May 23, 2011 • 18 mins
Queen Victoria loved two men: Prince Albert, and after his death, her servant, John Brown. Late in life, the Queen had a third partner, a Muslim man named Abdul Karim. So why did Victoria's children want the records of this relationship destroyed?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm playing a chocolate boarding and
we've talked a lot in the past six months. We've
done a few episodes, I should say on Britain in
(00:21):
India and the relationship between the two countries. And a
subject that comes up a lot is the difficulty we have,
or the difficulty many people have had in reconciling British
ideals and colonial British action. They just don't always mesh up. Yeah.
Especially notable are some British attitudes. In the luxhmi By
episode that we did recently. Sir Hugh Rose, the man
(00:44):
whose forces finally defeated this Indian joan of arc, also
called her remarkable for her bravery, cleverness and perseverance. Yeah.
So this personal admiration combined with a policy of suppression
can seem really really strange when you look back at it,
But perhaps no one epitomizes it better than Queen Victoria herself.
(01:05):
She's sort of the ultimate in combining admiration with suppression,
and on the one hand, she's all for imperialist expansion.
When she officially becomes embrass of India in eighteen seventy six,
she's just over the moon, and at that point it
is just a title change pretty much. She's been effectively
in charge for quite some time. On the other hand,
(01:27):
she also falls completely head over heels for Indian culture,
especially the culture that's imported directly to her by her
favorite servant, her Moonshi or teacher, a man named Abdual Kareem,
and he's often called the Indian John Brown. Yeah. To
understand that reference, though, we'll have to provide a little
background for you on Victoria's life. When twenty four year
(01:50):
old Abdual Kareem showed up in London, Victoria was in
her late sixties, and she was in a good place,
celebrating her golden jubilee and finally reassuming the busy schedule
of an active monarch. Yeah. So Victoria had, of course
assumed the throne as an eighteen year old, sheltered girl.
She had been raised in this close isolation by her
mother and her mother's conniving companion, Sir John Conroy, and
(02:14):
the plan those two had was to create a monarch
that was so utterly dependent on her mother. By extension,
Conroy would have the sweet position as regent. It didn't work,
and as soon as Victoria became queen she shook off
her early influences and went about choosing her own. First
her prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who she relied on a lot,
(02:35):
and then at twenty her cousin Albert, whom she married.
And if you've seen we were joking about this earlier,
if you've seen young Victoria, you know this part of
the story. Maybe something will revisit in greater detail at
some point, much requested, but just to give you a
background on where Victoria is coming from. Yeah. So she
and Albert had nine children, and in her constant state
(02:56):
of pregnancy and child bearing, Victoria handed over a lot
of her power or to her husband. She was happy
with them, though, she wrote once without him, everything loses
its interest. So when Albert died quite suddenly in eighteen
sixty one, the forty two year old Victoria went into
a very deep depression. And she had dealt with depression
throughout her life. She had postpartum depression after the birth
(03:18):
the most most of her children, but this was different,
she wrote, quote those paroxysms of despair and yearning and longing,
and of daily nightly longing to die for the first
three years never left me. So her people were okay
with this deep morning for a while. After all, it
was the respectful, respectable thing to do for a Victorian woman,
(03:41):
for Victoria herself. But eventually it just became too much.
