Conceptualizing Belonging

Belonging is a political, sociocultural, legal, and moral concept. At one level, I am interested in unraveling the different modulations and notions of belonging from the standpoint of Gurkhas and their families. These include addressing their experiences across different generations and the location they are emplaced within—Singapore, Hong Kong, Nepal, or the United Kingdom. Feelings of belonging and how they shift and transform are contingent on temporality, institutional structures, and policies, as well as the different cycles or steps of migration. These depend on the social actors and the migratory routes undertaken. I therefore explain how belonging is enacted at two scales of analysis; the local context, and via transnational connections across borders within and beyond the Asian region. On another level, assessing how belonging transpires requires a closer interrogation of other social actors, including the state and other institutions. These other actors and their policies on belonging cut across broader structural levels and processes. Taking both dimensions concurrently, investigations into the breadth and depth of belonging and not-belonging then engender a broader discussion and deliberation on what it means to conceive of a Gurkha diaspora.

In interrogating the migrant–nation-state relation, three central research queries foster my analytical thrust: (1) What is belonging, and what is its character? (2) What are the politics of belonging, and how do such politics shift over time, within and across generations, and through changing sociopolitical climates? and (3) What are the limits and/or possibilities of belonging? The first question can be answered by comprehending what belonging (and by extension, not-belonging) means to individual Gurkha family members. The second, then, deals with what is at stake for those families, contextualized within the constraints and the freedoms that social actors exercise as they assess their own contexts of not-belonging. In short, I am interested in exploring what belonging looks and feels like personally (or at the individual and social group level), as well as what it means in political and structural terms (or at the collective level).

The distinction between the first two queries corresponds with Yuval-Davis’s (2006) differentiation of belonging and the politics of belonging. For her, the former refers to tangible dimensions of belonging that include emotional attachment and a sense of “home” that one experiences. The latter has to do with how belonging is connected to collectives in particular ways, dovetailing discourses on nationalism, citizenship, and rights. Antonsich (2010) makes a very similar distinction between belonging as “place-belongingness” and personal and intimate sentiments of feeling “at home,” and the “politics of belonging” as a “discursive resource” that is related to claims or resistance revolving inclusion and exclusion (see also Guibernau 2013; Prabhat 2018). His typology comprises five factors that elucidate belonging as felt and experienced: autobiographical, relational, cultural, economic, and legal. These five elements will provide the necessary scaffolding for analyzing my data, resembling what Yuval-Davis includes as “social locations; identifications and emotional attachments; and ethical and political values” (2006, 199). Such discourses on belonging need to be framed within a set of specific historical and contemporary conditions (Teerling 2011) that confront Gurkhas and their families. For instance, one major difference between working for the British Army and the Singapore Police Force (SPF) is that while both British and Singapore Gurkhas took their families to live with them in their respective country of service, the latter is not allowed to remain in Singapore on retirement, as compared to the former. Such conditions of employment and domicile therefore influence and shape both sentiments and structures of belonging that conjoin the two interrelated queries outlined above.

