Jonathan Fryer

The extraordinary story of the maternal affection that the widowed Queen Victoria felt for a young Indian servant, Abdul Karim, brought over to England in 1887, is a worthy subject for Stephen Frears’ new film, Victoria & Abdul, which is now out on general release. The real Abdul — dubbed the Munshi or teacher, because he taught the monarch Hindustani (actually Urdu) at her request — was nowhere near as handsome as actor Ali Fazal, who plays him in the film, and as the years went by he became chubby and arrogant. But Victoria was certainly besotted with him, as she had been earlier with her devoted Scottish attendant, John Brown. On his mother’s death, King Edward VII ordered the burning of the correspondence between Victoria and Abdul, but there is enough material extant in diaries and other letters to reconstruct the skeleton of the story. As is portrayed in the film, the Royal Household was indeed scandalised by the Munshi’s increasingly high-profile presence at Court, for social and racial reasons. Of course, the film inevitably takes some historical liberties (there is no mention of Abdul’s trips home to India during Victoria’s lifetime, for example), but some of the things that might appear the most preposterous, such as Abdul’s kneeling down to kiss Victoria’s feet, are absolutely true. The settings, from the painted hall at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich to Osborne on the Isle of White, are stunning and the filming itself is a thing of great beauty. Judi Dench is magnificent as Victoria, her moods shifting from impatience to joy and then despair. At times there is a risk of caricature among the members of the Royal Household and doubtless some people will find that there is an uneasy balance between comedy and tragedy in the story as portrayed. But so there is in life, too.