LAHORE: Indian journalist and historian Shrabani Basu, the author of Victoria and Abdul: the True Story of Queen’s Closest Confidant, a story of Queen Victoria and her Munshi Abdul Karim Khan, said the book started in 2006.

“I searched for his grave in Agra and later I traced his descendents and I found his diary in Karachi. It had come to the family after the partition. Karim was dead but after Partition, somebody took his diary which really had his full story. Nobody had opened his diary. And over 100 years later, it was his voice speaking to me.”

Later on, five film studios were bidding for it which was of course exciting, she said. “I chose the big producers in the UK who made films like Love Actually and Mr Bean. The director was Stephen Frears who made My Beautiful Launderette and I was on the seventh heaven.” She said

she chose Ali Fazal to play Karim and it was a dream Hollywood life for at least two weeks for her.

Shrabani Basu was talking to Nelofar Bakhtyar in a session at the LLF on Sunday.

Ms Basu said Abdul and Karim lived in different delicate times.

“Queen Victoria had given Karim a lot of houses and one of the houses was Frogmire Cottage, just next to Windsor (Castle). After she died, her letters were burnt outside Frogmire Cottage. Years later, when Harry and Meghan got married, Queen Elizabeth had given them Frogmire Cottage. Who would have thought that the first person of colour to get married into the royal house would get the Frogmire Cottage.” She said the cottage did have a dark past.

Basu said the keepsakes of Abdul Karim and the Queen were destroyed by her son, Bertie, who later became King Edward VII who just could not stand Karim because he felt his mother was giving him everything that she should have given her son.

Talking about her book, the Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer, she said it was 2020 and all the people were locked down. “I was in the final stages of the book. For her, she said she was writing about racism in the police force. Seeing the happenings around, I thought, God, it is still happening after 100 years.

There was a very strict lockdown in the UK and most of the people who were arrested were blacks and I wondered why most number of arrested people were blacks, which pointed out institutional racism in the police and judiciary and she was writing about institutional racism 100 years ago.”

She said there might not be avert racism now but there was unconscious bias.

She said George Edalji, who is at the centre of the book, had bulging eyes and dark skin and it was his looks that got the attention of the media, which called him a parsee though he had converted to Christianity. The media mixed up all the stories from Kipling and whatnot in his story. There were strange stories in the press and the 12 white men in the jury really thought he was guilty and put him in jail for seven years.

“After searching for Karim’s grave I went in search of Edaji’s grave which was not that easy. It was England, I had to search for hours and hours in vain. Finally, it was the last grave left and I stripped off all the weeds and suddenly under it his name George Edaji emerged,” Basu said.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2023