Published Paper Details:

The film 'Victoria and Abdul' is about a burning discontent in the royal household of Queen Victoria - the epicenter of the Empire's colonial enterprise. The Queen of Great Britain mixes with a brown Indian Muslim servant by the name of Abdul Karim. An Indian waiter turns into the Queen's Munshi, the Queen's teacher and official Indian clerk in the span of a year. While Bertie, the future King Edward VII and the other members of the household, along with the director Stephen Ferars, perceive it as an unusual, rather a scandalous relationship of love and friendship, one that shakes up the very foundation of monarchy, it calls for a careful look to see that the nature of this relationship is not quite what it appears.What Frears recreates out of Shrabani Basu's account is a story imbued with strong overtones of love that definitely is not platonic by any chance, if not bordering on the sexual. But even a contemporary film like this glosses over the complex ramifications of this situation and chooses to tell a story of "History's most unlikely friendship" weaving an emotionally charged tale of love and affection.This paper will explore the nuances and intricacies of this relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian servant and argue that it is more a case of 'pathological narcissism' that only helps the monarch redefine herself as 'The Empress of India', her recently acquired title. I would refer to Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of the mirror stage and the formation of the ego to analyse the nature of objectification and representation of Karim. In the light of Abdul R. Jan Mohamed's classification of 'imaginary' and 'symbolic' texts, the paper would also like to analyse whether the film, which seems to hint at a syncretism between the native and his ruler, can therefore may be categorized as a 'symbolic' text.