When the glittering city and other Gulf states almost became part of India

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.

“The Raj maintains here a slightly phantasmal sway,” wrote Holden, “a situation rich in anomaly and anachronism… The servants are all bearers, the laundryman a dhobi, and the watchman a chowkidar,” he wrote, “and on Sundays the guests are confronted with the ancient, and agreeable, Anglo-Indian ritual of a mountainous curry lunch.”

The Sultan of Oman, educated in Rajasthan, was more fluent in Urdu than Arabic, while soldiers in the nearby state of Qu’aiti, now eastern Yemen, marched around in now-defunct Hyderabadi army uniforms.

In the words of the governor of Aden himself:

“One had an extraordinarily powerful impression that all the clocks here had stopped seventy years ago; that the Raj was at its height, Victoria on the throne, Gilbert and Sullivan a fresh and revolutionary phenomenon, and Kipling a dangerous debunker, so strong was the link from Delhi via Hyderabad to the South Arabian shore.”

Although largely forgotten today, 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.

The standard list of India’s semi-independent princely states like Jaipur opened alphabetically with Abu Dhabi, and the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, even suggested that Oman should be treated “as much a Native State of the Indian Empire as Lus Beyla or Kelat [present day Balochistan]”.

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.

Even at the time, however, few members of the British or Indian public were aware of this Arabian extension of the British Raj.

Maps showing the full reach of the Indian Empire were only published in top secrecy, and the Arabian territories were left off public documents to avoid provoking the Ottomans or later the Saudis.

Indeed, as one Royal Asiatic Society lecturer quipped:

“As a jealous sheikh veils his favourite wife, so the British authorities shroud conditions in the Arab states in such thick mystery that ill-disposed propagandists might almost be excused for thinking that something dreadful is going on there.”

But by the 1920s, politics was shifting. Indian nationalists began to imagine India not as an imperial construct but as a cultural space rooted in the geography of the Mahabharata. London saw an opportunity to redraw borders. On 1 April 1937, the first of several imperial partitions was enacted and Aden was separated from India.

A telegram from King George VI was read aloud:

“Aden has been an integral part of British Indian administration for nearly 100 years. That political association with my Indian Empire will now be broken, and Aden will take its place in my Colonial Empire.”

The Gulf remained under the purview of the Government of India for another decade, however.

British officials briefly discussed whether India or Pakistan would “be allowed to run the Persian Gulf” after independence, yet a member of the British legation in Tehran even wrote of his surprise at the “apparent unanimity” of “officials in Delhi … that the Persian Gulf was of little interest to the Government of India.”

As Gulf resident William Hay put it, “it would clearly have been inappropriate to hand over responsibility for dealing with the Gulf Arabs to Indians or Pakistanis”.

The Gulf states, from Dubai to Kuwait, were thus finally separated from India on 1 April 1947, months before the Raj was itself divided into India and Pakistan and granted independence.

Months later, when Indian and Pakistani officials set about integrating hundreds of princely states into the new nations, the Arab states of the Gulf would be missing from the ledger.

Few batted an eyelid, and 75 years on, the importance of what had just happened is still not fully understood in either India or the Gulf.

Without this minor administrative transfer, it is likely that the states of the Persian Gulf Residency would have become part of either India or Pakistan after independence, as happened to every other princely state in the subcontinent.

When British Prime Minister Clement Attlee proposed a British withdrawal from the Arabian territories at the same time as the withdrawal from India, he was shouted down. So Britain retained its role in the Gulf for 24 more years, with an ‘Arabian Raj’ now reporting to Whitehall rather than to the Viceroy of India.

In the words of Gulf scholar Paul Rich, this was “the Indian Empire’s last redoubt, just as Goa was Portuguese India’s last solitary vestige, or Pondicherry was the tag-end of French India”.

The official currency was still the Indian rupee; the easiest mode of transport was still the ‘British India Line’ (shipping company) and the 30 Arabian princely states were still governed by ‘British residents’ who had made their careers in the Indian Political Service.

The British only finally pulled out of the Gulf in 1971 as part of its decision to abandon colonial commitments east of Suez.

As David Holden wrote in July:

“For the first time since the heyday of Britain’s East India Company, all the territories around the Gulf will be at liberty to seek their own salvation without the threat of British intervention, or the comfort of British protection. This final remnant of the British Raj – for that, in effect, is what it is – has been for some years now an obvious, if in some ways charming, anachronism … But its day is over.”

Of all the national narratives that emerged after the Empire’s collapse, the Gulf states have been most successful at erasing their ties to British India.

From Bahrain to Dubai, a past relationship with Britain is remembered, but governance from Delhi is not. The myth of an ancient sovereignty is crucial to keeping the monarchies alive. Yet private memories persist, particularly of the unimaginable class reversal that the Gulf has seen.

In 2009, Gulf scholar Paul Rich recorded an elderly Qatari gentleman who “still got angry when he related to me the beating he received when as a young boy of seven or eight he stole an orange, a fruit which he had never seen before, from an Indian employee of the British agent”.

“The Indians, he said, were a privileged caste during his youth, and it gave him immense pleasure that the tables had turned and they now came to the Gulf as servants.”

Today Dubai, once a minor outpost of the Indian Empire with no gun salute, is the glittering centre 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, just as they did Jaipur, Hyderabad or Bahawalpur.

A quiet bureaucratic decision, made in the twilight of empire, severed that link. Today, only the echoes remain.

Sam Dalrymple is the author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia