Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2025
This article critically engages with ‘apolitical warriors’ as a conceptual tool for understanding how Gurkhas and their families are discursively embedded in political discourses. The analysis offered will shed light on the limited scholarly attention given to the implications of this soldiering community's ‘impartial’ and ‘martial’ identity in shaping ideas of (non-)belonging within Southeast Asia. By focusing on remembrances, this article draws out how a nation's past is produced vis-à-vis commemorative events and, within this context, it comparatively examines how Gurkhas, as military migrants, are remembered and represented during ceremonies held at, for example, the Gurkha Cemetery in Ipoh, Malaysia and the Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore. A central question involves evaluating the role of historical memory in informing the extent to which the Gurkha community is incorporated within the national narratives of countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei. Herein, I argue that their perceived apolitical tenor has long served a dual purpose which, in turn, forms the axis of their ambivalent belonging. While Gurkhas are celebrated as foreign warriors reputed for their invaluable contribution to these nations, they are excluded through policy measures that rule out the prospect of citizenship and govern their status as transient migrants.
This research was carried out as part of my doctoral studies at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. I am grateful to the GRSS for funding the fieldwork in Malaysia. I would also like to express my gratitude to members of the WIRA (Warrior's) Association Malaysia Perak and, also Mr Ian Holthouse and Mr Ken McNeill of the National Malaya and Borneo Veterans Association of Australia (NMBVAA), for warmly welcoming me and facilitating my participation in the Remembrance ceremonies in Ipoh. My heartfelt thanks to Dr John Prabhu Solomon for his invaluable suggestions on earlier iterations of this article. I also extend my appreciation to the three reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback.
1 Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic soldiers: State security in divided societies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
2 Vron Ware, Military migrants: Fighting for YOUR country (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
3 Peter Wilson, ‘Foreign military labour in Europe's transition to modernity’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 27, 1–2 (2020): 15.
4 Sarah Percy, ‘Strong norm, weak law’, International Organization 61, 2 (2007): 378.
5 Aditya Sharma, ‘The status of Gorkhas in international law’, Observer Research Foundation, Issue Brief: 685, 11 Jan. 2024.
6 Ibid.
7 Wilson, ‘Foreign military labour in Europe's transition to modernity’, p. 13.
8 Sugnam Pokharel, et al., ‘Russia has recruited as many as 15,000 Nepalis to fight its war’, CNN news, 11 Feb. 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/10/asia/nepal-fighters-russia-ukraine-families-intl-cmd/index.html (last accessed on 21 Apr. 2024).
9 Wilson, ‘Foreign military labour in Europe's transition to modernity’.
10 Enloe, Ethnic soldiers.
11 Banu Senay, ‘A political history of the “apolitical” migration: From the 1970s onwards’, in Beyond Turkey's Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, state politics and the Turkish diaspora (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), p. 60.
12 Floya Anthias, ‘Identity and belonging: Conceptualisations and political framings’, KLA Working paper, No. 8 (Kompetenznetz Lateinamerika, 2013), p. 1.
13 Hamzah Muzaini, ‘Producing/consuming memoryscapes: The genesis/politics of Second World War commemoration in Singapore’, GeoJournal 66, 3 (2006): 211–22.
14 See for example, Hamzah Muzaini, ‘The afterlives and memory politics of the Ipoh Cenotaph in Perak, Malaysia’, Geoforum 54 (2012): 142–50; Hamzah Muzaini and Brenda Yeoh, ‘Memory-making “from below”: Rescaling remembrance at the Kranji War Memorial and Cemetery, Singapore’, Environment and Planning A 39, 6 (2007): 1288–305; Clay Eaton, ‘A Cenotaph for Singapore: Contestation and community at the Straits Settlements War Memorial’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 88, 309 (2015): 25–50.
15 Abu Talib Ahmad, ‘The Tun Abdul Razak Memorial and the promotion of a national memory in Malaysia’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 84, 2 (2011): 1–32.
