In the study of First World War Gurkha postcards from France, Gilles Teulié noted the overwhelming presence of the South Asians compared to other Commonwealth troops, concluding it was due to ‘commercial and editorial considerations’ (2021, 112). In his view, it owed much to the fact that ‘Indian fighters caused a sensation at Marseilles and elicited the wonder of its inhabitants’ (2021, 112). The reproduction of colonial stereotypes and the creation of biased representations of war was justified by the proximity of the front and the enemy itself. Yet, the ‘imperial frame of mind’ (Teulié 2021, 112) spread further than the trenches and pervaded Central Europe. Since encountering the South Asians was not beyond the bounds of possibility for the Poles conscripted to the German Army, the news of the British Indian Army’s endeavours would often be delivered with a propagandist twist.

Indeed, the Illustrated Universal Calendar for the New Year 1917 offered no consolation to the people of partitioned Poland, for it presented mainly stories of betrayal and horror. Among them, one finds that of the Gurkhas of Nepal – or ‘The Tigers of the Global War’, who mercilessly slay the Austro-Hungarians and Germans at British orders, thus prompting questions about the ‘mercenaries’’ involvement in a ‘civilised’ war. For a more dramatic effect, an image showing Asian men wielding curved daggers in the European countryside accompanies the narrative. The caption in Polish reads: ‘Gurkhas – warriors of the British Indian auxiliary troops, crawl at night towards the German advance guards’ (‘Tygrysy wojny światowej’, 1916). That same Gurkha way of war, criticised by news outlets in the German part of partitioned Poland, was praised in the Russian-controlled area. In 1915, for instance, the Warsaw-based Kurjer Poranny shared a story of a war correspondent in France who applauded a Gurkha presenting how he had cut the throats of sleeping Germans with a khukuri the night before (‘Spokój indyjskiego żołnierza’, 1915).

This analysis aims to contribute to the study of the Polish representation of the Gurkhas by investigating the period of the Great War. It uses discourse analysis to examine the presence and portrayal of the Nepalese soldiers in Polish and German-language print press published mainly in the region of Silesia and Warsaw between 1914 and 1918. The findings point to the media’s tendency to offer a vision of a stereotypical ethnic identity stemming from imperial attitudes as well as present the readiness to utilise the Gurkhas to construct war narratives aimed at diverse audiences of the region, particularly in the late 1914 and early 1915 when the British Indian Army reached the Western Front. Also, I argue that the presence of conflicting discourses of the empires might have impacted the representation of Nepalese soldiers in independent Poland.