Shattered Lands: How Doha and Dubai could have joined India or Pakistan in 1947

Middle East Eye

21-06-2025

A century ago a large part of the Arabian peninsula, including modern-day Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, was legally part of India.
Today most people, including in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, have no idea about this, and many would find the idea ludicrous and absurd.
But it was indeed the case, as historian Sam Dalrymple shows in his newly published book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia.
It is a remarkable fact that Dubai and Doha could easily have ended up as part of modern India or Pakistan.
Very rarely can a book on history transform the public's understanding of an entire continent and region's past.
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But this could be such a rarity. Shattered Lands, Dalrymple's first book, is magisterial. In fact, I can confidently say it is groundbreaking.
Drawing on evidence from myriad archives and private memoirs and interviews in several languages, Dalrymple has produced an outstanding debut.
But better than that, it is a delight to read. Too many history books render extraordinary characters and events dull.
Shattered Lands, out now, is published by Harper Collins. (Supplied)
Dalrymple's energetic, electrifying prose is thus a breath of fresh air. Every paragraph is practically bursting with colour.
The scope of the work is enormous. The premise is that as recently as 1928, 12 modern nations - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait - were "bound together" as part of Britain's Indian empire, the Raj.
An entity of its own, the Raj housed a quarter of the world's population and was governed by the Indian rupee.
Shattered Lands documents how, over half a century, this vast empire was torn apart.
The book is vast in scope but particularly pertinent to Middle East Eye readers is the story of the Arabian Peninsula and how it was split off from India.
Much of the British Raj was hidden. Official maps never depicted the whole empire. To avoid the ire of Istanbul, Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire were bizarrely left off maps "as a jealous sheikh veils his favourite wife", in the words of one Royal Asian Society lecturer.
Oman, like Nepal in the east, was not officially part of the Indian empire, but it was governed as an informal protectorate by the viceroy of India and included in the list of Indian princely states, which were under indirect British rule.
As Dalrymple writes: "The standard list of princely states even opened alphabetically with Abu Dhabi, and Viceroy Lord Curzon himself argued that Oman should be considered 'as much a Native State of the Indian Empire as Lus Beyla or Kalat'."
'Central to the very idea of India'
Muscat, Doha and Dubai were legally part of India under the Interpretation Act of 1889. The wealthy Gulf states today are thus some of the few Indian princely states that actually survived; the larger ones which went to India or Pakistan were doomed.
Dalrymple tells us that "the Arabian and Burmese frontiers of the Raj were once central to the very idea of India, and several of the founding fathers of Yemen and Burma had even once conceived of themselves as Indian nationalists".
Close ties between the Gulf and the subcontinent stretched back long before the onset of British rule: "For more than two millennia, South Asian communities and their cultures had spread across Asia into China, Afghanistan and Arabia."
Persian or Arabian Gulf? A brief history Read More »
But the British Empire took this to an unprecedented level.
In the early 20th century many Arab elites were educated in Bombay and Aligarh in India, and wore Indian-style sherwanis.
The partition of the Arabian peninsula from the Indian empire began in 1937 with the separation of Yemen.
That same year it was also decided that India would "not be allowed to run the Persian Gulf" if it became independent.
A decade later, in April 1947, the Gulf states were partitioned from India and ceased to be run by the Indian Political Service (staffed mainly by Indians).
Indian soldiers were replaced by British ones, and India and Pakistan lost the (then largely undiscovered) vast oil wealth of Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE.
As Dalrymple argues, this was "India's greatest lost opportunity".
It was only decades later, in 1971, that Britain finally abolished its protectorates over the Gulf states.
An age of nationalism
One of the book's most fascinating sections examines the crucial role played by Hindu nationalism in the partition of the Arabian peninsula.
Because many Indian nationalists fixated on the ancient Hindu holy land of Bharat as their historical reference point, they were uninterested in Burma and Arabia.
This weakened Indian nationalism in those parts of the Raj and boosted alternative political visions.
We are introduced at one point in the book to the young Arab journalist Muhammad Ali Luqman, who in Aden served as the Gujarati-Arabic translator for one Mahatma Gandhi when he visited before Aden's separation from India.
Gandhi's supporters unfurled an Indian flag to "mad cheers by all those present". But many in Aden were turning against Indian nationalism.