16 Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack, War, memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012).
17 Rob Shields, Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 83.
18 Shirlena Huang et al., ‘Asian transnational families in transition: The liminality of simultaneity’, International Migration 46, 4 (2008): 7.
19 Heather Streets, Martial races: The military, race, and masculinity in British imperial culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester University Press: Palgrave, 2004).
20 See, for example, Kanchanmoy Mojumdar, Anglo-Nepalese relations in the nineteenth century (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1973); Michael Hutt, ‘A hero or a traitor? The Gurkha soldier in Nepali literature’, South Asia Research 9, 1 (1989): 21–32.
21 Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
22 Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’, in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
23 Douglas Peers, ‘The martial races and the Indian army in the Victorian era’, in A military history of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the nuclear era, ed Daniel P. Marston and Chandar S. Sundaram (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006).
24 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
25 Streets, Martial races.
26 Timothy Parsons, ‘“Wakamba warriors are soldiers of the Queen”: The evolution of the Kamba as a martial race, 1890–1970”, Ethnohistory 46, 4 (1999): 671–701; Gavin Rand and Kim A. Wagner, ‘Recruiting the “martial races”: Identities and military service in colonial India’, Patterns of Prejudice 46, 3–4 (2012): 232–54.
27 Lionel Caplan, Warrior gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western imagination (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995); Stephen Cohen, ‘The untouchable soldier: Caste, politics, and the Indian Army’, The Journal of Asian Studies 28, 3 (1969): 453–68.
28 Enloe, Ethnic soldiers.
29 Ibid.
30 Duncan Forbes, Johnny Gurkha (London: R. Hale, 1964); Scott Leathart, With the Gurkhas: India, Burma, Singapore, Malaya, Indonesia, 1940–1959 (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1998).
31 The Kukri – The Journal of the Brigade of Gurkhas, No. 1, May 1949 (accessed at The Gurkha Museum, Winchester, UK).
32 Hema Kiruppalini, ‘Imperial inheritance: The transnational lives of Gurkha families in Asian contexts, 1948–1971’, Modern Asian Studies 57, 2 (2023): 669–90.
33 Hema Kiruppalini, ‘Riots, “residence” and repatriation: The Singapore Gurkhas’, in Nepali diaspora in a globalised era, ed. Tanka Subha and A.C. Sinha (Routledge India, 2016), pp. 259–71.
34 David Wallen, ‘Brunei to add more Gurkhas’, South China Morning Post, 10 Dec. 1988.
35 Michael Leifer, ‘Decolonisation and international status: The experience of Brunei’, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs) 52, 2 (1978): 240–52.
36 Kiruppalini, ‘Riots, “residence” and repatriation’.
37 Claire Taylor, ‘Gurkhas: Terms and conditions of service’, International Affairs and Defence Section, House of Commons Library, SN/IA/4671, 12 June 2009.
38 David Cambell, ‘Gurkha 200th commemoration in Brunei’, 19 Oct. 2015, https://blogs.fcdo.gov.uk/davidcampbell/2015/10/19/gurkha-200th-commemoration-in-brunei/ (accessed on 20 Apr. 2024).
39 ‘Cenotaph ceremonies’, Singapore Standard, 12 Nov. 1956.
40 ‘Sultan of Kedah to lay wreath’, The Straits Times, 10 Nov. 1962.
41 ‘Wreath-laying at Cenotaph ceremony out’, The Straits Times, 7 Nov. 1957.
42 ‘Prayers for world peace at Kranji ceremony’, Singapore Herald, 9 Nov. 1970.
43 ‘Remembering the war dead’, The Straits Times, 14 Nov. 1983.
44 Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, Special Issue: Memory and Counter 26 (1989): 7–24.
