The Gurkha legacy: Nepal's National Shame

I believe soul-searching is very important, both in the lives of individuals as well as the societies. Arrogance and hypocrisy largely result from the fact that most people do not bother reflecting on their own deeds and keep themselves at the center of universe as an infallible entity. Nepal may be one of the least prosperous countries in the world but that per se has nothing to do with our dignity as citizens of this modern world. Foreign friends who have been helping Nepal financially deserve our sincere gratitude but by no means a voiceless servility. Moreover, while our individual identities are obviously significant, our collective identity as a people is no less significant. In this pretext, I intend to dissect the legacy of 'Gurkha recruitment', a process in which Nepali youths have been serving in the foreign armies for more than a century now.

First, I doubt even my nationalist credentials, let alone being a chauvinist or a jingoist. I am also one among large number of people who are highly skeptic of history in the conventional sense. But I abhor the notion of so called post modernists that history does not exist. Second, I know how it feels to dream of an ultimate utopia to be achieved through the proletariat revolution. But now that I am at safe distance from those romantic ideas, that matters little to my judgement. Third, I have enormous empathy to poor Nepalis who were forced into performing some of the worst and unwholesome jobs in the world and continue to do so till date. While I consistently blame the system and the institutions that benefited from it, I place no blame at persons who were either lured or forced into the arrangement to be discussed in this article. With this clarification, I intend to give a Nepali perspective of a process by which Nepali youths have been offering themselves for service in foreign armies. The immediate background of this article is a thought-provoking recent book in Nepali and I start the discussion with an reappraisal of a related documentary and a talk program that help us gauge the arguments on two sides of the debate.

Gurkhas advancing with tanks to clear the Japanese from Imphal-Kohima road [N.E. India] (captured between 8 March - 3 July 1944; source: Wikimedia Commons)

During this year's Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF), 'Who will be a Gurkha', a documentary dealing with the recruitment of Nepali youth in British army and directed by Keshang Tseten won two awards: both from the jury as well as the audience. I was naturally disappointed; leaving scores of other films that had meticulously documented the triumphs and tragedies in people's lives even risking their own lives, this not-so-brilliant documentary had won the accolades. Flawlessly artistic and sophisticated film-making of Tseten apart, this documentary had the major flaw of veering dangerously close to playing an apologist role to the so called 'Gurkha Bharti' or the tradition in which the British army continues to recruit a limited number of Nepali youth to date. While capturing the psychology of thousands of Nepali youths who aspire to join the 'Gurkhas' in British army relatively well, this work naturally avoided the contentious historical issues related to the tradition (having got the permission/blessing to shoot inside the British army's recruitment center in Pokhara, it was impossible to be judgmental). Any artwork like this obviously risks helping people to miss the bush by pointing to the trees.

The book on Gurkha recruitment by Jhalak Subedi

The other day, the organizers of KIMFF had organized a talk program featuring Jhalak Subedi who has recently published a book in Nepali that nearly translates in English as 'British Empire's legacy in Nepal: Nitty-gritty of Gurkha recruitment'. While I missed most of the program, I could catch up a lengthy diatribe against those who want to end the trend of so called 'Gurkha recruitment' by a man from the audience who introduced himself as Nobel Kishor Rai (hope I spell it correctly). His grievance was that despite the fact that wealth worth billions of rupees has been brought to Nepal by those serving in the foreign armies (mainly British and Indian) and people's access to as basic amenities as drinking water has been ensured precisely because of that wealth in many regions of Nepal, the smearing of the recruitment tradition has not ended. He was aghast at the attempt of some of the communist parties in Nepal to abolish the tradition itself at a moment when millions of Nepali workers have to roam the deserts of Gulf, just to make a living.

In fact, today's Nepal has so many issues to ponder on that little matters to most of the people whether this particular legacy of imperial Britain remains or is abolished; even though it is an altogether different matter for teenagers who aspire to have a 'glorious' life after joining the British army, and their families. Some questions related to the collective fate of Nepalis as a society, its historical background and the larger implications of such a process to our collective identity, however, are worthy of serious contemplation.

To start with, a debate as to whether so called Gurkhas fighting for foreign army were/are mercenaries is largely redundant: one recent incident in which one extra-servile Gurkha soldier beheaded an Afghan after shooting him to bring his head to his British lord as a proof of his execution speaks more than a thousand words. As Subedi puts it meticulously in his book, the early wave of recruitment of Nepali youth in British army was result of the Britain's need to recruit large number of young men in times of wars, particularly over the first half of the last century. Today's recruitment (a mere ritual compared to massive recruitment before and during world wars) is as much the result of push factors in Nepal created by chronically stunted economy as the Brit's wish to somehow continue the tradition. This, however, does not change the fundamental nature of the relationship between the recruiters and the recruitees: through a process that combines harassment, humiliation, pestering and torment, a human being is converted into an army soldier. While this process is arguably universal among professional armies in the world, the British seem to have gained extra mastery in the realm of manufacturing brutal mercenaries from trivial young men as shown by the appalling behavior of the aforementioned Gurkha soldier in combat in Afghanistan. (It is noteworthy that even during the decade long brutal armed conflict in Nepal, such nauseating brutality was not reported from either side).

The argument that recruitment of Nepali youths should not be stopped as long as Nepal has to export labor to places with often dismal working conditions and a relatively slim remuneration is just ludicrous. The fact that the share of remittance from the youth employed in foreign armies is shrinking fast in Today's Nepal notwithstanding, selling labor can never be equated with swearing to kill and get killed for someone else's interest. Moreover, a recapitulation of a historical phenomenon cannot be done by sole focus on realities of one day. In retrospect, Subedi's book paints a very grim and often abominable picture of hundreds of thousands of poor Nepalis first lured/forced to join the British army in the eve of war and then sent home literally empty-handed. Glorification of such a recruitment process is possible only so long as the devastation brought about by the death, injury and disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Nepalis in world wars and then the subsequent castigation of large size of Nepali workforce which had wasted its most productive years in the service of British Queen, is forgotten.