She wasn't doing her job, she was never around, she
was never at functions, she was just missing. I think
I even found a political cartoon from the time, which
is the British lion sitting behind the throne which is
completely empty. The crown is there and it's wondering where
(04:01):
the Queen is because she's just gone. And you may
have to post this one on a blog or something,
so from there it's oversimplifying both victorious personal feelings and
her rule a little bit. But basically two things happened
to finally draw her out of this depression. One was
her interest in imperialism, and the other was her interest
in her husband's former gilly and that was John Brown,
(04:24):
who was Scottish and he became her close friend in
eighteen sixty four until his death in three And there's
been a lot of debate about the precise nature of
Victorian relationship another movie, another potential podcast. I think definitely,
and I mean she was called Mrs Brown, and she
scandalized her court by staying alone with John Brown in
(04:47):
her Scottish cottage, and it caused a lot of talk. Definitely,
but it's certain, regardless of how far their relationship went,
it's certain they were very, very close. And she went
into deep morning after his staff too, and after her
own death, which happened about twenty years later, she had
her servant secretly add to her coffin not only mementos
(05:09):
from Albert, who she was still in mourning four years later,
but a photo and a handkerchief and a lock of
Brown's hair. So definitely, John Brown played a pretty major
role in Victoria's life. But by eighteen eighty seven, four
years after Brown's death, Victoria was once again a fully
active monarch. Her her low point in popularity had come
(05:30):
around eighteen seventy and it had been steadily on the
uptick since then, But by eighteen eighty seven she was
fully reformed. She was more popular than she had been
in a long time, and the year conveniently marked her
golden jubilee, which is fifty years as the reigning monarch. Yeah,
so she had a lot of people in from all
over to celebrate with her, including some Indian royalty, and
(05:53):
so Victoria wanted to Indian servants to wait on them,
and that's how she first met Abdual Kareem. And Kareem
was a twenty four year old from Aga and he
had been recommended to Victoria by his superior officer at
the jail where he worked as a clerk. So the
first thing he does when he gets to London is
toward the city visits the zoo. He also visits Madam
(06:13):
Tussau's which is just in everything. Now. I feel like
wax is the new exclamation. I thought cross dressing was
the new exclamation after we did all those Women's History
Month episodes. But maybe we just have a lot of
new themes. Yeah, we'll see what comes out on top
in the end. So after he does this little tourist
thing in London, he meets up with the Queen. Her
(06:34):
first impressions of him are well exhibited. I think in
this quote she says, the one Mohammed books, which is
the other one. It's very dark with a very smiling expression,
and the other much younger called Abdul Kareem, is much lighter,
tall and with a fine, serious countenance. His father is
a native doctor at Agra. They both kissed my feet,
(06:57):
So there you go. I guess a good first impression
from Victoria. She likes them. She calls him back later.
And we don't know much else about Mohammed. We do
know that within the year Kareem had graduated way above
waiting tables. He was sampling curry with the Queen, which
became one of her dining favorites. And he was teaching
(07:18):
her Urdu and Hindi and she really loves it too.
She's up in years, but she completely throws herself into
her studies trying to master these languages, and eventually even
produces a thirteen volume Hindustanding diary. And I'm just gonna
give you the description from the royal website where you
can actually see a one picture of a page from
(07:41):
these diaries, because it's really hard to understand the translation
process that abdual Kareem and Victoria worked out. So here
we go. It is thought that Queen Victoria wrote the
English text at the bottom, that Abdul Kareem then wrote
the middle section with the English text put into the
correct word order for the too standing translation in the
(08:01):
Hindustani words below in English script, and that finally the
Queen wrote the text in or Do characters, so lots
of languages going on help with grammar and vocabulary and guessing.
I know. He also made her a phrase book with
with simple everyday sort of phrases copied out in an
(08:23):
anglicized version, so she could just look it up and
be able to say what she needed to to whatever
print she was talking with. But Kareem still doesn't have
an official position, even though he's clearly with her quite
a lot. Yeah, So after a year, he thinks his
work is too menial considering his experience in India and
he wants to go home. So Victoria doesn't want that
(08:44):
to happen, and so she promotes him to official Munshi,
an Indian clerk to the Queen. So he's basically her
personal secretary at that point and her personal teachers still
and her personal teacher, so it's high rolling for him
from there on out. He starts mingling with the big
wigs on his annual trips to India. By eighteen ninety
he is servants of his own by eighteen nine one,
and he's allowed to carry a sword and wear traditional dress. Yeah,
(09:08):
and he brings over his family to Victoria's concerned that
he might miss his wife back home in India, so
he brings her over. I think he brings his nephew
over eventually. And they're given cottages that each of Victoria's estates,
and of course, when we say cottage, that is an understatement.
There lavishly decorated, lovely homes. He even gets his own
(09:28):
cottage at Balmoral name for him Kareem's Cottage, or at
least that's Victoria's nickname for it. And his father notably
becomes the first to smoke hookah at Windsor Castle, which
was kind of a big milestone because Victoria did not
like smoking at all in her presence. Yeah, so she
kind of embraces his family, and though she refuses to
(09:49):
confer knighthood on Kareem, she grows closer and closer to him.
