With the 100th anniversary of the death of the first empress of India (saving Raziya) falling on Monday, it is apposite to recall that the self-created title's last holder is alive and well enough for her 100 years, albeit with a broken collar bone and an unsteady step that almost brought her down as she left church last Sunday. Between Victoria, the first Kaiser-i-Hind, and Queen Elizabeth, the queen-mother, widow of the last, India faded from Britain's consciousness though Indians loomed large and vibrant. The shift is not noticeable here at Oxford where the only Indians I have seen are a few working women in salwar-kameez pushing trolleys in the supermarket. But dreaming spires do not so easily forget the historic connection with five thousand years of cultural continuity. Though no one can tell me about the lectureship that a Pundit Shymamaji Krishnavarma founded at Oxford in 1904, Corpus Christi is bidding for the proposed chair in Indian studies. It would be nice meanwhile to learn something about the pundit who wrote letters to The Times from Paris, contributed to a London publication, The Indian Sociologist, and whom the Edwardian establishment regarded as seditious. Time stands still in some respects at Corpus Christi, like the high table isolated in its pool of conviviality, but races ahead in others. I had to hunt down a classicist for the precise meaning and spelling of 'Benedictus benedicat!' the grace that resonates among the rafters of the vaulted hall. The new president is Oxford's strongest link with India. Fresh from the School of Oriental and African Studies, Sir Tim Lankester, the picture of tousled informality, is a modern man as befits an economist and civil servant, the first non-academic head in five centuries. Having served such diverse political bosses as James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher, worked for the World Bank and been posted in New Delhi, he will undoubtedly ensure that learning is geared to development. India means only immigrants beyond the gray stone and skeletal winter trees, still waters and Christ Church's frosted Meadow. I am told that a British Bengali civil servant, Suman Chakravarti, is slated to become HMG's first ethnic Asian permanent secretary. Victoria would have been pleased. For did she not plead with Lord Salisbury to appoint Rafiuddin Ahmed, a friend of her beloved Munshi, Abdul Karim, to the British embassy in Constantinople? Prescient beyond her times, she was acting on the same sound cultural principle that recently sent Sikkim's Karma Topden as India's ambassador to Mongolia. Drawing a blank, the canny Kaiser-i-Hind tried to persuade her government to use Rafiuddin to collect intelligence from Muslims worldwide. He had studied at Gray's Inn, wrote for a periodical called The Nineteenth Century, and Balliol's great Professor Benjamin Jowett had recommended him to Arthur Godley, permanent under-secretary of state at the India Office. These were formidable qualifications for a high-flying intelligence agent, a 19th-century Kim Philby. But, in a disparaging comment that echoes down the years, Victoria's courtiers dismissed Rafiuddin as 'a journalist and a meddler'. Worse, they accused him of selling state secrets to the Afghans. 'These Injuns' was how Sir Henry Ponsonby, the queen's secretary, referred to Abdul Karim and his circle. Today's 'Injuns' have wiped out the intervening decades to become the true inheritors of the Munshi of whom they have never heard. Every country has a core culture to which newcomers try to adjust. Past generations of foreigners, whether French Huguenots, Flemish weavers, Jewish tradespeople and others, sought merger in the mainstream so that the children of W.C. Bonnerjee's son, Shelley, who dropped the family surname, or Michael Madhusudan Dutt's Dutton descendants are as lost to their origins as any Dutch Bentinck or French Santer. Not for them a new-fangled multicultural British identity. Now, however, the insistence on halal meat, the demand for Friday holiday, investment in temples, the ebullience with which Holi, Diwali and Dussehra are celebrated, and organized pilgrimages to the Kumbh mela speak of a determination to stand out. Prince Charles's suggestion that the monarch's Defender of the Faith title should be revised to Defender of Faiths indicated the heir to the throne's support for the concept of a Britain that boasts more than one religious pole. Afro-Caribbeans probably began it all, subcontinentals joining them in assertive multiculturalism to comprise the 'New British' whose dialect and demeanour some English commentators find distasteful. The Munshi may have been a charlatan, but the cultural dignity on which he stood even as he used his English connections to speculate in property in Uttar Pradesh proclaimed him the father of successful modern multiculturalism. Another trend he set: Victoria's doctor found a different tongue each time he examined 'Mrs Karim'. But it was his influence that prompted the queen to write, spelling and punctuation eccentric as always, 'I agree with the Mohammedans that duty towards ones Parents - goes before every other but that is not taught as part of religion in Europe.' Many strands link the Munshi's England with Chakravarti's - an undying addiction to pagan ritual, a sturdy sense of justice that middle-class Indians who have done well here are strangely reluctant to acknowledge, and, of course, royalty's central role. Each bears elaboration. A hubbub down the road at All Souls on Sunday night resolved itself into a torchlight throng following a wooden decoy duck held aloft on a pole while a learned don in a sedan chair sang bizarre and sometimes lewd lyrics as he urged the crowd 'hunting the mallard' to run ever faster. Celebrated only once a century, it was originally a 'debauched and raucous' event to commemorate the wild duck that was surprised in a ditch when All Souls was being built in 1438, and in 1801 the roistering Fellows hunted and killed a live mallard and laced their wine with its blood. The tragic death in north London of an eight-year-old Nigerian girl at the hands of an Ivory Coast adherent of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God who believed she was driving demons out of the child was also a piece of tribalism but from which the savagery had not been exorcised. Second, Victoria's sense of social justice transcended the exotic appeal of her Munshi or Duleepsinghji. She complained that there were not enough Indians in the 1898 birthday honours, and ensured that Salisbury apologized for calling Dadabhoy Naoroji 'a black man'. But she did more, constantly holding up as an example the butcher's son who became archbishop, bestowing medals on Indian women who worked to reduce maternity deaths and demanding more honours for humbly-born self-made men in Britain. Disregard of race was a detail of her overriding belief in merit. Someone wrote the other day that while Victoria's voice can be heard loud and clear, no one knows what the queen-mother or her reigning daughter thinks. That is not quite correct. Friends in Marlborough House used to recount during the Thatcher years how hard Queen Elizabeth battled her prime minister to keep the commonwealth secretariat in her grandmother's palace. That commitment gives the monarchy a sympathetic international dimension. India is overlooked among the reasons for its fading aura. But on the train to Caernarvon to cover the Prince of Wales's investiture 32 years ago, an Englishwoman lamented perspicaciously that 'royal occasions hadn't been the same since those dear maharajas stopped coming!' Even in the Sixties, people said it was a shame that George VI, whom Krishna Menon called a friend of India and for whom Clement Attlee sought a title 'from India's heroic age', 'didn't get his durbar'. If Victoria's assumption of the Kaiser-i-Hind title was to establish parity with the German and Russian emperors, as The Statesman commented, it may not be surprising that the disappearance of those magic words, Ind Imp, diminishes the otherwise fondly regarded last empress, even in loyal British eyes.