10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor If you are still having problems viewing this message, please click here for additional help.
VIEW IN BROWSER | FORWARD TO A FRIEND
Queen Victoria’s Most Controversial Friendship
Her relatives tried to destroy all evidence of her close relationship with an Indian servant, but secret diaries revealed the untold story—and inspired a new feature film
(Courtesy of Focus Features)
When Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, 130 years ago in 1887, dozens of foreign rulers arrived in London to celebrate her 50 years on the throne. The queen led a grand procession to Westminster Abbey in open carriage, escorted by the Indian calvary, greeted screaming crowds on her palace balcony, and enjoyed fireworks in the garden. But of all the jubilee’s memorable events, it was the queen’s first encounter with Abdul Karim that became the most significant.
The friendship that ensued is the focus of the new movie Victoria & Abdul, starring Judi Dench as the titular queen. Karim had been working as a clerk at a jail in Agra when he was handpicked to be a “gift from India.” Soon after his arrival in England, he became the queen’s most trusted confidant, as well as the most controversial figure in the royal court. Their unusually close and controversial friendship spanned 14 years. When the queen died in 1901, her resentful children burned every letter she’d sent Karim, and unceremoniously deported him back to India.
Yet the record of their friendship has survived, thanks in large part to his diary. It was preserved by generations of his descendants, and in 2010, they shared it with the historian Shrabani Basu. It became the source text for Victoria & Abdul, the book on which the new movie was based.
Victoria’s own diaries record her first impression of Karim: “tall with a fine serious http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 1/8 10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor countenance.” After the jubilee celebrations concluded, Karim traveled with the queen to her summer home on the Isle of Wight. Using spices he had brought from India, Karim cooked a chicken curry with daul and pilau. According to Victoria biographer A.N. Wilson, the queen declared the dish “excellent” and added it to her regular menu rotation.
Eager to immerse herself further in Indian culture, Victoria asked Karim to teach her Urdu, or, as it was known at the time, Hindustani. “Am learning a few words of Hindustani to speak to my servants,” Victoria wrote. “It is a great interest to me, for both the language and the people.” A few months later, she bestowed upon him the title of Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim, making him her official Indian clerk and relieving him of his menial duties.
This developing relationship alarmed members of the court, because it felt all too familiar. Prior to Karim, Victoria’s closest confidant had been her Scottish servant John Brown. The queen had leaned heavily on Brown after her husband Albert’s death, so much so that several members of the court derisively referred to her as “Mrs. Brown.” (The movie adapation of that story, Mrs. Brown, also starred Dench as Victoria.) But Brown had died in 1883, and no servant had taken his place in the queen’s inner circle. Karim was increasingly stepping into that role. He was traveling constantly with Victoria and, as Michael Nelson notes in Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riveria, even occupying Brown’s old bedchambers.
Although Karim’s diaries suggest nothing romantic, his relationship with Queen Victoria was oddly intimate. The two turned heads when they spent the night at Glassat Shiel, a remote cottage in Scotland that the queen had previously shared with John Brown. (After his death, she had vowed never to return.) Victoria signed letters to Karim as “your closest friend” and “your loving mother.”
In their letters to one another, Victorian courtiers wished awful fates upon Karim. Ladyin waiting Marie Millet fumed, “Why the plague did not carry him off I cannot think, it might have done one good deed!” Private secretary Arthur Bigge wished Karim “a happy and lasting retreat in the Jail!” Some royal associates had reasonable complaints about Karim’s extravagant requests. He frequently asked the queen for favors, such as securing his father a pension or his former boss a promotion.
But it wasn’t just his arrogance that annoyed them. As Carolly Erickson writes in Her Little Majesty, “For a darkskinned Indian to be put very nearly on a level with the queen’s white servants was all but intolerable, for him to eat at the same table with them, to share in their daily lives was viewed as an outrage.”
The queen was well aware of this animosity towards Karim. Her assistant private secretary articulated her unwavering stance in a letter: “The Queen insists on bringing the Munshi forward, and if it were not for our protest, I don’t know where she would stop. But it is no use, for the Queen says it is ‘race prejudice’ and that we are jealous of the poor Munshi.” Victoria heaped gifts and titles upon Karim partially because she knew the court would not pay him the same respect once she was dead.
