bigmeat said:
how did the gurkahs come to serve in the english army
Oh, I'm absolutely enamoured by the Gurkhas, so if I pick up on this, it should probabaly end up in "History".
The reason I'm fascinated isn't som much because they are "a fierce race of mountain warriors" recruited by the British. In a sense they are, but they are also one of the best examples of how the British in India created "ethnicities" and accompanying mythologies. (Divide and conquer kind'o thing.)
Anybody interested can pick up Lionel Caplan's "Warrior Gentlemen: »Gurkhas« in the Western Imagination" (1995). (He's an anthropologist.)
What happened was that the British fought the Anglo-Nepalese war 1814-1816. It would hardly have been noticed behind the final chapter of the Napoleonic wars.
The ruling dynasty of Nepal they fought were the "Goorkhas". Their troops fought well and seems to have had a sense of "cheerfulness" (while getting killed) and "sportsmanship". (One wounded nepalese soldier is said to have sought out the British first-aid station, had his wound treated, and then returned to the fight.)
Anyway, the British were soon recruiting indigenous soldiers in large number, the Nepalese had made an impression, so naturally they recruited some of them as well. And upon these they put the label "Gurkha".
The Gurkha mythology got of the ground with the Sepoy rebellion in 1857. The Gurkhas like the Sikh stayed loyal and were rewarded for this by being kept in ethnically and religiously homogenous regiments.
Unlike the Sikh who were under direct British politcal control, the Gurkhas were recruited in independant Nepal (or perhaps semi-independant). Coupled with the very real military accomplishments of these troops, the British were free to idealize these "hardy mountaneers" as much as the liked. And they did tap into the strange mixture of racial and political doctrine that was spawned in India.
The Gurkhas were considered to be a kind of "honorary Europeans". They shared qualities withe their British officers, that was usually considered to be absent in "Orientals" in general. (Who were assumed to be lazy, cowardly, indolent, useless in a scrap etc.) The high point in this idealization came when the British decided that the Gurkhas and the Highlanders had a special bond ("They are both from "highlands", d'ye see!" seems to have been the logic behind this.) So the Gurkhas were supplied with bagpipes, drums and tartans. They were also given preferential treatment as "better-than-natives" by the fact that Gurkha NCOs could enter the white officers mess to report without having to be invited. A pretty useless privilege, but a source of pride in the Indian army.
Of course, you couldn't allow the Gurkhas to approach the superiority of their British commanders too closely, so for idelogical reasons these warriors were also cast as child-like, small, in need of a guiding paternal (white) hand, but plucky, cheerful and brave; i.e. a kind of oriental public-school boys.
The most elaborate bit of mythology was of course the one about the Gurkhas as an ethnically separate "nation" or "race" in Nepal. They have at times been cast as "free-holding yeomen", just what the British like to think of themselves. That's neat, considering that the Gurkhas were (and are) recruited among several of the lower casts in their society (gurung, magar, limbu, rai, tamang et al.) In Nepal they don't think of themselves as "Gurkha", they turned into that in the British army.
If there is any basis for thinking about the Gurkhas a specific "etnicity", it is based on the fact that they are linguistically peculiar, belonging to a tibeto-burmese group. Otherwise they differ very little from Napalese in general. (They are hindus like everyone else for one.) And their "ethnic" weapon", the kukri, seems to be based on a fairly common kind of knife in Nepal, with no special military connotations.
What the British think of the Gurkhas today I cannot really say, but they seem to be very popular. They were considered so important, that in 1947 while negotiating Indian independance, a deal was made that allowed Britain to continue to recruit 2 of the traditional 5 regiments. So India has Gurkhas as well.
That said, I don't think it detracts a whit from the valour of these troops, or their achievements.
The British empire never ceases to fascinate me!
