Indian Servitude(s) in Imperial London: Tanika Gupta’s The Empress

Abstract

Abstract Dramatic acts of retrieving marginalised stories and of rewriting imperial history from a transnational perspective have been essential for efforts at decolonising knowledge. In The Empress (2013), Tanika Gupta explores the neglected history of Indian communities and the nexus of imperial labour and mobility in late-Victorian London through interlacing the fictional story of the Bengali ayah Rani and the Indian lascar Hari; the true story of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian munshi Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim; and the stories of Westminster’s first Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. By foregrounding the urban experiences of diverging Indian servant characters in the sense of a critical cosmopolitanism and by privileging a heterogeneous “history from below,” this article explores how The Empress presents a counterstory to notions of a Dickensian London “full of bonnets and white people” (Royal Shakespeare Company, “Emma Rice”) and a critical intervention in discourses relating to the ethical challenges inherent in the commemoration and teaching of the British Empire.