But she made sure her friend would be comfortable and remembered. While Karim http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 2/8 10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor already enjoyed homes at the royal residences of Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne, Victoria also secured a land grant for him back in Agra. She commissioned multiple portraits of him, and had him written up in the Court Circulars and local gazettes. In her final wishes, she was quite explicit: Karim would be one of the principal mourners at her funeral, an honor afforded only to the monarch’s closest friends and family.
Karim died in Agra in 1909 with his correspondence destroyed and no children to preserve his memories. But his diary secretly stayed in the family of Abdul Rashid, Karim’s nephew, for several generations. It provides incredible new details on how the queen of England crossed class and racial lines to enjoy an unexpected, intense friendship.
—Kristin Hunt
Read the full story here.
The Men Who Marched With the Suffragettes
From Rabbi Stephen Wise to W.E.B. DuBois, men from all walks of life fought to get women a place at the polls
(Excelsior Editions)
By the turn of the 20th century, the movement for women’s suffrage in the United States was more than five decades old—and remained "a marginal nonstarter of a cause,” as Brooke Kroeger writes in her new book, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote.
But something surprising happened around 1908: A few men began to sign on.
To be sure, women still propelled the movement toward its ultimate success in 1920, with the ratification of 19th Amendment, but in what proved to be the last decade of a http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 3/8 10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor long slog, some men provided unexpected help. Kroeger, an author and professor of journalism at New York University, recently discussed her book with Smithsonian senior editor T.A. Frail.
Who were these New York “suffragents,” and why did they choose to get involved?
They came from every prestige profession. From 1909 to 1912, their ranks grew from 150 to 500 members, and after that into the many thousands, from all walks of life across 35 states and the developed world. They were progressives, thinkers and doers of both major political parties, men, who, as the Atlanta Constitution described them in 1911, seemed impelled only by the duty of "a just cause.”
The spearheaders—Oswald Garrison Villard, George Foster Peabody, Rabbi Stephen Wise and John Dewey—all were also active in the advancement of African Americans through the NAACP and other boards. Young Max Eastman was already a published writer when he became the Men's League's first secretary and instantly one of the suffrage movement’s most popular orators.
W.E.B. DuBois was an important fellow traveler, both because the AfricanAmerican community struggled against all disenfranchisement, and because granting the vote to black women would greatly augment the black voice in the democratic process. Most of these men took their inspiration or encouragement from a mother, sister, wife or lover who was either active in the cause or exemplified its highest ideals.
In pursing the right to vote, women risked imprisonment and worse. What did these guys put on the line?
Not jail or starvation, but quite a lot. Philanthropists like Peabody underwrote the cause financially. Others enabled the outsized activism of their suffragist wives and gave freely of their political clout to plead the suffrage case before legislators, government leaders and the public. The orators spoke and the writers wrote—the publishers among them were key, too. They filled the media with articles, essays and provocative letters.
The attorney Dudley Field Malone raced back and forth from New York to Washington, D.C., to orchestrate legal action for the jailed suffragists of Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party. Even more dramatically, he quit his coveted patronage job as collector of the Port of New York to protest President Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to support a federal suffrage amendment.
As an Alice Duer Miller poem ends: “Of men who care supremely/That justice should be shown/ Who do not balk at sacrifice/And make the cause their own, /I know, I think, of only one, That’s Dudley Field Malone.” Not insignificant, when they first organized, were the direct assaults on their masculinity during marches for supporting this “despised” women’s cause.
What was their most valuable contribution to that cause?
I’d say their influence, their access and their ability to bend the reason of other men were http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 4/8 10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor all invaluable to the movement in its last, determinative decade. Women leaders acknowledged this again and again. These men remained in the background until called upon to come forward. They rolled up their sleeves and got into the muck whenever needed. They took no credit. They yielded to the movement’s female leadership even when their own tactical or strategic views may have differed. When else before or since has such a thing happened with that balance of power?
