How Did Anchovies Become Beloved to the Gurkhas?

The popularity of the saltwater fish in landlocked Nepal tells an important story about the innovation of the Gurkha kitchen—and the untold human cost of British imperialism.

TEXT Prashanta Khanal PHOTOGRAPHY Getty Images

"My mother adds dried anchovies to many

Nepali recipes, from achaars and curries to soups. We adore anchovies,” Trisha Rai said. I met Trisha and her mother Yamini Rai in their restaurant, Yellow Pomelo (which has now been sold), located in the southern part of the capital Kathmandu. Every time I craved Southeast Asian flavours, I used to visit the restaurant.

Trisha Rai, now in her mid-30s, was born and brought up in Singapore, in the Gurkha Cantonment called Mount Vernon Camp, where her father Kamal Prasad Rai served as a Singaporean Gurkha soldier. In the cantonment, her mother would often make Nepali dishes cooked with dried anchovies.

The first taste of anchovy that Trisha remembers is a bitter gourd achaar that her mother made, topped with crisp, deep-fried anchovies. Bitter gourd achaar is a piquant relish made of bitter gourds using roasted sesame seed or philinge (Niger seed powder), chillies, lemon juice, fenugreek seeds and mustard oil. It is a popular dish from the foothills of the Himalayas, the home of the Gurkhas.

Trisha’s family has a generational history of joining the Gurkhas. In the late 1930s, Trisha’s grandfather was recruited by the British, and deployed in World War II in Malaya. In 1980, her father—who was born in Malaysia (then Malaya) in 1959—joined the Singapore Gurkha regiment. Trisha’s mother was also born to a British Gurkha soldier in the late ‘60s, in Hong Kong. Thus, the family has held a culture of eating anchovies for generations. In 2005, Trisha and her family returned to Nepal. Like many other Gurkha families, they brought anchovies back with them.

In a landlocked country where the nearest sea, the Bay of Bengal, lies several hundred kilometres away across the border, the curious presence of anchovies in Nepal’s cuisine owes a debt of gratitude to the Gurkhas.

Even though the British Empire never colonised Nepal, it left a heavy imprint of exploitation on the country. The recruitment of young Nepali men in the British Armed Forces has a history that goes back 200 years.

During the 1814–1816 Anglo-Nepalese war, Nepali soldiers fought bravely against the British East India Company’s army. The war ended with the Sugauli Treaty of 1815, through which Nepal lost one-third of its land and was coerced to allow British residency in Kathmandu. Although not mentioned in the treaty, the company also negotiated to recruit Nepali young men into its armed forces. Thus began the use of Nepali men as mercenaries by British imperialists.

These young men mainly came from four hill-based communities, whom the British considered martial races: Magar and Gurung from western Nepal, and Rai and Limbu from the east. Even today, many men from these communities continue to join the British Army and the Singapore Police Force, following their forefathers’ legacy and aspiring for a better future.

Gurkhas have served in every war the British Empire has fought all over the world, from Europe, Africa and South America to Central Asia. From late 1914 until 1918, the British colonial empire deployed Gurkhas in Europe during World War I. During World War II, Gurkhas waged heavy battles against the imperial Japanese Army in former Burma, a main theatre of the war in Asia. They also fought outside Asia.

In Southeast Asia, Gurkha deployment dates back as early as 1828, when the British East India Company recruited men from Nepal’s hills to serve as soldiers, guards, miners and farmers in its Burmese colony. In 1876, Gurkhas came to Malaya as a part of a British-Indian contingent to respond to the murder of a British resident.

The Gurkha connection to Malaya was cemented in 1947. After British colonial rule in India ended, Gurkha regiments were split between the British and Indian armies. The British moved the regiments under their employ to colonies in the Malay peninsula to protect their interests in the region.

From 1948 to 1960, during the Cold War, Gurkhas engaged in the “Malayan Emergency,” a long and costly guerrilla war in the dense tropical jungles of the Malay peninsula. Between 1963 and 1966, they fought along the Malaysian-Indonesian borders on Borneo Island against pro-independence fighters, in what is known as the “Indonesian Confrontation.”

In 1971, after the wave of independence in the Malay peninsula, the British moved Gurkha regiments to Hong Kong—Britain’s last colony in Asia—where they helped to contain the immigrants thronging from mainland China. In 1997, after China annexed Hong Kong, they moved the Gurkhas back to the U.K.

Even to this day, Singapore and Brunei recruit Gurkhas into their armed forces. Selected by the British Army with the purview of the respective governments, they are chosen annually through recruiting centres in Nepal.

“Anchovies have always been part of our diet, and their absence in our kitchen is stranger than their presence,” says writer and translator Muna Gurung. She runs a homemade pickle business called ĀMĀKO with her mother, Bhimi Gurung. Like Trisha, Muna was born in Singapore to a Gurkha father. The family returned to Nepal after her father retired in 1994, as Gurkhas are not entitled to Singaporean citizenship or residency.

While deployed in Southeast Asia, the Gurkhas and their families were introduced to inexpensive and abundantly available anchovies. In the region, salt-cured, dried anchovies, which are locally called ikan bilis, are an integral part of the local cuisine.

Gurkha families call dried anchovies bhure machha— bhure means small, and machha is fish in Nepali. They are also called Bruneiko or Singaporeko macha, indicating the places they came from. It was customary for Gurkhas recruited in the Malay peninsula, colloquially called Malaya lahure in Nepal, to bring back gifts of dried anchovies to their families and friends while visiting the country on holiday.

