A Gurkha unit was among those ordered to undertake the Amritsar Massacre, for example. Punjab isn't super far from Nepal, but the point stands: were there many Nepali people known in that part of India beforehand? Would the involvement of the Gurkhas create hostility towards Nepali people more broadly in Punjab or the rest of India, or did the public generally realize that it was all British manipulation anyway (it would seem to have been the case based on my limited knowledge)?
Even further from home, what about Iraq? Episode 71 of the Irish History Podcast samples from Charles Townsend's "When God made hell : the British campaign in Mesopotamia and the creation of Iraq, 1914-1921", which itself quotes a British soldier of the Manchester Regiment by the name of Brooking:
The modus operanda [against an attack on British troops] is as follows: artillery strafes the nearest village where most probably the marauders came from. Sometimes they get the wrong village, which matters little. And after an hour or two's bombardment a strafing party of infantry, the exact number depends on the size of the village, go and proceed and wipe out all who are foolish enough to wait for us. Gurkhas in particular like these jobs and can be relied on to scientifically dispatch all inhabitants, mostly per the kukri methods, bury them, and burn down the village and have everything tidied up before we arrive.
Was there any longstanding enmity towards Gurkhas in the region after the British involvement in Mandatory Iraq? What about, say, Burma and other areas of British imperialism employing the Gurkhas (or any other large "ethnic" units).
As an aside, what about the effect "back home"? Did British press attempt to downplay their government's involvement in brutal acts by blaming it on their "primitive subjects"? How did British (and French) writers exploit and use the image of the "ethnic" military unit in their literature? (I'm thinking of the brutal and infantilizing language and imagery in France towards black African colonial troops in WWI here) Is our modern image of the "badass Gurkhas" a modern development mainly, or is there a continuity between the modern image and the reputation the Brooking quote above constructs?
EDIT: I somehow forgot to put it in the title, but I'm also open to any information about French and other European colonial use of the military organization technique and their social repercussions.
Thank you!
Your question specifically concerned Nepali Gurkha units, which, unfortunately, I can't elaborate upon significantly. This being said, I can tell you quite a bit about another cultural/ethnic/religious group whose monolithic use in colonial policing did lead to a certain degree of enmity in foreign regions. I refer to the Sikhs, who were as foreign to many of the regions in which they served as were the Gurkhas to Punjab or Iraq.
Before I discuss the Sikhs, I would like to discuss the public reaction to the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, as the response by Indian nationalists to the massacre was largely against the white colonial apparatus which they deemed responsible for the bloodshed. This was partly due to the political context of the Indian nationalist movement and the events leading up to and immediately preceding the killing, which played nearly an equal role in the collective public outrage in 1919 as did the massacre itself.
If you are more interested in the crux of your question, feel welcome to read the heading "Sikhs in Shanghai" first.
I can sort of answer the question regarding Gurkhas in other areas of the British Empire, but as riot police, rather than armed forces. I hope this is not too late for OP, given that I only found this question in the weekly newsletter.
In 1949, Gurkhas were brought to Singapore to replace Sikhs in the riot police squad. The unit, called the Gurkha Contingent, remains till this day, in independent Singapore as a line unit under the command of a former British army officer with experience in commanding Gurkhas. As an example, the current Commander, Gurkha Contingent is Assistant Commissioner of Police (AC) William Robert Kefford, previously of the Royal Gurkha Rifles and who was made Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2009. In fact, their very first commander was a R. A. H. Cowan, a former Lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders, stationed in Scotland.^1 Cowan's appointment is a reminder of how the British thought of the Gurkhas as an 'Indian equivalent of the Scottish Highlanders', who were similarly renowned for a cultural fighting ability.^2
In colonial Singapore, their appointment as riot police might very well have stemmed from those martial theories, but very quickly, other factors came into play. Singapore is and was a multi-ethnic society comprising the native Malays, immigrant Chinese and Indians, as well as Europeans and Eurasians (descendants of male Europeans who had married locals). The Gurkhas' first outing in Singapore came during the 1950 Maria Hertogh Riots. The riots revolved around a Supreme Court case in which a British judge granted custody of a Dutch Catholic girl, Maria Hertogh, to her birth parents who were living in the Netherlands. The girl had been entrusted to a Malay family during WWII, raised as a Muslim and was married to a Muslim man.^3 The decision of the judge pitted the colonised Malay Muslims against the Christian European and Eurasians. The police, comprising of rank and file Malays and British officers, was initially deployed outside the Court to maintain order as a crowd had gathered outside.^4
When violence broke out, the Malay policemen ignored orders to disperse the crowds, with Superintendent Johnson, who was in charge of policing in the south, claiming 'it was a matter of passive resistance'.^5 This was likely due to the fact that the Malay policemen sympathised with the protestors and the parties in the court case. Joseph Conceicao, a Eurasian living in Singapore concurred:
And then a group of Malay policemen clob, clob, clob, two by twos came, clob, clob, clob and they did nothing because the Malays were rioting and the policemen were Malays. They did nothing. They just clob, clob through.^6
As to the Gurkhas, Conceicao said:
This time was troops of Gurkhas and the European chap with a microphone, a horn. ... These Malay chaps were still shouting and jeering him ... Jeering at him, calling him names and dancing in front of him. So the European, I suppose he's a Captain, gave instruction to the Gurkha. The Gurkha knelt on the ground, raised the rifle, bang, shot the chap. ... The others all ran away. One shot and the rioters all ran away.^7
A commission set up to investigate the mishandling concluded that the Gurkhas would have been more effective at controlling the protestors had they been called upon earlier.^8 When asked by the Commission if the Gurkhas had failed to rein in the rioters, Superintendent Johnson stated that 'not at any time did they fail. We did not have enough of them'.^9 Just over a month and a half later, a proposal to increase the strength of the Gurkha Contingent by 300 men was approved.^10 The increase signified their value to the colony as an impartial and effective riot police unit, as they were not likely to take sides in any ethnic conflict in multi-ethnic Singapore. As to effectiveness, the public were fearful of the men with large, curved knives: the kukri.