The women who flocked to India to bag a husband

pmaitra

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The women who flocked to India to bag a husband

From the 1600s until the Second World War, 'surplus women' flocked to India in a bid to bag a husband. In her new book, Anne de Courcy explains why
The history of the Fishing Fleet dates from the days of the East India Company, that vast trading organisation with its own army that wound up virtually ruling India. In its early days, when journeys by sail could take up to six months, many Company officers only came home once, if at all, during their service.

Some formed liaisons or marriages with Indian girls. For others, the Company developed the practice of sending out batches of prospective brides, whom they maintained in India for a year, during which time they were supposed to find a mate. They were known as the Fishing Fleet; if after the year they had proved too plain or too unpleasant for even the most desperate Company man, they were shipped home as "Returned Empties".
The women who flocked to India to bag a husband - Telegraph
 

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From the 1600s until the Second World War, 'surplus women' flocked to India in a bid to bag a husband. In her new book, Anne de Courcy explains why




Right through the era of "the Fishing Fleet" – the name given to the girls and women who went out to India to look for husbands from the 17th century on — engagements were often a brisk affair. After a mere half dozen meetings with her future husband, Violet Swinhoe wrote in her diary (in 1916): "James had final talk with Daddy and then we were engaged. Too queer for words. I lay down."

The history of the Fishing Fleet dates from the days of the East India Company, that vast trading organisation with its own army that wound up virtually ruling India. In its early days, when journeys by sail could take up to six months, many Company officers only came home once, if at all, during their service.

Some formed liaisons or marriages with Indian girls. For others, the Company developed the practice of sending out batches of prospective brides, whom they maintained in India for a year, during which time they were supposed to find a mate. They were known as the Fishing Fleet; if after the year they had proved too plain or too unpleasant for even the most desperate Company man, they were shipped home as "Returned Empties".

But most were snapped up on arrival, after courtships that lasted from a month or so to – sometimes – a mere few days. "You must not be surprised when I tell you I am going to be married on the 13th of next month to Miss Charlotte Britten," wrote Lieutenant Stuart Corbett to his father in February 1822. Corbett was a mere 19 years old but he had managed to land one of the 1821 Fishing Fleet within a month or two of their arrival in Calcutta.

His bride, Charlotte Batten, aged 20, was one of eight sisters: their father, in rural Kent, must have despaired of marrying them all off. His solution was to send two of them out to stay with their brother in India's happy hunting ground.



When I began to research my book The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj, I soon realised that this annual migration of young women was a vast phenomenon, not only a story hitherto untold but also a gripping aspect of our history that opened a window on the wider sphere of Empire.

In the early days, the first hurdle was the five-month journey out to India, negotiating anything from pirates to the perilous, stormy seas of the Cape of Good Hope. "The eggs all went bad and had to be thrown overboard weeks ago and though there is dessert on the table every day I cannot touch a thing, as biscuits, figs and ratafia are alive," wrote Minnie Blane, travelling in the late 1850s.

The first shock was the arrival port, seething with humanity — saris of bright pink, scarlet and emerald green vivid against brown skins, sellers of fruit, curry and sweetmeats shouting their wares — and a heat so searing it was like opening an oven door. (One of the stranger habits of the Raj was the medical insistence on wearing flannel next to the skin even in 40-degree heat; only at the beginning of the Twenties were corsets dropped in favour of cotton underwear.)

Social life depended on the climate, often near-perfect in the cold weather but hell in the heat. Then – for those who could not go up to the hills — shoes had to be shaken in case a scorpion had curled up inside, insects gathered so thickly that every wine glass had to have a cover, fatal diseases could kill overnight, clothes would rot, termites could destroy a house's foundations and prickly heat made life a misery.

But none of this deterred the Fishing Fleet girls — or the parents who sent them out. Some, especially in the early days, were adventuresses, women who had tried without success to find a husband in England who could support them in the way of life they wanted. Later, some were schoolgirls returning to families who lived and worked in India, yet others were despatched by parents to stay with brothers or friends with the words, spoken or unspoken, "Find yourself a husband!" ringing in their ears. Marriage, after all, was the goal of just about every woman before the Second World War.

Most were very young, and sexually both inexperienced and ignorant – like Magda Hall, aged 23. As she sat in her bedroom on her wedding day, waiting for her wedding dress to be brought, her brother-in-law, to whom she was devoted, rushed into her room. "Whatever Ralph may do tonight," he said, "remember – it's all right!" And that, she said later, "was all the preparation I had for married life. At the time, I wondered what on earth he could mean."

