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Long before the first British merchant, Captain Hawkins, reached the Indian west coast at Surat in 1607, the Portuguese were there.The Portuguese soon faced the central social problem that a century and a half later would haunt the next imperial wave of English intruders as well. It was impossible to maintain an army over long periods , to have enough men to hold a city, a region, and even a subcontinent, without women.The king of Portugal, after first experimenting with importing women from home, adopted the obvious solution. The soldiers were commanded to look for liaisons among the indigenous population, a method officially declared to meet with government approval whether the soldiers married the women or not, as long as the offspring of these unions were baptized as Christians (meaning Catholics). Starting with Captain Hawkins, the English followed the Portuguese example. Hawkins married a person who would come to be called, in one of the many racial euphemisms generated by the British presence in India, a “country-born” girl. His wife, presented to him by the Moghul emperor, Jehangir, was the daughter of one of the emperor’s generals, an Armenian, through a union with a local woman (Rodrigues , 127). Captain Hawkins’s wife is a perfect example of the kinds of women many British men of status in India did marry. First, most often they were women who were themselves “mixed race,” as the offspring of previous unions between Indians and foreigners (usually the Portuguese, but also the Dutch, the French, and many others). Second, at least in the seventeenth century, they were women of good family, bringing as part of their value some sort of political or economic alliance. The British did not leap immediately into the business of mixed-race marriages. First, like the Portuguese, they tried the import route. But what with passage and room and board, it turned out to be a costly proposition. Moreover, the volunteers were “scandalous to our nation, religion and government” (S. M. Edwardes, Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, 2:62). Just how “low” these women were, even given the near-catastrophic shortage of British women, is seen by a notice placed by 235 appendix two TheWomen of British India One must travel to understand Englishness. gikandi, 89 the local theater in the Calcutta Gazette of February 23, 1797. “A certain person who made her appearance on the first night of the performance is desired to take notice that in future she will not be permitted to remain in the house should she be so illadvised as to repeat her visit” (Bhatia, 23). Of the British women in India, most, of course, were of the sort who would not be thrown out of the theater. The problem was simply that until about the third decade of the nineteenth century they were so few. And those few were almost all already married. Wives were of two kinds. There were the very upper echelons, wives of the top officers or of the leading investors or merchants in the civil service, virtually always in India only temporarily. The others were the women who settled in India with their soldier husbands. After the wives, there was a second, almost infinitesimal, group, the unmarried females sent out to India to find a husband. These included the girls who set out for India single but were already engaged and traveling to meet their fiancés and the girls who became engaged or even married before they landed. A very few were still available when they got off the ship.These young hopefuls were the subject of a malicious poem by Thomas Hood. By Pa and ma I’m daily told To marry now’s the time, For though I’m very far from old, I’m rather in my prime. They say while we have any sun We ought to make our hay— And India has so hot a one I’m going to Bombay. (Bhatia, 32) Very rarely, the daughters or sisters or cousins sent to India were “old maids” who had failed to snag a husband at home, but almost all were young, anywhere from twelve to sixteen. Given the extreme shortage of British girls, marriage at thirteen in India was considered optimum, at sixteen already on the edge of too late. In this feverish marriage market, to be seventeen and unmarried was to have an unusually serious flaw. The general attitude was that there was nothing to wait for and every...

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