Indians around Queen Victoria

Abdul Karim, the male protagonist of the 2017 film Victoria and Abdul, is not the only Indian who frequented the British court during the Victorian era.

Queen Victoria never visited India, but these Indians who came to the English court brought a living India to the Queen's side. Queen Victoria reigned for a long time, and during her reign, many Indian princes, merchants, Hindu or Islamic reformers, and the Indian royal family came to England for a visit. Kanas Tagore was one of the first Indian merchants to come to the Queen. Tagore was the grandfather of nobel laureate and famous poet Rabindranath Tagore. He arrived in England in 1842 and accompanied Queen Victoria on a visit to Scotland. The Queen painted a sketch of Tagore in June 1842 and wrote in her diary: "He wore national costumes, scarves and trousers embellished with beautiful gold and red, as well as the lattice painted in the sketch." ”

Queen Victoria was the godmother of more than 60 children, two of whom were Dalip Singh from India, the last monarch of the Sikh Empire and Princess Gourramma of Kug (Goudagu). The two came to England in the 1850s and converted to Christianity. They spent most of their teenage years at Windsor Castle and Osborne Palace on the Isle of Wight, and the Queen had even hoped the two would marry. However, as a result of the war between Britain and India, Singer became a hostage, while Gourama married an Englishman named Campbell, eventually dying in England in 1864.

In the 1870s, Queen Victoria met with the Bengal reformer Kaishubo Chandra Sen at Osborne Palace. Sen used his good relations with the British court to establish the National Association of India to raise funds for the education of Indian women. However, some of India's traditional practices make it difficult for many women to benefit from these reforms. Chandra Sen's daughter Suniti enshrined Queen Victoria as the goddess of reform and wrote many books related to the status of women in India.

Before Abdel Karim entered queen Victoria's life, she knew very little about the lives of the 30 million Muslims living in India at the time. The Queen's more sympathy for Indian Muslims came from Rafidin Ahmed, a lawyer from Puna. At the end of 1892, Ahmed published the Queen's diary in Hindustan in a magazine, causing a sensation. Queen Victoria fell in love with the handsome lawyer for ten minutes, describing him as "very intelligent, loyal and desperate to promote Anglo-Indian friendship".

After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, many Indian princes began to visit Britain. Jagathi Sain, Maharajah of Captara, attended the opening ceremony of Imperial College London in 1893, presided over by the Queen. Thane met the Queen again in 1900, and he became one of the last foreigners the Queen saw before her death.