She writes some several letters a day, signing some with
quote your loving mother or your closest friend, or with
kisses according to the BBC. She also both friends his
wife and offers him advice on the couple's inability to
have children, So getting really personal here. Yeah, And she
(10:11):
sends him a Christmas tree in eighteen nine three and
also seeks out his advice too, so she's not just
getting into super personal husband and wife business, but she's
asking him about Indian affairs and his opinions. And it's
this last point that really drives her family in the
court crazy, and it frustrates some of her people in
(10:31):
government in India too because as a Muslim Indian, Korean's
opinions tend to decide with his own people and not
everyone in India under Victoria's government thought that was a
very good idea. But Victoria's family wasn't just upset about
his influence in her politics. They're also upset just by
how close they are, the sixtiesomething year old woman and
(10:53):
this young Indian man in his twenties, and especially when, surprise, surprise,
they too spend a night together in the same Highland
cottage that Victoria would visit with John Brown. This just
did not seem okay to the Royal family at all.
It's a little fishy. So it comes back to them,
I guess when Victoria dies. When she dies, her family
(11:15):
they do follow her wishes and they allow Kareem to
serve as one of her principal mourners, but as soon
as it's over, her son now Edward the Seventh, fires
Kareem and orders that the records of their relationship, kept
both at his UK and Indian homes, be destroyed. Yeah,
but we don't want you to think that this is
solely related to the relationship of Victoria and Abdual Kareem,
(11:39):
because it's actually in keeping with the general revisionism that
Victoria's children practice after her death. For instance, her daughter
Beatrice copied out and edited the decades and decades of
journals kept by by Victoria. She had kept journals since
she was a girl, and her daughter literally copied them
all out, taking out the part she that were inappropriate painstakingly, right,
(12:02):
I mean she even cut out images and things in
case them in the new versions. Again on the on
the Royal website, there are some copies of documents related
relating to Victoria's life, and one of them is the
diary entry right before she got married, so probably nothing
would have been too scandalous in that. And you can
see a little cut out where Victoria has sketched a
(12:25):
profile of herself in her wedding headdress, and I guess
Beatrice has felt the need to preserve the little picture,
but altered the text and copy it out herself. So
in a similar fashion, they took the material from her
time with Kareem and sort of destroyed all ever watched it. Right,
But there was still enough evidence left to know that
(12:46):
Victoria had had a very close relationship with this Indian
teacher of hers. For one thing, those Hindustani journals kept
at Windsor Castle, they were still there, although they hadn't
been translated at all until recently. And letters Victoria wrote
to other people that mentioned Kareem. Yeah. For instance, she
wrote a letter to her daughter Vicky saying that Kareem
(13:07):
was a very strict master but a perfect gentleman, so
they couldn't really control every word that had gotten out
about him. And also since this was such a gossipy
topic around court, there was there were plenty of records
about this close friendship between the monarch and this man, right,
so there was enough information floating around out there for
(13:29):
author Sharbani Bassu to write a book about it. Write
a book about the relationship between Victoria and Kareem I
should say. And while she was an India promoting this
book about Victoria and Kareem, she was contacted by a
surviving member of Kareem's family who read about the book
in a local paper. It turns out that after Kareem's
death in nineteen o nine, the family had managed to
(13:50):
keep some of his memento safe, including a diary covering
the ten year period between Victoria's golden and diamond jubilees.
So since seven they had to this hidden in Pakistan.
So Bossu traveled to Pakistan and studied the diaries and
the photo from Victoria that was signed in Urdu and
other keepsakes, and updated her book because clearly this was
(14:13):
good information to to have and to add to the
whole thing. There wasn't a bombshell, It wasn't like some
sort of confessional letter that would really make this whole
story scandalous. But the new information did mean that the
story made international news. I mean, we mentioned a BBC article,
It was all over the papers in March, because I
(14:34):
don't think people, or at least people had forgotten how
close Victoria was to this young man. Yeah, and I
mean even though it didn't reveal anything new, it at
least added more information, like more evidence to the store,
I think, yeah, and and just interesting facts about it too.
We have more quotes, and I mean, I think the
picture signed in the language she struggled so hard to
(14:57):
learn is is really interesting. But I also sort of
have a listener request of myself, and I know that
some of you are really up on Victorian Indian policy,
and I'm just curious about any specific instances where Kareem's
influence might have been seen in government, because if that's
what her family and people in her government were so
(15:19):
worried that he would just have too much power and influence.
