Central to The Empress is Rani. She is hired by Mrs Matthews to accompany her on the long sea voyage to take care of the children, her baggage and to make necessary arrangements for her comfort during her return journey from India to Britain. Most British households in India employed nannies, known as ayahs, alongside servants. Like Rani, these women established a deep bond with the children. To help on the journey to Britain, families enlisted their family ayah (like Rani) or hired a travelling ayah. Their numbers increased when the Suez Canal opened in 1869, shortening the sea journey from Britain to India by some 4,500 miles. 

Some British families used dubious employment practices, sometimes dismissing their ayah on arrival in Britain, which Rani experiences at the hands of Mrs Matthews: 

RANI: But where will I go? Where will I find work? I am a complete stranger in this country.  

SUSAN: That is not my problem. (Act 1, Scene 4) 

Although Rani is paid and receives references, many would find themselves completely abandoned. Very few ayahs could rely on employment contracts and often these were not honoured. Stranded ayahs had few options. Some advertised in local newspapers for a passage home. With dwindling finances many were left destitute and resorted to begging. Often they had to wait in England for long periods of time. Abandoned, they were exploited by ruthless landlords, living in over-crowded unsanitary lodging houses and charged high rents. Others found further employment, as Rani does with the Oakham family. 

The Ayahs’ Home

In Act 2, Scene 3, Rani, Asha and Firoza stay at the Ayahs’ Home. The existence of a lodging house for ayahs in London’s East End can be traced back to the mid-19th century, to an establishment run by Mrs Rogers near Aldgate.¹ During the 1890s, the Ayahs’ Home starts to build its reputation as a respectable place for ayahs to stay. The London City Mission, a Christian charitable organisation which already ran the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans, and South Sea Islanders, established in 1856 for lascars, took over the Ayahs’ Home in 1900 and moved it from Jewry Street to 26 King Edward Road, Hackney.

The picture of a group of Asian women sat around a table sewing and reading, wearing saris and Victorian dress, intrigued me. What were these women all doing in East London at the turn of the last century?

Hari, Indian seafarers and port cities

Indian seafarers, like Hari, known as lascars, were widely employed across the British Empire due to increasing trade between Britain and India and a demand for cheap labour. Lascar recruitment increased with the advent of steam shipping. In the 1890s, some 24,000 lascars were employed on British ships. By 1914, that number had risen to over 51,000. Working aboard ship they would be employed above and below deck, with some of the hardest work in the engine rooms as firemen, coal trimmers, greasers and donkeymen. They were commandeered by a serang (equivalent to a boatswain or petty officer). Indian seamen were hired on so-called ‘Lascar Articles’ stipulating their terms of employment. As reflected in the play, they were treated badly, discriminated against and their pay was much less than their European counterparts.

The play is deeply engaged with the politics of the 1890s. This period saw a number of personalities arrive in London including students who would later shape India’s independence movement. For example, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi studied law between 1888–91 at the Inner Temple and Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a law student at Lincoln’s Inn between 1893–96. In the play, Gupta imagines their encounters with Naoroji. Dadabhai Naoroji was a businessman, academic and politician who first arrived in London at the age of 30. Naoroji developed the ‘drain theory’ highlighting a direct link between high taxation and trade surpluses, which ‘drained’ India of between £30 to 40 million every year, and poverty in India. Naoroji became an important lobbyist for Indian self-rule before standing as an MP.

Naoroji was elected for the Liberal Party in the Central Finsbury constituency in 1892, and championed many causes including votes for women.² He overcame much prejudice and opposition, as expressed by Lord Salisbury when Naoroji was defeated in a previous election in 1886. He stated that ‘I doubt we have yet got to a point when a British constituency will take a black man to represent them’. Gupta dramatises these events in Act Two, Scene 7, opening the scene with Dadabhai, Gandhi and William ‘in high spirits’ after his ‘jubilant’ victory:

DADABHAI: (Laughing.) For goodness’ sake, put me down! I’m going to fall, you are all too intoxicated... Rani, do tell them to put me down. 

WILLIAM: The new Member of Parliament for the constituency of Finsbury! 

GANDHI: The British electorate have finally kicked Salisbury in the guts and elected “a black man”. 

Many of the scenes in the play depict the tender relationship between Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim and the prejudice he faced at court.

Abdul Karim was one of several Indian servants to arrive at the Royal Household to be ‘presented’ as a gift on the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 1887 (dramatised in Act 1, Scenes 3 and 4B). Ten years earlier, Parliament had given Victoria the title of Empress of India.

As Gupta has emphasised, theatre is a ‘collaborative’ medium to make a play text come alive on stage. This includes acting, set design, lighting, music, direction, fight and movement choreography. One major device in The Empress is that parts of the action take place simultaneously in different locations, and scenes are intercut with each other. The play features three such split scenes – in Act 1, Scene 15 (Scene 17 in the 2023 version of the play), and in Act 2, Scenes 5 and 11. For example, in Act 2, Scene 11, Gupta intercuts Queen Victoria’s preparation for her Jubilee celebrations with a speech Naoroji gives on famine in India to contrast the lived reality of colonialism with the projected benevolent image of empire embodied by the Queen-Empress. It allows the audience to access quickly the different settings across the class divide and suggest simultaneity in the action taking place.

The Empress premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in 2013 in a production directed by Emma Rice. A decade later, in 2023, the play was revived in a new production at the RSC’s Swan Theatre and Lyric Hammersmith, this time directed by Pooja Ghai. For this new production Gupta returned to the script and made some significant adjustments to the text, tweaking some of the language, adding dialogue and characters, such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, further texturing the historical narrative of the play and foregrounding Rani’s resilience.

[1] To find out more about the evolution of the home, its owners and service provision, please see these articles by Victoria Haskins <https://ayahsandamahs.com/2022/04/21/the-ayahs-and-amahs-home-a-history/> and <https://ayahsandamahs.com/2022/04/28/the-ayahs-and-amahs-home-a-history-2/>

[2] Naoroji received many endorsements including from the famous nurse, Florence Nightingale and Labour politician, Keir Hardie. As an MP, Naoroji, while often described as ‘Member for India’, championed many causes, including local temperance societies, working men’s clubs and trade unions. He also supported the Irish Home Rule bill. How serious he took his responsibility is indicated by his voting record – in 1893/94 he voted 304 times out of a total of 310 parliamentary votes.

Dr Florian Stadtler is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Migration at the University of Bristol. He researches South Asian and British South Asian drama, film, history and literature. He is co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project, "Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the present", a partnership between the University of Bristol the British Library and Queen Mary University of London. Among his publications are as editor Salman Rushdie in Context  (2023) and the special issue  ‘Britain and India: cross-cultural encounters’ (2012) for the magazine Wasafiri. With Susheila Nasta he has curated, Asian Britain: A Photographic History (2013).

The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.