Peter J. Karthak 

Brigade of Gurkhas, Hong Kong
What does it take to produce the “finest fighters in the world,” as the Gurkhas have been known for two centuries? Well, taming and training are two factors that go into manufacturing a Gurkha infantryman. Taming also comes with brainwashing, and training includes full-pack battle-gear morning jogs and long route marches. One National Geographic picture shows an early-morning white jogger in sweatshirt, shorts and running shoes standing and looking befuddled at a passing platoon of battle-ready Gurkhas on the double in Hong Kong. That’s what producing British Gurkhas is all about.

For these images, I take readers to Sek Kong in Hong Kong. It’s 1985, and I’m there to meet my ex-schoolteacher from Turnbull High in Darjeeling. Mr. Nirmal Chandra Pradhan, then principal of the Brigade School, takes me around – the barracks and infrastructures, his school.

A Babuji
Presently, there’s a young Gurkha passing by. This is a Rifleman Clerk of the Babuji Paltan. He salutes Mr. Pradhan and stands respectfully on the side. My teacher introduces us. I come to know that he’s from Paspan Hatta in Darjeeling and I remind him that I bought betel from his father’s paan dokan. Now this Tamang young man is in the British Gurkhas.

“So, how are you?” Mr. Pradhan asks him. “Now you’re in the paltan, yes?”

“Je, Saab.” He clicks his boots and stands at attention. “I’m fine.”

We notice his habit of clicking his heels and coming to “atten-hut” in military rigidity.

“There’s no need to do that. Don’t do it,” Mr. Pradhan tells him. “We both know your father in Darjeeling.”

“Je, Saab! I won’t do it,” he says but clicks his heels again and comes to attention anyway.

“But you did it again! Well, don’t. We aren’t your officers.”

“Sorry Sir!” But again the same clicking and joining of the heels.

“That’s brainwashing, Peter,” my teacher says to me after the lad has taken leave. “Even the Babuji Paltan is molded in this way.”

British Gurkhas
Then we see a platoon of infantrymen in fatigue and camouflage resting on one side of the grounds. One cursing Corporal breaks off from the crowd to greet Mr. Pradhan.

During the pleasantries, my teacher bluntly asks the Corporal, one Pun from Nepal: “Guruji, why do you Ustads use such abusive language at your recruits in their training and exercises?”

“Je Sir? What do you mean kyare?”

“Why do you marry your tender boys to their dear mothers and loving sisters with your vilest expletives?” Mr. Pradhan clarifies.
The Sergeant gives two straightforward replies.

“Je, Saheb, but we ourselves were trained that way by our superiors who were themselves molded in similar ways by their seniors who themselves were thrown around in vicious ways by their Hawaldars who themselves were broken in by their Subedars and Jamadars, who….. I mean, it goes back to the very beginning of the services, Saheb! Only this kind of treatment makes these greenhorn oafs tough soldiers in the end. Otherwise, the entire thing is hopeless.”

My teacher presses on him. “You Ustads threaten to show your boys their parents’ wedding day, using the most vulgar Nepali and Hindi swearwords…..”

“But what can we do, Sir?” the Corporal reasons, by way of explaining the second factor: “When they arrive here, they weep and wail, day and night, thinking of their parents, siblings, the village, their girlfriends. They talk of Marsyangdi Khola and Tyamke Danda, miss Tiger Hill and tea gardens and what not! Frankly, we did the same thing, too, when we reached Malaya from Barrackpore after days and nights on the water. But our Ustads ran us immediately to the muddy kampongs and rainy rubber plantations. So we give the same treatments to these sons of bitches, too. We train them all, Babuji Paltan clerks and sipahis alike, otherwise everything comes to nothing.”

We’re convinced. With such fire sermons and inhuman field and barrack treatments, the British Gurkhas are already washed off, in advance, of the common aftershocks of soldiering, such as PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), which beset the soldiers of other nations.

Super Trainer of Sirji-s at Mount Abu, India
My own family circle in Darjeeling had such a trainer. He was a granduncle called George Singh Mukhiya who was a senior trainer at Mount Abu since the late 1950s. Mount Abu, we learnt, had an all-India training center for IAS (Indian Administrative Service), IPS (Indian Police Service) and other central and state bureaucrat cadres. We called him George Baje and he regaled us with tales from Mount Abu.
Because of his long residency in India’s heartlands, his Nepali was a pidgin of Hindi, and he employed certain habitual terms to describe his trainees who were brainy and fit and came from high Indian families.

George Baje handled candidates from African nations, Fiji and other countries as well, and he allegedly abused them in every which way while training and teaching them. “I even train senior police and army officers from your Nepal,” he told me in 1974.

Today, I think of him as the Master Sergeant who humiliated Richard Gere and his mates in “An Officer and a Gentleman” or in other movies as “Full Metal Jacket” and such genres. George Baje certainly was no Danny DeVito teaching Shakespeare to his GIs.
“Lekin,” he said one day, “The final day of graduation is all ruwabasi, yaar!”

“Kina Baje?” We asked him.

“It’s because all these nimak haram come to touch my legs. That’s why, yaar! They weep and thank me for all I did for them. Imagine them wailing – those gold medalist MAs and MScs and sons of famous people.”

“What do you do, then?”

“I curse them for the last time. ‘Sala kutta, tu!’ I tell them on their face and then I salute them. After all, they’re officers now – DSPs, SDOs and all, and very soon they’ll be SPs, DIGs, IGPs, DCs and what not, yaar!”

George Baje visited Darjeeling just for a week or less. Why?

“Well, this year I saw a decorated elephant outside my camp and I heard it was for me. It was sent for me by one raj kumar from north Rajsthan. The caparisoned hatti took me to the railway station where a royal carriage awaited me, with wining-dining facilities and all that. How should I know the nalayak trainee was a prince, yaar? Well, I visited him in one of his previous princely districts of which he managed to be appointed District Commissioner. I was his mehman for two weeks. So I was late this year and I’ll stay in Darjeeling for just four days before I return to Mount Abu.”

George Baje was invited by powerful DCs and IGPs all over India every year during his annual vacation. He had trained them in judo, equestrian polo, hatti chukkar and other fineries of high life at Mount Abu, and his eminent gentlemen trainees worshipped him and competed to have him in their domains in the winter. George Baje had only a few days for his family and friends in Darjeeling.

That’s one Super Duper Trainer for a change!

Published on: 11 December 2013 | Republica