The Visual Anthropology of Migration Histories:

Discovering the Mobility of Nepali Women through Visuals

Sanjay Sharma

This paper uses visual anthropology to bring forth the migration histories of Nepali
women, especially those related to Gurkha soldiers. Using personal and archival
photographs and videos of migrants and their families, this paper uncovers mobility
patterns and migration histories of some Nepali women. The paper uses visuals to build a
narrative that deals not just with migration histories and destinations that go beyond
South Asia, but the larger meanings that individuals attach to the visuals. This paper goes
beyond the “factual data” that the visuals “reveal” by talking to the individuals in the
photos or those possessing the photos about the contexts and experiences attached to
those photos. The photos, taken mostly during the 20th century, help individuals not just
to be reminiscent about the past, but also to reflect critically on their migration pathways
and experiences retrospectively.

FOREGROUND

In an 86-second-long grayscale video clip entitled “For Valour” from the “Indian
News Parade,” dated 1945 and uploaded by British Pathé1 on YouTube,2 two Victoria
Cross (VC) winning Gurkhas – Naik Agansingh Rai3 and (posthumously) Subedar
Netra Bahadur Thapa – are being awarded in Nowshera,4 now a city in Pakistan. The
clip starts with the Viceroy of India, Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Viscount Wavell,
dressed in khaki riding breeches and boots and walking across, inspecting the
battalions of Gurkhas – all wearing half-sleeved khaki shirt and short khaki pants –
when the narrator, Bob Danvers-Walker, with his strongly accented British-English,
speaks: “As the Viceroy inspects the 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles, he begins a ceremony
in which two VCs are to be awarded, and rarely has the plain inscription 'for valour'
been more fitting.”
The clip then shows some Nepalis – four women and a girl dressed in overly
long baarha haatey (literally, "12-hand-long") white floral saris, their heads covered with
one end of their sarees, and three men in daura-suruwal, coat, and topi, the national
dress for Nepalese men – standing in front of a battalion of soldiers, British officers,
and their families. The narrator continues: “This is the
family of Naik Agansingh Rai. In Burma he three times
advanced into fire that was bringing down his men all
around him. Three times he silenced that fire. The first
time he killed three of the enemy, then again three, then at
the third post four.” The Viceroy is then seen awarding
the Victoria Cross medal to Rai. They shake hands. Naik
Rai salutes the Viceroy, and he salutes him back. The
Viceroy walks backwards with the salute.
The camera moves to a small Nepali girl of about 10-
12 years of age accompanied by an older woman to her Figure 1  Namasara Thapini and her mother‐in‐law 
left, understood to be her mother-in-law and the mother posing with Col. Eustace after receiving the VC 
medal. (Source: British Pathé)
of Subedar Netra Bahadur Thapa, along with, to her right,

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Colonel Norman Eustace, DSO,5 as her translator and escort (Figure 1, screenshot
from the clip; Farwell 1984, 150). The name of the girl is sometimes
________________________________________________________________
SANJAY SHARMA is a PhD candidate in the Dept. of Sociology, National University of
Singapore. His doctoral research offers a gender critique of the Gurkha migration and militarization.
He uses various methods as his research tools, which include the analysis of photographs, virtual
ethnography, social media engagements, online archives, and folklore, among others. His research
interests include feminist historiography, decolonial thought, Marxist literature, and colonial
migrations. E-mail: sanjays@u.nus.edu
_________________________________________________________________

written as Namasara Thapini and sometimes as Nainasara Magarni in the military

records that are still maintained in honor of Subedar Thapa. The name of the older
woman is not mentioned anywhere. The narrator continues: “This little girl was
betrothed to Subedar Netra Bahadur Thapa, but Subedar Thapa went to Burma.
There, for eight hours, he held a position to the limit of human endurance. In the
end, he fell, still fighting.” The Viceroy slightly bending his knees carefully hands over
the VC medal to the young girl. Namasara and the woman bow namaste to the Viceroy
after receiving this medal, and the Viceroy salutes
them and slowly steps backward. Namasara and
the woman bow namaste again, with their backs
bent deeper this time, and the Viceroy salutes
them again. Col. Eustace, the escort, takes the little
girl by her shoulder and directs her towards the
camera. She poses (Figure 2) with the open box
just handed over to her, which shows the VC
medal – a dark, cold metal cross of loss and
sacrifice – while her expressionless face stares at
the camera. She lowers her eyes, still impassive.
She is wearing a white floral sari with heart-shaped
leaves and dark-colored petals that also covers her
Figure 2   Namasara Thapini poses with the  head as a ghumto (a veil covering the cranium). The
VC in front of the photographers. (Source:  borders of the sari have a patterned hem.
Lawrence 2020) Although it is not very clear, her head appears to
be shaven,6 and a dark-colored floral(?) bandana
covers her head beneath the ghumto. She is also wearing a fuli (nose ring) on the left
nasal alae, a bulaki (gold nose ring worn on the nasal columella), a muga mala (coral
beads necklace, generally orange in color), and a slightly shorter jantar (square gold
plate tied with a string and hung as a necklace). The older woman’s face is never
clearly seen: she is visible only as a woman wrapped in a white sari with floral
imprints, with which she covers her head. Otherwise the camera does not focus on
her at all.
As the camera pans to show the marching Gurkhas, the narrator continues: “In
salute of such courage, the Royal Gurkha Rifles march past Lord Wavell with the
words of the citation ringing in their ears: His valour and devotion to duty will ever
remain an epic in the history of the regiment.” Two Britons – a woman wearing a
black hat and a furry black winter coat and carrying a white purse, and a man with a

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white hat and black winter coat over a white shirt with a dark necktie – start talking to
the older woman – with the British facing the camera and the Nepali woman and
Namasara with their backs towards it. The escorting translator, Col. Eustace, does
back and forth with the words between the two women. Namasara looks round as the
adults are talking. The narrator meanwhile says, “The little girl takes back a medal and
a great memory while the other hero’s family watches, knowing how bitter the loss
would have been to them had their boy not been there to see his glory” (my
emphasis). The camera then shows two Nepali men dressed in daura-suruwal and black
topi and two women in colorful saris (not white or black but, as the video is in
grayscale, I cannot really say which color)—all smiling towards the camera.7
In the end, the three British officers, including the Viceroy, are seen talking to
the woman while Namasara is standing still. The Viceroy shakes their hands one after
the other. They bow namaste to him after shaking his hand, but he does not return
their namaste this time. And so the video ends.