There’s a poignant moment when you note that decades after the fact, when these “suffragents” started dying off after rich and storied careers, their obituaries rarely mentioned their involvement in the suffrage cause. Why was that?
I wish I knew, but there is no real way to tell. And this is not only true of their obituaries, which they likely did not write, but also for those who wrote memoirs, references to their involvement are scant or nonexistent, except in the cases of Eastman and the playwright George Middleton. In the book, I leave it as a question. Was memory of these actions lost in the fullness of the next 20 to 50 years of their large lives? Or did the men deliberately downplay their role in the movement as all good allies should? The latter would be consistent with their comportment, but we're left to wonder.
Ask Smithsonian
In each issue of the magazine, Smithsonian experts answer a reader’s question. Here’s a bonus question and answer for our VIP members. (Submit your own questions at Smithsonian.com/ask.)
(Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
When did the the number zero make its first appearance?
The first mention of zero as a number was in a 628 A.D. text by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta. But new research shows that mathematicians in the region had been toying with the concept long before then—far longer, in fact, than experts previously believed. Carbon dating of an ancient text called the Bakhshali manuscript has bumped zero’s origin story back by 500 years.
The Bakhshali manuscript, which was discovered by a farmer in 1881, is a mathematical text written on 70 leaves of birch bark. The text does not contend with zero as a number in its own right; instead, it uses dots as “placeholders” noting the absence of a value—as a way to distinguish 1 from 10 and 100, for instance. Experts previously thought that the manuscript had been written between the 8th and 12th century. But the results of the carbon dating at Oxford showed that some of the manuscript’s pages were inscribed between 224 A.D. and 383 A.D.
Indian thinkers were not the first to deploy placeholders; Babylonians and Mayans also used symbols to denote the absence of a value. But India was where the placeholders http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 5/8 10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor developed into the concept of zero as a number that could be used in calculations, as laid out in Brahmagupta’s text. This dramatically changed the field of mathematics, paving the way for everything from calculus to the notion of the vacuum in quantum physics to the binary numerical system that forms the basis of digital technology.
The Bakhshali manuscript has been housed in Oxford’s Bodleian library since 1902. But on October 4, this remarkable text will go on display at the Science Museum in London, as part of a major exhibition on scientific, technological and cultural breakthroughs in India.
—by Brigit Katz
Read the full story here.
Smithsonian in the World
Fifty years after landing on the moon, the Apollo 11 capsule is set to make another trip —not to space, but across the country. The command module Columbia, usually housed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, will travel nationwide along with other objects from the mission beginning in October. Read more at USA Today.
Believe it or not, the Smithsonian owns the world’s largest collection of ticks. Housed at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, the U.S. National Tick Collection has over a million specimens stored in bottles in the basement of a campus building. Read more at CNN.
Fans of Yoko Ono and her radically experimental music at the Hirshhorn Museum’s “Concert for Yoko Ono, Washington and the World” got a front row seat to the ultimate tribute to Ono’s work. Musicians Kim Gordon, Lizzi Bougatsos and Moor Mother performed their own wild homages, all within earshot of tourists on the National Mall. Read more at the Washington Post.
Have comments on this VIP newsletter or on your latest issue of Smithsonian magazine? Send them to us here.
Editors’ picks from Smithsonian.com
How Mexico City’s Unique Geology Makes Deadly Earthquakes Even Worse
The entire country—but especially the capital—has all the ingredients for seismic catastrophe
http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 6/8 10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor
Is Animal Hoarding a Distinct Mental Disorder?
There are many differences between people that hoard objects and those that collect critters
How Strong Is a Zap From an Electric Eel? Shockingly Strong
A biologist learns an eel’s power first hand, allowing himself to be repeatedly shocked in the name of science
Photographer Reconstructs 1,400Mile Route Along the Underground Railroad
'Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad' traces a plausible path a freedom seeker could have taken North
Forward to a Friend | Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
© Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.
http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 7/8 10/23/2017 Smithsonian Magazine: From the Editor
http://links.sicirculation.mkt6348.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA3MTgwMjES1&r=MzU0Njk4NDM3NTM4S0&j=MTEyMjczMTE5NwS2&mt=1&rt=3 8/8