I read Victoria and Abdul, Shrabani Basu’s amazing and meticulously researched book before there was even a film planned. Stephen Frears’s film is a beautiful compliment to the book, and fascinating in its own right — it is a story for our times.

It is the story of the love and friendship between a widowed, lonely, aged queen and a young Indian man who taught her Urdu for more than 10 years. It is also the story of how the British establishment closed ranks not just to condemn this relationship and to hide it, but to actively search out and destroy documents over an extended period of time, going as far as India to do so.

Millions of pages have been written about Queen Victoria. Amazingly, not only do new facts still emerge, but Judy Dench can reveal new nuances of the woman she may have been, in a powerhouse performance where all the power comes from her restraint. In our day and age, with the increasing exploration of both the power and femininity of women, it is the strength of this actor that she not only brings a sympathetic freshness to these issues and character, but a cohesiveness to the contradictory (but documented) emotions of a lonely, powerful and mature woman.

In fact, the harder task was left to the young Indian actor Ali Fazal to sensitively play a man about whom very little is known, and who was — and perhaps had to become — a complex character in a culture that was alien to him and treated him as a pariah. He’s a man whom the old queen loved, and who at the same time, had gonorrhoea. He’s a man who came from a respectable and literate family and wished to extricate himself from domestic service. He’s a man who wished to improve himself and secure the future of his family ... To portray these contradictions and be able to keep the sympathy of the audience is the feat achieved by this extraordinary actor.

Stephen Frears returns with Victoria and Abdul, a story of love and friendship between a widowed queen and a young Indian man who taught her Urdu

It would be hard enough to get inside the skin of Abdul, but to bring a sense of cohesiveness to this character when the director, scriptwriter, the whole cast and crew — no matter how experienced or inspired or multi-cultured — come from a culture and a mindset entirely foreign to Abdul’s. It had to be a double reinterpretation of an already complicated man. The very language of English creates clumsy barriers in translation. Ali Fazal brought together a sense of fun, tenderness and honest values which sat convincingly with a young man’s ambition and responsibilities, as seen from his cultural perspective.

Abdul’s early encounters with the Queen are where you can see some cultural contradiction, but he brings a coherence as he grows from an eager young man to a poised but besieged — if still unembittered — man, totally dependent on a single powerful friend.

The film is full of great humour. The ridiculousness of protocol is a given, although there was an awkward and unbelievable scene with Prince Bertie visiting the servant’s quarters. Also, the possibility of a conservative young Muslim man of that time getting under the table to kiss the feet even of a monarch is more than extremely unlikely (unlike the flamboyant Ali Fazal in his own public persona), even given the syncretism of the Indian subcontinent; of course, there is no accounting for personal idiosyncrasy and it gets a laugh in the film as well as establishes a short cut.

No film can be all things to all men — a book has a better chance — and almost all of the political discussion was unsatisfactory, with too many thread left hanging. At a micro level, to refer to the 1857 “mutiny” as a Muslim enterprise, to mention only the numbers of British people killed in that conflict and never mention the far larger numbers killed by the British — these are unforgiveables, which reinforce stereotypes, even if one accepts that the film is not about politics. Yet, on a larger canvas, this is a political film, illustrating the adage, “the personal is political.”

As a diehard Bollywood fan, I grew so tired of the subcontinent being interpreted through British-coloured lenses that, with some notable exceptions, I virtually gave up watching films made about India for British consumption. Indian characters would have the wrong accents and would jar in all the wrong places. To choose an actor who speaks beautiful Urdu, a fairly unusual quality amongst younger Indian actors today, was one of the best things Stephen Frears did. But the film needed a lot more Urdu in it!

Ali Fazal is a known Bollywood actor, although not amongst the biggest stars in an industry that is permeated through and through with the dynasty culture of the subcontinent. Despite that, like Shahrukh Khan, another rank outsider, he is emerging as perhaps the finest actor in the new generation.

When talking about this film, people in England would refer to it as the Judy Dench film. Coming as I do from the subcontinent, I tended to think of this as the Ali Fazal film! Given that the trailer, perhaps intentionally, largely centres on the queen, it is a refreshing surprise to find that Abdul is not a prop in a story about Queen Victoria; he emerges as a controlled yet compelling character. From a subcontinental perspective, Abdul’s tragedy is underplayed, if not untold, but in a fine British tradition.

Given this, it has been dispiriting to read some reviews in England which do not even mention the young Indian actor who shares the titular role or only do so in passing, while extolling less central characters who are better known locally.

Perhaps nothing else could indicate more clearly why this is still a story for our times.

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 17th, 2017