APPROACHING MIGRATION HISTORIES

In this paper, I adopt approaches of visual anthropology to discover and understand

the migration histories of some Nepali women during the 20th century, and to
interpret deeper meanings attached to migration through videos and photographs
(visuals) that are available online, in on-site archives, and in the personal collection of
some migrants and their families. By seeking meanings in the visuals I try to
apprehend the "voice" of their subjects. This is an attempt to promote them from
being mere objects in photographs and acknowledging their agency, even in situations
where they were limited by being colonized subjects of the British Empire. However,
although the British did not directly rule over Nepal, the autocratic Nepali rulers were
under an enormous British influence after Nepal lost the 1814–16 Anglo-Nepalese
War (Whelpton 2005). As Nepalis in general were not allowed to migrate for laboring
except to India or the larger Indian subcontinent before the mid-1980s, the chances
of Nepali women’s migrations being recorded for regions outside South Asia is
limited.8 The only way that Nepali women were able to go overseas was as family
members of Gurkha soldiers. The recruitment of the Gurkhas was actively supported
by the autocratic Nepali state from the late 19th century onwards.
The quasi-fictional category “Gurkha” falls under the British imaginary of
“martial races” that constructed a mythical "race" (Caplan 1995; Des Chene 1991).
There is and has been no ethnic group named “Gurkha” in Nepal. However, Gorkha
is a north-central district in Nepal whence the expansion of modern-day Nepal began.
The expansionist Gorkhali empire was a regional power center in the Indian
Subcontinent during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where a political tussle was
going on between the Imperial British forces and local principalities or kingdoms
(Regmi 1999). Outside Nepal the Gurkhas derived mainly though not only from four
ethnicities – Gurung, Magar, Limbu and Rai – which in themselves are diverse
groups. Because of their cultural and physical similarities, the British started labeling
all these men Gurkhas who, they believed, belonged to the same “martial race” (Sinha
1995).
With heavy but documented casualties during deployments, the Gurkha soldiers
have a long history of service to the British crown (and later to India, Singapore and
Brunei). Impressed with their warrior-skills primarily during the Anglo-Nepalese War

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of 1814–16, the British Army started recruiting into the British–Indian army Gurkha
soldiers, from 1815 onwards—men who initially were dissidents of the expansionist
Nepali (Gorkhali) empire or prisoners-of-war from Nepal (Des Chene 1991; Husain
1970). It was a lot cheaper for the British to hire mercenaries or migrant soldiers
(Ware 2012, 65). With the expanding territorial control that the British were gaining in
India and elsewhere, they needed a “native” army to help that expansionism and to
control and govern alien populations (Des Chene 1991, 2). It is especially interesting
to note that only men got noticed, hired, and exoticized as Gurkhas by the British,
although there had been numerous women who assumed active roles in the Anglo-
Nepalese War as well (Smith 1852; Adhikari et al. 2006). Later on, the Gurkha troops
and their families, in limited numbers, were based in British India until its
Independence around 1947–48 and then moved to Malaya and Singapore (until the
mid-1960s) and Hong Kong (until 1997), before finally being stationed in Britain
(Bellamy 2011).
In this paper I will focus on Gurkha women who had migrated across the world
with or without the soldiers, in their capacity as military wives, daughters, and/or
professionals. Photographs and videos of Gurkha women will be used here to build a
narrative that will deal not just with the histories of this migration and the
destinations, but the larger meanings that individuals have attached to the visuals. We
thus go beyond the “factual” data that the visuals reveal by interpreting the contexts,
experiences and emotions that are expressed in them. The various activities that the
visuals have captured will help us understand the social and cultural meanings of
those movements (Mitchell 2002). On the one hand, the whole idea of family- and
marriage-migration is guided by the notion of a “male breadwinner,” where women
will have very little say over the type of mobility or choice of destinations. On the
other hand, the popular understanding about military migration is that women get
“left behind” in the migrant household when men move on, or else are mere passive
followers of their highly mobile male relatives. I challenge the passivity and ignorance
attached to women’s migration histories by means of the visuals.
This paper, by building on the appearance and disappearance of women like
Namasara Thapini, argues that Gurkha women were not invisible or absent but rather
have been ignored, overlooked and forgotten by outsiders. Their migration-related
experiences have gone unrecorded and unwritten. Here I will highlight some
representative examples which remind us that these women are indeed visibly present
in the migration histories of Nepal, but that their contributions and histories are being
ignored. Similarly, with the use of visuals, I argue that Gurkha women were inspected,
presented and otherwise involved in limited ways by British and Gurkha officers, yet
forgotten in the larger discourses of contributions and personal sacrifices. Women
have performed their gender roles in the ways that the society, the army, and the
Empire expected of them (Butler 2006). I will locate the agency of Gurkha women
while they confront the patriarchy ingrained in Nepalese society on the one hand and
the highly masculine and patriarchal Empire and its military forces, on the other.
The paper began with a description of a short video, with the girl Namasara
Thapini getting most of the screen time. But she disappears after that. I am consumed
with why no one found it interesting to trace her in all these years. Why do women in
general disappear from the pages of history? Questions such as, Who makes history
and who does not? are intriguing here. Even at the award ceremony, no one
seemingly asked what Namasara was going through or would do next. No one

4
questioned who she was. No one was bothered about what might befall a child
widow. All the talking was done by her mother-in-law, with translation help from Col.
Eustace. Namasara was a personal witness to a major event in world history; she
appeared for a moment of time in this important part of the Second World War; she
lost her husband in that War when she was still a child; she was asked to remain
proud of her husband’s contribution and perform a widow’s duties—but that is the
end of it, for she disappeared again.
I will talk below about how I am approaching the topic and how I discovered the
visuals; and will then elaborate on how photos tell, change and criticize migration
histories. The paper adopts feminist methodologies of interpreting the visuals, by not
just finding a voice in the photographs and videos but also challenging the Imperial
and hegemonic masculine gaze at female bodies (Azoulay 2008, 229).

