Peter J. Karthak

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a recently diagnosed post-service health condition, both mental and physical, among armies of the world, most especially of the most developed, highly educated, immensely rich and modernly sophisticated countries. Chief among the most publicized and academically studied and intellectually dissected cases are found among American and British soldiers who come home to suffer, and cause suffering to family and society, and be generally liable to the system and state. Derangement, disillusionment, destructive tendencies, including suicide, and physical deterioration are the symptoms in those “vets” who have returned from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other theaters of war. 

These psycho-physiological symptoms are evident in those nations, mostly of the West, where acquired wisdom is against wars but the geopolitical logic of the day offers no other alternatives. Yet, in sum, economic comfort and civilized comport are strange bedfellows to conflicts and wars but it;s such First World nations must intervene as policemen for universal democracy, international justice, human rights for all and other paraphernalia of proper living and conduct made possible by capitalistic values and norms. In the process, PTSD is one of the prices to pay. 

But not really so for the Gurkhas of the British Army and the Gorkhas of the Indian Army, nor for the Singapore Police Force or the Sultanate of Brunei’s own Gurkha Reserve Unit, among other services having the martial men of Nepal.

Why is that, that not a single case of personal frustration and defeatism is seen in those fighting men of Nepal since their first engagement with the British in India, beginning with their first commission in their army in 1820?

Some factors are worth considering with regards to the Nepali fighters’ freedom from personal angst and individual anger:

First, these men have had nothing more to lose. From the beginning of time, they lived in highlands of harsh nature. The puny creeks and dry gulches of their habitats turned into impassable raging rivers in the rainy months. They tilled their perennially windy landscapes prone to landslides in the steep contours of the Nepal Himalaya. They eked out their living out of craggy and infertile soil. So the “Lure of the South” to “Muglan” (Mughal) in India and beyond provided them the vision and dream of deliverance and betterment. Joining the army of the Angrej Bahadurs – “nearly as brave as ourselves” in the Gurkha eyes – was one of many options. This was the great hope which dawned on them in the early 19th century, the zenith of colonialism in the world.

Two, what best lands and pastures they had had for centuries were taken away from them when the marauders of the Hindu king Prithvi Narayan Shah and his successors disenfranchised these very peoples from their ancestral lands. Consequently, their native lands in Myagdi, Parbat, Palpa, Kaski, Gorkha, Lamjung in the mid-west, and Tehrathum, Taplejung, Panchthhar and Ilam to the remote east were overtaken by Bahuns, Thakuris, Chhetris and other horsetail followers of the Shah and Rana rulers. The arriviste Hindu castes of Nepal cast out the indigenous nationalities from their own prehistoric lands.

Fortunately, the push received a pull, and these displaced tribes, natives and ethnics of Nepal were pulled in by the British in India and lands beyond.

What about the rest of Nepal, west of the Rapti-Narayani Basin? The region belonged mostly to the Baisi (twenty-two) and Chaubisi (twenty-four) Rajyas (kingdoms and principalities) held by other Shahs, Shahas, Shahis, Sens, Chands, Mallas, Kunwars (one branch became the Ranas from 1842) and other Thakuri rulers. Their virtue lay in being Hindus, as the dominant Shahs were, and therefore, though they lost their suzerainty to Prithvi Narayan’s new Durbar in Kathmandu, they retained much of their ownership rights and revenue privileges; and in addition, they gained the patronage, protection and pampering of the amalgamating ruler of the “Asali Hindustan” which Prithvi Narayan edified himself to be in his new Kingdom of Nepal.

In these ways, the Gurkhas in Nepal were disowned, marginalized and also ousted. They were thus already traumatized, stressed and disordered at home. What of modern PTSD, then, for the Gurkhas in their many actions, including two world wars, and engagements when they already had their own PTSD in Nepal, and that too decades earlier? Here, the “P” should also stand for “pre” and the-then “present.”

The Gurkhas/Gorkhas as the world’s finest fighters come replete with many shibboleths ascribed to them. One is “Ayo Gorkhali!” This is poorly translated by the British as “The Gurkhas are upon you!” The proper war cry simply is, “Here come the Gorkhalis!” Another given motto is, “Kafar hunubhanda marnu niko,” meaning “It’s better to die than being (a) coward.” This is outright silly: Why be coward, and die, too? That’s not the Gurkha business to cower and collapse. It’s not even “Do or die!” or “Kill, or be killed!” The Gurkhas opt for undiluted “do” and “kill” and not for dying or being killed. That was how the “Ayo Gorkhali!” war cry heralded their “Jarmanko Dhawa” and Burmah Front upfront.

The one principal governing principle of the Gurkhas was “Maranko okhati chhaina/Hukumko jawab chhaina.” – There’s no antidote to death and no countermand to (battle) orders. The other was “Lekhala bhavi metala ko?/Afno afno lahana ho.” – What’s plotted can’t be blotted; so each one to his own lot. These beliefs translated into “Ayo Gorkhali!” It’s the sense of fate, destiny and action that leads a Gurkha on. With such predetermined and preordained mindset, what’s PTSD for a Gurkha?

It’s, however, asserted by some Nepali scholars (Pratyoush Onta et al) lately that Gurkhas wrote of their “dukha” in foreign lands in their letters home. It’s this academized and intellectualized “dukha” that’s taken as symptomatic of traumas, stresses and disorders they went through in the trenches, deserts and mangroves. But this is merely one particular kind of misery among the universal vagaries of human life in this world.