(Lahure is a term used for men employed in a foreign army. The word comes from Lahore, in modern-day Pakistan, where Nepali men used to serve in the army of the Sikh Empire ruled by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, before the kingdom was annexed by the British East India Company.)

"Unlike other seafood, dried anchovies easily made their way into Gurkha kitchens, including those in Nepal, because they were easy to transport across the seas."

For Gurkhas deployed in Southeast Asia and their families who accompanied them, dried anchovies were one of the few foods that seemed not as foreign. They looked familiar, and probably reminded them of small, dried river fish called sidra that they ate back home.

When not occupied in back-breaking farming or engaged in social ceremonies and duties, Nepal’s ethnic hill communities, the Magar, Gurung, Rai and Limbu, occasionally climb down to rivers and streams for fishing. In the nutrient-deficient rivers cascading rapidly through rugged Himalayan valleys, river fish are not as abundant as anchovies in the open sea. They are an occasional treat in the Nepali hills. When the catch is more than they can consume fresh, they preserve the fish by smoke-drying them over firewood to make sidra.

“Dried anchovies were very popular within the Gurkha community in Brunei,” remembered Tim I Gurung, a former Gurkha soldier in Brunei and author of Ayo Gorkhali: The True Story of the Gurkhas, published in 2021. “We used to bring dried anchovies back home to Nepal and gift them to friends and relatives.”

Unlike other seafood, dried anchovies easily made their way into Gurkha kitchens, including those in Nepal, because they were easy to transport across the seas.

Trisha also recounted her early memories of seeing her mother packing dried anchovies along with kerupuk udang (or prawn crackers) and lungis (or colourful sarongs) to send back home. While sukuti (smoke-dried meat) and gundruk (dried, fermented mustard greens) were taken overseas from Nepal, dried anchovies made their way back. In Gurkha homes, anchovies became a customary part of the hospitality extended to visitors. For instance, my neighbour would give me a packet of dried anchovies every time her husband came to visit from Brunei. She would serve guests crisp fried anchovies or a spicy achaar made of anchovies cooked with tomatoes, along with a glass of alcohol. Alcohol is an indispensable part of culinary customs of many Indigenous hill communities in Nepal, including the Gurkhas. Not surprisingly, anchovies pair well with it.

In both Trisha’s and Muna’s homes, the other common dish prepared with anchovies is aloo-dum—a spicy dish made of boiled potatoes in a spice-laden gravy, which is popular in eastern Nepal and in adjacent Darjeeling. When fiddlehead ferns are in season, they are also stir-fried with anchovies and eaten with rice.

Thanks to their versatility, anchovies have gained popularity among a larger section of Nepalis. Today, it is common for grocery stores and supermarkets to stock anchovies on their shelves. Once a foreign ingredient, they have become a prized delicacy.

The popularity of anchovies in Nepali cuisine at large also allows us to reframe some popular narratives about the Gurkha community—or at least look at them through a different lens.

I would wager that if there is one thing that the world knows about Nepal besides its mountains, it is probably the Gurkhas and their legendary fierceness.

But this narrative overlooks and minimises the cost that the Gurkhas have had to bear for it. During World War I, approximately 200,000 Nepali men are believed to have served the British Indian Army. As Alaka Atreya Chudal notes in his paper "What Can a Song Do to You? A Life Story of a Gurkha Prisoner in World War I," one out of 10 Gurkhas from the Himalayan foothills recruited during the war never made it back home, although official British records maintain that 6,168 Gurkhas in total were killed—a much smaller number.

Letters and diaries written by the Gurkhas who fought in World War I and were captured as prisoners of war by the Germans paint haunting pictures of hunger, pain and suffering in the wet, cold trenches of Europe. Many

of the diaries and letters sent by Gurkhas were censored and never reached their families. They are displayed at the British Museum Library in London. They portray the soldiers yearning for home and to see their loved ones, and regretting joining the war.

Again, in World War II, over 250,000 Gurkhas fought alongside the British. More than 33,000 men never returned.

The British government sent many Gurkhas who survived these wars back home empty-handed, without pensions or severance pay. Many of those who were sent back were forced to live in poverty or engage in low-paying jobs as watchmen in India. The Gurkha families who lost their loved ones received no compensation.

“The way the British treated the Gurkhas in the aftermath of the First and Second World War was not only cruel and inhumane but also a disgrace,” writes Tim I Gurung in his book, “[They] were always taken for granted and exploited.” From World War II until 1994, Gurkhas were on average paid 10 times less than their British counterparts. Even to this day, veteran Gurkhas don’t earn an equal pension for doing the same job, a continuation of a discriminatory colonial legacy. It was only in 2009, after years of legal struggle, that the British allowed Gurkhas to settle in the UK.

As recently as in July 2021, British Gurkha veterans staged a hunger strike in London demanding equal pensions.

It's important to acknowledge the history of the Gurkhas beyond the single story of their bravery and loyalty. Their humane stories are often not told or recognised.

As Muna Gurung says, anchovies offer us an unlikely glimpse of the community’s ability to adapt and persevere.

“Anchovies tell stories of where we had been,” she says. “They signify the creativity and resilience of Gurkha women like my mother—how they embraced something that [was] new to them and made it their own. In this process, they made their culinary culture so much richer.”