DISCOVERING THE VISUALS

As visits to the archives recently became difficult because of the pandemic, I started
exploring online archives, looking in particular for visual material. When I came
across a video entitled “For Valour,” where Naik Agan Singh Rai and Namasara
Thapini were being awarded the VC, there was so much captured in the brief video
that I wanted to write about it. With the dominant effects of male out-migration,
Namasara’s story resonates with a lot of Gurkha women, especially with wives. Their
migration histories are not just about the experiences of traveling as a migrant, but
also about the effects of migration on non-migrants and the social impacts of
migration. Women like Namasara are part of history who have witnessed important
moments in world history up close and personally, but have quickly disappeared from
the history books; so no one bothers to go back and talk to them. They remain
ignored and overlooked even though they are very much present and visible (Farwell
1984). Despite its similarities, Namasara’s story is also different from those of many
other Gurkha women whose husbands did not go to the battlefield or die.
Furthermore, as a child-wife during the war years and subsequently as a child-widow,
Namasara was denied the opportunities that she could have otherwise cashed in on by
migrating and traveling with her husband to military locations. With educational
opportunities and exposure to the outside world, Gurkha daughters have made
valuable contributions as nurses, teachers, radio presenters, clerical staff, etc. in the
lives of the Gurkhas and the British Army as a whole. Their contributions too do
however remain ignored.
During the lockdown amidst the Covid-19 pandemic I started an Instagram9
account and a Facebook10 page with the name “Gurkha Women.” I then started
posting photo stories through those accounts from August 2020 onwards. The
photos were mostly taken from online sources, books, the journals The Kukri and
Parbate of the Brigade of Gurkhas, and the Gurkha Memorial Museum in Pokhara,
which I had visited before the pandemic. The number of individuals interacting
("visiting, liking, following," and commenting) with the pages grew rapidly. I was also
approached by a few individuals online offering their family photographs to tell their
migration history. When I started online and in-person interviews for a doctoral
research project, some individuals explained their migration pathways and histories
and the effects of military migration on their lives through such personal
photographs. Among the research interlocutors, some gave me permission and some

5
encouraged me to use their stories and photos on the social media pages. Some even
commented on photographs that I uploaded with new information about them that I
was unaware of. For instance, I connected with the niece of Maj. Radha Rawat
through one of her Facebook comments and interviewed her in detail about her
long-deceased aunt’s life. Maj. Rawat was commissioned in the Queen Alexandra’s
Royal Army Nursing Corps (QARANC) in Britain in 1962. Similarly, a “follower” of
the Gurkha Women’s Instagram page connected me with the son of Shoba Kumari
Chhetri (Aamaji—the mother) as she saw him posting photographs and narratives
about his mother. Aamaji, a midwife and nurse attached to the 10th Gurkha Rifles,
was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1960 for her work with the Gurkha
community in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. I took visual anthropology to a
virtual platform where I could interact with interested individuals and enhance my
understanding of the migration histories of such women.
Visual anthropology entails understanding the human condition and social
relationships that emerge from the visuals. Finding meanings in the visual culture is
to attach it to “human societies, with the ethics and politics, aesthetics and
epistemology of seeing and being seen” (Mitchell 2002, 166). This visual culture
involves seeing the outside world that includes other or one's own cultures and
individuals. Mitchell (ibid.) argues that the central task of visual culture is to “make
seeing show itself” that puts the visual on display and open for interpretation and
analysis, which Mitchell calls “showing seeing.” Similarly, MacDougall (1997, 287)
highlights that the rising sense of anthropological focus on emotions, time, the body,
the senses, and gender and individual identity has made a turn in changing the
previously-held understanding of visuals in anthropology as a lazy tool. There must
be a shift from making films that are about anthropology to making anthropological
films. For MacDougall, “visual anthropology is not about the visual per se but about a
range of culturally inflected relationships enmeshed and encoded in the visual”
(idem). The following paragraphs are my attempt to understand and analyze
migration-related human and social relationships that are entangled and encoded in
the visuals.

DISCOVERING MIGRATION HISTORIES THROUGH VISUALS

Here I will present a few representative cases of women from Gurkha families and
beyond who have traveled across the globe, mostly in the mid-20th century. These
women were directly or indirectly associated with the British Army and therefore
constituted instances of Nepalese women traveling abroad when such opportunities
for other women from there were unheard of. As a student of gender and migration,
it is particularly intriguing to me how these women, who were associated with the
Gurkhas, have been completely ignored while the soldiers were glorified as almost
heroic (Caplan 1995). Nonetheless, there do exist photographs and other visuals that
unearth forgotten migration histories and life experiences. This ignorance of women’s
experiences not only highlights how female social actors have been sidelined in social
history but it also emphasizes the patriarchal nature of Imperial society and the
military organization that gives primacy to the migration histories and achievements
of men. Women were pushed to the margins, both as Nepali nationals and as British
subjects.

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 There have been many undocumented
cases of Nepali women’s migration which are
visible in the photographs on display at the
Gurkha Memorial Museum (GMM) in
Pokhara, mainly collected from the The Kukri
and Parbate journals that were published by the
Brigade of Gurkhas annually and fortnightly
respectively. Most photos were taken by
British officers in the Gurkha regiments. The
most iconic photo, one that made me question
the migration history of Nepali women, is of
the wives of Gurkha soldiers with the caption
“2/7 GR leaving Singapore, 1954” (Figure 3).
Figure 3   2/7 Gurkha Rifles leaving Singapore, 1954. (Source: 
“Iconic” because this was the first instance
Gurkha Memorial Museum)
where I saw a visual of migrant women from
Nepal apart from those within the Indian
subcontinent in the 1950s itself. I have not seen any detailed textual documentation of
the same or other similar migrations, except where The Kukri and Parbate casually
mention that the families of the Gurkhas arrived in British Malaya, Singapore, or
Hong Kong. Figure 3 shows women of the 2nd battalion of the 7th Gurkha Rifles
(GR) leaving Singapore for Hong Kong in a Dutch ship named "MS Tijwangi" on 23
Nov. 1954. Although most Gurkha battalions left Southeast Asia for Hong Kong
from the mid-1960s some battalions, along with their families, were sent to Hong
Kong earlier, in the 1950s. This photo (showcased at the GMM) was first published in
1955 in The Kukri. Non-commissioned soldiers could only bring their wives and
children to military camps abroad for three years. Some lucky ones got the chance to
bring them twice over. The wives of Gurkha soldiers are pictured in this photo as
they readied to depart from Singapore and start their temporary stay in tents in Hong
Kong. Two of these four women are smiling but the other two look skeptical. Their
uncertainty could be about the move, or could be the sea-sickness that lay ahead, or
could have been shyness about being photographed. As Azoulay (2008, 229)
mentions, photographs can be looked at from the perspective of a “masculine gaze”
by the governing (colonizing or masculine) other. The shy or looking-away faces
could also mean that the women were unable to avoid being photographed. However,
the stare of the woman on the left towards the photographer reflects the gaze back.
Namasara had also offered a brief glance at the camera when she was displaying the
Victoria Cross medal. Azoulay (idem) calls such women who gaze back the “new
female figure… whose consent must be sought.”
Women from Gurkha families had traveled across various parts of Asia and
beyond long before Nepal opened its borders because of neoliberalization in the early
1990s. It was only in 1985 that the Foreign Employment Act allowed Nepali men
(apart from going to India or as British Gurkhas) and women to apply for jobs
overseas in limited numbers (Sijapati and Limbu 2017). Before that the Nepalese state
did not very readily issue passports to Nepalis. Since the 1990s many men and women
have left the country as migrant labor to various destinations, but primarily to the
Middle East and Malaysia. Despite traveling overseas with the British Gurkhas,
neither the soldiers nor their wives had any say in the sort of destination they wanted
to go to. All migration pathways and destinations were decided by the British Army. It

7
is only the journey and the experiences of these women that were personalized
through these rare photographs, but were seldom recorded as texts.
These military wives are often called “camp followers.”
Describing this notion Enloe (1983, 1-2) highlights that “the
archetypal image of the camp follower is a woman outcast from
society, poor but tenacious, eking out a livelihood by preying on
unfortunate soldiers. If by chance she falls in love with a soldier, she
is destined to be abandoned or widowed.” The category of camp
followers has included not just soldiers’ wives but also their cooks,
provisioners, laundresses, and nurses (ibid., 3). The act of following
carries with it a notion of dependency and has a negative connotation
attached to it as being “rootless, promiscuous, parasitic” (Enloe 2000,
40), and it gives preference to the work of the military personnel and
not the agency of the follower (Cooke and Speirs 2005). In an
undated studio family photograph taken somewhere in British India
(some sources suggested this could be in Afghanistan/Waziristan)
where the 4th Gurkha Rifles were then stationed, Subedar Major
Kulpati Gurung of the 4th Gurkha Rifles and his son Jemadar Figure 4   4th Gurkha families: 
Kiruram Gurung are pictured with their wives. Although undated, this Subedar Major Kulpati Gurung with 
photograph (Figure 4) was taken before 1891 because, according to his son Kiruram Gurung and their 
11
the London Gazette, Kiruram was killed in action that year. wives. (Source: Gurkha Memorial 
Museum)
Subedar Major Gurung is framed leftmost in the photo, sitting
on a chair and wearing his uniform, with medals on his left and a sword in his right
hand, used as a prop. Seated to his left in a squatting posture is his wife, who remains
unnamed in the photo. She wears a sari covering her head and a large, visible nose
ring. A boy in a white civil dress with a turban is standing behind Subedar Major
Gurung and his wife, most probably his second son; his name is not mentioned in the
caption either. Jemadar Kiruram Gurung is also seen wearing his army uniform. Like
his father, he is sitting on a chair to the left of his squatting mother. He is holding a
stick with both hands, and a dog sits on his lap. Finally, Kiruarm’s wife is also dressed
and squatting, like her mother-in-law; no name of Kiruram’s wife is mentioned either.
It seems as though her identity has also been erased or is limited to being Kiruram’s
wife. The army, being a masculine and patriarchal institution, viewed such women
solely as the wives of soldiers. Their names were not just unrecorded, they were given
the names of their husbands. A clear display of socially-prescribed femininity and
masculinity can be seen in this photo (Figure 4) with the confident-looking masculine
males, especially Subedar Major Kulpati Gurung (leftmost). However, there can also
be seen an scintilla of shyness both on Kiruram’s wife and the male figure with a
white turban standing at the back. This not just differentiates male from female, it
also suggests to us the layers of masculinity at play, while the photograph was being
taken. The colonial and masculine gaze of the photographer seems to dominate the
masculinity of the man in a turban.