But there’s the second, and more important, story behind the alleged “dukha.” This was expressed by those Gurkhas who were conscripted by Rana Nepal against their wishes, especially during the long autocratic rule of Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher who deputized “gallawallas” or recruitment agents to the villages to forcefully requisition young men for British India. In this arbitrariness, Nepalis didn’t join the British as enthused Gurkhas; they were ordered to become ones against their free will. Consequently, those who didn’t wish to mortgage their souls rather decided to flee to Muglan, and the exoduses happened in droves of hundreds and overnight (Mahesh Chandra Regmi) – a “silent cry” of another kind which Ludwig Stiller’s theme did’t incorporate. The Ranas may’ve owned their bodies, but not their hearts and souls, and it was this trauma that caused the “dukha.”

It’s not, on the other hand, the universal PTSD that besets the returning Gurkhas but the Nepali viruses of traumas, stresses and disorders caused by their own fellowmen, and in their own motherland. This national industry is based on the assumption that every homecoming Gurkha is a goldmine, and is therefore ripe for Nepal’s corrupt officials, brokers, agents and cabbies to fleece them to their birthday suits.

For fear of being too prejudiced here, it’s best to quote from Lionel Caplan’s book, “Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination” (Himal Books, 2003) which reports on observant British officers routinely visiting their retired men in Nepal and finding them “doing nothing in particular, other than living off pensions and invested capital.” Caplan continues with a particular officer’s statement on his former orderly, now living in Phidim in Ilam:

He does nothing there. It’s awful. He has two houses in Phidim, lives in one, and rents out the other. I don’t think we ever thought  that this sort of situation would arise. But if you ask them ‘why don’t you do something for your country?’, they say, ‘what’s the point, sahib, these [high castes] are all corrupt and will take everything we have.’

The “high castes” are the oft-cited BCN (Bahun-Chhetri-Newar) combine, the most extortionist triumvirate in the bureaucratic rip-off system of Nepal which loots the “Loaded Lahure”-s in various ways.

The Gurkhas and Gorkhas have always remained apolitical and free of religious fundamentalism and racial extremism. But lately, their organizations have been politically polarized, and infiltrations by non-Gurkha politicians have been evident at many caucuses.

How were the Gurkhas extorted during the so-called 15-yearlong Maoist “People’s War” is a separate study. The “donation collection” drives of Maoist guerillas and other pretenders depopulated most Gurkha neighborhoods in Dharan, Pokhara and Kathmandu.

These war-in-peacetime circumstances and other civil war situations pressured most of the Gurkhas to migrate to other countries, most of them taking up residency in Britain on their at-par British Army pensions, which, again, is another sad story of traumas, stresses and displacements – best left to Joanna Lumley to elaborate.

These are some of the many latter-day and made-in-Nepal pre-, present-, and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs) historically suffered by the Gurkhas and carried on to the present times in its ultramodern forms crafted and finessed in their own motherland.

The Gurkhas have won 13 Victoria Crosses (VC) since 1911 – the year they were enlisted for the honor – numerous Military Medals (MM) and Military Crosses (MC) and MBE (Member of the British Empire) titles for dispatching external foes. But the enemy within remains unvanquished right inside their own Mother Nepal. That’s the chronic PTSD for the Gurkhas! 

“Ayo Gorkhali!” in South Asia

Publicity on the Gurkhas have mostly been from the British, some American, and Southeast Asian perspectives while the voice from India – whose armed forces employ the most number of Nepal’s hardy hill men, called Gorkhas there – has been muted and rarely heard. But here, too, the silence is slowly breaking down, and more of India’s Gorkhas are now in the news.

In the first week of December, a friend emailed me a story captioned “Aayo Gorkhali Cry that won us a war” filed by Ashok K Mehta on the 4/5 Gorkha Rifles (FF, or Frontier Force). The first three paragraphs of the story have this to say:

Tales of valour of the 4/5 Gorkha Rifles during the 1971 war [with Pakistan] are legendary. The brave soldiers of the battalion fought so valiantly in Sylhet [in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh] that the Pakistani forces actually believed that they had encountered a brigade.

With 15 days to go for Vijay Divas [Victory Day], India’s first comprehensive war victory in 1,000 years, it is appropriate to recall one of the epic battles of 1971 in East Pakistan, the battle of Sylhet which enabled it. Fought between December 7 and 15, it is the first ever heliborne operation resulting in the surrender of the 7,000-strong [Pakistani] Sylhet garrison at the hands of just 500 Johnnies of 4/5 Gorkha Rifles (FF). They have reason to celebrate the battle feat this week as also to usher in 50 glorious years of their raising in Dehradun on January 1, 1963. The battle record is not restricted just to Sylhet but also spreads to its sterling contribution in nailing the Pakistan Ghaznavi force in 1965, the IPKF [Indian Peacekeeping Force] in Sri Lanka, the counter-insurgency in Kashmir and the North-East and in Siachen, where it distinguished itself with zero casualties on the glacier.

But Sylhet is the crown jewel in its ‘bahaduri ka khazana’. The khukuri attack at Atgram and the demolition job at Gazipur were warm-ups for the serial insertions into the jaws of death – a 20th century version of the Charge of the Light Brigade: The charge of Aayo Gorkhali. The ferocity of Four Five at Atgram and Gazipur had preceded the battalion helidrop at Sylhet.”

And so on for the next 12 paragraphs of Mehta’s feature.

The Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, resulting in the birth of Bangladesh, is considered the shortest war in modern history. Perhaps the 4/5th Gorkha Rifles helped in the brevity of the final battle which won India the whole war, and in record time. The Gorkha Bahadurs of General (later Field Marshal) Sam “Bahadur” Manekshaw, India’s Chief of Staff at that time, did him proud.

The writer is the copy chief at The Week and can be contacted at [email protected]

Published on: 28 December 2012 | Republica