Is there anything that we can look at and say that,
well that might have traced back to him in some way. Yeah,
so right to us. If you know anything, we'll give
you the email in just a minute, but before that
we're going to do some list for mail. So this
(15:39):
email is from Chris and he wrote, Hi, Sara and Dablina.
I just listened to your podcast on the Oneida group
and was a little disappointed that Charles Guiteau, McKinley's assassmin
didn't make an appearance before turning his attentions to politics
and violence. He was actually a member of the Oneida community,
and despite their free love attitude of c only, no
(16:00):
one wanted to use a trysting room with him. According
to some sources, he was so unpopular that he earned
the nickname Charles get Out. He left in a huff
even tried to sue noise, as I recall, and many
people think it was in large part over his sexual rejection.
I remember when I first heard about this, thinking that
(16:20):
if only he'd been more popular in bed, he probably
never would have shot anyone. Anyway, I love the podcast,
and even though we all learned about ministory, I think
he should do a presidential Assassin series. There are definitely
enough weird facts about the assassination that we've either forgotten
or never heard about, like Guta's Unaida connection. And actually
(16:40):
I did see this, and I knew if Skara Vowel
has a new book out to or I guess it's
one of her older books that mentioned this connection to Anida.
I just I was actually thinking of saving it if
we ever drew Well, now we haven't Astraditions podcast every
now and then, there's a fact that I'll keep in
my back pocket for some dreamy future. Podcast will do. Oh,
(17:04):
that's a good idea that one. Okay, this could also
it sounds like become a stuff mom never told you podcasts?
I think can sexual rejection drive you to murder? Maybe
we'll go suggest that to Molly and Kristen after we
get out of here. But thank you Chris for your email.
I couldn't resist it because of your mention of the
trysting room. But um, pretty pretty interesting stuff. So if
(17:29):
any of you have any great stories like that additions
to previous podcasts or future podcast we love getting these
entries from you. Guys do a lot of the work
for us. UM write us at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com, or you can look us up
on Twitter at Miston History or on Facebook. And you
can also look up our blogs, right, Sarah, you sure can.
(17:50):
We are at www dot how stuff works dot com.
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a ride. Download it today on iTunes. M
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm playing a chocolate boarding and
we've talked a lot in the past six months. We've
done a few episodes, I should say on Britain in
(00:21):
India and the relationship between the two countries. And a
subject that comes up a lot is the difficulty we have,
or the difficulty many people have had in reconciling British
ideals and colonial British action. They just don't always mesh up. Yeah.
Especially notable are some British attitudes. In the luxhmi By
episode that we did recently. Sir Hugh Rose, the man
(00:44):
whose forces finally defeated this Indian joan of arc, also
called her remarkable for her bravery, cleverness and perseverance. Yeah.
So this personal admiration combined with a policy of suppression
can seem really really strange when you look back at it,
But perhaps no one epitomizes it better than Queen Victoria herself.
(01:05):
She's sort of the ultimate in combining admiration with suppression,
and on the one hand, she's all for imperialist expansion.
When she officially becomes embrass of India in eighteen seventy six,
she's just over the moon, and at that point it
is just a title change pretty much. She's been effectively
in charge for quite some time. On the other hand,
(01:27):
she also falls completely head over heels for Indian culture,
especially the culture that's imported directly to her by her
favorite servant, her Moonshi or teacher, a man named Abdual Kareem,
and he's often called the Indian John Brown. Yeah. To
understand that reference, though, we'll have to provide a little
background for you on Victoria's life. When twenty four year
(01:50):
old Abdual Kareem showed up in London, Victoria was in
her late sixties, and she was in a good place,
celebrating her golden jubilee and finally reassuming the busy schedule
of an active monarch. Yeah. So Victoria had, of course
assumed the throne as an eighteen year old, sheltered girl.
She had been raised in this close isolation by her
mother and her mother's conniving companion, Sir John Conroy, and
(02:14):
the plan those two had was to create a monarch
that was so utterly dependent on her mother. By extension,
Conroy would have the sweet position as regent. It didn't work,
and as soon as Victoria became queen she shook off
her early influences and went about choosing her own. First
her prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who she relied on a lot,
(02:35):
and then at twenty her cousin Albert, whom she married.
