Ganju Lama, an ethnic Bhutia, wangled his way into the Gurkha regiments and won a Victoria Cross in the Second World War – and proved that a true Gurkha need not come from a “martial” race, or be defined only by battles and bravery

“If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or he is a Gurkha,” reads a widely-circulated line attributed to Sam Manekshaw, the eighth chief of staff of the Indian Army and the first Indian to be elevated to the rank of field marshal. Sam Bahadur, as Manekshaw was fondly known among his men, was the first Indian officer to command a Gurkha battalion, following the departure of the British from the Subcontinent in 1947. And though it is not clear when and where he made the statement – could it be apocryphal?  – it is used everywhere, from Bollywood films to internet forums, and newspaper pages to political speeches, as a go-to adage to describe the martial prowess of the “Gurkha race”.

It is, therefore, not a surprise to find the quotation on display at the Ganju Lama VC Museum in Sangmo village in the Indian state of Sikkim, in the northeastern Himalaya. The museum is a tribute to the eponymous war hero. When he was barely nineteen, Ganju Lama fought in the Second World War as part of the Burma Campaign, where he displayed such feats of courage that, in the space of a month, he won two military awards. The second of these was the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award that anyone in the British and Commonwealth forces can receive. Ganju remains the only Indian from the Gurkha regiments to win the Victoria Cross; the other Gurkhas who have won the medal have been from Nepal.

Ganju was born in Sangmo, in Ravangla sub-division of southern Sikkim. His children put together the museum, which was inaugurated by the Sikkim chief minister Prem Singh Tamang two years ago, with objects belonging to their father and information panels detailing his life and achievements. The museum stands today as testimony to his valour. Ganju was undoubtedly brave; but appreciating the true nature of his courage, and his “Gurkha” identity, demands looking beyond just the vaunted bravery of the Gurkha soldier for a more nuanced understanding.

ABOUT A CENTURY AGO, Kinchuk Shangderpa, Bhutia by ethnicity and Buddhist by religion, was the mandal of Sangmo in what was then the independent Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. A mandal was a village headman, who also collected taxes for the royal treasury. On 22 July 1924, Kinchuk’s wife Ninjem gave birth to the couple’s fourth child, a son. They named him Gyamtso Shangderpa.

In those days, there were no schools in that part of Sikkim. Gyamtso worked hard in the family’s cardamom fields, looked after their farm animals, and imbibed Buddhist values and principles from his father, who was a deeply religious man. Shangderpa senior was also a strict disciplinarian, who let the rod do the talking for every act of transgression on the part of any of his eight children.

Gyamtso grew up with an urge for adventure. He did not wish for himself the life of a simple villager, especially after the day his elder brother came home on leave from his job with the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary force raised by the British colonial administration in Northeast India. Gyamtso was totally taken in by his brother’s starched uniform, shiny boots and Gurkha hat, the transistor that he carried with him everywhere and the air of superiority that said he had seen the outside world. Gyamtso wished to enlist too, but his father would not let him even entertain the thought. 

Gyamtso worked hard, but his heart was young; it strayed at times. One day, as usual, his father sent him to the market in Singtam to sell the family’s cardamom. “With the money from the proceeds in his pocket and some friends in tow, Gyamtso headed to the town fair,” Chunilal Ghimirey, a Gangtok-based dramatist, filmmaker and author who has written a book and has made a film on Gyamtso’s life, told me over the phone from Gangtok. Gyamtso gambled away all the money. Then fear struck the teenager. He did not dare go home and face his father. He went to the gallawallah instead, Ghimirey said.

Gallawallahs were agents of the British Raj who recruited soldiers for the British Indian Army. The Second World War was on and the gallawallahs were on the lookout for able-bodied Gurkha “hill boys”, who had earned a reputation for being the bravest and fiercest soldiers in the world. Gyamtso was not exactly the kind of hill boy they were looking for – he was a Bhutia, not a Gurkha – but he wanted to take a chance.