The third dimension of belonging pertaining to limits or possibilities are contingent on how bracketing takes place. Where belonging and not-belonging as a lens is useful to exemplify how social actors feel neither here nor there, as well as here and there (e.g., feeling a sense of belonging to both Singapore and Nepal), I go a step further. I propose the notion of bracketed belonging based on three interrelated emphases. The first is to signal how belonging is both actor- and action-oriented—running the range of social actors from individuals, communities, to state actors and their accompanying legal infrastructure, immigration rules, and others. Signaling belonging as such also highlights the intersubjective dimensions of not-belonging. The second has to do with analyzing the limits of belonging. Such limits are either placed on oneself, or nation-states and other structures constrain aspirations or hopes to belong. Third, bracketed belonging as a conceptual framework points not only to definitive belonging or not; it also indicates what or who would be both included and excluded simultaneously. Concomitantly, it unveils the varied motivations underlying these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Such bracketing is either self-constructed, or imposed on the self (cf. Guibernau 2013) by other actors including the nation-state. For example, bracketing belonging as self-constructed may be exemplified by a Gurkha police serviceman telling his daughter to not get too used to life in Singapore as she had recounted to me. This is because the family would have to return to Nepal once his service comes to an end. By way of doing so, the father consciously sets the limits and extent to which his children may experience a felt sense of belonging. Albeit having been born and bred in Singapore, the children’s felt sense may not be (allowed to be) enduring. Knowing that mandatory repatriation to Nepal comes at the end of one’s service thus explains and motivates the Gurkha father’s conscious and cautionary act of bracketing. In essence, he suspends if not limits her belonging. The character, rationale, and felt senses of belonging and not-belonging therefore continue to take shape, bend, and respond to wider circumstances. These depend on how the actor locates him or herself (and/or the family) at any one biographical point in the broader migratory schema. Therefore, the notion of bracketed belonging as an analytical tool makes visible a variety of contours and loci of affinity for different members or generations of Gurkha families. These are contingent on time, place, history, and culture as I demonstrate in this book.

As an instance of bracketed belonging that is imposed on the individual, one may refer to legal structures that place some social actors at the edge of belonging. In certain cases of adult Gurkha children, the First Tier Tribunal in the United Kingdom has ruled that some of them are not granted an Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) in connection with immigration policy. This outcome also arises owing to the lack of sufficient evidence to prove family connectedness and potential disruption to family life (see chapter 5). By delineating when and how one may belong, with limits and boundaries put in place, bracketed belonging holds the potential to showcase the criteria and range of how belonging, not-belonging, and partial or limited belonging transpire. The brackets that govern belonging, either through self-construction or external imposition, thereby frame the extent and degree of not-belonging at any given point in time and within a specific sociopolitical context. Crucially, “belonging is never entirely about migrants’ subjective feelings of ‘fitting in’ or not, but also relates to how (powerful) others define who belongs” (Ralph and Staeheli 2011, 523). Furthermore, to belong is not merely about articulating felt experiences but to also translate these as a moral right or resource (Mustassari, Maki-Petaja-Leinonen, and Griffiths 2017). Arising from this translation, social actors may argue for certain citizenship provisions or entitlements. Therefore, belonging is deployed as a moral and political tool in negotiations for rights to resources such as improved pension arrangements, among others.

Bracketed belonging goes beyond mere identification of belonging and not-belonging as neatly defined categories. Through bracketing as a form of framing, the concept also distills the limits, contours, and negotiations that are spotlighted beyond belonging and not-belonging as coterminous. How far can an individual claim for oneself or others to belong only in particular ways that are at the same time accompanied by limits and boundaries? These constraints and contours are contingent on spatiotemporal experiences, as well as structural frames that nation-states operate with and that institutionally bracket who does or does not belong. To bracket is to draw up or delineate boundaries that both include and exclude as exacted by an array of institutional gatekeepers. To bracket also means making delineations as a thought or felt experience at the back of one’s mind that is not usually foregrounded. In Lamont and Molnar’s (2002) discussion on acts of boundary making, they point out that such processes involve boundaries that are drawn up in less outwardly manifest ways. Paying attention to bracketing in these ways therefore make visible multiple frames of belonging and not-belonging that are usually concomitant rather than distinct or lucidly kept separate. In approaching belonging through bracketed terms, therefore, I consider belonging as multiple (Freyer 2019; Gellner 2015; Jones and Krzyzanowski 2011; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2020), intersectional, and derivative from shifting contexts across different nation-states.

