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Victoria & Abdul

Page 28

by Shrabani Basu


  With the last batch of Queen Victoria’s letters divided between Agra and Windsor, the story of the Queen and her Munshi was finally confined to bureaucratic files. It is not known whether the letters held by the Munshi’s widow were ever returned to Windsor after her death. King Edward was to die a few months later, on 6 May 1910. Few after him were interested in pursuing the letters. George V would rule a world torn apart by revolution and war.

  Bigger events were overtaking British rule in India. A tide of political unrest was sweeping the sub-continent and the first stirrings of the nationalist struggle were beginning to rattle the Imperial administration. Not since the Mutiny of 1857 had the powers-that-be in Westminster witnessed the wave of feelings against the British government and the growing demands for independence. The cries of ‘Vande Mataram’ (Bow to the Mother) were beginning to fill the air again and Bengal was gripped by revolutionary zeal. Women handed in their jewellery to help fund the revolutionaries, bonfires of British goods were organised, and the air was heavy with plots, secret meetings and assassination attempts. From jute mill workers to farmhands, students to the landed aristocracy, all of Bengal was seething with nationalistic fervour following the partition of the state.

  Far away in London, on 1 July 1909, a twenty-two-year-old Indian engineering student, Madan Lal Dhingra, while attending the annual function of the Indian National Association, pumped five bullets into Sir Curzon Wyllie, Political Aide-de-Camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord Morley, as he entered the hall of the Imperial Institute. It was just over a decade ago that the foundation stone of the Institute had been laid by Queen Victoria in far happier circumstances. Dhingra was arrested immediately and refused to have a defence counsel, saying the courts in Britain had no right to try him. It took the judge at the Old Bailey only twenty minutes to sentence him. On 17 August 1909 he was hanged in Pentonville Prison.

  Dhingra was defiant in death. ‘I believe that a nation held down by foreign bayonets is in a perpetual state of war … the only lesson required in India at present is to learn how to die,’ he declared before he was hanged. He showed no remorse or fear and said he believed that the English would have done the same had the Germans been occupying their land. Dhingra became the first Indian nationalist to become a martyr on British soil, inspiring later revolutionaries like Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh, all of whom went to their deaths fighting for freedom.

  Later that year, Minto and his wife were themselves to survive an assassination attempt while on a visit to Ahmedabad in western India. Two bombs were thrown at the carriage in which they were driving. The explosives did not go off, but they succeeded in injuring a water-carrier who picked them up.

  By 1911 all of Delhi was transformed for the Durbar of George V, which saw the British government make an important announcement. The capital of the government would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi. It was clear that the political climate in Bengal had become much too hot. The new Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, successor to Lord Minto, entered Delhi on an elephant in 1912 to inaugurate the construction of the new city, but was met with a daring bomb attack. He survived, but only just. Hardinge was carried away on a stretcher as the elephant and mahout collapsed in a sea of white dust.

  It was the time of assassination attempts around the world. Two years later the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo would see the outbreak of the First World War. Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, who had knelt together at her deathbed, were now at war, drawing the whole world into a conflict which was to leave millions dead. One million Indian soldiers were recruited and sent to fight on the front line, dying in trenches in far-off lands. The smell of gunfire, the sight of the injured and the dead were to become the signs of the day.

  Barely a year later, in January 1915, an astute young lawyer stepped off a boat from South Africa at the Bombay docks. His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. A new chapter in Indian history was about to be written. It was a time far removed from the sunny days spent in marquees in the gardens at Frogmore and Osborne, when an elderly English Queen sat learning Hindustani from a young Indian, who told her tales of his homeland and won her heart.

  EPILOGUE

  The Regional Archives of Agra – a small house located in a sleepy residential area – had a forgotten air about it. ‘We only open it if someone needs a document,’ apologised the junior official, who had driven up in a scooter from another building to let us in. It was clear that he did not need to do this too often.

