saying, ‘There is no water in my land,
so I have no rice to eat. My urine is
like blood. I have come to ask for
the gift of water.’
And when she said this I struck the
ground with my fist and water sprang out.
I told that woman that if she offered me
rice on the day of the transplanting
there would always be water to flood her
paddy fields.
But because the woman was a widow and
contemptible to other people, they
rechannelled her water and she came to
me weeping.
So I destroyed that place to which the
water had been taken and I cursed those
people. I cursed those people and said
that if ever they did scrape together
some little wealth, then it would vanish
like ice in water. I cursed those people
and said that there would never be a
single day when there wasn’t someone ill
in their house.
The sun sets and the harsh lines of sun and shadow dissolve into blurred shapes and muted colours. The dhāmis look almost human – as vulnerable as actors when the stagelights fail.
They carry on dancing, but they’re only holding the attention of a small part of the audience. Most faces have come to watch the ḍāṇgri who’s just come out of the shrine and is standing in the doorway. He’s wearing only a new white dhoti and his body looks old, its loose flesh striated with veins and sinews. In his right hand he’s holding a curved knife with a short wooden handle.
He walks out of the shrine without looking at the crowd, picks up one of the lambs, frightened and bleating, and carries its almost weightless body round to the side of the shrine. He puts it down at the base of the new liṇga – the stripped pine trunk that all the men brought back from the forest and erected early this morning – and pours some water over the lamb’s head and in a stripe down its back to the base of the tail. The lamb shrugs it off – nodding, they say, the god’s acceptance and its own acquiescence – and the ḍāṇgri stoops down and saws through its throat. There’s no resistance; it seems that the neck has no muscle, no bone, no leather hide, that it’s just a blood-filled tube of white fur.
The ḍāṇgri holds the body while the young red blood squirts out and slashes the base of the liṇga in criss-cross patterns. When it has stopped coming, he drops the body and goes back for another lamb and another, creeping down the earthen steps with his bloodstained knife and his feet and ankles splashed with red.
He sacrifices four lambs at the base of the liṇga, then takes two inside and kills them by slitting open the throat and the chest and cutting off one of the forelegs at the shoulder, so the heart can be taken out, still pumping, and offered to the god on a plate on the dhāmi’s raised seat.
The dancing has stopped now. All eyes have turned to the killing. And when the ḍāṇgri goes inside they remain fixed for an instant on the liṇga and the ground around it, with the four white bodies, and the separate wide-eyed heads, and the stains of blood going brown already in the trampled grass.
In those days I brought about stability
and made laws. If there was anyone who
was suffering then I did whatever there
was to be done and wiped away that
person’s tears. And if there was anyone
who was causing suffering to others,
then I would build a trap of poisoned
bamboo, and I would ensnare and kill
that person. I told them that I could
do whatever I wanted – if I wished to
do good, then it would be good and if I
wished to do evil, then it would be evil.
Suddenly the crowd rearranges itself, like the changing pattern in a kaleidoscope; one twist and the border of any empty space dissolves into small agitating clusters spread throughout. There’s a hiss of people talking and laughing, and the explosive shrieks of children playing, shaking off the intensity of the afternoon. A man is passing round some morsels of raw heart and liver. It’s the prasād, food offered to the gods, eaten in essence and then passed back, blessed, for the people to eat.
The crowd lingers for a long time, until it’s almost dark. There’s a sense of release after the excitement, of fulfilment. The gods came; they ate and danced and then left contented. Now they’re honour-bound to watch over the crops and the livestock and ward off ghosts and evil forces.
A group of men are standing on the veranda. They’re calling out, one by one, the names of all the households in the village. Shapes move forward in the fading light to collect their pile of puris, the due from their offerings of flour and oil, and a few small pieces of meat, prasād.
That place with its sweeping cedar trees
and juniper. That place where I could be
blessed by Kaskā Sundari Devī in the
mornings and the evenings. There I built
a shrine and sacrificed a he-goat in the
name of the truth.