And if you've seen we were joking about this earlier,
if you've seen young Victoria, you know this part of
the story. Maybe something will revisit in greater detail at
some point, much requested, but just to give you a
background on where Victoria is coming from. Yeah. So she
and Albert had nine children, and in her constant state
(02:56):
of pregnancy and child bearing, Victoria handed over a lot
of her power or to her husband. She was happy
with them, though, she wrote once without him, everything loses
its interest. So when Albert died quite suddenly in eighteen
sixty one, the forty two year old Victoria went into
a very deep depression. And she had dealt with depression
throughout her life. She had postpartum depression after the birth
(03:18):
the most most of her children, but this was different,
she wrote, quote those paroxysms of despair and yearning and longing,
and of daily nightly longing to die for the first
three years never left me. So her people were okay
with this deep morning for a while. After all, it
was the respectful, respectable thing to do for a Victorian woman,
(03:41):
for Victoria herself. But eventually it just became too much.
She wasn't doing her job, she was never around, she
was never at functions, she was just missing. I think
I even found a political cartoon from the time, which
is the British lion sitting behind the throne which is
completely empty. The crown is there and it's wondering where
(04:01):
the Queen is because she's just gone. And you may
have to post this one on a blog or something,
so from there it's oversimplifying both victorious personal feelings and
her rule a little bit. But basically two things happened
to finally draw her out of this depression. One was
her interest in imperialism, and the other was her interest
in her husband's former gilly and that was John Brown,
(04:24):
who was Scottish and he became her close friend in
eighteen sixty four until his death in three And there's
been a lot of debate about the precise nature of
Victorian relationship another movie, another potential podcast. I think definitely,
and I mean she was called Mrs Brown, and she
scandalized her court by staying alone with John Brown in
(04:47):
her Scottish cottage, and it caused a lot of talk. Definitely,
but it's certain, regardless of how far their relationship went,
it's certain they were very, very close. And she went
into deep morning after his staff too, and after her
own death, which happened about twenty years later, she had
her servant secretly add to her coffin not only mementos
(05:09):
from Albert, who she was still in mourning four years later,
but a photo and a handkerchief and a lock of
Brown's hair. So definitely, John Brown played a pretty major
role in Victoria's life. But by eighteen eighty seven, four
years after Brown's death, Victoria was once again a fully
active monarch. Her her low point in popularity had come
(05:30):
around eighteen seventy and it had been steadily on the
uptick since then, But by eighteen eighty seven she was
fully reformed. She was more popular than she had been
in a long time, and the year conveniently marked her
golden jubilee, which is fifty years as the reigning monarch. Yeah,
so she had a lot of people in from all
over to celebrate with her, including some Indian royalty, and
(05:53):
so Victoria wanted to Indian servants to wait on them,
and that's how she first met Abdual Kareem. And Kareem
was a twenty four year old from Aga and he
had been recommended to Victoria by his superior officer at
the jail where he worked as a clerk. So the
first thing he does when he gets to London is
toward the city visits the zoo. He also visits Madam
(06:13):
Tussau's which is just in everything. Now. I feel like
wax is the new exclamation. I thought cross dressing was
the new exclamation after we did all those Women's History
Month episodes. But maybe we just have a lot of
new themes. Yeah, we'll see what comes out on top
in the end. So after he does this little tourist
thing in London, he meets up with the Queen. Her
(06:34):
first impressions of him are well exhibited. I think in
this quote she says, the one Mohammed books, which is
the other one. It's very dark with a very smiling expression,
and the other much younger called Abdul Kareem, is much lighter,
tall and with a fine, serious countenance. His father is
a native doctor at Agra. They both kissed my feet,
(06:57):
So there you go. I guess a good first impression
from Victoria. She likes them. She calls him back later.
And we don't know much else about Mohammed. We do
know that within the year Kareem had graduated way above
waiting tables. He was sampling curry with the Queen, which
became one of her dining favorites. And he was teaching
(07:18):
her Urdu and Hindi and she really loves it too.