Bracketed belonging as a key conceptual anchor broadens the cartography and analytical scope of belonging in studying migrants, mobility, and nation-states. It is about the experiences, options, choices, and constraints that people and countries manage and negotiate within a migrant–nation-state nexus. I consider their various shifts, permutations, intergenerational similarities and differences, among others. Furthermore, one needs to think about temporality, inter- and intragenerational lived experiences, calibrations, and changes in how belonging is asserted or not. It would be a mistake to assume intergenerational difference and intragenerational sameness. A similar point is noted by Jones and Krzyzanowski (2011, 43) who contend that migrants should not be reified as a “coherent [and] internally consistent group.” There exist wide-ranging possible sources and repertoires of identification, experience, and allegiance arising from military or police and security service and diasporic phases. Different cohorts of Gurkhas and their children may therefore adopt similar or contrastive views about where and how they belong. Together, these dynamics thereby raise further differentiation in how bracketed belonging transpires across time, generations, and locales. They also importantly reflect the heterogeneity and fluidity of experiences in the wider Gurkha diaspora.

I briefly discuss the point on intergenerational difference and sameness by returning to the context of Gurkha police service in Singapore. While Gurkhas themselves are subject to contractual terms with the SPF that determine the length of their service, children of Gurkhas are by association affected by these terms. As mentioned, once their Gurkha father leaves the SPF, the entire family has to go back to Nepal. However, it is interesting to consider the experiences of Gurkha children in relation to “return migration”—for which the term needs to be problematized. This is because the children are, in a manner of speaking, not really “returning” to Nepal since they were born and educated in Singapore. They are second-generation children, not migrants themselves (Brocket 2020; Graf 2017; Haikkola 2011). They are returning to their parents’ birth country and not their own. This has consequences for the way they relate and adjust to living in Nepal, having spent close to two formative decades of their lives overseas as Singaporean-born Nepalis. This is unlike their parents’ biographies, which include their birth and a substantial period of their youth in Nepal. The notion of “return migration” is therefore more applicable for the first generation, that is, Gurkhas and their wives. Teerling’s explanation concerning second-generation migrants and “return” is instructive:

For the second generation, the term “return” is ambiguous; it is not a return in terms of birthplace statistics, but rather an emigration to another country. Nevertheless, these migrants often do have a sentimental relationship with the parental homeland. Hence the ”return” has empirical meaning even if it breaches the logic of migration statistics. (Teerling 2011, 1080)

In this regard, what then is the significance of “return” for both generations? How do they differ in terms of their capacities for engendering a sense of belonging or not-belonging given their respective exposure to contrastive linguistic, cultural, and national contexts? Ostensibly, migration as well as experiences of belonging are not static or consistent when we compare across the different generations of Gurkhas and their families. They change over time, contingent on how social actors choose or have to lead their lives over different periods and in response to options presented to them, or changes at the structural level based on the rules and regulations of varying nation-states. I echo Des Chene’s (1998) point on addressing the nexus between structural arrangements and contingent circumstances in my interrogation of belonging. Such circumstances refer to “contingent happenings of daily life,” which intertwine with structure. These work concomitantly as “people think through their positions and act from within a host of structured but also contingent circumstances” (1998–40). After all, belonging is “something that emerges from a lived experience” (Allwood 2020, 40). Employing the metaphor of bracketing, and how it modulates over time, expands on newer imaginaries or felt senses of belonging. Consequently, notions of home are then constructed and rationalized accordingly. These are dependent on one’s biographical phase, aspirations, constraints, and possibilities. It follows that social actors routinely assemble, disassemble, and/or reassemble what it means to belong or not over the course of their life and migratory routes. It is therefore pertinent to examine the degree and extent to which social actors continually craft and carve both belonging and otherwise through the act of bracketing.