Shattered Lands is Sam Dalrymple's first book (Supplied)
After its separation from India, the discovery of oil turned Aden into one of the world's most important ports.
By the 1950s, it was a "vibrant city of businessmen and dreamers where cruise ships jostled alongside the old Arabian dhows and Yemeni Jews mingled with Gujarati Hindus and Somali Muslims".
But monumental changes arose with the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who became president of Egypt in 1954.
'A dangerous environment for non-Arabs'
Nasser's brand of Arab nationalism spread like wildfire across the region. "In quick succession states all over the Arabian Raj formally tied citizenship to 'a fair knowledge of Arabic' and being 'Arabs belonging to an Arab Country'," Dalrymple writes.
"In the process the once cosmopolitan Indian Ocean society would gradually be replaced by arbitrary new national identities."
And nearly everywhere South Asians "found themselves on the wrong side of the citizenship line and were forced to sell their properties".
'So ended the idea that 'Arab' could be an Indian ethnicity like Bengali or Punjabi - one that had been common for centuries'
- Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple
By this point, Luqman, once an Indian nationalist, was campaigning for a "Greater Yemen".
The Aden Trade Union, meanwhile, announced it aimed to create "a hostile and dangerous environment for non-Arabs".
Anti-Indian sentiment was also fuelled by the consequences of the fall of Hyderabad, India's largest princely state - which was widely recognised as a centre of the Islamic world.
Hyderabad had a population of tens of thousands of Arabs. Indian soldiers rounded them up and detained them when the state was annexed by the fledgling Indian nation in September 1948. In the end many left and a few thousand were deported.
"So ended the idea that 'Arab' could be an Indian ethnicity like Bengali or Punjabi - one that had been common for centuries," Dalrymple writes.
Imperialism was often a brutal and oppressive affair, but it could also be cosmopolitan and multicultural.
Nationalism could be just as brutal - and regularly very bloody. Much that was complex and attractive was destroyed in the violent convulsions of decolonisation.
The Qu'aiti sultanate
Under the rule of the nizam, the richest man in the world and the patron of the deposed Ottoman caliph, Hyderabad had effectively governed the Qu'aiti sultanate - the third-largest state in the Arabian peninsula - as a vassal.
This gave rise to a rich cultural fusion which produced, among other things, the famous dish of haleem - a Hyderabadi variation on the Arabian dish harees that is famous today.
One of the most remarkable figures Dalrymple interviewed for Shattered Lands is Sultan Ghalib al-Qu'aiti, the charming and scholarly former ruler of the sultanate, whose mother was the nizam of Hyderabad's niece.
The seventh nizam of Hyderabad (centre) with some members of the ruling family of the Qu'aiti sultanate in around 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1966, he became ruler of the Hadhramaut region of southern Yemen at the age of 18. Enormously popular with his people, Sultan Ghalib worked with manual labourers three times a week to convey "the true meaning of socialism in conformity with the teachings of Islam".
But in 1967 the young ruler was betrayed by the British and overthrown in a coup by the National Liberation Front, an Arab nationalist militia, which declared the socialist republic of South Yemen.
After he was deposed, he went to Oxford and Cambridge and became a distinguished historian. To this day, however, Sultan Ghalib remains tragically stateless.
'Unimaginable class reversal'
Another fascinating fact Dalrymple documents is that Omani sultans owned the port of Gwadar on the Pakistani coastline until the mid-1950s (a Baluchi khan had given Gwadar to an Omani prince in 1783).
The Omani Sultan Said bin Taimur was educated as an Indian prince in Ajmer, and was so Indian in his tastes and sensibilities that the British consul-general called him "Babu".
Revealed: Why there is an abandoned Ottoman tomb in remote India Read More »
The sultan even discriminated against Arabs in his own polity, denying them education and government positions.
Unsurprisingly, he was spectacularly unpopular and was ultimately replaced by his reformist son, Sultan Qaboos.
Qaboos bucked the Arab nationalist trend by declaring "many communities from across the Indian Ocean as indigenous tribes".
He even declared Kanak Khimji, a Gujarati merchant, to be a sheikh with responsibility for Oman's 200,000 Hindus - the first Hindu sheikh in Arab history.
Few non-fiction books are worth reading cover to cover, but Shattered Lands is a rare exception.
Outside of some academic circles, the history of the Arabian Raj has been largely forgotten.
Dalrymple's book should make waves in the Gulf, which today hosts a massive South Asian population - mostly poor migrant labourers, in what Dalrymple calls an "unimaginable class reversal".
But the book will also shatter historical orthodoxies in the subcontinent itself.
Shattered Lands is a triumph - and I strongly suspect Dalrymple has much more up his sleeve.