She's up in years, but she completely throws herself into
her studies trying to master these languages, and eventually even
produces a thirteen volume Hindustanding diary. And I'm just gonna
give you the description from the royal website where you
can actually see a one picture of a page from
(07:41):
these diaries, because it's really hard to understand the translation
process that abdual Kareem and Victoria worked out. So here
we go. It is thought that Queen Victoria wrote the
English text at the bottom, that Abdul Kareem then wrote
the middle section with the English text put into the
correct word order for the too standing translation in the
(08:01):
Hindustani words below in English script, and that finally the
Queen wrote the text in or Do characters, so lots
of languages going on help with grammar and vocabulary and guessing.
I know. He also made her a phrase book with
with simple everyday sort of phrases copied out in an
(08:23):
anglicized version, so she could just look it up and
be able to say what she needed to to whatever
print she was talking with. But Kareem still doesn't have
an official position, even though he's clearly with her quite
a lot. Yeah, So after a year, he thinks his
work is too menial considering his experience in India and
he wants to go home. So Victoria doesn't want that
(08:44):
to happen, and so she promotes him to official Munshi,
an Indian clerk to the Queen. So he's basically her
personal secretary at that point and her personal teachers still
and her personal teacher, so it's high rolling for him
from there on out. He starts mingling with the big
wigs on his annual trips to India. By eighteen ninety
he is servants of his own by eighteen nine one,
and he's allowed to carry a sword and wear traditional dress. Yeah,
(09:08):
and he brings over his family to Victoria's concerned that
he might miss his wife back home in India, so
he brings her over. I think he brings his nephew
over eventually. And they're given cottages that each of Victoria's estates,
and of course, when we say cottage, that is an understatement.
There lavishly decorated, lovely homes. He even gets his own
(09:28):
cottage at Balmoral name for him Kareem's Cottage, or at
least that's Victoria's nickname for it. And his father notably
becomes the first to smoke hookah at Windsor Castle, which
was kind of a big milestone because Victoria did not
like smoking at all in her presence. Yeah, so she
kind of embraces his family, and though she refuses to
(09:49):
confer knighthood on Kareem, she grows closer and closer to him.
She writes some several letters a day, signing some with
quote your loving mother or your closest friend, or with
kisses according to the BBC. She also both friends his
wife and offers him advice on the couple's inability to
have children, So getting really personal here. Yeah, And she
(10:11):
sends him a Christmas tree in eighteen nine three and
also seeks out his advice too, so she's not just
getting into super personal husband and wife business, but she's
asking him about Indian affairs and his opinions. And it's
this last point that really drives her family in the
court crazy, and it frustrates some of her people in
(10:31):
government in India too because as a Muslim Indian, Korean's
opinions tend to decide with his own people and not
everyone in India under Victoria's government thought that was a
very good idea. But Victoria's family wasn't just upset about
his influence in her politics. They're also upset just by
how close they are, the sixtiesomething year old woman and
(10:53):
this young Indian man in his twenties, and especially when, surprise, surprise,
they too spend a night together in the same Highland
cottage that Victoria would visit with John Brown. This just
did not seem okay to the Royal family at all.
It's a little fishy. So it comes back to them,
I guess when Victoria dies. When she dies, her family
(11:15):
they do follow her wishes and they allow Kareem to
serve as one of her principal mourners, but as soon
as it's over, her son now Edward the Seventh, fires
Kareem and orders that the records of their relationship, kept
both at his UK and Indian homes, be destroyed. Yeah,
but we don't want you to think that this is
solely related to the relationship of Victoria and Abdual Kareem,
(11:39):
because it's actually in keeping with the general revisionism that
Victoria's children practice after her death. For instance, her daughter
Beatrice copied out and edited the decades and decades of
journals kept by by Victoria. She had kept journals since
she was a girl, and her daughter literally copied them
all out, taking out the part she that were inappropriate painstakingly, right,
(12:02):
I mean she even cut out images and things in
case them in the new versions. Again on the on
the Royal website, there are some copies of documents related
relating to Victoria's life, and one of them is the
diary entry right before she got married, so probably nothing
would have been too scandalous in that. And you can
see a little cut out where Victoria has sketched a
(12:25):
profile of herself in her wedding headdress, and I guess
Beatrice has felt the need to preserve the little picture,
but altered the text and copy it out herself. So
in a similar fashion, they took the material from her
time with Kareem and sort of destroyed all ever watched it. Right,
But there was still enough evidence left to know that
(12:46):
Victoria had had a very close relationship with this Indian
teacher of hers. For one thing, those Hindustani journals kept
at Windsor Castle, they were still there, although they hadn't
been translated at all until recently. And letters Victoria wrote
to other people that mentioned Kareem. Yeah. For instance, she
wrote a letter to her daughter Vicky saying that Kareem
(13:07):
was a very strict master but a perfect gentleman, so
they couldn't really control every word that had gotten out
about him. And also since this was such a gossipy
topic around court, there was there were plenty of records
about this close friendship between the monarch and this man, right,
so there was enough information floating around out there for
(13:29):
author Sharbani Bassu to write a book about it. Write
a book about the relationship between Victoria and Kareem I
should say. And while she was an India promoting this
book about Victoria and Kareem, she was contacted by a
surviving member of Kareem's family who read about the book
in a local paper. It turns out that after Kareem's
death in nineteen o nine, the family had managed to
(13:50):
keep some of his memento safe, including a diary covering
the ten year period between Victoria's golden and diamond jubilees.
