279. Partition: How Dubai Almost Became Part of India (Part 2)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durrumpur. And we continue our miniseries with Sam de Rimpel discussing his rather excellent five partitions that reshaped modern Asia. And in this episode, which I think is actually one of the most intriguing of all of the chapters that you've covered in this history, is the history of the Arabian Peninsula, which honestly you would not put together with the Indian Raj at all. So let's talk about this, because a century ago, a large part, we're talking about Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, were legally part of India.

1:11Sam Jorimple, discuss. And why don't we know this? Yes, why? Why is this forgotten? How come that none of us knew it? It's been kind of forgotten. And I think each of the nation states involved, be it India, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, has kind of written over this. And it was really forgotten until this guy called James Onley, this professor and archivist, was hired by the Qatari government to create what's known as the Qatar Digital Library, which is really good. And anyone should go online, anyone who's doing research, it's one of the best archives out there. I got lost for weeks in that archive.

1:46It is extraordinary. I was honestly searching for a really obscure name, a British name that had served in India and I knew had been in Muscat. And then suddenly you've got his handwriting, you've got reports about him. It's replete with these gems that I just had no idea existed until this archive was made open. It was fabulous. So he's basically sent out to try and find any documents on the history of Qatar before oil, because that's when most Qatari histories tend to begin, really. He discovers that most of the archives on Qatar are not sitting in Qatar, and they're not sitting in the Arabian Peninsula.

2:21They're not sitting in London. They're sitting in Bombay. And that basically the entire swathe, this ring from Aden and what's now Yemen all the way up to Kuwait, basically the whole peninsula bar North Yemen and Saudi Arabia, had been part of the Bombay presidency and essentially been ruled as princely states of Bombay. Just clarify for those who don't know what a princely state was. Crucially, only two thirds of the Raj was what we call British India, directly conquered and ruled by the Brits. And a third was ruled by some 570 something states that had given up their foreign policy and defence over to the Viceroy and the Indian Army, etc.

3:09but were more or less internally independent. Now, anyone who goes to India on holiday may have been to Jaipur, Jodhpur, the blue city, the desert city of Jaisalmer. These were all princely states. These were all not directly ruled by the British government in the way that, say, Delhi or Kolkata were. Likewise, if you've been to Pakistan, Bharapur, Kalat, and Chitral are all princely states that joined Pakistan. But what we forget is that states like Nepal, Bhutan, Dubai, Oman were all princely states too and were separated off before Indian independence. And that's what happens with the Gulf.

3:45So if you open the Al-Khubanama, which is the list of princely states that are subservient to the Viceroy of India, it opens alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. And on the same page you can see Bhutan and Lahej and all these other states that are not part of India today. There's a passport that I managed to find of a Yemeni Jewish woman who wants to migrate to mandate Palestine after the Balfour Declaration declares it a homeland for the Jewish people. And in order to migrate from modern-day Yemen to modern-day Jerusalem, she has to get an Indian passport because by virtue of being born in Aden, she is an Indian citizen.

4:27Extraordinary lost world, Sam. None of us realise this. But you say that there's a reason that we're ignorant, that the British actually went out of their way not to emphasise these states were part of India. Well, I mean, not even visualise it. I mean, visualising it was a problem. I mean, maps showing that line around what was, you know, the Indian part of the empire. I mean, they just didn't really exist, did they? Precisely. So to avoid the ire of Istanbul, basically, the Ottoman Empire had a claim to the whole of the peninsula. and to avoid a diplomatic dispute, the Arab states of the Gulf were always left off maps.

5:05And there's a Royal Asian Society lecturer who says, as a jealous sheikh veils his favourite wife, so the British veil their activities in the Arabian Peninsula. Crucially, Sam, you point out that in a sense it wasn't the favourite wife, that these places, which today we think of as incredibly rich, I mean, anyone would like to get their hands on the treasuries of Qatar and Dubai. But in Raj terms, as late as the 1930s and 40s, they were one-gun salutes. They were very minor princely states, or zero-gun salutes, as opposed to, say, Hyderabad, which was what, a 21-gun? Exactly, and Jaipur, which had 17-gun salutes.

5:45This was one of those absurd Raj ceremonial whereby each ruler had a number of guns that would go off when he arrived somewhere. And there was vast competition between them. Are you a 15 or a 17 or a 21? Or in the case of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, zero gun salute. No one would salute them when they turned up. The only one that had a lot was Oman, which was also, I think, a 21 gun salute. So it was recognized as a major princely state. But so, you know, bits of Yemen are part of the East India Company from 1830s, when the East India Company first annexes Aden. Before Lahore. Yeah, exactly. So Yemen was part of the Raj or part of the East India Company before Lahore, which in a sense is the archetypal sort of Kipling Indian city.

6:31It's extraordinary. But the Gulf states, kind of to the east of Yemen, are brought into the Raj a bit later. There are treaties between these states and the Raj from the early 19th century, but it's only with Lord Curzon, the viceroy who's most famous for dividing Bengal and later helping to save all sorts of bits of English heritage, like Bodium Castle. It's Curzon who has a derbar, this kind of, you know, a court, holds court in Sharjah in the early 20th century and begins integrating them completely as princely states. And he has this quote, Oman should be considered as much a native state of the Indian Empire as Lusbele or Kalat, which are two states in modern day Baluchistan.

7:19Sam, one of the things you found which interests at least the Indian listeners here is that a lot of these Arabian princes sent their sons to boarding school to the posh sort of Eton of India, which was Mayo College in Rajasthan, where they would have their own house with their own elephant alongside the son of the Maharaja of Jaipur and Jobpur. Yeah, and crucially, the sultans of Oman in the early 20s and 30s are more fluent in Urdu, an Indian language, than they are in Arabic, which sort of alienates them from their people to some extent. And the language of the Omani army, Urdu remains one of the languages of the Omani army till very, very late.

8:03There's all sorts of things. You know, you get all these Yemeni princes showing up at the Delhi Derbar. And most importantly, though, I think many of the princes of the region would have considered themselves part of the Indian sphere of influence. But you often get the question, how much did the average person in what's known as the Arabian Raj actually feel Indian? The answer is not that much. So the average person in Dubai probably wouldn't have known that much that they were considered legally Indian. But in the big cities they were, so Aden specifically, you have many Arabs considering themselves Indian nationalists.

8:40There's a particular guy called Muhammad Ali Luqman, who's one of the great founding fathers of modern Yemen. And throughout the early 20th century, he's traveling around with the great Dalit leader Ambedkar. He's a massive fan of Gandhi. He's actually Gandhi's Arabic translator whenever he comes to address the Indian National Congress in Aden. And he, whilst critical of the fact that the only history Arabs are taught in schools across the peninsula is about the Mughals and the reign of Tipu Sultan and the Marathas, and nothing about Arab history, he nonetheless has an intense sense of an Indian identity, this idea that Arabs can be Indians too, just in the same way that a Punjabi or a Bengali can.

9:25We'll come on to Lukman in more detail in a second, but I just want to I'll just go back to Curzon because we've mentioned this before. This man was the viceroy of India. I mean, even when he was at university, people found him pompous and arrogant. George Nathaniel Curzon is a most superior person. Thank you for taking the words right out of my mouth. Yes, thank you. But I mean, the thing is that he believed in pomp and ceremony. You mentioned the gun salutes. But there is also a visual image of what he thought of the peninsula states because he may have wanted them to be included. But this photograph that exists in the British Library, it shows Curzon.

10:01He liked to sort of sit in the middle of all this to show his grandeur. And all of the Nawabs and all of the Rajas and Maharajas would have to come and bow before him as a sequence to show that the British Empire is supreme. You may be a princely state, you may have jewels and diamonds, but you bow to us. In India, they were given quite a lot of respect. In the photograph that was taken at Sharjah, they don't even have chairs, some of them. They're sitting on the ground around him or kneeling before him. So although he wanted them present in this sort of great India of his, he didn't want them to forget their place and their place was very low to the ground.

