Relics of empire: A cultural history of the Gurkhas, 1815-1987.

摘要

Since 1815 Nepalese men have served as soldiers in foreign armies, first of colonial India, and later of India and the United Kingdom. The first part of this study documents the creation of Gurkha regiments and analyzes the invention of Gurkhas as a kind of man in colonial India. The second part is a local study of the meaning and import of Gurkha soldiery for one heavily-recruited Gurung community in the hills of West-Central Nepal.;For Gurungs the central attribute of Gurkhas is not even that they are soldiers, but rather that they engage in wage labor in foreign places, returning with alien commodities and knowledge. Gurungs conceive of the years of soldiering not as the centerpiece of their lives, but as a hiatus in them. I examine the historical transformation of the value of soldiering as three distinct cohorts of soldiers have coped with leaving their community, living in foreign lands, fighting and returning home. I argue that Gurung ideals of social harmony and the value they place on competency are effectively turned to obedience within the military and to violent ends in warfare. Thus while Gurungs little resemble British images of the Gurkhas, their comportment can be assimilated to those images. The final chapter examines efforts to sustain a Gurung identity while dealing with the changes wrought by soldiery. I argue that neither models of modernization nor post-modern images of pastiche can describe Gurung styles of negotiating the modern, and that understanding best emerges by attending to Gurung thoughts, based on long and varied experience, about the "developed" world and its relation to their own.;During the nineteenth century Gurkhas were transformed from prisoners-of-war to a celebrated corps d'elite within the British-Indian army. Using archival materials, memoirs and regimental histories, I show how Gurkhas were domesticated through assimilation to European self-images, yet remained alien, understood in the terms of colonial Indian ethnology as a martial race. Comprehensible enough to control with assurance, yet alien enough to deploy against foreign and domestic enemies, the Gurkhas became the military familiars of the British in India and the currency of diplomacy in Anglo-Nepalese relations.