The Empress

Tanika Gupta’s 2013 play The Empress, based on the true story of Queen Victoria’s friendship with her Indian teacher Abdul Karim, is set at the height of British imperial power, as the English crown expanded its territory during the late 19th century. Though the aging Victoria herself never travels in the play, she is always aware of the vastness of her lands; indeed, her intimate conversations with Abdul are often defined by…

In The Empress, Tanika Gupta’s play about Indian immigrants living in London in the late 1800s, protagonist Rani Das is constantly issued the same warning: “we all know what happens to pretty girls in this city.” Indeed, the play depicts England as being rife with sexual predation and cruel double standards; even Queen Victoria, the ruler of imperial Britain, is sidelined by male relatives and nobles. But The Empress uses an intersectional lens to…

Destitute and alone at the end of her first year in London, Rani Das, the heroine of Tanika Gupta’s 2013 play The Empress, laments that “I have been abandoned by everyone I ever met here.” Indeed, Victorian London is often tremendously hostile to Rani and other Indian immigrants, many of whom face racial prejudice, structural injustice, and housing insecurity. Yet at the very moment Rani laments her “abandonment,” she is taken in…

Queen Victoria, the titular character in Tanika Gupta’s 1913 play The Empress, is desperate to learn about India, the largest territory in the sprawling British Empire over which she rules. However, while Victoria eagerly studies the architectures, cuisines, and languages of the Indian subcontinent, even hiring Abdul Karim as her Indian Munshi (teacher), she rarely leaves the British royal residences. And despite Abdul’s best efforts to “bring India” to the queen through his…