The earliest of European settlers in the lands that are now Bangladesh, were famous, one might almost say infamous, in their home lands, for their miscegenation with the women and girls they found in the parts of Empire in which they spent their working lives.
Many of the most acquisitive returned home, not just with enormous wealth, but leaving behind a heritage of Anglo Indians that haunted the society of the Raj for generations.
But if it haunted the most moralistic of the British ... frequently from somewhat lower middle class origins ... it inevitably haunted, too, the most religious, and most nationalistic, of the native peoples.
Some men, however, stayed, and founded, in the early days, such famous, “white Mughal” dynasties as the Gardners and Skinners, others, later, simply remained with their families, having founded more ordinary dynasties that remain, with distinctively European family names, even today.
These relationships, even marriages, have left, it is said, not only the family heritages, but such cultural heritage that took a reverse direction, bringing to Europe such habits of personal hygene as the slowly developing habit of daily bathing, that so transformed social hygene back in Britain.
But the men of the East India Company, and their successors in the Raj period, known to be in a position of social admiration and envy, as well as economic potential, attracted the British parents of young women who sought both wealth and position for their daughters.
A little like parents in today’s Bangladesh who seek, or are prepared to encourage, marriage of their sons and daughters to holders of British, Canadian, US or Australian passports for their social and economic potential, poverty stricken upper and middle class parents encouraged their daughters to seek an employee of the East India Company, and, later, the Raj, to secure, often not just their daughter’s future, but also their own.
From the middle of the 19th century, and the beginning of the Raj, Indian Civil Service employees were regarded as the greatest prizes, with such as Plantation supervisors the lowest on the list of prospects.
From the earliest days, when the economic potential of East India Company employees became apparent in Britain, so apparent that, in 1719, Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe’s last adventure, in his eponymous novel, in the lands around the Ganges delta, revelling in the wealth to be obtained there, it appears parents were ready to entrust offspring to hazardous voyages with the prospect of hooking an eligible husband.
And it was probably the, perhaps unspoken, but certainly thought, use of the “hooking” word, that may have inspired the description of nearly two centuries of husband seeking travel between Britain and the sub-continent, as the, “fishing fleet.”
After Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which, there is little doubt, derived much of its funding investment from the wealth generated in its increasing Indian territories, Britain saw the steady rise of a professional and commercial middle class.
This rising middle class were, especially with medical advances, as well, the ready producers of large families. The unmarried daughters of such families were often considered, in the vernacular British parlance, as being, “on the shelf,” by their mid twenties, if they had failed to find a husband.
As the bureaucracy of the East India Company developed, especially following the Act of Permanent Settlement in 1793, and through to the middle of the 19th century, the rules of the Company increasingly reflected the morality of that rising middle class. Graduates of the Administrative Academy, and their Military College, were discouraged, both to marry before the age of thirty, and to associate with local women in India.
Earlier, East India Company employees, especially, the more senior, had regularly developed relationships with, especially, more aristocratic local women, and many of the more junior responded to their natural urges in the time honoured fashion of bordellos.
The social evolution of administration, however, saw all such relationships, officially, at least, frowned upon.
In Britain, the families overburdened with unmarriagable daughters, slowly began to realise that, in the Indian territories, especially those most highly regarded, in the Bengal that flourished under administration based in Calcutta, but operated across the rich lands, most of which now lie in Bangladesh, offered the prospect of rich pickings in the league of eligible husband material.
As the writer, Anne de Courcy, puts it in her book, “The fishing fleet,” the girls who were, “too intelligent, too poor, or too plain to make good matches at home ... were trawled around the balls and clubs of Calcutta and Delhi as soon as they arrived.” Distant relatives and friends, the older married women of The Company, and later, The Raj, were commissioned to supervise such trawling.
De Courcy focuses, rather, on the later 19th century, and early 20th, the height of the Raj, but there is little doubt that “the flee,” began to arrive at a much earlier age.
Match making did not only rely on such trawling, of course. Even the great Warren Hastings found his second wife aboard the ship returning him to Calcutta in 1769; she was, at the beginning of the onboard romance, already married to someone else. The very long voyages, around the Cape, of the earliest century, or so, were, surely, also rich fishing grounds! There is not much doubt that even aboard ship on the way out, catches could be hooked; and, if the trawling in India failed, there was always a last chance during the long voyage home.
As the UK Guardian Newspaper put it in its revue of de Courcy’s book, her, “girl’s eye view of the Raj makes clear the damage imperialism did, not just to India, but to the imperialists themselves. Indian Civil Service men had no home leave for eight years, so the offspring of the marriages might not see their fathers for many years in a row. De Courcy includes the accounts of several miserable offspring born in India and incarcerated at boarding schools in England. As an account of husband hunting, ‘The fishing fleet’ is thorough and serviceable. As an account of how to screw up two societies at once, it’s unparalleled.” There is little doubt that the social effects of Indian life on the ruling and administrative middle classes of Britain may, even yet, have no entirely escaped its socially damaging influences.
And there is little doubt that traces of the consequences of this form of social engineering linger still. In Britain, the awful public school system has had to rapidly reform itself, especially in recent decades, but the emotional and physical abuse the system facilitated and harboured has, undoubtedly, left an inheritance.
The other side of that coin leaves the possibility that, the “fishing fleet” may well have mitigated what might, otherwise, have led to far higher levels of abuse and miscegenation. The modern appeal of “Portuguese Eyes,” the blue, green and grey eyes that grace so many attractive brown skinned faces today, in Bangladesh, especially in the far south east, may be more apparent to the visitor that to the local purist. And the continuance of both a strong, if small, Christian tradition, and family names of a decidedly European origin betrays the integrity of many of the European visitors, over the past five centuries, who fell in love, and put down roots. For both good, and ill, it may be reasonable to consider that the “fleet” has had a lasting effect on both sides of the coin.
Something that those who have migrated to Britain, but who have continued the traditions of the “fleet” in a reverse direction, relying on relatives or marriage arrangers to overcome the visa obstacle the now stands in the way, may care to reflect on.
We do know that the earliest migrants to Britain, from the earliest seamen, the “laskars,” who settled in Britain from as early as the 17th century, like the early European settlers in India, developed relationships and marriages, with British girls. Miscegenation was two sided, but the “fishing fleet” of the 18th and 19th centuries was entirely one sided. How times change!