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 In a black and white portrait dated 1979 (Figure 5), Sama Gauchan
(name changed) is wearing a saree and a sweater but no jewelry. This photo
was taken when she was about to leave for Hong Kong with her husband.
In the photo, she looks happy and anxious at the same time. Sama is
holding a black placard that has an inscription of her husband’s army
number 258199 6G.R. with a slightly smiling face. Sama told me in an
interview that after she reached Hong Kong, she was called unansay-ni (99-
ni, where 99 is the last two digits of her husband’s army number and -ni as
a suffix in the Nepali language femininizes the name) by her fellow camp
residents, as her husband was called unansay (99, in Nepali, from his army
number). The same happened with Namasara Thapini (Nainsara Magarni) Figure 5   Sama Gauchan, as 
as well but to a different degree. Unlike Sama, who was given her a young bride, carries a 
husband’s army name, Namasara retained her first name, but her surname placard with her husband's 
was changed. “Thapini” and “Magarni” are not names but the femininized army number inscribed on it. 
(Source: Sama Gauchan)
versions of the surname and the ethnicity of Subedar Netra Bahadur
Thapa, who belonged to the Magar ethnicity. Hence the femininized name
“Thapini” and “Magarni” for Namasara.
The same happened with
Dhanmaya Limbuni. Dhanmaya was
married to Lieutenant Dhojbir
Limbu (QGO—Queen’s Gurkhas
Officer) who later retired as a
(Gurkha) Major. According to her
identity card (Figure 6), which was
issued on 18 April 1960, Dhanmaya
left Barrackpore (India) which she
must have reached from her home
in eastern Nepal on foot and by
train. She boarded a ship to Sungai
Petani (Malaysia) from Calcutta. The
Figure 6   The identity card of Dhanamaya Limbuni. (Source: 
Dhanmaya's granddaughter)
identity card no. 15415 mentions
Dhanmaya first as the wife of army
no. 454860 and then mentions her
husband’s “surname.” Her name – written under the heading “wife’s name” – comes
after her husband’s name. A woman’s identity in such cases is not just secondary to
her husband’s, but also to his army number. According to Dhanmaya’s
granddaughter, who showed me the family albums and shared some anecdotes about
her grandmother, after Dhanmaya went to live in the camp, she was called Dhojbir-ni
(femininized name of her husband Dhojbir Limbu). Her granddaughter did not
know her original name until she discovered the identity card within the photo
albums that her grandfather maintained. Both Dhojbir and Dhanmaya have passed
away now. “Dhojbir-ni” or Dhanmaya, as the wife of a Company Commander, had
to unofficially supervise the Gurkha family lines and Gurkha wives on behalf of her
husband. Her granddaughter told me that she troubled many Gurkha wives over
issues of cleanliness. This is very much unlike Gurkha Majors’ wives as, according to
most of my research interlocutors, they are generally supportive of their Nepali didi-
bahini (sisters) who are new at the camps and only there for three years. Dhanmaya
also went on to become a matriarch in her family in Dharan (a town in eastern

9
Nepal) where the family settled after retirement. Not much information about
Dhanmaya has passed on to the younger generation except a big collection of
photographs. These photographs, mostly taken by Dhanmaya’s husband Dhojbir
Limbu, reveal the explorations made by Dhanmaya as a Gurkha officer’s wife. Unlike
the wives of soldiers, Dhanmaya, as an officer’s wife, could live with her husband for
extended years. There were many photos of Dhanmaya donning Western clothes
mixed with Nepali ones while her husband was posted as the Queen’s Guard at
Buckingham Palace in 1961. There is also one photograph (Figure 7) taken at the
“Sea Palace” where Dhanmaya is dressed as a queen with jewelry and a crown on her
head, and is sitting on a throne-like chair. The explorations made by Dhanmaya tell
us that Gurkha wives have done so much more as migrants. The agency of women
like Dhanmaya is worth exploring while they were under enormous patriarchal
pressure from Nepali society, the military, and the British Empire. These three
institutions did not just restrict women’s lives, they also controlled women’s bodies
and placed them under surveillance.
The fact that Namasara was wearing an extraordinarily long saree that she would
not have donned in her Magar village in central Nepal, thereby performing the
British expectation of an oriental widow, is an example of the type of control over
Gurkha women’s bodies by the military and by extension the Empire. Even after the
passing away of the Empire, the surveillance continued within the military. For
instance, in the family lines of the military camps, Gurkha women were inspected,
presented and involved in limited ways by British and Gurkha
officers. The visuals from the family lines tell us that Gurkha women
were a part of the military in that they had to perform as “good
wives.” The idea of “good wives” was primarily attached to White
women during colonial times and was transcended to colonized
women during the civilizing mission. White women were regarded as
moral and virtuous and therefore “good wives,” while women of
color, irrespective of their jobs, were thought to be sexually licentious
and capable of evil and indeed were “nasty wenches” (Rose 2010, 45-
46). In the case of Imperial India the domesticity of European women
was deemed superior to the “ignorant and uncivilized” domestic
practices of the natives (Walsh 2004, 15). Analyzing manuals to
maintain domesticity and memoirs written by Indian women and their
husbands, Walsh (ibid.) explains that the domesticity of Indian women Figure 7   Dhanmaya at the “Sea 
was guided by migrations of Indian men to Britain and White women Palace” as photographed by her 
husband, Dhojbir. (Source: 
to colonial India. Dhanmaya’s granddaughter) 
When the England-educated Bengali men returned to India, they
brought change within the patriarchal system and introduced a “new
patriarchy.” “New” because it challenged the existing forms of patriarchy by
encouraging women to get an education, travel outside the home, but “patriarchy”
nevertheless because it still maintained women in a dependent and subordinate status
(ibid., 3-4). In the "old patriarchy" young women had to surrender to their mothers-
in-law, while in the new one they had to “devote” themselves to their husband. This
brought about a change of authority and power relations within the extended
family—it ended elderly women’s family authority, at least over their daughters-in-
law, but at the same time established misogynistic men as teachers of their wives
(ibid., 160). Young women, however, found better opportunities in intimate husband-

10
 wife relationships even though it led to extreme criticism within
the family, even social ostracism from the elders (ibid., 5). The
domesticity of a Hindu woman was at the center of debate
between colonial modernity and indigenous family life. Walsh
(ibid., 15) notes, “As the discourse of domesticity made its
appearance among the colonized, its central images—the well-
ordered home and the skillful wife who ran it—became tropes
for the progress and happiness that European civilization could
bring.” With the Gurkha soldiers working under the British
officers and their White wives at the military camps, the Gurkha
wives were also put under the scrutiny of the civilizing mission.
The British officers (Commanding Officers), their wives, the
Gurkha officers (Company Commanders), and their wives (like
Dhanmaya, mentioned above) regularly checked the Gurkha
camp houses. While such “inspection” visits were usually pre-
announced, sometimes the inspectors did come unannounced.
The Gurkha women I interviewed told me that they used to stay
hungry during the inspection day waiting for the inspection team,
as cooking would make their kitchen messy. Some women told
me that the wives of British officers sometimes even checked the
cleanliness of rather unlikely places like the window glass. Apart
from this Gurkha women were involved in various sports,
gardening, and house-making competitions. The photographs
show Purna Rai’s (name changed) home in Hong Kong being
inspected (Figure 8), participation in a gardening competition
(Figure 9), and an award presentation (Figure 10). There exist
many photographs of women being awarded in such competitions, mainly published
in the biweekly Parbate magazine. Furthermore, these photographs and the military
intervention in the lives of the Gurkha families depict everyday life colonialism. The
Gurkha wives (or families) were to be modernized by the governing British with the
help of WRVS volunteers, the wives of British officers, and the British officers
themselves to lift off their “white man’s burden.” However, the role of women
stopped there, their contributions and sacrifices in the larger discourses of military
migration are forgotten.

Figure 8 Inspection visit at Purna Rai's home at the military camp in Hong Kong. (Photo courtesy of Purna
Rai's daughter)
Figure 9 Purna Rai and her children in front of her kitchen garden. (Photo courtesy of Purna Rai's
daughter)
Figure 10 (Purna Rai getting awarded after a competition. (Photo courtesy of Purna Rai's daughter)

The above section examined visuals and highlighted some representative

examples that made women visible in the migration histories of Nepal. The
following section will find the subjective voices of migration experiences and
histories through visuals. Here I will focus mostly on Namasara Thapini and bring in
other historical figures wherever relevant.

11
SUBJECTIVIZING THE VISUALS

What became of Namasara or the wives of Subedar Major Kulpati Gurung and
Jemadar Kiruram Gurung? What became of Dhojbirni/Dhanmaya? The story of such
women is limited in the history books to the visuals. The whole purpose of visual
culture, as Mitchell (1996) argues, is to subjectivize it. The subjectivized object in
some form or other is incurable (ibid.). However, subjectivizing Namasara, Saran, and
Dhanmaya or any other Gurkha women with the limited information I have is a
daunting task. Only some, like Sama, are alive to narrate to me their visual stories.
Pinney (2006) asks whether the visual should be seen as a mode of communication
free of language or as a screen where knowledge and practices produced elsewhere are
projected. Knowing the background in which the visual was captured, it is particularly
difficult to assign full independence to the visuals. Anthropologists, as interpreters,
would only assign a limited degree of freedom to the visuals. Mitchell (ibid.) believes
that we are stuck with a pre-modern attitude towards objects, especially visuals,
thereby creating a power hierarchy between not just those who took the photos but
also those who are looking at them, and our task is to understand them. Mitchell
suggests questioning pictures about their desires instead of looking at them as vehicles
of meaning or instruments of power. Therefore, he asserts, there must be a shift
“from what pictures do to what they want” (Mitchell 1996, 74, his emphasis). I have
attempted to give as much independence as possible to the photographs while
interpreting and subjectivizing them.
Farwell (1984), in his brief account of Namasara’s visit to Nowshera, mentions
that it was not just that no one went off to find Namasara and talk to her about
herself or her dead husband, but her unclear name is only mentioned as being the
wife of Subedar Thapa who went to receive his medal. Namasara’s identity got limited
in history to this: the girl/child-widow receiving Subedar Thapa’s medal on his behalf.
Many men like Subedar Thapa went away from their homelands as migrant-soldiers to
fight for the British and Indian armies but never returned. Most of these migrations
were triggered by economic hardships and exacerbated by the autocratic Nepali state
policies of assisting the British Empire and the cultural aspirations of becoming a
soldier (Hitchcock 1966). The loss of a beloved member would not just bring
emotional trauma to his household, but the loss of a breadwinning member would
also push the family towards further economic hardships. There were about 200,000
Nepali men like Subedar Thapa who participated in the Second World War; about
20,000 of them perished (Des Chene 1991); like Subedar Thapa, they never returned.
Unlike Namasara, however, there are also many women who never knew what
happened to their husbands on the battlefield: they never heard back from their
partners. No decorations were given to them—no ceremonies were organized.
When I contacted the record offices of the British Army and the Indian Army,
they informed me that no records of Namasara exist. No one received any pension or
benefit after Subedar Thapa was killed during the Second World War. The British
Army record officer in Pokhara informed me over the phone that they do not keep
records of Gurkha soldiers before 1947 as that jurisdiction falls under the Indian
Army, and this holds true for the VC awards too. The Assistant Military Attaché
(Pension) & OIC at the Pension Paying Office (PPO) of the Indian Army in Pokhara
replied to my email inquiry about Namasara saying, “Subedar Netra Bahadur Thapa