The gallawallah initially tried to turn Gyamtso away because he did not want to invite the wrath of the boy’s father, the mandal. But Gyamtso persisted until the gallawallah relented. They trekked for two days to reach Darjeeling, where the British had set up a recruiting depot, and Gyamtso got himself enlisted. 

THE DAY WAS 27 July 1942. Gyamtso presented himself at the recruiting desk, excited and nervous. The following is a recreation of Gyamtso’s conversation with the recruiting clerk, as imagined by John Percival in his 1985 book, For Valour: The Victoria Cross – Courage in Action.

“Name?” snapped the clerk at the recruiting office.

“Gyamtso,” replied the boy, mumbling in embarrassment.

“Ganju,” wrote the clerk. Then, “What clan are you from?”

“Lama,” said the boy.

“Gyamtso” was thus corrupted to “Ganju”, which was easier on the British tongue. “It happened without Gyamtso realising it. It was during a roll call that he discovered that he was being called ‘Ganju’,” Ghimirey told me. “It took him some time getting used to it.”

“Lama” as a clan name was a careful choice. 

Not everybody could enlist themselves with the Gurkha regiments. These were reserved for young men from certain tribes of Nepali origin that had been labelled “martial” by the British – such as the Magars, Gurungs, Khas, Rais, Limbus and Sunwars. 

The British had made an unexpected discovery of these ethnic groups during the Anglo-Nepali War of 1814. Nepal’s Gorkhali army lost the war but inflicted heavy casualties on the British, thereby impressing them greatly. The Sugauli Treaty, signed between Nepal and the East India Company in 1816, brought an end to the war. It also allowed the British to recruit soldiers from Nepal. Since then, Gurkha soldiers have fought for the British all over the world. More than 200,000 of them fought in the two World Wars. 

“Martial category was a key element in recruiting soldiers,” the historian Tejimala Gurung writes in a journal article titled ‘The Making of Gurkhas as a “Martial Race” in Colonial India: Theory and Practice’. Although, Gurung adds, “the categories of Nepalese fighting groups did not remain static over time and was (sic) subject to various external influences.”

The Bhutia ethnic group is believed to have originated in Tibet. Bhutias are today the majority in Bhutan, but a minority in Nepal and India, though they are present in large numbers in Sikkim. From its founding in 1642 to its annexation by India in 1975, the Kingdom of Sikkim was ruled by the Namgyal dynasty, a Bhutia royal house. In 1942, with Sikkim still an independent kingdom, the Bhutia were outside the purview of the British classification of martial races. 

Gyamtso, a “non-martial” Bhutia from Sikkim, adopted the surname Lama, a clan name of the Tamang ethnic group. According to Gurung, the Tamangs had begun to be recognised as a martial race only around the middle of the 20th century. In dire need of manpower amid the Second World War, “the colonial state enlarged its recruitment zone to recruit soldiers even from groups not regarded as martial,” she writes. 

So when Gyamtso turned up at the recruiting depot in Darjeeling, the British were unlikely to reject him on the basis of his race or ethnicity. “In 1942, with Singapore and Malaya in Japanese hands and their armies storming northward through Burma, there was not much time for nice distinctions of this kind,” Percival writes. In the words of the British journalist John Parker, author of The Gurkhas: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Feared Soldiers (1999), “As things were then, the recruiters were prepared to accept any volunteers who closely resembled Gurkhas.”

“Gyamtso used to wear his hair in a long braid, like Bhutia men did in those times,” Ghimirey told me. Within hours of his recruitment, he was shaved bald, had the name of his regiment scrawled on his chest, and was sent off for rigorous training.

BURMA WAS THE hotbed of the South-East Asian theatre of the Second World War. Most of the combat there was concentrated in Japanese-occupied Burma, and in a series of battles that became known as the Burma Campaign.

In January 1943, after barely six months’ training at the Palampur regimental centre in what is now the state of Himachal Pradesh, Ganju was packed off to the battlefront in Manipur, on India’s northeastern border. He was a rifleman with B Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Gurkha Rifles – part of the 48th Indian Brigade, 17th Indian Division.