If a bell is tied round the neck of a crow
then, as it flies about, everyone will hear
the ringing – so there was no one who did
not know about the powers of this god. But
mostly his influence was barely perceptible,
like the blowing of a breeze, like the
sound of a butterfly wafting through the air.
DUKHA DURING THE WORLD WAR
Pratyoush Onta
Pratyoush Onta has a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He has written about Nepali nationalism, Gurkha history, institutions, area studies, the politics of knowledge production, and media. He has written, co-written, edited or co-edited several books including Nepal Studies in the UK, Social History of Radio Nepal, Social Scientific Thinking in the Context of Nepal, Radio Journalism: News and Talk Programs in FM Radio, Growing up with Radio, Mass Media in Post-1990 Nepal, Ten Years of Independent Radio: Development, Debates and the Public Interest, Autocratic Monarchy: Politics in Panchayat Nepal, 25 Years of Nepali Magazines, The State of History Education and Research in Nepal and Political Change and Public Culture in Post-1990 Nepal (forthcoming). He is also the founding editor of the journals Studies in Nepali History and Society and Media Adhyayan. He has been associated with the research institute and public forum Martin Chautari in Kathmandu since 1995 and is currently one of its directors of research.
Laxuman Gurung was awarded the Victoria Cross for his performance in the Burma Front in 1945. He lost his right arm and much of his hearing during the medal-winning action. Last year, he was asked by Gorkha Sainik Awaj, a magazine representing the interests of former and serving soldiers, how many people he had recommended for the army. The pensioner replied: “I joined a foreign army; was involved in a war and lost my arm. I could have died but with luck I lived. Many of my friends died in the war, some froze to death, many were blinded when engaged in war in the high Himalaya. Anybody who sends an able young person to the army to experience all that dukha is guilty of paap. I cannot do such paap. I cannot recommend anybody to join the army.”
Dukha – bodily pain, mental suffering, extreme hardship and death – has been real in the life of Laxuman Gurung. And yet, as a subject of reportage and scholarship, the Gurkha’s dukha has remained virtually unexplored. Celebratory accounts over the course of the century have glorified the dogged courage and loyalty of the men from Nepal’s hills, and the vicarious honour they bring their country while fighting the Empire’s war. Gurkhas emerged from the two World Wars as icons of superhuman bravery, who were in a class apart when it came to enduring the pain and suffering of battle.
The genre of celebratory writing is exemplified by B.M. Niven’s 1987 coffee-table book, The Mountain Kingdom: Portraits of Nepal and the Gurkhas. Niven, himself a Gurkha officer, wrote: “Even terribly wounded [Gurkhas] cling on and th
eir tough bodies and harsh upbringing enable them to endure. The job in hand and the name of the regiment are everything... Death and the threat of it, they are used to by their very upbringing and so they do not hold back at the prospect of death or of danger that may precede death. Discomfort, they are inured to from childhood and so at war the prospect of being out in, and at the mercy of, the elements, does not in any way inhibit them.”
The Gurkha’s stoicism, accounted for by “harsh upbringing”, is invariably linked to his proverbial loyalty to the sahib commanding officer. There is, for example, the lore reported by the writer Edmund Candler in his 1919 book, The Sepoy. In France, a British officer is knocked out by shell-shock. He opens his eyes to find his orderly kneeling over him fanning the flies off his face, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Why are you crying, Tegh Bahadur?” he said; “I am not badly hit.” “I am crying, Sahib,” he said, “because my arm is gone, and I am no more able to fight.” With a nod, Tegh Bahadur indicates the wound. The shell that had stunned the sahib had carried off the orderly’s forearm at the elbow.
More than 60 years later, Byron Farwell wrote in his popular book, The Gurkhas (1984), “The stoicism of wounded Gurkhas impressed all who witnessed their sufferings. Often enough their first question on reaching the field dressing station was, ‘How soon can I get back?’”
