The Impact of the British Empire in Nepal (eBook)

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: In January 2012 the BBC News reported that the British Ministry of Defense had announced major job cuts in the British Army. According to the chairman of the British Gurkha Welfare Society, Major Tikendra Dal Dewan, these retrenchments were about to affect the Gurkha Brigade the most. During the past decades, the Brigade has repeatedly been faced with several problems of similar kind. The working conditions of the Gurkha soldiers have always been very poor compared to those of their fellow soldiers serving the British Army, which becomes most obvious when looking at the different incomes: a Gurkha soldier earns only around one third of the salary of a British soldier. Furthermore, their pension is by far not as high as the pension of those former soldiers being of British origin.

Additionally, once retired, they were not allowed to stay in Great Britain with their families for a long time. Instead, they were sent back to Nepal. In the face of all the inequities and disadvantages the Gurkhas have been experiencing over the last decades, the question arises, why the British Army is still able to recruit Gurkha soldiers to such an extend?

The name Gurkha, also Gorkha or Goorkha, is derived from the Nepali word ‘“Gorkhali”’. Gorkha, literally signifying ‘Defender of cows’, means a man of Mongolian ancestry, from the ancient princedom of Gorkha about fifty miles to the west of Kathmandu, whose King, Prithivi Narayan Shah, constituted the Gorkhali army.

Surely, not all Nepalese soldiers had or have Gurkhali ancestors in their families. Nevertheless, the label ‘Gurka’ is uniquely used for all Nepalese soldiers who serve the British Army. Using a certain variety of spellings, the military still continues to label the ethnically diverse group of Nepali soldiers as Gurkha and by doing so manifests the term as a stereotypical designation that was obviously shaped by western imagination.