Imphal, the capital of what was the princely state of Manipur, was the main British base in the area. The Japanese army had advanced through Burma and, menacingly, consolidated its position along the Indian frontier. The Allies tactically retreated, and a new phase of the war began, with the Allied forces under the command of Admiral Louis Mountbatten after October.

For Ganju Lama, it was baptism of fire. But he learnt fast, and impressed his British officers with his courage, his discipline and his commitment to his comrades. His acts of valour during the Burma Campaign have been meticulously recorded in the annals of British military history.

A display at the Ganju Lama VC Museum in Sangmo village, Sikkim. Victoria Cross awardee Ganju Lama’s children set up the museum to perpetuate the memory of their father.Photo courtesy: Anuradha Sharma

In March 1944, the Japanese began to advance towards Imphal. On the night of 16 May, 1/7 Gurkha Rifles confronted and killed a patrol of Japanese soldiers near a bridge at Milestone 33 on the Tiddim–Imphal Road, but themselves came under intense fire from tank-mounted guns. A platoon of five tanks was advancing towards the Gurkha position when Ganju stopped them with his Piat gun.

The Piat was a British-made portable weapon developed in 1942 and put into service the very next year. The 1/7 Gurkha Rifles had received four of them, and Rifleman Ganju was issued one after a quick course of instruction. In practice, however, at the time of the battle, not even the officers knew how to use the gun properly. 

“Ganju kept his head,” Percival writes in For Valour, which is based on his television series on Victoria Cross awardees. Ganju calmly loaded his Piat and hit two tanks, which blocked the advance of the rest. For his “courage and resourcefulness”, Ganju later received the Military Medal. 

A few weeks later, on 12 June, Ganju’s platoon was in the north of the Burmese town of Ningthoukhong, a Japanese stronghold, when the Japanese launched a surprise early-morning attack involving tanks. 

Ganju sustained severe injuries and collapsed, yet he still managed to crawl forward and take out two tanks from close quarters. He then stood up to deal with a third tank. He missed his shot, and the surviving crew members of the burning Japanese tanks opened fire at him.

By now, machine gun bullets had pierced Ganju’s right hand, his left wrist, and both his legs. “He was almost completely disabled,” Percival writes. With one hand completely useless, Ganju countered with a grenade attack, pulling the pins out with his teeth, and managed to kill or wound all of the remaining Japanese soldiers.

Then it all went silent. Ganju collapsed in a hollow. Eventually, he heard someone call his number, 763. It was the commander of the number 7 platoon, Narjit Rai. “‘Hello,’ he said, ‘you won, Ganju, you won’,” Ganju recounted years later to Percival.

“Ganju himself saved what looked to be a tricky situation and in doing so became known as the man who ‘single-handedly took on three tanks firing at point blank range—and won’,” Parker writes in The Gurkhas.

“The Burma campaign was one of the longest fought by the British during the war,” according to the website of the National Army Museum in the United Kingdom. “Remote from the experience of most people at home, and often sidelined in the contemporary press, it became known as the ‘Forgotten War’; the troops serving there were the ‘Forgotten Army’.”

On 15 August 1945, Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, announced his intent to surrender after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The surrender came on 2 September. The Second World War was over.

KINCHUK SHANGDERPA WAS shocked by his teenage son running away from home to fight in history’s bloodiest war, but the mandal eventually came to terms with it. Initially, though, it was the change of Gyamtso’s name and official identity that caused real problems.

“My father refused to acknowledge that he had a son called Ganju Lama,” the war hero is quoted as saying in an undated interview with Sikkim Observer, featured on one of the panels at the Museum in Sangmo. After Ganju’s heroic exploits, the army tried to contact his family to give them the news of his hospitalisation and the medals he had won. “The officials then went to Nepal,” Ganju said in the interview, “only to realise that there was no Sangmo village there.”

