WARRIOR GENTLEMEN

Of late, there has been a growing interest in how non-Western peoples have been and continue to be depicted in the literatures of the West. In anthropology, attention has focused on the range of literary devices employed in ethnographic texts to distance and exoticize the subjects of discourse, and ultimately contribute to their subordination. This study eschews the tendency to regard virtually all depictions of non-Western others as amenable to the same kinds of orientalist analysis, and argues that the portrayals found in such writings must be examined in their particular historical and political settings. These themes are explored by analyzing the voluminous literature by military authors who have written and continue to write about the Gurkhas, those legendary soldiers from Nepal who have served in Britains Imperial and post-Imperial armies for more than two centuries. The author discovers that, instead of exoticizing them, the military writers find in their subjects the quintessential virtues of the European officers themselves