On September 2nd, 2010, 35-year-old Bishnu Shrestha gazed out the window of a Maurya
Express train as it chugged through the dense jungles of West Bengal.
Around midnight, the train came to a screeching halt as gangsters poured aboard, armed with
knives, clubs and firearms.
Stomping up and down the carriage, they began extracting cash, jewelry, laptops and watches
from the terrified passengers.
Initially, Shrestha kept his head down.
It was only when the hijackers put their hands on a helpless young woman that he could no
longer stand idly by.
He leapt up, drew his kukri knife and threw himself upon the fiends.
In the ensuing melee, Shrestha single-handedly killed three gangsters and injured eight more,
causing the rest to flee.
Who was this humble superhero, whose badassery could serve as the inspiration for a Die Hard
movie?
He was a Gurkha, a member of arguably the single most elite fighting force of the 20th
century.
In this presentation, we will explore the history of a revered community of modern warriors
with a reputation that surpasses the Ancient Spartans.
Welcome to our video on the friendly, chipper, and utterly fearless Gurkha Brigade, whose
motto is “better to die than be a coward.”
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Who are the Gurkhas?
Indian Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw once was quoted as saying: “If a man says he is not
afraid of dying, he is either lying, or he is a Gurkha.”
The Gurkhas are elite soldiers native to Nepal, a mountainous country which has long existed
at the crossroads of the great Empires of Eurasia.
They are most famous for their 200-year history of foreign service in the British Army and
other global military forces, in which they have earned a reputation as arguably the most
reliable, disciplined and fearless warriors of the 20th century.
The title of ‘Gurkha’ is derived from the historical Nepalese Kingdom of Gorkha,
but has since evolved to refer exclusively to Nepali nationals serving in a foreign army
or police unit.
Since time immemorial, the frigid peaks and steep valleys of the Himalayan mountains have
incubated many hardy peoples who developed robust martial societies in an unforgiving
high-altitude environment.
A culturally diverse fighting force, the Gurkhas are drawn from across Nepal’s many distinct
ethnic minorities, most of whom speak their own unique language and practice a unique
variation of the Buddhist or Hindu faith.
However, all Gurkhas are fluent in both English and the national language of Nepal, an Indo-Aryan
tongue of Sanskrit heritage.
With an average height of five feet and three inches, the Gurkhas are the world’s fiercest
short kings.
They are deadliest in CQC, wielding their iconic weapon, the kukri knife, with fatal
finesse.
The Gurkha’s prowess with the curved blade is the stuff of legend and spawned this amusing
wartime gag: Locked in close combat in the trenches, a squat Gurkha takes a swing at
a tall German with his kukri.
The German appears to side-step the swipe.
“Ha!”
He taunts, “You missed!”
To this, the Gurkha wipes a drop of blood from his knife and replies, “Shake your
head.”
An insanely rigorous training regimen ensures that the Gurkhas are among the most physically
fit humans in the world.
In order to even qualify for training camp, each prospective Gurkha has to be able to
perform physical feats that would make a prime Rocky Balboa look geriatric.
These include performing 75 bench jumps in one minute, 70 sit-ups in two minutes, and
running three miles up the steep foothills of the Himalayas while carrying 55 pounds
of rocks on their backs in under an hour.
Every year, nearly 28,000 young Nepalese men compete for just 200 spots in the British
Army’s Brigade of Gurkhas, ensuring only the toughest of the tough are inducted into
the modern world’s most feared fighting force.
Examples of Gurkha Heroism Gurkha history is utterly inundated with insane
stories of military heroism, and we would be remiss not to retell some of them here.
In 1945, Lachhiman Gurung of the 8th Gurkha Rifles was cut off and encircled by over 200
Japanese soldiers in the Burmese jungle.
Alone in a trench with only two other comrades, he held off the enemy hordes singlehandedly.
Twice, the Japanese lobbed grenades into his trench, and twice, he managed to return them
to sender.
A third grenade landed.
This time, when he picked it up, it exploded in his hand, blowing off most of his fingers
and severely wounding his face, torso and right leg.