So since seven they had to this hidden in Pakistan.
So Bossu traveled to Pakistan and studied the diaries and
the photo from Victoria that was signed in Urdu and
other keepsakes, and updated her book because clearly this was
(14:13):
good information to to have and to add to the
whole thing. There wasn't a bombshell, It wasn't like some
sort of confessional letter that would really make this whole
story scandalous. But the new information did mean that the
story made international news. I mean, we mentioned a BBC article,
It was all over the papers in March, because I
(14:34):
don't think people, or at least people had forgotten how
close Victoria was to this young man. Yeah, and I
mean even though it didn't reveal anything new, it at
least added more information, like more evidence to the store,
I think, yeah, and and just interesting facts about it too.
We have more quotes, and I mean, I think the
picture signed in the language she struggled so hard to
(14:57):
learn is is really interesting. But I also sort of
have a listener request of myself, and I know that
some of you are really up on Victorian Indian policy,
and I'm just curious about any specific instances where Kareem's
influence might have been seen in government, because if that's
what her family and people in her government were so
(15:19):
worried that he would just have too much power and influence.
Is there anything that we can look at and say that,
well that might have traced back to him in some way. Yeah,
so right to us. If you know anything, we'll give
you the email in just a minute, but before that
we're going to do some list for mail. So this
(15:39):
email is from Chris and he wrote, Hi, Sara and Dablina.
I just listened to your podcast on the Oneida group
and was a little disappointed that Charles Guiteau, McKinley's assassmin
didn't make an appearance before turning his attentions to politics
and violence. He was actually a member of the Oneida community,
and despite their free love attitude of c only, no
(16:00):
one wanted to use a trysting room with him. According
to some sources, he was so unpopular that he earned
the nickname Charles get Out. He left in a huff
even tried to sue noise, as I recall, and many
people think it was in large part over his sexual rejection.
I remember when I first heard about this, thinking that
(16:20):
if only he'd been more popular in bed, he probably
never would have shot anyone. Anyway, I love the podcast,
and even though we all learned about ministory, I think
he should do a presidential Assassin series. There are definitely
enough weird facts about the assassination that we've either forgotten
or never heard about, like Guta's Unaida connection. And actually
(16:40):
I did see this, and I knew if Skara Vowel
has a new book out to or I guess it's
one of her older books that mentioned this connection to Anida.
I just I was actually thinking of saving it if
we ever drew Well, now we haven't Astraditions podcast every
now and then, there's a fact that I'll keep in
my back pocket for some dreamy future. Podcast will do. Oh,
(17:04):
that's a good idea that one. Okay, this could also
it sounds like become a stuff mom never told you podcasts?
I think can sexual rejection drive you to murder? Maybe
we'll go suggest that to Molly and Kristen after we
get out of here. But thank you Chris for your email.
I couldn't resist it because of your mention of the
trysting room. But um, pretty pretty interesting stuff. So if
(17:29):
any of you have any great stories like that additions
to previous podcasts or future podcast we love getting these
entries from you. Guys do a lot of the work
for us. UM write us at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com, or you can look us up
on Twitter at Miston History or on Facebook. And you
can also look up our blogs, right, Sarah, you sure can.
(17:50):
We are at www dot how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and that's of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast,
click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner
of our homepage. The how Stuff Works iPhone app has
a ride. Download it today on iTunes. M
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