Characters: Rani, Hari, Abdul and the Queen
Four Lives Across Fourteen Years
The Empress follows four central figures whose stories run side by side but almost never touch. Rani Das and Hari Sharma travel from a ship’s deck to London’s docklands and back to each other. Abdul Karim and Queen Victoria move from a breakfast tray to a shared grief neither expected. Understanding how each character changes — and staying alert to who they never meet — is essential groundwork for strong characterisation choices on stage.
Rani Das: From Ayah to Teacher
Rani begins the play as a sixteen-year-old Bengali ayah, playing hide and seek with the Matthews children and counting in Bengali. By the final scene, fourteen years later in 1901, she is about thirty, married to Hari and training to open her own school. Her arc moves through repeated betrayal: Susan Matthews abandons her at Tilbury with no written contract, Lord Oakham seduces her and then denies the child, and even her decision to leave her newborn on the docks comes from desperation rather than cruelty. Firoza and Lascar Sally stop her from walking away completely, and it is Firoza who names the baby Asha, meaning hope.
A performer playing Rani needs a clear vocal and physical journey. The eager, curious sixteen-year-old who asks Dadabhai whether she might visit the Queen should sound very different from the composed woman who later asks to work for him as his assistant. Physically, the weight in her posture might shift across the play: light and playful on the ship, collapsed and defensive outside Lord Oakham’s house, upright and purposeful once she is working for Dadabhai and teaching evening classes.
Rani’s name means “queen” in Hindi — a deliberate echo of the play’s title and of Queen Victoria, even though the two women never meet on stage. Her arc runs from a servant with no legal protection to a teacher hoping to open her own school.
Hari Sharma: The Lascar Who Waits
Hari is a lascar who falls for Rani on the voyage over and spends most of the play trying to find his way back to her. After one night together at Sally’s boarding house he loses her; the Serang forces him back to sea before he can find her again. He writes to her for years, organises the lascars around a set of demands for fair treatment, and is thrown off the ship at the Cape as a troublemaker. He digs in a diamond mine, then rebuilds himself as a furniture-maker in Whitechapel.
A designer thinking about Hari’s transformation has concrete costume options: a barefoot, undernourished lascar in rough cotton at the start; a beaten, bloodied figure thrown ashore at the Cape; a man in a well-fitted brown suit by the final Tilbury scene. Each costume change is a visible marker of thirteen years passing without a single line of exposition.
Abdul gives Rani his father’s silver compass as a good-luck charm at Tilbury docks in Act One, telling her “you must think of yourself first. Always.” She carries it through every later hardship and, in the play’s final scene, presses it into Abdul’s hand as he is sent back to India. A performer holding this prop across two timelines needs a consistent physical relationship with it — perhaps always kept close to the body, taken out and turned over only in moments of decision.
As a designer, you might light the compass with a small hand-held practical or a tight follow spot in both scenes, connecting them visually across fourteen years of stage time even though the audience has watched hours of other plot unfold in between.
Abdul Karim: From Khitmagar to Munshi
Abdul arrives as a twenty-four-year-old “presentation” for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, initially serving as a khitmagar before Victoria promotes him to munshi, meaning teacher. He teaches her Hindi, tells her about Agra and the Taj Mahal, and eventually challenges her directly, asking how monarchs can stay compassionate while their subjects suffer such hardship. After Victoria’s death he is stripped of his livery, his letters are burned, and he is sent back to India.
Performing Abdul requires two registers: the confident courtier who waltzes with the Queen and questions her rule, and the humiliated man re-dressed as an ordinary civilian in the final scenes. A performer might use upright posture and direct eye contact throughout the Windsor and Osborne House scenes, then let the physicality collapse — shoulders in, eyes down — once the royal household turns on him after Victoria’s death.
Abdul rises from khitmagar (waiter) to munshi (teacher) within the play’s first act, but the wider royal household never accepts the promotion — his relationship with Lady Sarah and the court stays hostile throughout, and it is this hostility that destroys him after Victoria dies.
Queen Victoria: Power and Isolation
Victoria is sixty-seven when the play opens and eighty-one when she dies. She keeps Abdul close against her household’s wishes, learns Hindi from him, and is eventually threatened with a declaration of insanity if she continues to honour him. Her power is real — she can overrule Lady Sarah and the Master of the House — but the play also shows its limits: faced with the household’s threat to declare her insane, she keeps Abdul as her Munshi but retracts the honour she wanted to give him, and Abdul later observes that all she ever had of the Empire was her imagination of it, since she never travelled to see it herself.
A designer staging Victoria might use height and levels to show her authority — an elevated chair for the Windsor and Osborne House scenes — while lighting could isolate her in a pool of warm light during private moments with Abdul, contrasted with colder, more formal light in the state scenes attended by Lady Sarah.
A common mistake is writing that Rani and Queen Victoria meet, perhaps at the Ayahs’ Home or during the Diamond Jubilee. They never do. The closest the play comes is a moment late in Act Two when Rani sees Victoria only from a distance in the Jubilee procession — a stage direction, not a meeting. If a question asks you to interpret a moment where these two characters share the stage space, the honest answer is that the play deliberately keeps them apart: its power comes from parallel lives, not a shared scene.
Supporting Relationships That Shape the Four
Each central character is defined partly by who opposes or supports them. Lady Sarah works against Abdul throughout, delivering the King’s final instructions after Victoria’s death. The Serang bullies and controls Hari. Georgina and Lord Oakham exploit Rani, until Georgina’s growing subtext of distrust finally surfaces as she realises her master has done this to a succession of nannies. Firoza and Lascar Sally offer Rani female solidarity when she has nowhere else to turn, and Dadabhai Naoroji gives her both employment and an education. Tracking these secondary relationships gives you material for questions about character motivation and interaction, not just each character’s headline arc.