Disregarding his mortal wounds and operating his rifle one-handed, the Nepalese warrior
fought off wave after wave of Japanese assaults for four hours, all the while screaming, “Come
and fight a Gurkha!”
By the time the enemy retreated, he had amassed a final kill count of 31.
He survived his wounds, was awarded the Victoria Cross, and lived to the age of 92.
Six months earlier, Tul Bahadur Pun of the 6th Gurkha Rifles was advancing on a Japanese-held
railway bridge when his entire platoon section was wiped out.
As the last man standing, Rifleman Pun charged alone into a hailstorm of enemy fire, barreling
ahead over thirty yards of open ground while ankle-deep in mud, weaving through shell holes
and leaping over fallen trees.
Miraculously, he reached the enemy position without being hit.
Leaping into a bunker, he killed four Japanese soldiers with his Bren Gun and another three
with his kukri.
He then gave accurate supporting fire from the bunker, which allowed the remainder of
his platoon to advance.
Rifleman Pun was awarded the Victoria Cross and lived until the age of 88.
Gurkha families are often warrior dynasties, with sons and grandsons striving to live up
to the deeds of fathers and grandfathers.
As it turned out, Rifleman Pun’s grandson would more than live up to the legacy of his
fearless grandfather.
In 2010, Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun was standing guard on a roof checkpoint in Helmand
province, Afghanistan, when he found himself surrounded and under attack by up to 30 Taliban
fighters armed with AK-47s and RPGs.
Believing he was about to die, Sergeant Pun resolved to kill as many of the enemy as he
could before he went down.
Fending off attackers from three sides, he fired more than 400 machine gun rounds, launched
17 grenades, and detonated a mine.
When he ran out of ammo, he resorted to using his gun’s tripod as a club, smashing it
against an insurgent’s skull as he scaled the roof.
Singlehandedly, Sergeant Pun fended off the attack and was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry
Cross by Queen Elizabeth.
Origins of the Gurkha - The Unification of Nepal
Having introduced the Gurkhas and provided a sampling of the action-movie heroics they
are capable of, let us explore their origins and how they came to serve in the British
Army.
The story begins in the year 1743, with the ascension of Prithvi Narayan Shah to the throne
of the tiny Kingdom of Gorkha, one of many petty statelets strewn about the Himalayan
foothills at the time.
Prithvi Narayan soon came into his own as one of the greatest visionaries in the history
of the Indian Subcontinent.
Embarking on a mission to unify all of Nepal, he slowly conquered over 54 other principalities
throughout the Himalayas, training up one of the most well-drilled, disciplined and
experienced armies in Asia in the process.
However, Gorkha was not the only rising power in the Indian Subcontinent at the time.
By the late 18th century, the British conquest of India was well underway, spearheaded by
a private megacorporation, the British East India Company.
Back in 1757, this hydra of capitalism defeated the last independent Nawab of Bengal at the
Battle of Plassey, annexing all of Bengal in the aftermath.
This put the Gorkha Kingdom and the East India Company on each other’s borders, causing
their spheres of influence to overlap.
In 1767, Prithvi Narayan Shah set his sights on conquering the Kathmandu Valley.
Seeking to curtail the expansion of their regional rival, the British deployed a 2,500-man
expedition under one Captain George Kinloch to prevent Kathmandu’s capture.
In the hilly jungle province of Sindhuli, the Gorkhas ambushed their foe, pouring out
of the thicket and wreaking havoc among the enemy formation with kukri in hand.
It was the first time that British redcoats had faced the Gorkhas in battle, and it would
be an experience they would not soon forget.
Out of Kinloch’s 2500 men, less than 1000 returned to Bengal alive.
With the East India Company knocked out of the picture, King Prithvi Narayan Shah captured
Kathmandu in 1768 and made it into his royal capital.
The great Nepalese conqueror-King died in 1775, and would go down in history as the
man who had thoroughly humbled the British Empire and unified all of Nepal.
The Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814-1816 For the next few decades, the Kingdom of Gorkha
and the British megacorporation maintained an uneasy peace, but it was only a matter
of time before their next clash.