45 Ibid., p. 12.
46 Ibid.
47 The Kukri, 1949.
48 R. Thambipillay, God's Little Acre: Batu Gajah (Ipoh: Perak Planters' Association, 1998). This is a commemorative book compiled by the author to mark the 50th anniversary of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960). It provides an overview of the Remembrance events at God's Little Acre, and contains reminiscences, reports, and a memoriam of the graves. See also, R. Thambipillay, The last post: Story of the Emergency and commemorative events, 1948–1960 (published by R. Thambipillay: Malaysia, 2011).
49 A disproportionately high number of Gurkha names under the column of the 6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles is noticeable, which is not surprising as Ipoh was their regimental home since the early 1950s. Prior to being known as ‘Suvla Lines’, regimental sources on the Gurkhas referred to the barracks of the 6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles in Ipoh as ‘Sirmoor Lines’ up until the 1950s, and by 1960 it was referred to as ‘Suvla Lines’. For further information, see, 6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles Regimental Association, No. 23, Spring 1959. Also see, The Kukri – The Journal of the Brigade of Gurkhas, 1954, pp. 6–9, and 1955, p. 40.
50 Nora, ‘Between memory and history’, p. 8.
51 Having said that, this is only based on a one-off participant-observation from my end, and it may not be representative of whether this has generally been the case in previous years.
52 Leong Kar Yen, ‘Memory, trauma, and nation: Contestation over the Batang Kali Massacre in Malaysia’, in Oral history in Southeast Asia: Memories and fragments, ed. Kah Seng Loh, Stephen Dobbs, and Ernest Koh (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
53 Katharine McGregor, ‘Cold War scripts’, South East Asia Research 24, 2 (2016): 242–60.
54 For further information on the Gurkha pipe and drum bands and their historical connection to the Seaforths, see the following newspaper articles: ‘Gurkhas renew a bond with Scots’, Edinburgh Evening News, 22 July 1953; ‘Gurkhas and Scots are old comrades’, The Evening Despatch, 22 July 1953. ‘Highland link with the Gurkhas’, The Northern Chronicle, 22 July 1953; ‘Gurkhas in Scotland’, The Glasgow Herald, 23 July 1953. See also, ‘Scrapbook of the Coronation Contingent 1953’, The Gurkha Museum –Winchester, United Kingdom, 1973.
55 Hew Strachan, ‘Scotland's military identity’, The Scottish Historical Review 85, 220 (2006): 315–32.
56 Kaushik Roy, ‘The construction of regiments in the Indian Army: 1859–1913’, War in History 8, 2 (2001): 127–48.
57 Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and migration: Globalization and the politics of belonging (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 2000).
58 Neha Vora, Impossible citizens: Dubai's Indian diaspora (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2013).
59 Kevin Blackburn, ‘Colonial forces and postcolonial memories: The commemoration and memory of the Malay Regiment in modern Malaysia and Singapore’, in Colonial armies in Southeast Asia, ed. Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 286–309.
60 CSO, 0171/45. Memorandum No. D.2646-CA/46. Letter of correspondence from Sgd H. Dayal, Under Secretary to the Government of India to His Britannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Nepal, on the subject ‘Gurkhas for Malayan Police’, 13 April 1946.
61 ‘Gurkhas are here to stay: Jaya’, The Straits Times, 14 Mar. 1987.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Anthias, ‘Identity and belonging’.
66 ‘War or peace, Gurkhas deserved reputation’, The Straits Times, 2 Jan. 1999.
67 See, for example, Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Federal Publications, 2000), p. 20; Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), pp. 21–2.
68 Facebook/Lee Hsien Loong, 2019.
69 Djuna Thurley, ‘The campaign for Gurkha pensions’, House of Commons Library, 8 Sept. 2021.
70 ‘Britain opens door to 36,000 Gurkha veterans after policy U-turn’, The Times, 29 Jan. 2009.
71 ‘Nepalese Gurkhas end hunger strike over UK military pensions’, Aljazeera, 20 Aug. 2021.
72 Iain Hollingshead, ‘The Gurkhas in Aldershot: Little Nepal’, The Telegraph, 21 Feb. 2011.