12
VC (IO-28467) is not traced out [traceable], he may have not borne on pension
strength of this PPO.” One interesting question that lies ahead is why Subedar Thapa
did not record Namasara as his beneficiary? I have no answers, only speculations. As
Namasara was too young when she was betrothed to Subedar Thapa, the likelihood of
their having offspring is almost nil. Being a child-widow and without any pension or
benefits, she might well have faced difficulty in sustaining herself independently in a
Nepali village almost 80 years ago. If she were getting benefits and/or a pension, the
likelihood of her remarrying (or at least recording her remarriage) would have been
slight, as she would not want to stop a meager yet stable income source. But given
that no economic support was offered by the British Army, it could be that she
remarried or eloped as a teenager. In that case, Subedar Thapa and Namasara’s trip to
Nowshera must have become a dream, maybe one that she preferred to forget.
As mentioned above, Nowshera is over 1600 km. from Raghu, Subedar Thapa’s
village in central Nepal. It was probably the first time that Namasara and Subedar
Thapa’s mother had traveled so far. A male guardian could have been escorting the
two, but no record is available of such an escort except for Col. Eustace who perhaps
met them in Nautanwa, a town in northern India. Even if they took a train from
Nautanwa, this town was over 150 km. away from Raghu, and walking was their only
option to reach there then. Having reached Nautanwa, boarding the enormous and
noisy train which they had never before seen, let alone ridden in, must have been
exciting but also harrowing with the constant fumes of the coal-fired engine. With
several train changes and staying at unknown locations, until finally Subedar Thapa’s
family reached Nowshera, what sort of hospitality and reception would have they
gotten from the Gurkha soldiers or officers? How long did they stay there? How did
they prepare or were made to prepare themselves for the award ceremony? Did
Namasara and her mother-in-law ever think that the whole ceremony was worth
traveling over 3200 km. there and back? What might have motivated or compelled
them to travel so far except that cold piece of medal?
What did Namasara make of the whole ceremony? What was going on in her
mind when all this was happening? The whole ceremony could have been a mere
façade after the loss of her husband and bread-winner. As the narrator of the clip
mentions, was Namasara indeed carrying “back a medal and a great memory”? He
remarks that Naik Agansingh Rai VC’s family was watching Subedar Netra Bahadur
Thapa VC’s family “knowing how bitter the loss would have been to them had their
boy not been there to see his glory.” The narrator does not directly address
Namasara’s loss, but indirectly references the “bitterness” through the family of Naik
Rai. Not empathizing with Namasara here is another way of overlooking what she
must have been going through during the ceremony. Rather, the narrator romanticizes
the loss with the phrase “a great memory.” Was the VC medal enough or the memory
so great as to compensate for their loss?
What could the Victoria Cross medal mean to Namasara, the medal being the
highest gallantry award of the British Army? The news of Subedar Thapa’s death must
have reached her within a few weeks. She could have been Subedar Thapa’s soltini
(mother's brother’s daughter) and, in the Magar tradition of cross-cousin marriage,
she must have been betrothed to Subedar Thapa as a small child. Subedar Thapa was
killed on 26 June 1944, and was posthumously awarded the VC on 10 Oct. 1944. It
was on 23 Jan. 1945 that the medal was presented to Namasara along with that for
Naik Agansingh Rai.12 The bereaved family never saw Subedar Thapa’s corpse as it

13
could not be retrieved from the battlefield. They probably had not seen him alive for
quite a few years either, as regular leave would have been impacted during the war
conditions. The two females, however, were spectators to what was happening in
honor of their beloved VC awardee seven months after his death. They did not visibly
share the excitement that Naik Rai’s family was showing. The smiling happy faces of
Naik Rai’s family are totally different from the impassive face of Namasara. Marcus
Banks holds that ethnographic films have been made in such a way that the
anthropologist seems entirely active, and the “subjects” seemed almost entirely
passive. Such films carried a message suggesting what “‘we’ did to ‘them’” (Banks
1998, 7). This impassivity in the subject is particularly important in the case of women
like Namasara whose husband died while at war, but she was given the medal and was
asked to cherish the life of a dead husband and left to live a life of her own.
Was Namasara only impassive, though? Was there anger and resistance in her
face when she stared at the camera for a moment and looked down? Or was she sad,
unhappy, nervous, and out of place? Maybe Namasara was too young to find out what
was going on, to feel enraged about the whole ceremony, and felt too scared about
the enormous number of marching Gurkha soldiers and White officers with their
wives, scenes she had never witnessed in her life before. How differently did Subedar
Thapa’s mother feel? Was she scared too? Or was she enraged when all this was
happening? Did she have the bargaining power to protest to the British officers for
the loss of her son? On the other hand, was she convinced to celebrate the bravery
and, as the narrator mentioned, “take back a great memory”? Could she ask for a
minimum compensation in cash or kind for the loss she was facing? There are more
unanswered questions than satisfying answers available from the short visual. This is a
critical moment in interpreting Namasara’s emotions through that visual. Azoulay
(2008) warns that although photos do not necessarily lie, they are at the borders of
deception, and anthropologists might narrate a story in excess of what was happening
in the photos, making such photos deceptive. MacDougall (1997) warns us, as does
Azoulay (2008), that an uncaptioned photograph is open for interpretation from the
viewer but the viewer can land upon a wrong conclusion as to what was portrayed in
the photo. Similarly Mitchell argues, “We as critics may want pictures to be stronger
than they actually are in order to give ourselves a sense of power in opposing,
exposing or praising them” (1996, 74). Power attached to photographs is an
important dimension for analysis. Critics may attach a lot more power to rather
"weak" photos and hyperbolize the agency of the “subjects” of those photos.
Therefore, it is extremely difficult to estimate the power encoded in photographs
(idem). While I may be trying to imagine rage or loss or nervousness in the minds of
Namasara or her mother-in-law, I may be misinterpreting the whole visual and
pushing too hard for understanding; or maybe I am interpreting this correctly, based
on the way Namasara stares at the camera; or maybe Namasara was too immature to
think through all of this.
Dressed in a long, perhaps uncomfortable sari, Namasara was performing the
role of an oriental widow satisfactorily to the British eyes. What were the Britons
there thinking about this young widow and the mother of Subedar Thapa? Were both
of them female counterparts of the “bravest” and “most feared” “warrior gentlemen”
(Caplan 1995; Ware 2012), or were they just poor oriental subjects with no bargaining
power facing the massive Empire and its actors? To ask for what pictures want does
not lead to an abandonment of studying pictures through the lens of the artist or the

14
observer, but rather this new way will allow one to engage with the “question of
pictorial meaning and power” differently (Mitchell 1996, 71). For Banks,

the new ethnographic approaches are historically grounded and politically aware, recognizing
the frequent colonial or neo-colonial underpinnings of the relationship between the
anthropologist and anthropological subject, recognizing the agency of the anthropological
subject and their right as well as their ability to enter into a discourse about the construction
of their lives. (Banks 1998, 6)

Mitchell (ibid.) argues that visuals are gendered where images and films are understood
to be feminine, creating an opposing gaze between women as visual and men as the
viewer. Photographs have power on human emotions and behavior. Mitchell argues
“From the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the mode of the subaltern
to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak” (ibid., 74). In that sense, are
anthropologists not just trying to understand and interpret the objects, subjects, and
emotions in the photos, when photos trigger certain emotions and behavior in the
onlooker as well.