Finally, after rechecking the records at the recruiting depot in Darjeeling, they again contacted Shangderpa senior and managed to convince him that Ganju Lama was indeed his son Gyamtso.

A couple of months later, the proud father was on the Red Fort lawns in Delhi to witness Ganju being decorated with the Victoria Cross at a grand investiture ceremony, in the presence of Mountbatten and the British Viceroy Archibald Wavell, among others. 

In later accounts of the Burma Campaign, Percival writes, Mountbatten – who went on to become the Viceroy and Governor General of India and oversaw the partition of the Subcontinent – said that Ganju’s was the most richly deserved Victoria Cross won in the whole Far Eastern theatre of the war.

Instituted by Queen Victoria in 1856, the Victoria Cross is awarded for “extreme bravery in the face of the enemy”. Only 1358 crosses have ever been awarded. Ganju is one of 13 Gurkhas to have received the honour.

“Throughout the action,” Ganju’s award citation states, “Rifleman Ganju Lama, although seriously wounded, showed a complete disregard for his own personal safety and it was solely due to his prompt action and brave conduct that a most critical situation was averted, all positions regained, and heavy casualties inflicted on the enemy.”

The Victoria Cross and George Cross Association remains proud of Ganju. “Ganju Lama VC’s personal disregard for his own safety and incredible bravery on the 12th June 1944 will be remembered and recalled for generations,” Rebecca Maciejewska, the chief executive of the association, wrote in an email. “He was a quiet man of great honour and of action; an inspiration to us all.”

Ganju was transported from Lucknow General Hospital to Delhi in an ambulance to receive his award at the investiture, which he attended in his wheelchair, rising only to be decorated. Afterwards, he was back in hospital. It took him almost two years to recover and rejoin service. 

When India gained independence in 1947, the 7th Gurkha Rifles became a regiment in the British Army. Ganju decided not to move to England, electing instead to transfer to the re-raised 11th Gurkha Rifles of the Indian Army. He served as aide-de-camp (ADC) to the president of India, and upon his retirement from the army as a captain in 1972 was given the title of honorary ADC for life.

The scars from the war remained. In 1963, he developed a large boil on his leg. When it burst, a Japanese bullet emerged. 

In 1966, Palden Thondup Namgyal  – Chogyal, or king, of Sikkim – honoured Ganju with the Pema Dorjee, the kingdom’s highest civilian award. The ruler also granted him almost a hundred acres of agricultural land in Sangmo, where, after his retirement, Ganju cultivated cardamom.

“IT IS ALL dead now,” Ganju’s son, Pema Leyda Shangderpa, told me, pointing to the fields where the family cultivated large cardamom until a few years ago. Sikkim is considered to be India’s hub for large cardamom farming. However, production is fast declining. “Viral diseases called chhirkey and furkey completely wiped off our crops,” Pema explained. “In spite of our best efforts, we have not been able to protect the crops.”

Thick undergrowth has taken over the fields once nurtured by Ganju. From the grandeur of the Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi, the estate of the president of India, where he lived as the ADC, Ganju had returned to the soil of his birth. He built a two-storey house of stone and wood, and began a new life as a farmer, community leader, religious and social activist, and philanthropist. He spent the rest of his life serving the people of Sikkim, until his death from cancer on 1 July 2000.

All the while, he also remained closely connected with the global community of his fellow war veterans, especially VC-awardees, who used to be hosted regularly by the late Queen Elizabeth at her royal palaces in London. He visited Britain often. In the last years of his life, Ganju was the Vice-Chairman (Overseas) of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association. “He showed us around in London, Pema recalled. “He knew every street.”

The queen accorded special respect to the VC-awardees. “Say, if any VC were to cross her path, she’d let the veteran pass first,” Pema said. “She also used to write to us once in a while to let us know, for example, that the orchids taken by my father as a gift to the royal palace were doing well in her garden.”