10:39So the Gulf states are, he views, as particularly small, essentially. So I think several of the states of modern day Yemen, as well as the state of Oman, were very important in his eyes and were given massive respect. But as far as he was concerned with the sheikhs of Dubai and Doha and Sharjah, they were right at the bottom of the imperial pecking order. And one of the great stories that has emerged from this book is the fact that there is this complete reversal. So today, Indians go to the Gulf and are often treated quite badly and as servants. As housekeepers, yeah. Or taxis in Dubai. And 100 years ago today, the reverse was true.

11:19You had Arabs from Dubai moving to Bombay, etc., as servants. There's this wonderful quote that I managed to find of a Qatari man who was very pleased that the tables had turned. And whilst he was once hit for stealing an Indian official's apple and was basically beaten, now the Indians come to Qatar as servants and he can do the same to them. Slightly dark but strange reversal. So let's go back to this fascinating guy, Muhammad Ali Lukman because he is from an Arab family in Aden, as you say, but he feels Indian. I mean, not only feels Indian, but he speaks Indian languages as well, doesn't he?

11:56I mean, Gujarati is one of his languages. Hindi is one of his languages. He writes a short story about life in Gujarat. He's got cousins in Gujarat. And he writes that for many years after becoming Gandhi's translator, I eulogised the aims of the Indian Congress. And it's only in the 1930s that he begins propagating Arab solidarity and disseminating Arab aspirations instead. So there's this reversal that just as Burma that we discussed in the last episode, just as Burmese people are beginning to feel alienated from India, you get people like Gandhi saying, you're not really Indian though, are you?

12:32Because you weren't featured in the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. At exactly the same moment, the same sort of attitude as being applied to Arabs like Lukman. He's being told, well, you're not really Indian. Aidan's a part of the Indian empire, but you're not really Indian. Sam, how similar was this to the way that many Arabs would have felt Turkish being under Ottoman rule? Was it a parallel to that? So it's rather interesting. So yes, it's definitely similar. One of the things, interestingly, that really alienates Arabs like Lukman from this kind of pan-Indian identity is the fact that most Indian Muslims support the Ottoman Caliphate and really think that the downfall of the Caliphate in World War I and the independence of the Arab states, think Lawrence of Arabia time.

13:19Many Indian Muslims think this is an awful thing, that the Caliphate is the leader of the world's Sunni Muslims and should be propped back up. Whereas Arabs like Lukman begin to feel like, why are you supporting a colonial power that's dominating Arabs. And so a wedge begins to form even between Arab Muslims and Indian Muslims, in a sense. It's so extraordinary. We never have this image of Arabia divided between the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire, but it is a cleavage and it's a very important one. Let's cast our eye on Aidan more closely, because on the same day, in the last episode, we talked about the partition of Burma.

13:52On the same day, April 1st, 1937, you have the decision to separate Aden from India. And this is the telegram that George VI reads out. Aden has been an integral part of British Indian administration for nearly 100 years. The political association with my Indian empire will now be broken and Aden will take its place in my colonial empire. Why do they decide to do this and why do they decide to do it now? So there's multiple things going on here at once. You've got an increasing sense that India might be independent in the future. It's the express aim of the Congress. And frankly, separating off these bits that Indian nationalists don't want mean that we can potentially keep them in the future.

14:37There's this guy, Bernard Riley, who's one of the governors in Aden, and he's constantly going on about how much reforms in the Arabian Peninsula are always bogged down by the vast Indian bureaucracy that's always more focused on events in Bengal and Punjab than it is on events in Aden. And so he definitely was pushing separation just for the sake of economic reforms. And then there's a growing sense that in the wake of World War I, there's more of a sense of Arab nationalism that's growing and a sense that maybe these regions should be looking more to Cairo and Beirut than they should be looking to Bombay.

15:18Bombay and Calcutta. Right. I mean, so I get that reasoning. What you said during the Burmese episode, and if anyone hasn't heard that yet, I urge you to go back. It is mind-blowingly interesting. That separation, and you likened it to sort of Brexit when you're separated from the mothership, if you like, you know, the bigger economy, it sort of is a prelude to economic disaster. Is the same true for Aidan, which is separated on the same day? Or are there more mitts to catch it? I think there's less because its economy was always less tied to India, I think, than Burma that literally shares a massive land border.