Professional historians have been equally adept at ignoring the suffering of the Gurkha, focusing as they have on matters of high diplomacy, geopolitics and Gurkha romance. Most historians have relied on written sources of British India (now housed in various archives in India and the United Kingdom) which were created in the process of acquiring information on the localities from which the “raw materials” that could be turned into the “Gurkhas” could be found. Diplomatic negotiations between the British and Nepali rulers regarding the recruitment of Gurkhas also gave birth to voluminous writings. Gurkha historians who have thus side stepped the entire question of dukha include Asad Husain, Kanchanmoy Mojumdar, and Sushila Tyagi.
Among Nepali historians, the recent book The Gurkha Connection by historian Purushottam Banskota (1994) recognises the heavy casualties suffered by the Gurkha regiments during the two World Wars. But even he prefers to analyse the impact of Gurkha recruitment more in terms of Nepal’s prestige in the world, modernisation of her army, enlightenment of Nepalis through experience abroad, and benefit to the economy.
Only Prem Uprety’s Nepal: A Small Nation in the Vortex of International Conflicts 1900–1950 (1984) contains a brief but useful discussion of the “physical impact of war”. The faces of many Gurkhas who had been wounded in World War I, he writes, were disfigured due to the loss of noses and eyeballs; in one case the forehead had been damaged so badly that both the eyeballs “were protruding out like that of an unearthly creature”. General Babar Shumsher, son of Rana Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher, after an inspection tour of the wounded wrote “how could life linger on in such desperate souls?” According to Uprety, arrangements were made so that fresh recruits did not come across the demobilised soldiers, who bore the scars of the battlefield.
MEMORIALISING MASS DEATH
The Gurkhas who arrived at the recruitment centres of the Raj mainly came from four ethnic groups of Nepal: Magar, Gurung, Rai and Limbu. During the early years of the twentieth century, none of these groups were represented in Kathmandu’s intellectual class that sustained itself by chakari – sycophantic attendance to the Rana court. This class, with Bahuns and Chhetris dominant, seem to have been vaguely aware that huge numbers of Nepali hillmen had been sucked into British Gurkha regiments. It would have been too much to expect them to show concern for the recruits’ war-induced hardships.
In an account that describes Nepal’s participation in World War I, mahila guruju Hemraj Pandey, who headed the Rana office of military supplies during the war years, fully supports his master Chandra’s decision to help the British. Without understanding the apocalyptic nature of WW I, he wrote, it was not possible to understand the crisis that had beset the British Empire and the world, nor appreciate the importance of Nepal’s help to her British friend. In risking their lives in the battlefield, soldiers from Nepal had enhanced the country’s and the jaati’s glory.
In Purano Samjhana (1972), a selected compilation of journal entries of Rammani A.D., a member of Chandra Shumsher’s court, we find out that he was aware that many “sons of Nepal” had “sacrificed themselves” during the First World War. The Tribhuvan-Chandra Military Hospital in the capital was apparently made to honour these brave sons who gave up their lives to increase, in the words of Chandra Shumsher, “the glory of their motherland and to ameliorate the pain of their (wounded) colleague-soldiers.”
Kedarmani A.D., Rammani’s son, recalls in his autobiography Aaphnai Kura how as a student in Calcutta he read news about the war in English newspapers but he does not mention Nepal’s connection to it. The versatile litterateur Balkrishna Sama, who was in his early teens when the war began, remembers the war years in his autobiography, Mem Kabitako Aaradhan, writing that, “After reading the English newspaper, Statesman, my grandfather used to describe the war to my grandmother and say ‘in the end, the English will win, will win.’ The Nepalis serving in the Gurkha regiments had already reached Europe for the war.... The photograph (in The Illustrated London News) of Nepali Gurkhas crossing a river with their khukuris held in their mouths boosted my morale. Thereafter, whenever we played, I felt like playing war games. I kept thinking that I too should participate in a war and die fighting.”