In November of 1814, during the reign of King Girvan Yuddha Bikram Shah, an escalating frontier
dispute led to the second and final showdown between the two powers: the Anglo-Nepalese
War.
According to historians, the Gorkha army at this time numbered around 12,000 to 14,000
strong.
To contend with this force, the East India Company mustered an expedition of over 50,000
men.
That the British levied such a massive army in preparation for their push into Nepal displayed
just how highly they regarded the fighting skills of their mountain-dwelling opponents,
Kinloch’s doomed expedition no doubt still fresh in their minds.
As expected, the East India Company’s advance into the Himalayas was slow, brutal and bloody.
Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Gorkhali army put up an extremely effective resistance,
utilizing the mountainous terrain of their native homeland to stymie the advance of their
numerically superior foes.
The first major battle of the Anglo-Nepalese war took place at the fortress of Nalapani,
where Gorkha captain Balbhadra Kunwar and a garrison of 600 Nepalese men, women and
children held the line against British General Rollo Gillespie’s force of over 3,500 men.
Outnumbered seven to one, Balbhadra withstood the British bombardment for over a month and
even managed to kill General Gillespie in action.
Throughout the battle, many British soldiers developed a begrudging respect for their lionhearted
enemies, not just for their fighting spirit but for the honour they displayed in battle.
James Baillie Fraser, a Scottish adventurer accompanying Gillespies’ division, wrote:
“There was here no cruelty to wounded or to prisoners; no poisoned arrows were used;
no wells or waters were poisoned; no rancorous spirit of revenge seemed to animate them:
they fought us in fair conflict, like men; and, in intervals of actual combat, showed
us a liberal courtesy worthy of a more enlightened people.”
The bill the British paid for Nalapani amounted to over a thousand casualties and the life
of an experienced commander.
This pyrrhic victory would set the tone for the rest of the war, in which the East India
Company would continue to make slow, incremental and costly advances into Gorkha territory,
all the while growing increasingly impressed by the gallant resistance put up by their
fearless yet noble enemies.
Indeed, the Gorkhas fought on with seemingly no comprehension of their own mortality.
In April of 1815, at the Battle of Deuthal, 74-year-old Gorkha General Bhakti Thapa repeatedly
threw himself headlong into British cannon fire until he and his warriors had been mown
down to the last man.
Out of respect for this old man’s incredible courage, the British wrapped his body in an
expensive shawl and ensured it was returned to his people with due honours.
The Treaty of Sugauli - The Gurkhas Join the British Army
Despite their seemingly inexhaustible font of courage, the Gorkha Kingdom was eventually
ground down by the British Empires’ superior manpower and firepower.
In March of 1816, the Anglo-Nepalese war came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of
Sugauli, which forced the Kingdom of Gorkha to cede around a fourth of its recently conquered
territory to the East India Company, reducing it to the borders that mark present-day Nepal.
Although the Nepalese war effort had been a losing one, they had fought fiercely enough
to maintain their independence, and would remain a free nation even as the British extended
their rule across the entire rest of the Indian Subcontinent.
However, while Nepal would not be colonized directly, there was still one further price
to be paid for their defiance.
Incredibly impressed by the tenacity of the Gorkha soldiers who had fought them so bravely,
the British made it a term of the peace that the Kings of Gorkha would have to allow British
recruiters to roam the Nepalese countryside and encourage their able-bodied warriors to
volunteer in the British Army.
In the British narrative, the creation of the Brigade of Gurkhas is considered an event
to be celebrated.
Peace had been made with a gallant foe who they had come to respect, and henceforth,
Gurkha and Briton would no longer be enemies, but fight side by side as comrades-in-arms.
However, from the Nepalese perspective, this watershed moment is often cast in a more sombre
light.
Tim Gurung, a modern Nepalese writer and Gurkha veteran, claims that the policy of recruiting
young Nepalese men into the British army “not only took the sting out of the Gorkhali Army
but also made the country into a toothless tiger and crippled it for the foreseeable
future.”
“By depleting Nepal of its youth and able men for generations,” Gurung says, Nepal
would “never again be able to raise its head against the British.”