  The register indicated that the last person had visited over a month back. After handing me a handwritten catalogue, the official – clearly at a loose end – said he was going for some tea. Would I like some? I certainly would. Searching for the Munshi’s records in this neglected place seemed like a hopeless task. The room smelt of open drains. A sleepy dog lay on the verandah, surveying me through a half-closed eye. The mosquitoes under the table had already started making a meal of my legs. I thought longingly of the cosy surrounds of the Round Tower in Windsor where the other half of the Munshi’s records lay. At the Queen’s Royal residence, they rang a bell at eleven and served us tea and biscuits. The contrast could not have been more obvious.

  Miraculously, the cataloguing actually worked. In the languid surrounds of the room, in steel almirahs with rusty handles were filed records of the Munshi’s life in Agra: letters, land documents and detailed arrangements for the Viceroy’s Durbar. Before long, I had forgotten about the mosquito bites and was staring at a crumbling parchment map spread across the table. It was a map drawn by an official in the Collector’s Office in Agra in 1896, showing the area of land occupied by the Munshi. A black border had been marked around the plots numbered 11–125. These were already owned by the Munshi and gifted to him by the Queen. Marked in red was the huge chunk of government land adjacent to it, which the Munshi wanted to buy. It numbered up to plot 314 and covered an area of 141 acres. There was a road running through it, with several trees including jamun, mango and neem. There was farmland and fallow land. The Munshi had clearly acquired a giant stretch of land, shaped amazingly like the map of the United States, in the heart of Agra. On plots numbered 177–187 he had built his dream house, Karim Lodge.

  We seemed to have been in the car for nearly an hour, driving through what was once the Munshi’s estate, passing large gated houses covered with bougainvilleas, jasmine and fragrant flowering plants. Palm trees and brightly painted flower pots lined the streets. Occasionally, one got a glimpse of manicured lawns. The rich and prosperous of Agra had built their houses here now. ‘All this belonged to Abdul Karim,’ said my guide from the local Agra estate agents. ‘It is now a whole area in Agra.’ Finally, he pulled up outside what looked like the remnants of an old stone wall and a gate with a carved medieval arch. On it was stuck an announcement by the Rashtriya Lok Dal, a political party. Next to the gate were rows of chemists’ shops, the makeshift shacks running for nearly a mile along the wall that had once cordoned off Karim’s property.

  All that remained of the original Karim Lodge was the brick wall, the arches and the living room with its high ceiling. The back of the house had been modernised and turned into a nursing home and medical practice. The front of the house had been further divided into two residential houses. Prakash Hingorani, the present owner of the original house, knew only a few sketchy details about Abdul Karim. He showed me a letter from Karim written on Windsor notepaper. It gave the date and time of his arrival by the mail train to Agra. Hingorani had laminated the yellowing page and kept it as a souvenir. It was one of the things he had found lying among the papers in the house.

  His grandfather, Hiranand Vaswani, had occupied Karim Lodge when the family had come from Pakistan after the partition in 1947. The biggest movement of people in history had seen nearly 15 million refugees crossing the border on both sides between India and Pakistan, leading to riots, looting and wanton killing. In the darkest days after independence, Hindus crossed over from Pakistan to India, a
nd Muslims from India moved to Pakistan for fear of becoming minorities in their homeland. The descendants of Karim’s extended family, the grandchildren of his brother and sisters, left the acres of land that they owned and went to Pakistan. The land was seized by the Ministry of Rehabilitation in Agra and distributed to Hindu refugees from Pakistan.

  ‘We lost our land in Pakistan and we were housed here. Those were troubled times,’ said eighty-seven-year-old Himesh Chand Chaturvedi, who lives in one of the smaller original houses of the estate, a few hundred yards from Karim Lodge. The sprightly man with a flowing beard gave me a mischievous smile. ‘I found a pile of letters in this house written by Karim. My wife made me throw them away, as they were of no use to anyone. How did I know you would come looking for him after all these years?’ Chaturvedi remembered some of Karim’s descendants who had not left immediately for Pakistan. ‘Some of the family were still left here,’ he said, trying to recall the names and faces of the people all those years back. ‘The children used to play in the garden. Karim had no children of his own, so they were his brother’s grandchildren.’ I figured they would have been the children of Karim’s favourite nephew, Abdul Rashid.