The new arrival plunged into a whirl of gaiety – polo matches, race meetings, moonlight picnics, dances, cocktail parties and dawn rides as the blue smoke from a distant village rose against the sky.

Then there were the men. Fit from days in the open air and the sport that formed so large a part of Raj life, handsome in their uniforms, and eagerly attentive, they were enough to turn the head of any susceptible young woman.

Once married, the realities of Raj life hit home. The Fishing Fleet bride found her life subordinated to that of her husband, as his was to the Raj, a patriarchal hierarchy shot through with a rigid protocol.

Calling cards were de rigueur and there was even a document entitled the Warrant of Precedence that showed the exact status of everyone in British employ so that seating at official dinners, for instance, could be arranged according to seniority. Wives took their husband's rank, so that senior ladies had their "own" sofa at the Club and first use of the loos after dinner.

What drove the Fishing Fleet girls in their thousands to this alien land? The answer was the inexorable, increasing pressure to marry. It is difficult for us today to realise that for most of the 19th century, a girl without fortune or great beauty became a non-person if she did not marry.

When the taking-over of India by the British government was declared in 1858, single women continued to come out. Ten years later came the opening of the Suez Canal – and a sudden shift in demographics. The trickle became a flood.

Between 1851 and 1861 the number of unmarried women in Britain almost doubled (for the next 60 years, roughly one in three women between the ages of 25 and 35 was unmarried); and most of these were in what were called "the servant-keeping classes".

Articles were written in newspapers and societies founded to deal with the problem of "surplus women", as they were known. For the bold, the solution was to go where the men were: the Empire, especially India.

For here marriageable men outnumbered women by roughly four to one and were avid for wives. In India a girl who was too plain or too poor to find a husband in Britain would be showered with proposals; and she and her husband would live life at a much higher standard than either could at home, with a retinue of servants, spacious bungalows and all the sport you could wish.

For many, India cast a spell that nothing broke. As one of them, Veronica Bamfield, put it: "I was one of the lucky few on whom India lays a dark, jewelled hand, the warmth of whose touch never grows cold to those who have felt it."

The women who flocked to India to bag a husband - Telegraph
 

W.G.Ewald

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A Passage to India - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Passage to India (1924) is a novel by E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj...


A young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, visit the fictional city of Chandrapore, British India. Adela is to marry Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate.

Meanwhile, Dr. Aziz, a young Indian Muslim physician, is dining with two of his Indian friends and conversing about whether it is possible to be friends with an Englishman. During the meal, a summons arrives from Major Callendar, Aziz's unpleasant superior at the hospital. Aziz hastens to Callendar's bungalow as ordered, but is delayed by a flat tyre and difficulty in finding a tonga and the major has already left in a huff.

Disconsolate, Aziz walks down the road toward the railway station. When he sees his favourite mosque, a rather ramshackle but beautiful structure, he enters on impulse. He sees a strange Englishwoman there, and angrily yells at her not to profane this sacred place. The woman, who turns out to be Mrs Moore, has respect for native customs (she had taken off her shoes before entering and she acknowledged that "God is here" in the mosque) disarms Aziz, and the two chat and part as friends.

Mrs. Moore returns to the British club down the road and relates her experience at the mosque. Ronny Heaslop, her son, initially thinks she is talking about an Englishman, and becomes indignant when he learns the facts. He thinks she should have indicated by her tone that it was a "Mohammedan" who was in question. Adela, however, is intrigued.

Because the newcomers had expressed a desire to see Indians, Mr. Turton, the city tax collector, invites numerous Indian gentlemen to a party at his house. The party turns out to be an awkward business, thanks to the Indians' timidity and the Britons' bigotry, but Adela does meet Cyril Fielding, headmaster of Chandrapore's government-run college for Indians. Fielding invites Adela and Mrs. Moore to a tea party with him and a Hindu-Brahmin professor named Narayan Godbole. On Adela's request, he extends his invitation to Dr. Aziz.

At Fielding's tea party, everyone has a good time conversing about India, and Fielding and Aziz even become great friends. Aziz buoyantly promises to take Mrs. Moore and Adela to see the Marabar Caves, a distant cave complex that everyone talks about but no one seems to actually visit. Aziz's Marabar invitation was one of those casual promises that people often make and never intend to keep. Ronny Heaslop arrives and rudely breaks up the party.

Aziz mistakenly believes that the women are really offended that he has not followed through on his promise and arranges the outing at great expense to himself. Fielding and Godbole were supposed to accompany the little expedition, but they miss the train.

