Word: gurkha
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fact is that Nepal, home of the famed Gurkha soldiers, has so far proved singularly impervious to outsiders. When India built Nepal a 78-mile road, some Nepalese concluded that Nehru was planning to take over the country-an attitude that India found as disconcerting as the U.S. often finds India's. Of the $12 million that Red China is pouring in, most has vanished down the well of government deficit, and Nepal has flatly refused to allow Chinese technicians inside its borders. As for recent U.S. aid-development projects in more than 1,200 villages, the ridding...
...British Empire, but never, apparently, on novels about it. Currently the most prolific of old-colonial-writing hands is John Masters (Bhowani Junction, Coromandel!), an ex-infantry officer (4th Gurkha Rifles) who now offers the sixth installment of his projected 35-volume epic of the British in India. The book is a reliable old elephant, advancing indomitably over the narrative terrain while throwing the dust of unlikely adventures in the reader's eye. The gist of Far, Far the Mountain Peak is that, given enough rope in India, a cad may climb it-socially...
...turning out first drafts at a clip of 11,000 words a day. But U.S.-naturalized Novelist Masters has paused in his fiction labors to write a memoir of his youth. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be about his service in India as an infantry officer in a Gurkha regiment...
Born in Calcutta of a family that had served in India since 1805, he was as excited about India as though he had gone there from a Midwestern farm. He was afire with the need to make good with his Gurkha troops, tribesmen from Nepal whose qualities as men and soldiers still excite his respect and imagination: "There were no excuses, no grumbling, no shirking, no lying. There was no intrigue, no apple-polishing, and no servility." Not until two years had passed did they put the seal of approval on the young subaltern. It was a loyalty worth having...
Relentless in his determination to catch the outlaw, Dixit set a specially trained company of Gurkha police combing the jungle for his quarry. As an added precaution, he himself climbed to a mountain shrine in Amarnath to ask help of the god Siva. One day last week, as Man Singh sat resting under a banyan tree near the village of Kakekapura, Siva answered the prayer. A telephone rang in the New Delhi residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, and over it a jubilant voice crowed to India's Prime Minister: "Panditji, this is Home Minister Dixit. We have just killed...