MOVEMENTS FOR AUTONOMY IN DARJEELING 49 of Darjeeling from Sikkim and Bhutan and the containment of Nepal, the English traders started to increase trade with Sikkim, Nepal, and Tibet through Darjeeling. While the import items included horses, blankets,tea, tar, coal, wool musk, musical instruments and shoes, the export items consisted of European piece-goods, rice, salt, indigo, brass and copper wares, tobacco etc. Throughout the 19th century, the volume of trade through Darjeeling went on increasing and the prospects of the Central Asian trade through the Himalayas appeared to be more alluring. The friendly relationship between. British India and Nepal gradually became a subservient one which provided another major factor for the British thrust towards Darjeeling. After Jung Bahadur Rana (1846-77), the Prime Minister of Nepal, replaced the Gorkha King by making him only a tutelar entity, the process of subservience to the English rulers was set in motion. Jung Bahadur not only offered the British Government military assistance in the Anglo-Sikh war (1848-49) but himself appeared at the head of 9000 Nepali soldiers to help the English suppress the Great Sepoy Revolt in 1857 and rescued Lucknow from the rebel hands. This mercenary role of the Nepali soldiers motivated the British rulers to use Darjeeling as a permanent recruiting centre for the British Indian Army. The recruitment of the Gorkhas (all categories of Nepali-speaking recruits were known as 'Gorkha' in the British Indian Army) had started in the second half of the 19th century. Pleading for more recruiting centres at Darjeeling, E. Drummend, the then Magistrate of Dinajpur, urged upon the Government of Bengal to increase the Nepali recruitment as "they would in every way be more efficient, courageous and trustworthy body of men than any to be had in the plains". This was the beginning of the formulation of "martial race" theory which Lord Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army (1885-1893), would subsequently make the corner-stone of the British recruiting policy in armed forces. Lord Roberts wrote: "the first step towards improving the quality of army was to substitute men of more warlike and hardy races for the Hindusthani sepoys of Bengal, the Tamils and Telugus of Madras and the so-called Marathas of Bombay." The underlying compulsion of the British rulers in the post-Sepoy Revolt period was to recruit "loyal" Nepali soldiers who would not be affected by the incipient nationalist feelings which were distinctly found among the Indian sepoys during the Revolt of 1857. Consequently, the increase in the number of the Gorkha battalions was dramatic; from five in 1862 to twenty in 1914. Darjeeling became