Women of the Raj

Chapter 1 The Voyage Out Englishwomenand Welsh and Scots and Irish womenhad been going to India for generations by the time the Raj reached its peak in the late nineteenth century. The first to make the voyage may have been a Mrs. Hudson and her maid, Frances Webb, who went in 1617 as companions to an Armenian lady who had been born in India. (Frances had a love affair on the voyage, unwittingly setting the pattern for countless women who came after her.) Over the years, India drew a few women looking for workas milliners, perhaps, or governesses. And some women had a calling to be missionaries. Others simply went because they had been summoned back by their families after an education in Britain. The great majority, however, went to India because their husbands were there or because they hoped to find husbands for themselves. (To keep them chaste for the marriage market, unmarried women traveled, until well into the twentieth century, under the care of chaperones, usually married women who were making the voyage anyway.) The "fishing fleet," as it was known unkindly but accurately by the nineteenth century, arrived in India in the autumn at the start of the cold weather. One lady who came out in 1779 divided what she called "the speculative ladies" into old maids, "of the shrivelled and dry description," and girls, "educated merely to cover the surface of their mental deformity." The odds were that their fishing would meet success: throughout the period of British rule in India, European men outnumbered European women by about three to one. Understandably, few British women had cared to come to the unsettled India of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and, what is more, the early charters of the East India Company pointedly forbade women on its posts. Its employees ignored that regulation as they did so many others. They took Indian mistresses; worse, from the point of view of the Company's staunch Protestant directors, they married Catholics, daughters or widows of the Portuguese. To save the souls of its men, the Company, for a time, played matchmaker. In the later part of the seventeenth century it shipped batches of young women from Britain to India. The cargo, divided into "gentlewomen" and "others," were given one set of clothes each and were supported for a yearquite long enough, it was thought, for them to find themselves husbands. Some did not; and the Company tried to deny that it had any obligation to look after them further. Most unfairly it also warned them to mind their morals: "Whereas some of these women are grown scandalous to our nation, religion and Government interest," said a letter from London to the Deputy Governor of Bombay in 1675, "we require you to give them fair warning that they do apply themselves to a more sober and Christian conversation." If that warning did not have the right effect, the women were to be fed on bread and water and shipped back to Britain. The experiment was not a happy one and it must have been with relief that the Company abandoned the practice in the eighteenth century. British women still traveled to India but they came individually. The voyage was a dreadful one. The wooden sailing vessels, tiny by today's standards, were tossed about in every stormand the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean were famous for their storms. The passengers faced at best being thrown about in their cabins, at worst drowning. The Reverend Hobart Caunter recorded one such storm, which took place off the east coast of India in the 1830s. The weather began to turn foul early one morning. "The only lady among us every now and then expressed her fears, when a sudden gust caused the vessel to lurchMacMillan, Margaret is the author of 'Women of the Raj ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780812976397 and ISBN 0812976398.