Gurung’s words are important to remember.
For, as captivating as stories of Gurkha invincibility are, we must remember that, at least originally,
they were hired mercenaries serving an Imperialist power in colonial wars often fought to subjugate
the homelands of indigenous peoples, and that this has resulted in the Gurkhas having a
complex and controversial legacy both in their own homeland and beyond.
History of Gurkha Military Service Indeed, the Gurkha’s reputation among the
British public for loyalty and reliability began coming into form during the Great Revolt
of 1857, when a massive uprising against the British East India Company erupted across
the Indian Subcontinent.
As some of the only native troops who remained loyal to the British, the Gurkhas played a
significant role in putting down the insurrection.
From the end of the Great Revolt to the start of World War I, British Gurkha Regiments were
deployed to fight in colonial wars in Afghanistan, Burma, Tibet, and China.
Throughout all these campaigns, the Gurkhas slowly cultivated their reputation as some
of the most resilient, adaptable and indomitable soldiers in the known world.
Throughout the First World War, over 200,000 Gurkhas served in the British Army.
They fought with all the discipline and bravery that had come to be expected of them, suffering
around 20,000 casualties and receiving almost 2,000 gallantry awards for feats of both individual
and regimental heroism.
The Gurkhas threw themselves against the Germans in the trenches of Ypres and Loos, and bloodied
their kukri against the Turks at the meat grinder of Gallipoli, where they were among
the first to arrive and the last to leave.
Throughout the Second World War, over 250,000 Gurkhas served in almost every theatre of
battle, suffering around 32,000 casualties.
They fought Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists in Syria, North Africa, Sicily and
Greece, while bloodying the nose of Imperial Japan in Burma and Singapore.
Earlier in this video, we told the stories Lachhiman Gurung and Tul Bahadur Pun, two
Gurkhas whose insane feats of bravery against the Japanese in the Burmese jungle earned
them the Victoria Cross.
These were just two of a mind boggling 2,734 bravery awards the Gurkhas earned throughout
World War Two.
After India achieved its independence, the British lost their monopoly on Gurkha invincibility
when some of the Gurkha regiments that had formerly formed part of the British colonial
army in India were transferred to the newly independent Indian army.
Meanwhile, in Singapore, a unit of British Army Gurkhas was formed as an riot-control
and counter-terrorism wing of the local police force in 1949, and played a crucial role in
stabilizing the city-state in its turbulent road to independence.
The Gurkha regiments that remained in the British army continued to see action in every
conflict the United Kingdom took part in.
They were in Cyprus in 1974, the Falklands in 1982, participated in the Gulf War of 1991
and were deployed into Afghanistan in 2001.
Legacy of the Gurkhas After over 200 years of loyal service to the
British crown, the Gurkhas have undoubtedly been immortalized as some of the modern era’s
most lionized soldiers, with a reputation of immortality that rivals the ancient Spartans.
However, despite being celebrated as heroes by the British public, their relationship
with the British government has not been quite as rosy.
In retirement, the Gurkhas have long been subject to unequal treatment by their British
paymasters, their military pensions only a fraction of what British veterans of equal
rank received.
Moreover, Gurkha veterans seeking to immigrate and live in the UK, a country they had fought
and killed for, faced significant barriers to entry.
After decades of protests, the British government agreed in 2007 to start providing pay and
pensions on par with British soldiers.
Then, in 2009, the House of Commons passed a motion allowing all Gurkha veterans the
right to residence in the UK.
In their home country of Nepal, the Gurkhas are considered in some circles to be a source
of national shame, a consistent drain on the country’s best and brightest, and a major
contributor to economic stagnation back home . However, despite the controversies, many
in Nepal hold the Gurkhas in high regard, and take pride in the reputation for fearlessness
and invincibility they have earned for the Nepalese people on the world stage.
Thus, it seems that for the foreseeable future, young men throughout Nepal will continue to
enlist in foreign Gurkha brigades, where they will cultivate themselves into some of the
physically and mentally toughest people on the planet, living up to the legacy of their
Gurkha fathers and grandfathers as the fiercest soldiers of the modern age.
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