Conclusion – Slow Death and Failure in the Life Building of Gurkha Communities

Summary

This book has focused so far on the everyday lives and experiences of Gurkhas and Gurkha wives who come to participate in global security markets. I have explored the martial histories that continue to shape the experiences of these men and women. These histories inform us of how Western clients interpret and value Gurkha security practices in Afghanistan, and how white British nationals, who were formerly Gurkha officers and are now security company directors, draw upon these martial histories in their management of Gurkhas. The book has shown how affects of love and happiness sustain these men and women in colonial and gendered relations within security markets. It has also examined the gendered and racialised affective labour that is taken up by Gurkhas in their everyday practices of making security clients feel safe. All of this has illuminated how affective relations to militarism, structurally conditioned through colonial geographies, bind these communities to global security markets in the hope of a good life.

Failure and the (Un)making of the Gurkha Good Life

I want to dedicate some space to the other side of the Gurkha story – those young men who failed to secure the position of Gurkha and their families. As the opening chapter showed, failure to become a Gurkha carries much more certainty than success does. To be sure, failure comes with a whole host of affective attachments, including shame, despair and disillusionment. But it also, as Halberstam reminds us, provides us with an opportunity to ‘poke holes in the toxic positivity’ (2011, 3) that ideas of success and of following the Gurkha life pathway to happiness often bring. Failure opens conceptual space to think through how acts of ‘losing, forgetting, not knowing, undoing and unbecoming might indeed offer more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of living and being’ in the world (Halberstam 2011, 2–3). Failure also alerts us to the heterogeneity of life stories of failure – that even when notions of failure are institutionally embraced, not everyone is allowed to fail and/or experience failure in the same way (Lisle 2018). While some may indeed fail up, for others who are not afforded the same structural and social privileges, failing can result in significant trauma, material loss, shame and disappointment (Halberstam 2011; Lisle 2018).