  Chaturvedi recalled how people would still talk about Abdul Karim, the ustad, and his relations with Queen Victoria. There were many stories about how he was trained for the job, how he became the Queen’s teacher and acquired a special place in the Court. There were stories about how Karim Lodge was built with bricks and labour from Agra Jail, so it could be ready for him on his return. He recalled how he had read some of the letters which were lying in the house. They were from Karim to his wife, asking her to send him certain spices, or his favourite pan and supari (betel nut). ‘He would give her instructions about which mail company to send the parcels with. There were many, many letters …’

  Suddenly the old man sprang up and walked to the main entrance of Karim Lodge.

  ‘This is the gate that Abdul Karim’s carriage would drive up to. Here he would alight in his smart clothes and turban and walk indoors,’ said Chaturvedi, his mind racing back to the stories he had heard. ‘People spoke about him for years …’

  The Munshi had lived quietly with his memories after his return from England. Though he knew the strength of the feelings against him in the Palace, he had never spoken any ill of the Royal family or the Household. The Queen’s family never understood that he had provided her with the companionship over the last decade of her life, which they themselves had not been able to offer.

  An ambulance rattled past us to the nursing home at the back of the house. A nurse in starched whites was briskly attending the line of patients sitting in the neon-lit room, the silence broken only by the occasional cough and the sound of her white shoes clicking on the marble floor. Karim’s carriage had stopped coming here a hundred years ago. A forgotten grave, a laminated telegram and the memories of an old man were all that was left of him in his native city. Agra had moved on.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  RA – Royal Archives

  QVJ – Queen Victoria’s Journals

  QVJ/HIND – Queen Victoria’s Hindustani Journals

  ADDL/MSS – Additional Manuscripts

  IOR – India Office Records

  AKJ – Abdul Karim’s Journals (1887–97). Unpublished

  1. Agra

   1  AKJ, and article in Black magazine, 15 June 1985

   2  IOR MSS/Eur/F130/8b, Viceroy to Secretary of State, 8 September 1887, Simla

   3  IOR MSS/Eur/D558/1, Queen to Viceroy, 18 December 1890, Windsor

   4  AKJ (Year 1887)

  2. A Jubilee Present

   1  IOR MSS/Eur/F130/6, Dufferin to Cross, 20 March 1887, Calcutta

   2  IOR MSS/Eur/F130/9, Cross to Dufferin, 22 April 1887, London

   3  Ibid., 28 April, London

   4  Sunity Devi, The Autobiography of an Indian Princess, quoted in Lucy Moore, Maharanis (London: Viking, 2004), p.104

   5  AKJ (Year 1887)

   6  RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 21 June

   7  Ibid.

   8  Ibid.

   9  IOR MSS/Eur/F130/9, Cross to Dufferin, 24 June 1887

   10 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 22 June

   11 Ibid., 23 June

  3. An Indian Durbar

   1  RA MRH/MRH/HH/1/214a: 3 July 1887

   2  RA MRH/MRH/HH/1/214b

   3  Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, His Life From his Letters (London: Macmillan & Co., 1943), p.383

