South Asians in the Indian Ocean World: Language, Policing, and Gender Practices in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates

Despite the striking similarities between the two Persian Gulf states of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the similar positioning of South Asian expatriates in them, language, policing, and gender practices help produce significantly different expatriate experiences in these two Gulf settings. The cultural currents flow in different directions, pointing one society toward the Middle East and the other toward South Asia. These experiences are to some extent historically determined but depend also on contemporary policies and demographic configurations. While the economic forces of globalization strongly affect social and cultural domains, “anthropology has repeatedly focused not only on the pervasiveness of power, but on the power of culture.”¹

The Historical Context: South Asia and the Gulf

Historical ties between South Asia and some of the Gulf states, particularly Oman and the UAE, are long-standing. In the eighteenth century, British empire building led to efforts to protect the trade route to India, and that meant dealing with the maritime empire of the Omani sultanate and the Qawasim tribal confederacy, the latter based in Ash Shariqah and Ra’s al Khaymah. Nineteenth-century battles of the Qawasim confederacy with British forces led to the trucial system, under which the small polities of the Gulf signed separate treaties or truces with the British government. This process began in 1820 and was sealed in 1853 with the Perpetual Maritime Truce signed by the present members of the UAE.²

British dominance in the Gulf continued to be oriented to India. British relationships with the Gulf polities were first directed by the provincial government of Bombay, then after 1873 by the colonial government of India, and after Indian and Pakistani independence in1947 by the British Foreign Office. Britain conducted separate relations with each state, leading to separate flags, travel documents or passports, and ultimately national anthems.³ Thus the states, whose boundaries and relations with each other had been historically fluid, developed distinct identities.

Yet British dominance also produced important commonalities. The Indian rupee was the principal currency in the Gulf, Indian stamps were used (overlaid with state names), political officers applied British Indian regulations, and Urdu (Hindustani) words infiltrated the Arabic coastal dialect.⁴ Yemeni and other Gulf Arabs worked as soldiers in Indian native states, including Hyderabad.⁵ Other links to India included those developed through the pearl-diving industry, the mainstay of most Gulf economies before the oil discoveries commenced in the 1930s. For example, Gulf merchants sent pearls to Hyderabad, India, for stringing and setting into jewelry. The 1929 Wall Street crash, the resultant world economic depression, and the Japanese introduction of cultured pearls brought about the collapse of the pearl industry, plunging the Gulf economies into crisis. But it was just at that time that foreign oil companies began arriving in search of concessions, and the oil concessions established a pattern of reliance on foreign expertise and manpower that has persisted beyond the termination of the foreign oil concessions in the late 1970s.⁶

Thus the Gulf states rely heavily on expatriates, including South Asians, for whom there are opportunities to use their skills for higher pay and in better working conditions than at home. Businessmen, professionals, service workers, and laborers have left their home countries to become expatriate workers. But it is the Arab rulers who control these labor flows through laws that set a “steel frame” for work and family life.⁷ In the Gulf,⁸ we see a unique example, perhaps, of transnationalism as a deliberate strategy of economic and political governance.

The Gulf rulers launched their states into the modern world with the help of expatriates. The pearl industry, on which most Gulf states depended before the 1930s, was based on indigenous...