Aziz and the women begin to explore the caves. In the first cave, however, Mrs. Moore is overcome with claustrophobia, for the cave is dark and Aziz's retinue has followed her in. The press of people nearly smothers her. But worse than the claustrophobia is the echo. No matter what sound one makes, the echo is always "Boum." Disturbed by the echo, Mrs. Moore declines to continue exploring. So Adela and Aziz, accompanied by a single guide, a local man, climb on up the hill to the next cluster of caves.

As Aziz helps Adela up the hill, she innocently asks him whether he has more than one wife. Disconcerted by the bluntness of the remark, he ducks into a cave to compose himself. When he comes out, he finds the guide sitting alone outside the caves. The guide says Adela has gone into one of the caves by herself. Aziz looks for her in vain. Deciding she is lost, he angrily punches the guide, who runs away. Aziz looks around again and discovers Adela's field-glasses (similar to binoculars) lying broken on the ground. He puts them in his pocket.

Then Aziz looks down the hill and sees Adela speaking to another young Englishwoman, Miss Derek, who has arrived with Fielding in a car. Aziz runs down the hill and greets Fielding effusively, but Miss Derek and Adela have already driven off without a word of explanation. Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Aziz return to Chandrapore on the train.

Then the blow falls. At the train station, Dr. Aziz is arrested and charged with sexually assaulting Adela in a cave. She reports the alleged incident to the British authorities.

The run-up to Aziz's trial for attempted sexual assault releases the racial tensions between the British and the Indians. Adela accuses Aziz only of trying to touch her. She says that he followed her into the cave and tried to grab her, and that she fended him off by swinging her field glasses at him. She remembers him grabbing the glasses and the strap breaking, which allowed her to get away. The only actual evidence the British have is the field glasses in the possession of Dr. Aziz. Despite this, the British colonists firmly believe that Aziz is guilty; at the back of all their minds is the conviction that all darker peoples lust after white women. They are stunned when Fielding proclaims his belief in Aziz's innocence. Fielding is ostracized and condemned as a blood-traitor. But the Indians, who consider the assault allegation a fraud aimed at ruining their community's reputation, welcome him.

During the weeks before the trial, Mrs. Moore is unexpectedly apathetic and irritable. Her experience in the cave seems to have ruined her faith in humanity. Although she curtly professes her belief in Aziz's innocence, she does nothing to help him. Ronny, alarmed by his mother's assertion that Aziz is innocent, decides to arrange for her return by ship to England before she can testify to this effect at the trial. Mrs. Moore dies during the voyage. Her absence from India becomes a major issue at the trial, where Aziz's legal defenders assert that her testimony alone, had it been available, would have proven the accused's innocence.

After an initial period of fever and weeping, Adela becomes confused as to Aziz's guilt. At the trial, she is asked point-blank whether Aziz sexually assaulted her. She asks for a moment to think before replying. She has a vision of the cave in that moment, and it turns out that Adela had, while in the cave, received a shock similar to Mrs. Moore's. The echo had disconcerted her so much that she temporarily became unhinged. She ran around the cave, fled down the hill, and finally sped off with Miss Derek. At the time, Adela mistakenly interpreted her shock as an assault by Aziz, who personifies the India that has stripped her of her psychological innocence, but he was never there. She admits that she was mistaken. The case is dismissed. (Note that in the 1913 draft of the novel EM Forster originally had Aziz guilty of the assault and found guilty in the court, but later changed this in the 1924 draft to create a more ambiguous ending).

All the English are shocked and infuriated by what they view as Adela's betrayal of the white race. Ronny Heaslop breaks off their engagement. Adela stays at Fielding's house until her passage on a boat to England is arranged. After explaining to Fielding that the echo was the cause of the whole business, she departs India, never to return.

Although he is free and vindicated, Aziz is angry and bitter that his friend, Fielding, would befriend Adela after she nearly ruined his life. Believing it to be the gentlemanly thing to do, Fielding convinces Aziz not to seek monetary redress from her. The two men's friendship suffers in consequence, and Fielding soon departs for England. Aziz believes that he is leaving to marry Adela for her money. Bitter at his friend's perceived betrayal, he vows never again to befriend a white person. Aziz moves to the Hindu-ruled state of Mau and begins a new life.

Two years later, Fielding returns to India and to Aziz. His wife is Stella, Mrs. Moore's daughter from a second marriage. Aziz, now the Raja's chief physician, at first persists in his anger against his old friend. But in time, he comes to respect and love Fielding again. However, he does not give up his dream of a free and united India. In the novel's last sentences, he explains that he and Fielding cannot be friends, at least not until India is free of the British Raj. Even the earth and the sky seem to say, "Not yet."
 

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