November 30, 2003

While discussing the Anglo-Nepal War 1814-16 (also known as the Gurkha war) Penderel Moon in his magnum opus, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, quotes from a memorandum sent by Charles Metcalfe, Resident of Delhi, to Lord Hastings, the Governor-General, that the Company had come up against an opposition, not previously encountered, and they had met with an enemy who showed bravery and steadiness.

He stated that their troops had been repulsed by inferior numbers with sticks and stones. The troops had been charged “by the enemy sword in hand and driven for miles like a flock of sheep”. He wrote that they had number on their side, and skill and bravery on the side of the enemy. Calcutta, agreeing with Metcalfe, said that fighting the Gurkha was like “knocking our heads against these mountains”. Hastings was worried about the exploits of the Gurkhas, and exclaimed, “the cloud that overhangs us is imposing”.

In the eastern Nepal, a large force under Major-General Marley was tasked to make the main drive against the Gurkhas, but the operations ended in spectacular failure. And there was an amazing episode of a general deserting his army. Unnerved by reports of inexhaustible energy and excellent fighting qualities of the Gurkhas, Marley suddenly left his army to look after itself!

After the war, Sir David Ochterlony, one of the commanders of the Company’s forces, organized the Gurkha deserters into battalions, which became part of the Company’s regular army. That was the beginning of the valued association of the British with the Gurkhas.

Years later, a young lieutenant, William Slim, impressed by the dash and gallantry of the Gurkhas, joined an elite Gurkha regiment and “thus set his foot on way to becoming a field-marshal”.

Who are these Gurkhas? Even now, they form an integral part of the British army. They have also notched a place for themselves in English literature. Kipling’s In the Presence is the story of four Gurkhas who mounted guard at the lying in state of Edward VII. Talbot Mundy (Hira Singh’s Tale, 1918), Alfred Ollivant (Old For-Ever, 1923), and Gordon Cassarley (The Elephant God, 1920) were attracted by these men of a gallant warrior race, and their merry eyes.

Lionel Caplan, the author, who is Emeritus Professor of South Asian Anthropology in the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, also asks the same question. “Who are the Gurkhas?” And, he, himself, provides the answer, which is based on an analysis of military literature produced over a period of two centuries by British officers of the Gurkha regiments, their personal memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, and regimental histories and books, which tell the Gurkha story in a general and popular way, coffee-table picture books, recruiting handbooks, and the author’s own field work among the Gurkhas in eastern Nepal.

The author maintains that the Gurkhas portrayed in the military writings were endowed with characteristics of the British officer class — martiality, courage, masculinity and loyalty. The British military writers singled out for praise in the Gurkhas these very qualities of the officer class itself. The Gurkhas had an additional quality associated with those who led them: that special combination of traits (courtesy, humour, sportsmanship) which defined persons of breeding. The Gurkhas were not simply warriors, but gentlemen, as well. They were depicted as akin to public school boys. This was in contrast to various other classes of Indians, who represented “others”. But the perceived similarity and identification are not total.

With reference to the superiority of an expanding Empire, always created by Europeans, other and colonized people were projected as lesser: “less human, less civilized, as child or savage, wild man, animal or headless mass”, which was the keystone of imperial ideology. In relation to England, they are characterized as “secondary, abject, weak, feminine, and other”. And depending upon imperial interest, certain categories of people were deemed to be closer to the English self than others. Within the extended Empire, some, for instance, the Gurkhas were rated to be superior to Indians. The Gurkhas were like the Zulus, who were seen as “a people imbued with nobility”, and were different from “others”. During one of the Sikh Wars, the Gurkha detachments asked to pitch their tents with the British regiments, not with the ‘black folks’. When the term “Native Officers” was dropped from the Indian Army, the Gurkha subedars and jamadars became “Gurkha officers”, and not “Indian officers”. Their soldiers were called “riflemen” and not “sepoys”. The Gurkha riflemen were entitled to share the same canteens as British soldiers, a privilege Indian sepoys did not enjoy.

All along military literature has accorded the Gurkhas characteristics, which reflect more the nature of their officers — mostly British — than those of Nepali hillmen. This was in accordance with the social background of the officers of the British Royal Army, which attracted aristocrats, who had come through British public schools, producing future officers on “a uniform diet of games, an ideology of chivalry, and imperial triumphalism”, reflecting proper masculinity. And the Gurkhas had been raised to a higher pedestal, and were endowed with characteristics of martiality, loyalty and physical courage — these being the characteristics of ideal manhood. But the writers kept a safe distance. The Gurkhas were perceived to be physically courageous, but did not have moral courage, with which only the British officers were endowed. This distinction is summarized by the author as “the Gurkhas are brave, their officers are courageous”.

In a nutshell, the military writings portrayed the Gurkhas as short, young gentlemen or cherished pets; and, their comparison to British public school boys underlined precisely that point. The Gurkhas are anything but stereotypical Oriental: they are “honorary Europeans, miniature versions of the officers themselves”. The author proposes that the Gurkha only exists in the context of the Western military imagination, a sort of a screen on to which the British projected themselves.

All in all, the book is a thoughtful, novel, and well-written analysis of military writings on the Gurkhas. But Caplan’s source is not based on anthropological texts, which could have been utilized to discuss, in some details, social structure, religious beliefs and kinship of the Gurkhas. It is impossible for a reader to locate the places in east Nepal, where the author stayed for his research work. A sketch map of the area or a map of reasonable scale would have been helpful. I had to use my R.F.1:1250000 map to locate them. Then the cover shows “a Gurkha platoon ... in Waziristan, Afghanistan, 1919”. Waziristan in Afghanistan? And that too in 1919, years after the demarcation of the boundary between Afghanistan and British India?

Though it is an interesting reading, the book might not appeal to a Pakistani anthropologist, least of all, to a common reader, who is not concerned about the Gurkhas. Perhaps, it might interest the historian of Frontier Force Regiment, which had, before 1947, the 5th Royal Gurkhas as one of its regiments having permanent headquarters in Abbottabad.

Warrior Gentlemen — Gurkhas in the Western Imagination
By Lionel Caplan
Himal Books, P.O. Box 166, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur, Nepal
Tel: +977-1-542544/548142
Fax: +977-1-541196
Email: books@himalassociation.org
Website: www.himalassociation.org/books
ISBN 99933 43 42 0
239pp. Napalese Rs375

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