Queen Victoria trusted one man above all others. Her family tried to erase him
Queen Victoria defended Abdul Karim against her entire court. When she died, her son tried to burn every trace of their friendship.
Image: An 1888 portrait of Abdul Karim | Public Domain
In the last years of her reign, Queen Victoria gave her complete trust to one man. She promoted him, housed him and named him one of the few people permitted to walk beside her coffin.
Her household despised him. When she died, her own son moved fast to make sure the world forgot he had ever existed.
This is the extraordinary story of how one young clerk from India became one of the most trusted and important people in all of Great Britain, and then vanished from history almost without a trace.
The servant who became a Queen’s teacher
Abdul Karim arrived at Windsor in 1887, one of two Indian attendants sent to serve Victoria during her Golden Jubilee year. He was 24, the son of a hospital assistant from near Jhansi and had spent his working life as a clerk at a jail in Agra.
He had just weeks to learn English and court etiquette before he was put in front of the Queen herself. He made a big impression.
After delighting Queen Victoria’s taste buds with a chicken curry – a dish that quickly became a firm favourite of hers – he was soon giving the Empress of India private lessons in Urdu. Long before Duolingo existed, she’d dutifully record what she’d learned in her journal each night.
A promotion from servant to Munshi, her personal secretary and teacher, quickly followed. Such was her sudden infatuation with Indian culture that she even had an entire wing of Osborne House decorated in a traditional style in homage to their shared interest.
From wood carvings and furnishings by Indian artisans to murals of the elephant god, Ganesh, the Durbar Room was painstakingly transformed into an ornate Mughal-style banqueting hall.
The bond deepened quickly and openly. Following the death of her Scottish confidant, John Brown, a few years earlier, courtiers noticed Victoria was pouring the same devotion into Karim. He was given his own carriage, land in India, a place at the best tables and permission most staff never received.
Victoria called him her closest friend. And she meant it.
The family that wanted him gone
Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of this sat well at court. Karim's rapid rise, and Victoria's insistence that he be consulted on matters of Indian politics, turned senior staff and even government officials against him.
She was told plainly that people around her resented his position. Her response was to defend him harder, at one point writing to accuse her own household of race prejudice for how they treated him.
That protection ended the moment she died in 1901. Her son, the new King Edward VII, ordered Karim back to India within days. Guards were sent to his cottage, and years of private letters between him and Victoria were burned on the King's instruction. It was a deliberate attempt to remove Karim from the official memory of her reign.
And it almost worked.
Karim died in India in 1909, aged forty-six, with no children to carry his story forward. What his own family kept hidden, and what the palace never managed to destroy, was a set of diaries and letters Karim had held back, secretly tucked away rather than handed over.
They surfaced roughly a century later and are the only reason we now know exactly how much one ageing queen was willing to risk for a friendship almost everyone around her wanted to end.
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