Dubai: In the winter of 1956, The Times correspondent David Holden arrived on the island of Bahrain, then still a British protectorate. After a short-lived career teaching geography, Holden had looked forward to his Arabian posting, but he hadn’t expected to be attending a garden durbar in honour of Queen Victoria’s appointment as Empress of India. Everywhere that he went in the Gulf – Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Oman – he found expected traces of British India.
According to BBC, in the early 20th Century, nearly a third of the Arabian Peninsula was ruled as part of the British Indian Empire. From Aden to Kuwait, a crescent of Arabian protectorates was governed from Delhi, overseen by the Indian Political Service, policed by Indian troops, and answerable to the Viceroy of India. Under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these protectorates had all legally been considered part of India.
Indian passports were issued as far west as Aden in modern Yemen, which functioned as India’s westernmost port and was administered as part of Bombay Province. When Mahatma Gandhi visited the city in 1931, he found many young Arabs identifying as Indian nationalists. However, few members of the British or Indian public were aware of this Arabian extension of the British Raj, as maps showing the full reach of the Indian Empire were only published in top secrecy.
By the 1920s, politics was shifting, and Indian nationalists began to reimagine India not as an imperial construct but as a cultural space. On 1 April 1937, imperial partitions began, and Aden was separated from India. The Gulf remained under the purview of the Government of India for another decade. British officials briefly discussed whether India or Pakistan would “be allowed to run the Persian Gulf” after independence. However, the Gulf states, from Dubai to Kuwait, were finally separated from India on 1 April 1947, months before the Raj was divided into India and Pakistan.
The British only finally pulled out of the Gulf in 1971 as part of its decision to abandon colonial commitments east of Suez. The Gulf states have been successful at erasing their ties to British India, and a past relationship with Britain is remembered, but governance from Delhi is not. Yet private memories persist, particularly of the unimaginable class reversal that the Gulf has seen.
Today, Dubai, once a minor outpost of the Indian Empire, is the glittering center of the new Middle East. Few of the millions of Indians or Pakistanis who live there know that there was a world in which India or Pakistan might have inherited the oil-rich Gulf. A quiet bureaucratic decision, made in the twilight of empire, severed that link. Today, only the echoes remain.