   4  RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 28 June

   5  Ibid., 30 June

   6  Ibid.

   7  Ibid.

   8  RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 28 July

   9  Ibid., 3 August

   10 Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p.130

   11 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 6 August

   12 Ibid., 11 August

   13 Ibid., 20 August

  4. Curries and Highlanders

   1  Reid Archives, Scrap Book, 1887, Vol. 1

   2  Ibid.

   3  Queen Victoria, Our Life in the Highlands (London: William Kimber, 1968, revised edition), p.14

   4  Reid Archives, Scrap Book, 1887, Vol. 2

   5  RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/HIND/7: 24 May 1899

   6  RA VIC/ADDU/104/1

   7  RA VIC/ADDA12/154

   8  RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 18 September

   9  IOR MSS/Eur/F130/9, Cross to Dufferin

   10 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 29 September

   11 IOR MSS/Eur/F130/9, Cross to Dufferin

   12 IOR MSS/Eur/F130/6, Randolph Churchill, Secretary of State, to Dufferin

   13 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 9 October

   14 Ibid., 2 December

   15 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/HIND/7: 24 May 1899

   16 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1887: 31 December

  5. Becoming the Munshi

   1  Reid Archives, Scrap Book, Vol. 2

   2  RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/HIND/9

   3  Michael Nelson, Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera (London: Tauris Parke, 2007), pp.21

   4  RA VIC/MAIN/L/24/30, Ponsonby to Queen, 31 July 1888, St James’s Palace

   5  RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1888: 11 August

   6  RA VIC/ADDA/15/5188, Queen Victoria to the Duchess of Connaught, 3 November 1888, Balmoral

   7  RA VIC/MAIN/Y/172/85, Queen Victoria to Sir Theodore Martin, 20 November 1888, Windsor

   8  RA VIC/ADDU/104/2: 25 September 1888, Balmoral

   9  RA VIC/ADDU/104/3: 25 September 1888, Balmoral

   10 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1888: 2 November

   11 Christopher Hibbert (ed.), Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, (London: Penguin, 1985), p.314

   12 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/1, Queen to Viceroy, 22 February 1889, Windsor

   13 Ibid., Viceroy to Queen, 21 April 1889, Viceregal Lodge, Simla

   14 Ibid., Queen to Viceroy, 22 March 1889

   15 Ibid., Queen to Viceroy, 8 April 1889

   16 Ibid., Queen to Viceroy, 17 May 1889

   17 Reid Archives, Scrap Book, Vol. 2, Queen to Reid, 13 May 1889

   18 Reid Archives, Scrap Book, Vol. 2

   19 Ibid.

   20 Ibid.

   21 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/1, Queen to Viceroy, 18 July 1889, Osborne

   22 Ibid.

   23 Ibid., Viceroy to Queen, 15 June 1889, Viceregal Lodge, Simla

   24 Reid Archives, Scrap Book, Vol. 2

  6. A Grant of Land

   1  Reid Archives, Scrap Book, Vol. 2

   2  RA VIC/ADDU/32/1890: 17 May

   3  IOR MSS/Eur/D558/1, Telegram No. 28, Queen to Lansdowne, 11 July 1890, Windsor

   4  Ibid., Telegram No. 32, Lansdowne to Queen, 6 July 1890, Viceregal Lodge, Simla

   5  Ibid., Telegram No.
29, Queen to Lansdowne, 1 August 1890, Osborne

   6  Ibid., Telegram No. 32, Queen to Lansdowne, 27 August 1890, Balmoral

   7  Ibid., Telegram No. 33, Queen to Lansdowne, 28 August 1890, Balmoral

   8  Ibid., Telegram No. 36, Lansdowne to Queen, 2 August 1890, Simla

   9  Ibid., Telegram No. 39, Lansdowne to Queen, 23 September 1890, Simla

   10 Ibid., Letter No. 41, Lansdowne to Queen, 21 October 1890, Simla

   11 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/3, Cross to Lansdowne, 30 October 1890, India Office, Whitehall

   12 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1890: 7 October

   13 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/3, Lansdowne to Cross, 19 November 1890

   14 Ibid.

   15 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/1, Telegram No. 39, Queen to Lansdowne, 29 October 1890, Balmoral

   16 Ibid., Telegram No. 42, Lansdowne to Queen, 30 October 1890, Viceroy’s camp

   17 Ibid., Telegram No. 40, Queen to Lansdowne, 30 October 1890, Balmoral

   18 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/7

   19 RA VIC/ADDU/32/1890: 2 November

   20 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/3, Lansdowne to Cross, 12 November 1890, Jeypore

   21 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/1, Telegram No. 41, Queen to Lansdowne, 21 November 1890, Windsor

   22 Ibid., Telegram Nos 43–44, Queen to Lansdowne, 23 November 1890, Windsor

   23 IOR MSS/Eur/558/1, Telegram Nos 44–45, Queen to Lansdowne, 24 November 1890, Windsor

   24 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/1, Telegram No. 45, Lansdowne to Queen, 26 November 1890, Agra

   25 Ibid., Lansdowne to Cross, 27 November 1890

   26 IOR MSS/Eur/D558/3, Lansdowne to Cross, 2 December 1890

   27 Ibid., Cross to Lansdowne, 18 December 1890, India Office, Whitehall

 

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