Kathmandu’s intellectual class thus responded to the Gurkha participation in the First World War by cheering from a distance, memorialising mass death as if it were blood sacrifice to add glory to the motherland. They sanitised the suffering and death of the Gurkha soldier as a moment of national celebration. The soldier’s pain in the battlefield was legitimised as part of one’s necessarily sacred duty to the Nepali nation. Of course, no one asked why it was always other Nepalis who had to die to enhance the name of their motherland.
THE MOTHER’S INSTINCT
Before World War I, there was hardly any administrative structure for Gurkha recruitment within Nepal. The approximately 2,000 Gurkha recruits a year that were necessary to keep the 20 Gurkha Rifle battalions at full strength were rounded up by labour contractors in Central and East Nepal and taken to Gorakhpur, India. But when the British required larger numbers of recruits in the fall of 1914, Rana Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher of Nepal put to work a whole new internal mobilisation scheme. Chandra ordered his district governors to ensure that the supply of “raw materials” was up. Although it was emphasised that only volunteers were to be taken, there seems to have been considerable forced recruitment. Incentives of various kind were given both to recruiters and those being recruited. Chandra also allowed the opening of several recruitment centres on the Nepal frontier and recruiting agents were allowed into previously prohibited areas in the hinterland. Between 1914 and 1919, over 60,000 Gurkhas were recruited into the combat regiments, and about twice that number were taken into supporting non-combative roles in units like the Army Bearer Corps and Labour Battalions.
It has been long estimated that over 20,000 Gurkha soldiers were killed during the course of the war. However, even until today we have very little knowledge of those who perished, and we do not know the names of the families, villages and communities that suffered the most losses.
When anthropologist Mary Des Chene was researching Gurkha recruitment in Kota, a village in central Nepal, one Gurung woman, born in 1898, recalled the First World War in the following words: “Now it is different, but in my time everyone who left was lost. They walked out of our Gurung country and got lost. They died there or they got lost. My father, I never knew him. He was coming home, we heard, but then he died, too. My elder brother, my younger brother, my father’s sister’s son. All died. Many, many others too. So many!”
The number of soldiers that were seriously wounde
d and disabled for life is not known but it certainly ran into tens of thousands. And we can only guess the number of soldiers shell-shocked or mentally affected for life after seeing and experiencing the hardships of the First World War. Many of the disabled were returned to Nepal during the war itself. They were met by Nepali frontier officials and occasionally assisted to their individual homes in the hills.
There is nothing to be said for the dead, but the wounded and disabled retired as unreported and isolated individuals who returned to the hinterland villages from where they emerged to be recruited. Other than the odd mountain minstrel who would sing ballads of the trauma, there were no Nepali reporters, writers and chroniclers in the early decades of the century to bring the suffering to notice. Besides, it was hardly in the wartime interest of the British or Chandra to highlight the dukha.
In terms of casualties, the Second World War is thought to have been a repeat performance of the earlier conflagration. The devastation of the First World War was still fresh in the memory of families across the Nepali hills when the Second began. In her 1991 Stanford University dissertation, Des Chene writes that when the gatlawata (recruiter) arrived at Kota at the start of World War II, mothers who were teenagers or young wives during 1914–18 uniformly resisted the enlistment of their sons, “going to great lengths to hide them from recruiters and pleading with them not to go.”
These women, a few of whom were still alive in the mid-1980s, feared “that their own sons were being ‘grabbed’ in the same way that their fathers, brothers and sometimes their husbands had been.” For these mothers and grandmothers, the lands beyond the Modi valley were, in the main, “a source of sorrow” – lands where their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons had died or disappeared.
THE DUKHA THEME
Gurkha dukha, of course, does not begin in this century and is not limited only to the battlefield. The cases of desertion sporadically reported in the nineteenth century sources indicate that Gurkha soldiers were prepared to go to considerable personal risk in abandoning the army. Separation of families, additional burdens imposed on wives whose husbands are away in service, anxieties caused by broken lines of communication and forced recruitment during the two World Wars are some other examples of hardships induced by this long-distance form of labour. But it is the dukha of the battlefield that is most physical, most obvious, and the least recorded and reported.
House of Snow Page 17