As a corollary, processes and acts of bracketing are impermanent. With shifts in temporal and sociocultural contexts, such bracketing may transform or realign accordingly. The process of bracketing one’s belonging as a multilayered construct is contingent on specific circumstances, one’s biographical phase in the migratory runway, rather than based on a fixed or static sense of belonging (Antonsich 2010). Belonging is therefore an ongoing, constant project in the making—corresponding with what Thapa (2009, 97) calls as a “process in continuum.” It also highlights the various struggles and negotiations that social actors navigate in finding their own footing on how, where, and when to belong across experiential, spatial, temporal, and legal terms. Every act of bracketing requires or intersects with varying social formations that may either be easily enacted or encounter contestation as I explain in this book. Such fluidity brings to the fore, how belonging vis-à-vis attachments and affinities transpire on multiple fronts and over a range of social constellations (Röttger-Rössler 2018; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2013). In sum, I deploy the notion of bracketed belonging that intersects with three dimensions of analyses. First, I demonstrate how bracketed belonging instigates renewed interpretations of colonialism, empire, and security studies in terms of the migratory movements of diasporic Gurkha communities across the globe. Second, the notion illustrates how belonging is continually negotiated, contested, with time-bound limits exacted across vastly different political, legal, and social contexts and by different social actors. Third, bracketed belonging makes visible multiple and bracketed frames of belonging and not-belonging, which transpire in different contexts and temporalities. Probing the varying subtleties and transformations of belonging across shifting time periods and through these three dimensions reflect deeply the relationship that migrants share with nation-states in the wider diaspora.

Scheme of the Book

This book ethnographically documents how Gurkhas and their families negotiate transnational interfaces in relation to their migrant experiences of work, everyday life, and interpretations of “home.” It addresses how the Gurkhas and their families as transnational actors are situated in regard to citizenship, belonging, rights, and entitlements across the four countries in which they work and live. The book fleshes out and deliberates on such processes in these different contexts. Overall, it interrogates the transnationalization of Gurkha security and armed forces work and their familial lives in documenting the far-reaching effects of the British Empire in colonial and postcolonial temporalities. At the heart of the book lies how Gurkha families as a transnational diasporic community live their military and police lives in different places as well as grapple with their predicaments of belonging and not-belonging. All of these arise from global military networks and security structures that govern where and how Gurkha family lives unfold in ways that are simultaneously constraining and enabling. On a broader level, the book critically unveils how nation-states and military migrants articulate, circumscribe, and assert varying rights over different time periods within the locus of state-diaspora relations.

In order to conceive of the Gurkhas not only as soldiers but as military and police migrants, the next chapter explores the conceptual and empirical parameters of a Gurkha diaspora. I do so by assessing their military- and police-migratory flows. These flows are explained against the backdrop of armed forces service and how Gurkhas have been deployed globally since 1815. By deliberating on the connection between military and police service and migration paths, I construct a Gurkha diaspora in the context of Asia and map out their diverse phases and routes of migration. I articulate their regional if not global dispersal that has been contingent on military vicissitudes and security requirements as well as nation-specific structures in terms of citizenship and political rights. Through acts of transnational bracketing, I analyze how a Gurkha diaspora is made (with reference to military/police recruitment of Gurkhas and their right to remain in a particular context, among other things), and how this diaspora is experienced (with reference to one’s sense of home and belonging in different contexts).

Based on my close reading of military autobiographies, military documents, archival materials, media reports, popular history books, social media posts/discussions, and other texts, chapter 2 focuses on how the Gurkhas form an imagination for the British and the wider public as “warriors.” Additionally, I analyze military handbooks that stipulate recruitment criteria of Nepali soldiers in both historical and contemporary contexts. This approach adds to constructions of the warrior Gurkha. By explaining the different ethnic compositions of Nepali society that have been consigned as “martial races” (cf. Imy 2019)—Limbu and Rai (from eastern Nepal); and Gurung and Magar (from western Nepal)—and how the Gurkhas are associated with bravery, courage, and valor (Dhakal 2016; Stirr 2017; Streets 2004), this chapter documents and problematizes the image of the Gurkha as a warrior. The discussion therefore serves as a foil to the succeeding chapter. Acts of bravery and willingness to die for the crown are juxtaposed against the everyday life narratives of the Gurkhas that at times bifurcate from such extant discourses. I reflect on stereotypical constructions of the warrior Gurkha, contrasted against how they have lived their (military and police) lives and what this reputation might imply for their children, known otherwise in Nepali as bhanja (male) or bhanji (female).³ Such constructions of the Gurkhas as a martial race thereby articulate the workings of imperial knowledge and power that conjugate ideas of nation and race (Imy 2019; Rand 2006).

