Hamesha Indian Movie

[Elgin Carmona]

Inthe last 13 years of Queen Victoria's life, she spent a great deal of time with Abdul Karim, who came from India initially to wait on the queen's table, but soon became part of her inner circle. And despite all opposition, Victoria and Karim curried on. Alexander Bassano/Spencer Arnold/Getty Images hide caption

They met at breakfast. On the third morning of her Golden Jubilee celebrations in June 1887, a tired Queen Victoria was greeted by a tall, bearded young man in a scarlet tunic and white turban. Victoria was 68, Abdul Karim, 23. As he knelt to kiss her feet, she was struck by what she described in her diary as his "fine serious countenance." Some inexplicable connection was made that day, with the queen, who was still grieving the death of her beloved Scottish servant and companion John Brown, deeply drawn to Karim.

Karim had been sent from Agra to London as a "gift from India," to wait at the queen's table. But Victoria was so taken by the young Muslim man that she asked him to teach her Urdu (then called Hindustani). Within a year, he had gone from being what the English dismissively referred to as the "kitchen boy" to the queen's "Munshi" (teacher).

A few weeks after kissing her feet, writes Shrabani Basu in Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant (the book on which the movie is based), Karim cooked Victoria "a fine Indian meal: chicken curry, daal, and a fragrant pilau." In a diary entry on Aug. 20, 1887, the queen noted appreciatively: "Had some excellent curry prepared by one of my Indian servants."

This was scarcely the first time Victoria had tasted curry, a dish which had become popular in England in the late Georgian period, with a variety of curry pastes and powders available in the stores. "She definitely had curry before Karim," says British food historian Annie Gray, who chronicled Victoria's lavish appetite in her book, The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria. "Long before Karim, curry de poulet appeared on the dinner menu at Windsor Castle on December 29, 1847."

The queen evidently thought otherwise. Soon, curry was being served on a regular basis at her dining table. Victoria's Swiss cook, Gabriel Tschumi, who joined the kitchens as an apprentice in 1898, described how the Indians did everything from scratch, using only halal meat and grinding their own spices: "For religious reasons, they could not use the meat which came to the kitchen in the ordinary way, and so they killed their own sheep and poultry for the curries. Nor would they use the curry powder in stock in the kitchens, though it was of the best imported kind, so a part of the household had to be given to them for their special use, and there they worked Indian-style, grinding their own curry powder between two large round stones and preparing all their own flavoring and spices."

Indeed, there's no real evidence of Victoria actually relishing it. The only time curry pops up in her diary is on that very first occasion when Karim makes it for her. "She never mentions it again," says Gray, who strongly suspects that this legendary curry wasn't even cooked by Karim, but by the Indian cook whom he and the other four Indian servants had employed to cook for them.

"There are all these myths about Victoria eating curry every day and for breakfast, which is just not true," says Gray. "Her breakfast was mutton chops, sausages and a beef steak. She had a sweet tooth, a taste for whiskey (once adding it to her claret), and a lifelong penchant for Brussels biscuits (a kind of rusk) and fresh fruit. Her physician, Dr. Reid, was forever advising her to eat less and take digestion salts to deal with her stomach upsets and flatulence, but no, though she ordered curry to be cooked, she didn't eat it every day."

As curries simmered in the royal kitchens, so did the royal household, which watched with growing resentment as the lowborn Indian servant continued to bask in the queen's favor, receive land grants, promotions and honors, and walk around with a sword and a chest of medals. "He had reduced the household to a level of abject jealousy," says Gray. Everyone, including the Indian servants, found him pompous, grasping, and conceited.

Through the plotting and intrigue, the queen carried on with her Urdu lessons. A quick learner, she filled her little red and gold phrase book with everyday Urdu phrases, including two peevish complaints about her meals: Cha Osborne mein hamesha kharab hai (The tea is always bad at Osborne) and Unda thik ubla nahin hai (The egg is not properly boiled.)

Karim, whose English had greatly improved, regaled her with spangled stories of the Taj Mahal, the street bazaars of Agra, and the way in which religious festivals were celebrated in his homeland. Victoria had been proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, but had never visited the country. For the gourmand queen, tasting an Indian mango soon became an ide fixe. The mango scene in the film, says Basu, is based on fact. Victoria did indeed order a mango from India, despite Karim warning her it wouldn't survive the six-week sea voyage. Sure enough, when it arrives and is presented by a footman, the overripe orb is peremptorily declared to be "off."

It was too late of course. Curry has insinuated itself into the English palace and palate. The Swiss chef who wrote about the Indian servants grinding masalas would later note that under Edward VII, curry and rice were cooked regularly by non-Indian cooks, and that George V, Edward's curryholic son and Victoria's grandson, insisted on curry every single day.

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