The Story: Act One, 1887
Act One, 1887: From the Ship to the Docks to the Court
Act One is set entirely within a single year, 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It runs across fifteen scenes plus an extra scene numbered Scene Four B, cutting between a ship crossing from India to England, the docks and households of London, and Windsor Castle. Two young people open the play travelling in opposite directions through the same world: Rani Das, a sixteen-year-old ayah, and Abdul Karim, a servant about to be handed to the Queen as a Jubilee gift.
Scenes One and Two: Aboard the Ship
The play opens on a ship’s deck, where lascars scrub the deck barefoot while singing a parody of a real shipping company’s marching song — the Clan Line, whose crews mocked their officers in bawdy songs mixing English and Hindustani. The Serang strikes and kicks Hari, driving the crew to get the deck ready before an inspection by the captain. Rani enters playing hide and seek with two English children, and Hari asks to see her later. Abdul Karim introduces himself and shows Rani his father’s silver compass, while the elderly Dadabhai Naoroji and the eighteen-year-old Gandhi discuss taxation without representation and Lord Salisbury’s dismissal of an Indian candidate as unelectable.
In Scene Two, moonlit and quiet, Rani teaches Hari to read from a poem by Coleridge. He tells her about carving wood with his grandfather and describes falling for her like a sailor sighting land after a long voyage. They kiss before Rani is called away to the children.
Six of the play’s central figures are introduced on the ship in Act One, Scene One: Rani, Hari, the Serang, Abdul Karim, Dadabhai Naoroji and the young Gandhi. This single scene sets up Rani and Hari’s romance, Abdul’s charm and ambition, and Dadabhai and Gandhi’s political conversation — before any of them has reached England. Other major figures (Lascar Sally, Firoza, Georgina, Lord Oakham) arrive only once the action reaches London.
Scene Three and Scene Four B: Abdul Arrives at Windsor
At Windsor, Victoria eats breakfast with Lady Sarah, remembering her Jubilee crowds and missing her late husband Albert. Lady Sarah reports a letter announcing a mysterious gift due to arrive by boat within the week. In Scene Four B, that gift turns out to be Abdul Karim himself, sent from the governor of the north-west provinces of India as a Jubilee present.
Within minutes, Victoria has discovered Abdul speaks several languages, appointed him to serve her breakfast, and overruled Lady Sarah’s objections to a male Indian servant in the royal household. This is one of the fastest character arcs in the play: Abdul moves from an unnamed gift on a letter to a named favourite of the Queen inside a single short scene.
The script itself asks a director to move constantly between the grime of the lascars’ deck and the gilt of Windsor Castle. This structural device is called cross-cutting, and it is one of the play’s most important dramatic methods. A designer could use two contrasting playing areas: a bare wooden platform, roughly lit, for the ship, against a raised gilded area lit with a warm golden wash for Windsor. Switching between them without a full scene change keeps the audience aware that both worlds exist at the same historical moment.
A performer playing the Serang might use a hard, barking vocal delivery and sharp downward gestures with a stick, contrasted immediately by Lady Sarah’s controlled, clipped, upper-class vowels and stillness — two very different kinds of power communicated through voice and body within the same few minutes of stage time.
Scene Four: The Abandonment at Tilbury Docks
Rani manages the family’s luggage and the children at Tilbury docks — a real steamship dock that had opened only the year before, in 1886. Dadabhai encourages her to keep reading before he leaves. Then Susan Matthews hands Rani an envelope of money and a reference letter and dismisses her on the spot: the family already has an English nanny. When Rani protests that there was an agreement, Susan tells her, “No written contract you understand,” and that it is not legally binding.
Rani kneels in the street and grabs the hem of Susan’s dress in desperation. Susan calls her nothing more than her own servant’s child and orders her onto the next ship home if she is unhappy. When Hari speaks up for Rani, Susan dismisses him too, as an interfering sailor. Abdul steps in, helps Rani to her feet, tells her she must think of herself first, and presses his father’s silver compass into her hand as a good-luck charm before he is called away to Windsor.
Abdul’s silver compass is one of the play’s most important props as symbols. He gives it to Rani in Scene Four as she is abandoned at the docks; she carries it through the whole play and only returns it to him in the very last scene, fourteen years later.
Scenes Five and Six: Lascar Sally’s Boarding House
Hari takes the heartbroken Rani to Lascar Sally’s crowded, rowdy boarding house for the night. There the lascars share news that a ship called the Britannia has been wrecked, with many crew members drowned. Upstairs, in a cramped and damp room, Rani and Hari imagine a shared future — a school for her, furniture made by him — but she refuses to go further than a kiss in such surroundings. In the night, Rani slips away without waking him, leaving a note in Bengali that neither Hari nor Sally can read.
Back at Windsor in Scene Seven, Abdul entertains Victoria with stories of Agra, the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal, while pointing out that British soldiers and officials have stripped the palace of its jewels and treasures for their own pleasure. He takes her hand and waltzes with her across the room while Lady Sarah watches, outraged at the breach of protocol.
A common mistake is muddling Rani’s two employers. Susan Matthews, whom Rani travels with from India, is her first employer — and it is Susan who abandons her at Tilbury docks in Scene Four. Lord Oakham, recruited through his housekeeper Georgina in Scene Eight, is her second employer, and it is his household where she is later seduced and thrown out pregnant. Keep the order straight: Matthews dismisses her first, Oakham betrays her second.
This matters for the compulsory design-and-context question on the exam: an extract showing Rani in a sari caring for two young English children belongs to the Matthews voyage; the plain English nanny’s uniform, the pinned-up hair, the Indian cooking and the request to dress as an Indian woman all belong to the Oakham household.
Scenes Eight to Ten: A Second Position
At the docks, the older ayah Firoza teaches Rani the exact words to use when asking for work, and tells her to have faith in herself. Several English women refuse Rani before Georgina, housekeeper to Lord Oakham, inspects her and hires her on a month’s trial. Meanwhile Hari, searching for Rani, is threatened with blacklisting by the Serang and forced back onto the ship.
Georgina dresses Rani in a sombre English nanny’s uniform. At dinner, Lord Oakham — who grew up in India himself — guesses the Indian dishes she has cooked by smell alone, asks her to wear a sari instead of her uniform, and seduces her; the scene ends with them beginning to make love, while, in a separate space on stage, Hari is shown writing her a letter of apology by candlelight aboard his ship.
Scenes Eleven to Thirteen: Abdul Promoted, Suspicion Grows
At court, Victoria promotes Abdul from khitmagar to munshi, and commissions a formal portrait of him. Lady Sarah reports rumours about Abdul’s household back in India and doubts about his father’s real profession, but Victoria refuses to demote him and insists he is her teacher, not her servant.
Scenes Fourteen and Fifteen: Two Women, Two Fates
Heavily pregnant, Rani is thrown out of the Oakham household. Lord Oakham denies the child is his, insults her, and suggests she abandon the baby at a workhouse or worse. Georgina, who once pleaded on Rani’s behalf, only now realises that a string of previous nannies may have suffered the same fate.
Act One ends on a devastating cross-cut. In Scene Fifteen, Abdul teaches Victoria her first words of Hindi and secures her promise to provide him with land in India after her death — while, in the same scene, Rani reaches the docks alone with her newborn daughter, tells the baby she may have a better chance without her, and walks away, leaving the baby on the ground.
Act One ends with Rani abandoning her newborn daughter at the docks. She does not get the baby back herself — in Act Two, Firoza and Lascar Sally stop Rani leaving and name the child Asha, meaning hope.