Sultan Abu Bakar, Queen Victoria and the Golden Gift
Abu Bakar's gift to Queen Victoria, a model of the Albert Memorial “A Royal Quest”, Chapter 5 of Palace of Ghosts , is about the lifelong quest of Temenggong Abu Bakar, later Sultan Abu Bakar, to realise his life’s goal: royalty. Like most tasks undertaken by Abu Bakar, failure was never going to be an outcome. To mark the achievement of his goal Sultan Abu Bakar built an enormous palace; Istana Tyersall was a magnificent statement announcing his presence on the world stage. But becoming a Sultan, a sovereign monarch, is not something you fill in an application form for. It requires recognition by people who already had the status you aspired to and, in the 1880s there was no one on earth whose status outshone that of Britain’s Queen Victoria. Victoria and Abdul Shrabani Basu’s brilliant 2010 book Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant tells the amazing story of an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim who, on becoming a servant to Queen Victoria in 1887, de...