For all the splendour of a high-flying life, Ganju remained rooted in his soil, which smelled of spice and hard labour. “Growing up as a child in these hills was a difficult experience for him; he did not wish the same for the generations to come,” his wife Pema Chuki Kazini said. Kazini who lives with her youngest son, Norden Dorjee Shangderpa, and his family in the house that Ganju built in Sangmo.

Kazini was Ganju’s second wife. They married in 1965, when she was barely 20 and he was more than twice her age. “Even before he retired, in fact even before our marriage, he set up a school here and every month sent money from his salary to fund it,” she said. “He couldn’t go to school as a child, so he was really committed to promoting children’s education in our area.”

Ganju, who is remembered as VC saab – or “VC sir” – in these parts, helped set up two schools, a health centre, a monastery and a temple. The schools are now run by the government. The road that he pushed to get built to connect his village to the nearest town is now named after him. On it stands the museum dedicated to him.

Ganju’s children pooled their own personal resources to set up the museum to tell the story of their father, a brave young man from the village who went on to do great deeds in times of war and peace. The museum is now on the tourism map of Sikkim. The children are also starting a resort in the area, with the idea that visitors not only get to know the story of Ganju at the museum but also explore the environment from which he arose, exactly 100 years ago. 

GANJU LAMA, the fierce warrior from the battlefields of Burma, turned deeply religious in later life. In 1979, he made a large donation towards building the monastery in Sangmo, and also supervised its construction, the pain of his old wounds notwithstanding. He spent hours every day on religious rituals, and routinely invited Buddhist lamas to organise religious events that went on for days. “It seemed almost as if he was atoning for his violent past,” recalled Pema Leyda Shangderpa, who sometimes used to attend the ceremonies with his siblings when home from boarding school. 

Percival quotes Kazini saying: “As you know, we are not allowed to kill animals even. Killing is prohibited. So he feels that since he did so much killing in the war, he should now practice religion and (do) good deeds … Now he should do good to people all round the village.”

Ganju himself expressed a much-nuanced view when asked by Percival if he felt a conflict between his aggression as a soldier and his religious devotion. According to him, it is not wrong to be a soldier when you are attacked and forced to defend yourself. Ganju always maintained that if there were to be another war, and he were required to fight to defend his people and his land, he would. 

His religiosity notwithstanding, Ganju did not regret doing his job, Ghimirey said. “His actions were in line with his duty. He was committed to his job. He performed his duty with honesty and integrity.”

However, according to Ghimirey, Ganju was principally opposed to violence, having seen it from very close quarters. “In his declining years, he promoted peace. He became an ardent follower of the Dalai Lama, who stands for peace and non-violence,” said Ghimirey, who spent considerable time with Ganju in his last few years. 

Ganju was also tormented by memories of the war. “He used to get nightmares; he never quite overcame the trauma,” Pema said about his father.

Kazini, who married Ganju long after the war – she had no clue why the world fussed over him until much later – heard from him war stories of a different kind, filled with not deeds of heroism and valour but gut-wrenching tales of human suffering and pain. He shared with her the haunting memories that lingered of friends cut down in their prime, of the relentless din of death and destruction, and of the unending cycle of violence that scarred his soul forever. “He used to tell me stories of the pain and hardships of the soldiers in the battlefield, about having to walk long distances without food; his friends lying about dead and injured, and he not being able to help them,” Kazini said. “People dying every moment. People killing people.”

Even so, Ganju advocated military training for young people and encouraged them to join the army to learn discipline and build qualities like self-confidence.

Percival puts it succinctly: “It is more a matter of seeing different kinds of enterprise as being appropriate for different stages of life. A young man may fight for glory; a mature man should work hard and raise a family; and an old man should turn his mind to good work and quiet contemplation, and as far as possible, make amends for what he has done wrong. … This shows how it is possible for a courageous young warrior to bring his courage to quite different tasks once the battle is won and the war over.”

Perhaps Sam Bahadur’s celebrated statement can be reworked to read, “If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or he is a Gurkha – or he is Ganju Lama.”

Read the story on the Himal Southasian website.