CONCLUSION

I have here adopted visual anthropology concepts to understand the blindness

towards the migration histories of Nepali women and the effect of migration on them
primarily in the 20th century; and to interpret the deeper meanings attached to
migration through visuals that are available in online or on-site archives or in the
personal collections of migrants and their families. Visual anthropology attempts to
understand the deeper meanings that individuals attach to the visuals that they are
part of; and it helped me move beyond treating visuals as mere objects to un-mute the
voices. I focused primarily on women who came from the families of Gurkha
soldiers, and who had migrated across the world with or without those soldiers, in the
capacity of military wives, daughters or professionals. I have tried to go beyond the
“factual” visual data by interpreting the contexts, experiences and emotions expressed
in those visuals. The various forms of activity that photographs have captured helped
me to understand the social and cultural meanings attached to those activities that the
individuals in the visuals are involved with. The visuals thus uncovered the otherwise
hidden and forgotten migration histories and personal experiences of migrant women
from Nepal. While the visuals attempt at creating powerless subjects ruled by the
colonial forces, the photos and videos tell us of more than just a unidirectional flow
of power. The women and men of the photos, like Namasara, gaze back at the
photographer whom Azoulay (2008, 229) calls the “new female figure.” With the
migration histories of women like Purna Rai and Dhanmaya Limbuni, and many
others, this paper demonstrated that women from Gurkha families are not invisible,
absent or erased: rather, they are ignored, overlooked and forgotten in migration
discourses and diaspora studies. Such ignorance both on the part of modern Nepali
society and the British Army suggests that Gurkha women were limited to being
military wives and “camp followers.” The British Army tried to erase the identities of
women like Kiruram’s wife by objectivizing her, while Nepali society has also pushed
such women to the fringes by permanently linking their identities with their
husbands'. For instance, the name Dhojbirni, instead of Dhanmaya, and the

15
placement of Namasara Thapini in history as merely being Subedar Thapa’s child-
widow were attempts at making the personhood of Gurkha women completely
dependent on their husbands'; and the British actively nurtured such erasure of
identity. Furthermore, the paper has shown how the British continued with a colonial
construction of the “White man’s burden” in modernizing the “primitive” Gurkha
women (and men), uplifting them in military camps by making them "improve" their
ways of life. The constant inspection of soldiers’ homes and the policing of women’s
bodies and lives were some of the typical cases of the British trying to civilize the
colonized Other. The British actively invested in such a civilizing mission by
recruiting volunteers to monitor women’s everyday lives, thereby governing their
movements and attires.

NOTES

1. British Pathé was a major cinematic journalism producer which dominated the
British cinema experience between 1910 and 1958, before its eventual decline in
popularity after the coming of television. It has thousands of archival clips
available online.
2. British Pathé, 1945, “For Valour.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IedYyqswXA (accessed 13 March 2021).
3. Naik Agansingh Rai was later given the title of Honorary Captain by the Indian
Army. The 5th Gurkha Rifles remained with the Indian Army after 1947.
According to the Tripartite Agreement made among the British, Indian and Nepali
states in 1947, the 2nd, 6th, 7th, and 10th Gurkhas went with the British, while the
1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 8th, and 9th Gurkhas stayed with the Indian Army.
4. The Nowshera Brigade was an important military station formed by British India
during World War II. Nowshera, now in Pakistan, is more than 1600 km. away
from Subedar Thapa’s home in Nepal. DSO is the abbreviation of the
Distinguished Service Order.
5. According to James Lunt (1994, 159), Col. Norman (‘John’) Eustace “was
appointed to command 2/5 Gurkha Rifles during the bitter fighting to repel the
Japanese attempts to take Imphal.” He had joined 2/6 Gurkha Rifles in 1921.
6. All new recruits from Nepal used to have their heads shaven and given a good
bath, mainly for delousing. I am not sure if something similar happened with
Namasara and her mother-in-law. Forbes (1967, 191) cites Maj. Rakamsing Rai,
who mentions that all Gurkha heads were shaven before World War II and only a
tuppi (tuft of hair on the crown) was left. It was only after the War that the
Gurkhas were allowed to keep their hair.
7. Note that these women are differently dressed than what the narrator had
mentionedearlier, and the camera had shown, to be Naik Agansingh Rai’s family.
8. Despite such bans on migration, many Nepalis did also travel as indentured
workers to various British colonies, ranging from Fiji to British Guyana.
9. www.instagram.com/gurkhawomen (accessed 2 Feb. 2022).

16
10. www.facebook.com/gurkhawomen (accessed 2 Feb. 2022).
11. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/26192/page/4372/data.pdf
(accessed 2 April 2021).
12. http://www.victoriacross.org.uk/bbrai2.htm (accessed 30 March 2021).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the individuals who helped by providing the personal
photographs in narrating this story, and the institutional archive maintained by the
Gurkha Memorial Museum, Pokhara, Nepal. I would also like to thank the Centre for
the Study of Labour and Mobility (CESLAM), especially Professor Suresh Dhakal,
Sadikshya Bhattarai, and Khem R. Shreesh, for their guidance and support in
finalizing this paper. I am also grateful towards the anonymous reviewer and editor
Paul Hockings who provided their invaluable comments to make this paper richer.

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