Chapter 3 conveys the Gurkhas’ own experiences of enlistment as well as military and police service by tracing their lives as diasporic security forces. It extends information given in earlier chapters that structurally depict the Gurkhas’ recruitment process and service. The discussion comprises how they reconstruct their biographies and talk about their varied mobilities and experiences of military and police service. I draw on primary data in the form of my interviews carried out with retired Gurkhas living in Nepal, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong, and present their narratives as migrant actors. Tapping into a wide range of oral history accounts shared by Gurkhas, including my examination of other secondary sources, I provide an overall background to the enlistment, posting, and military and other experiences of the Gurkhas. After enlistment and initial periods of military training, they traveled across and lived in multiple places around the globe during different phases of their lives. By laying out the processes and obstacles toward being recruited as a Gurkha police or soldier, including their overseas postings and life thereafter, this chapter serves as a corollary to the previous discussion. It charts the different routes that young Gurkhas first took as they leave their home in Nepal. Given the recent turn to possibilities of enlisting female recruits into Gurkha service for the British Army, I also address issues related to gender positionings. I critique how plans for the recruitment of Nepalese women have been debated and received. In so doing, I take “Gurkha” as a gendered category of analysis beyond well-debated notions revolving around masculinity and bravery among Gurkha men. This discussion thereby amplifies earlier discourses presented in chapter 2.

Furthermore, I trace the Gurkha culture of emigration (Yamanaka 2000) that threads across the different generations of Gurkha families. I also explicate how this culture has shifted valence over time. I note as well that older generations of Gurkhas and their wives went through different experiences compared to younger Gurkha cohorts. Variations across generations are therefore teased out and compared. Such comparisons are useful to unveil shifts and attendant transformations in what it means to be a Gurkha over contrastive periods of historical and contemporary contexts within which they are emplaced. Over and above popular constructions of the Gurkhas as fearsome warriors (see Chapter 2), their multifold work and life trajectories have extended beyond national boundaries (Pries 2001). These include recruitment to overseas regimental postings, and how the Gurkhas build families across borders. The chapter therefore elucidates their lives as migrant warriors and how they grapple with bracketing varying sentiments toward the country or countries in which they have trained and lived.

For retired Gurkhas and their wives, the variegated ways in which belonging occurs will be explored. The aim is to present their strategies as returnees to Nepal after a few decades of Gurkha service abroad. How they make themselves relevant and contribute to Nepali society in such cities as Kathmandu and Pokhara through various initiatives will be documented and analyzed. Their forms and practices of belonging are subsequently evaluated in terms of their identities both as retired Gurkhas and as Nepali citizens. In order to illustrate how Gurkhas and their wives’ generation differs considerably from their children’s generation, the notion of bracketed belonging is deployed. Where the former consigns Nepal as their place of origin, the latter does not necessarily relate to Nepal as “home.”

Where Gurkhas are clearly mobile based on their military service and accompanying vicissitudes, their wives and children are, in a manner of speaking, bound to the various cycles of military postings and security service. How did their wives cope with life at home in Nepal or other places while the Gurkhas continued to work for the British Army elsewhere? How and why were these children taught Nepalese customs, language, and religion—for those who were born and bred in Singapore, the United Kingdom, or Hong Kong? How are Nepali children who have not left Nepal compared to Gurkha children who first lived “abroad” before they gather a sense of what Nepal is as a country and as their parents’ country of origin? These key inquiries constitute the core of chapter 4. Stemming from their nonrecognition of Nepal as home, Gurkha children are caught in a conflictual position: they feel a sense of neither belonging here nor there. These children are those who have lived their early and adult years elsewhere. While the Gurkhas may regard Nepal as their homeland, the same sentiment cannot be applied to their children whose birthplace is Singapore, the United Kingdom, or Hong Kong. The latter’s connection to Nepal is perhaps only realized through their parents’ inculcation (Espiritu and Tran 2002; Kananen 2020) rather than by their own recognition of Nepal as their country. In this sense, the bifocality of homeland/place of residence requires further examination. While the children attempt to make sense of Nepal and Singapore based on their Gurkha father’s return back to Nepal after his police service concludes, they are also aspiring to move elsewhere either for further studies or for work. These places include the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, among others. Conceptually, I show how the migratory pathways of the Gurkhas and their offspring diverge and thus illustrate the “different turning points” (Berg 2011, 46) for each diasporic generation. In doing so, I return to my notion of bracketed belonging. I demonstrate how this idea captures the divergent sentiments and senses of belonging for different generations of Gurkhas and their families through a close reading of their migrant biographies. Examining these biographies will illustrate how these diasporans traverse between structural arrangements and contingent circumstances (Des Chene 1998).

