The Munshi

Abdul Karim — who adopts the title the Munshi, meaning teacher or clerk — enters Tanika Gupta's The Empress as one of several Indians presented to Queen Victoria as living demonstrations of imperial bounty. He is a colonial gift: a man delivered alongside objects and curiosities to ornament the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations. From the moment he is distinguished from this context, Gupta insists on his interior life. The Munshi carries himself with a composed, watchful dignity that refuses the posture of gratitude the court expects. He does not perform servility, nor does he reach for open defiance; instead he occupies the space between those positions with a quiet, deliberate self-possession that unsettles everyone around him. Educated, multilingual, and perceptive, he reads the court's hostility with accuracy and endures it with remarkable equilibrium. Gupta constructs him not as a symbol but as a fully inhabited person — one whose intelligence is never in question, even as his humanity is perpetually contested by those with the power to define it.

The Munshi's trajectory moves from anonymous colonial exhibit to the most intimately trusted figure in Victoria's later court — and Gupta uses that rise to expose how precarious elevation within an imperial structure can be. His motivations are layered: at the surface, survival and advancement within the only system available to him; beneath that, a genuine desire for human connection and recognition on equal terms. His Hindustani lessons with Victoria become the engine of his arc. What begins as a function — teaching the Queen a few phrases to burnish her image as Empress of India — deepens into something neither party expected: real intellectual exchange, real affection, a relationship that inverts the expected colonial hierarchy precisely because Victoria chooses to learn rather than simply to possess. As his influence grows, so does the court's organised resentment, and the Munshi's arc tightens into a study of how far dignity can be sustained when it depends entirely on the protection of one woman's favour rather than any structural right.

The Hindustani lessons are the play's emotional centrepiece: Victoria stumbling over pronunciation while the Munshi corrects her with patient authority reverses, scene by scene, the usual teacher-student dynamic of empire. Here he holds knowledge the most powerful woman in the world lacks, and Gupta frames this explicitly as a kind of reclamation. Equally significant is the court's mounting campaign of surveillance and suspicion — courtiers scrutinising his correspondence, questioning his background, treating his proximity to Victoria as inherently transgressive. These scenes do not merely dramatise racism; they reveal how institutional power manufactures threat where none exists. The moments in which Victoria defends him against Lord Salisbury and the assembled hostility of her household are charged because the audience understands, even as Victoria does not fully articulate it, that her protection is total but also temporary — mortal, contingent, terminable.

Victoria is both the Munshi's shield and his structural limitation. Their bond is genuine, and Gupta does not sentimentalise it into simple imperial benevolence: Victoria sees him, listens to him, fights for him. But the relationship also crystallises his central predicament — that his dignity exists only within the radius of her authority, not independent of it. Lord Salisbury functions as the institutional face of the hostility the Munshi navigates daily: aristocratic, certain of hierarchy, unwilling to distinguish between a threat to the Queen and a threat to his own sense of imperial order. The contrast with John Brown is structurally illuminating; Brown was another intimate outsider whose closeness to Victoria scandalised the court, yet the Munshi discovers that the court's tolerance has a racial threshold Brown never reached. The parallel with Sarah Forbes Bonetta is thematic rather than dramatic: both were absorbed into Victoria's personal circle as evidence of imperial kindness, both were simultaneously instrumentalised and genuinely loved, and together they trace the empire's habit of elevating individuals while leaving the structures that diminish them entirely intact. Against the Rani of Jhansi — present in the play as a counterpoint of armed resistance — the Munshi represents a different, equally complicated mode of survival: accommodation, navigation, proximity to power rather than confrontation with it.