Character analysis
Abdul Karim
in The Empress by Tanika Gupta
Abdul Karim, affectionately referred to as "the Munshi" (teacher), plays a pivotal role in The Empress as Queen Victoria's loyal Indian clerk and confidant. His journey from servant to royal favorite is a significant dramatic thread in the story. When he arrives from India as a young man to serve at the Queen's table, Abdul quickly stands out for his intelligence, warmth, and quiet dignity, winning Victoria's deep personal affection. She promotes him to be her Munshi—her teacher of Urdu and Hindustani—a move that causes a stir within the royal household and the British establishment.
Abdul's story highlights the tension between his genuine connection with Victoria and the institutional racism and colonial attitudes that surround him. Courtiers, politicians, and even some royal family members attempt to undermine his position, casting doubt on his motives and fabricating questions about his background. Yet, Abdul remains poised and self-assured, never fully succumbing to the humiliations aimed at him. His relationship with Victoria is depicted as one of mutual respect and intellectual companionship: she eagerly studies Urdu, while he provides her with an authentic human link to India—her Empire—that official channels cannot replicate.
His key traits include resilience, cultural pride, diplomatic grace under pressure, and a subtle ambition. Ultimately, his arc sheds light on larger themes of empire, race, and the limitations of royal favor: even with Victoria's protection, he cannot escape the colonial prejudice that will persist beyond her reign.
Who they are
Abdul Karim arrives in Britain in 1887 as one of two Indian servants selected to wait at Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee table — a ceremonial role, decorative by design. He is a young Muslim man from Agra, possessed of education, quiet self-possession, and a fluency in both language and social reading that those around him persistently underestimate. The court sees a servant; Victoria, almost immediately, sees something else. Gupta establishes him from his first scenes as a man caught between two worlds: formally subordinate within the machinery of Empire, yet personally extraordinary enough to rupture the very hierarchies that are supposed to contain him. His full name and his title — the Munshi, the teacher — become the axis around which the play's central tensions revolve. The establishment's insistence on reducing him to a function (a title, a role, a problem to be managed) rather than acknowledging him as a person serves as one of Gupta's sharpest dramatic arguments.
Arc & motivation
Abdul's trajectory moves from ceremonial table servant to royal confidant and appointed Munshi, charged with teaching Victoria Urdu and Hindustani. This promotion drives the play's conflict. His motivation is layered: there is genuine intellectual and emotional investment in his relationship with Victoria, accompanied by a proud determination to represent India — its language, its culture, its human complexity — to a monarch who rules it largely through abstraction and official report. He is, in his own quiet way, conducting a form of diplomacy that no ambassador has been permitted to attempt. His resilience in the face of courtly hostility — the fabricated questions about his background, the coordinated campaign led by figures like Lord Salisbury to have him removed — never collapses into bitterness but sharpens into resolve. By the later acts, his persistence becomes a political act. His arc does not conclude in triumph: Gupta shows that Victoria's protection, however fierce, is mortal, while institutional racism persists.
Key moments
The scene where Victoria asks Abdul to teach her Urdu marks a pivotal turn — it transforms the power dynamic from patron and servant into something closer to student and teacher, and Gupta explores the reversal carefully. Abdul's composure during the court's interrogations of his background — the attempts to demean him by questioning his caste, his father's profession, his truthfulness — reveals the psychological cost of navigating institutional racism while maintaining dignity. His conversations with Victoria about India allow Gupta to dramatise the gap between imperial self-image and colonial reality; Abdul becomes the conduit through which Victoria receives an unmediated human account of her Empire. The implicit comparison with John Brown — raised by courtiers as a precedent for scandal — forces the audience to distinguish between discomfort at intimacy and discomfort at race.
Relationships in depth
The relationship with Victoria forms the play's emotional core. It is characterized by genuine mutual affection and intellectual reciprocity, yet Gupta ensures the audience recognizes the structuring asymmetry: Victoria's love for Abdul cannot fully liberate him from the Empire she represents. Their bond is real, as are its limits.
Lord Salisbury embodies the institutional face of everything arrayed against Abdul — paternalistic, racially condescending, and politically calculating. His hostility is not about personal pique but systemic; Abdul's influence over Victoria represents a disorder in the imperial order.
Sarah Forbes Bonetta provides a parallel rather than a contrast. Both are people of color drawn into Victoria's intimate circle, both navigating the paradox of genuine royal favor within a structure of racial hierarchy. Together they test the limits of Victoria's proclaimed progressivism.
The Rani of Jhansi functions as a structural counterpoint. Where Abdul seeks to work within proximity to British power — to humanize, inform, and perhaps quietly reshape it — the Rani's resistance is outright refusal. Abdul's position is contextualized and complicated by her example.
Connected characters
- Queen Victoria
The defining relationship of Abdul's life in Britain. Victoria elevates him from table servant to Munshi and personal confidant, studying Urdu under his instruction and defending him fiercely against courtiers who seek his removal. Their bond is one of genuine mutual affection and intellectual companionship, though it is ultimately bounded by the power asymmetry of Empire.
- The Munshi
Abdul Karim is the Munshi—this slug represents his role as Victoria's appointed teacher of Urdu and Hindustani, the title that both honours him and becomes the flashpoint for court resentment. The distinction between the man and the title underscores how the establishment reduces him to a function rather than a person.
- Lord Salisbury
Lord Salisbury represents the political establishment's hostility toward Abdul. As a figure of imperial authority, Salisbury views Abdul's influence over Victoria with suspicion and works to curtail it, embodying the institutional racism and paternalism that dog Abdul throughout his tenure at court.
- John Brown
John Brown, Victoria's previous beloved Scottish servant, serves as an implicit predecessor to Abdul—another 'outsider' favourite who provoked courtly scandal. The parallel invites the audience to interrogate whether the objections to Abdul are truly about propriety or are rooted specifically in racial and colonial prejudice.
- Sarah Forbes Bonetta
Sarah Forbes Bonetta, another person of colour brought into Victoria's intimate circle, shares a thematic kinship with Abdul. Both navigate the paradox of royal favour within a racist empire, and their parallel stories collectively interrogate the limits of Victoria's progressive self-image.
- Rani of Jhansi
The Rani of Jhansi functions as a symbolic counterpoint to Abdul—where Abdul negotiates proximity to British imperial power, the Rani resisted it outright. Her presence in the narrative contextualises Abdul's position within the broader story of India under British rule.
- Prince Albert
Prince Albert, though deceased before the main action, casts a long shadow. Victoria's grief and her need for intimate companionship after Albert's death help explain her deep attachment to figures like Abdul, situating his role within her emotional history.
Use this in your essay
To what extent is Abdul Karim's role as Munshi a form of resistance within the empire, or does it ultimately represent accommodation? Consider how Gupta frames his cultural pride against his institutional compliance.
How does Gupta use the parallel between Abdul and John Brown to interrogate whether opposition to Abdul is rooted in propriety or in race?
Analyze how the tension between Abdul's personal relationship with Victoria and the political reality of empire exposes the limits of individual goodwill as a force for structural change.
"The establishment reduces Abdul to a title rather than a person." Examine how Gupta dramatizes the distinction between the man Abdul Karim and the function of the Munshi.
Compare Abdul Karim and Sarah Forbes Bonetta as figures who illuminate the contradictions of Victorian imperial benevolence.