Belonging is explored as a legal trope in chapter 5 as I shift gears here to examine broader sociolegal and structural processes. I interrogate the legal aspects of citizenship, pension issues, and other rights that different cohorts and groups of Gurkhas lobby for. The key question here is: To what extent and degree are the Gurkhas and their families allowed to belong in legal terms? I expand the conceptual utility of bracketed belonging to illustrate how states and their legislative behavior place the Gurkhas and their families at the edge of belonging in the United Kingdom. Such state behavior in effect reveals the threshold of belonging; juridical lines are drawn between citizenry and Gurkha “foreignness” that thereby block the “doorway to belonging” (Morrice 2017, 600). I suggest that in terms of legal aspects, the Gurkhas and their families stand at the margins of belonging. This is so, given that various laws and policies appear to be discriminatory in manifold aspects. The chapter covers and expands the range of Gurkha settlement policies, compensation packages for retired Gurkhas and/or Gurkha widows, pension issues, indefinite leave to enter (ILE), citizenship and rights to remain, and tribunal adjudication, among others. The discussion is accomplished by carefully scrutinized official documents from the UK Ministry of Defence and other sources. I account for how immigration controls of the Nepalese Gurkha community as meted out by the British government signal legal structures of rights to belong based on previous Gurkha service. I also address how the legacy of such service impinges on the rights of children in terms of entry and/or citizenry, as well as other issues. In doing so, I critically examine the legal-political approaches to and implications of bracketing belonging to demonstrate how inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms intersect with legal manifestations of belonging or otherwise.

I provide a consolidated analysis of manifold and contextual notions of belonging—deliberated across different groups and generations of social actors to include the Gurkhas, their wives, and their children by way of conclusion. As a concept and as enacted in practice, bracketed belonging and its attendant registers are summarized in order to explain its broader analytical and explanatory use in the fields of security migration, diaspora, and transnationalism studies. I reiterate the conceptual linkages between diaspora and its transnational connections, belonging and not-belonging, as well as generational difference and sameness. I recapitulate how the Gurkha experience reflects migrant mobilities and aspirations couched within specific temporalities and structural possibilities and/or constraints. These dynamics together articulate the workings of a global military-security landscape wherein the migratory flows and mobilities of Gurkhas and their kin transpire.

The many facets of transnational ties, linkages, and senses of belonging are realized over time due to the global dispersion of these migrant warrior families since the imperial period. Such webs of transnational connectivity are enacted with social actors operating along different axial and kin ties occurring between, inter alia, Singapore and Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Nepal, and Nepal and Hong Kong. Taken together, the differentiated senses of bracketed belonging elucidate the robustness of belonging as an analytical tool. I use it to comprehend the features, composition, and lived experiences of the Gurkha diaspora. The concluding chapter therefore weaves together a broader abstraction of how one may approach diaspora and belonging by considering military-labor social actors as a migrant category alongside the spectrum and depth of bracketed belonging. This would thereby depart from the extant inventory of migrants that existing studies have routinely examined. In the process, the book unveils new aspects of colonialism and security infrastructures that continue to wield enduring influence in the present. More pertinently, I address and reiterate the key inquiry of how to more generally grapple with and problematize the relation and social contract between migrants and nation-states in the wake of empire and global security networks.