isle of Wight. There, Karim distinguished himself by surprising the sovereign with one of his favorite recipes. Using spices he had brought from Agra, Karim cooked a chicken curry with dal and pilau. According to Victoria biographer A.N. Wilson, the queen declared the dish “excellent” and added it to her regular menu rotation.

Eager to immerse herself further in Indian culture, Victoria asked Karim to teach her Urdu, or, as it was known at the time, Hindustani. Their lessons initially seemed somewhat relaxed. “Am learning a few words of Hindustani to speak to my servants,” Victoria wrote. “It is a great interest to me, for both the language and the people.” That interest soon turned to zeal. In an effort to improve communication between teacher and student, the queen doubled Karim’s English lessons, and he was a fast learner. Within two months, Victoria had ceased sending Karim instructions through her staff and begun writing him directly. Within a few more, she had bestowed upon him the title of Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim, making him her official Indian clerk and relieving him of his menial duties.

This developing relationship alarmed members of the court, because it felt all too familiar. Prior to Karim, Victoria’s closest confidant had been her Scottish servant, John Brown. The queen had leaned heavily on Brown after her husband Albert’s death, so much so that several members of the court derisively referred to her as “Mrs. Brown.” But Brown had died in 1883, and no servant had taken his place in the queen’s inner circle. Karim, however, was increasingly stepping into that role. He was traveling constantly with Victoria and, as Michael Nelson notes in Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riveria, even occupying Brown’s old bedchambers.

Although Karim’s diaries suggest nothing romantic, his relationship with Queen Victoria was oddly intimate. The two turned heads when they spent the night at Glassat Shiel, a remote cottage in Scotland that the queen had previously shared with John Brown. (After his death, she had vowed never to return.) Basu notes that Victoria signed letters to Karim as “your closest friend” and “your loving mother.” He was also afforded perks few servants could fathom. The queen not only allowed the Munshi to bring his wife over to England, but hosted his father and other family members. Karim enjoyed his own personal carriage and the best seats at the opera.

In their letters to one another, Victorian courtiers wished awful fates upon the Munshi. Basu shares several nasty excerpts in her book. Lady-in-waiting Marie Millet rued, “Why the plague did not carry him off I cannot think, it might have done one good deed!” Private secretary Arthur Bigge wished Karim and his father “a happy and lasting retreat in the Jail!”

Some royal associates had reasonable complaints about Karim’s extravagant requests. He frequently asked the queen for favors, such as securing his father a pension or his former boss a promotion. But it wasn’t just his arrogance that annoyed them. Historians have plainly pinned the hatred on 19th-century racism. As Carolly Erickson writes in Her Little Majesty, “For a dark-skinned Indian to be put very nearly on a level with the queen’s white servants was all but intolerable, for him to eat at the same table with them, to share in their daily lives was viewed as an outrage.”

The queen was well aware of this animosity towards Karim, and did not tolerate it. Fritz Ponsonby, her assistant private secretary, articulated her unwavering stance in a letter. “The Queen insists on bringing the Munshi forward, and if it were not for our protest, I don’t know where she would stop,” he wrote. “But it is no use, for the Queen says it is ‘race prejudice’ and that we are jealous of the poor Munshi.” Victoria heaped gifts and titles upon Karim partially because she knew the court would not pay him the same respect once she was dead. But she made sure her friend would be comfortable and remembered.

While Karim already enjoyed homes at the royal residences of Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne, Victoria also secured a land grant for him back in Agra. She commissioned multiple portraits of him, and had him written up in the Court Circulars and local gazettes. In her final wishes, she was quite explicit: Karim would be one of the principal mourners at her funeral, an honor afforded only to the monarch’s closest friends and family. Victoria could not control what happened to the Munshi from beyond the grave, but she did everything in her power to mitigate the harsh treatment she presumed her family would inflict upon him.

The queen’s fears were justified. Upon her death on January 22, 1901, Victoria’s children worked swiftly to evict their mother’s favorite adviser. Edward VII sent guards into the cottage Karim shared with his wife, seizing all letters from the queen and burning them on the spot. They instructed Karim to return to India immediately, without fanfare or farewell.

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From left: Nivedita Udupa, Jagrirti Mohata and Lalit Munshi Jagriti Mohata, Nivedita Udupa and Lalit Munshi have been promoted to partnership level at Samvad Partners, effective 16 September 2025. Mohata will lead the corporate and transactions practice at the Mumbai office. She brings more than 14 years’ experience in mergers and acquisitions, venture capital and private equity transactions, as…

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