15:54And Aden really has its heyday in the 60s, actually, after decades later. Throughout much of this time, it's essentially a point where if you're taking a boat from London to Bombay, you stop off at Aden on the way to refuel. That's how most people experienced it. Evelyn Waugh writes about it, doesn't he, in one of his travel books arriving at that time? Exactly. And actually, Evelyn Waugh is a fascinating source on all this because he writes about the growing dispute, the sense amongst Arabs in the city that they're never going to get as good loans as Indians from the Indian national banks. But crucially, what's bizarre is that the Arabian Peninsula is separated from the Raj in bits and pieces.

16:33So you get Aidan separated on April Fool's Day, 1937. But the Gulf states, like Dubai, remains a part of the Indian Empire until much later, until basically early 1947. So just as Indian independence is looming, you get all these conversations about, well, we should quickly separate them off now before we hand over the reins to the Gulf. And so there's all these bizarre telegrams that I managed to find in the archives. There's British officials discussed whether India or Pakistan would be allowed to run the Persian Gulf after independence. Yet a member of the British legation in Tehran writes of his surprise at the apparent unanimity of officials in Delhi that the Persian Gulf was of little interest to the government of India.

17:21So the Indians are essentially offered the Gulf and turn it down. And as the Gulf resident William Hay puts it, it would clearly have been inappropriate to hand over responsibility for dealing with the Gulf Arabs to Indians or Pakistanis. There is very, very almost a world in which the entire united oil wealth of the Gulf is handed over to either India or Pakistan. And it would have changed global geopolitics entirely. And it's one of the most consequential decisions, in a sense. Imagine Pakistan as an oil state or India as an oil state. It's extraordinary. But oil hasn't really been discovered yet.

17:57And it wouldn't have just been an oil state. Think of what Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain each have and put it all together. I wonder if the decision taken by India, no thanks, but no thanks. Thanks very much. Nice of you to think of this, but no, we don't want it. It's informed by the fact that there are growing fissures within the independence movement as well, between the Indian Congress and groups like the Khilafat movement, who identify themselves as being primarily Muslim. And there is this sort of like building picture in India itself in the 1930s and early 40s of we can't have any more tipping the balance out of our favour.

18:35To answer your question, Anita, I think that it's much more the fact that the Indian government just sees this as a money drain. Oil hasn't really been discovered. And these are tiny villages on the other side of the Arabian Sea that, you know, they will have to fund a huge navy to protect. one of the reasons that all of these states were never brought into modern Saudi Arabia when Ibn Saud unifies all the Arabian tribes in the 1920s is because they were under the protection of the Indian army. And the question was, do they really want to have to continue funding the protection of these small villages that were a crucial link in the Indian empire?

19:13But how relevant are they really to Indians today. That's so brilliant. So they just said they can't afford to look after Dubai and Qatar because they're such a drain. Isn't it reminiscent of when the Russians sold back the West Coast of the United States before the gold was found in the gold rush? Doh! Just before. And Alaska before the oil. Doh! Doh! Well, let's take a break here at another doh moment where India said, no thanks, thanks, but no thanks. We don't want these bits. You can keep them before oil is discovered. Join us after the break when we introduce you to a really fascinating man.

19:51His name is David Holden. And only this year has he been exposed as a CIA KGB double agent. See you in a moment.

20:05Welcome back. OK, well, that was a tease and a half before we went into the break. Sam de Rimpel, tell us all about this man, David Holden. So David Holden's a really fascinating figure. He shows up in my book because his writings as correspondent for various newspapers in the 1950s across the Arabian Peninsula is one of the best visualizations for the lingering Indian influence across the region. He writes amazingly about the fact that he had looked forward to his Arabian posting, but he hadn't been expecting to be attending a garden der bar in honour of Queen Victoria's appointment as Empress of India in the 1950s, kind of Bahrain.

20:43And he writes that the Raj maintains here a slightly phantasmal sway, a situation rich in anomaly and anachronism. The servants are all bearers, the laundryman are Dobie and the watchman are Chokhidhar. And on Sundays, the guests are confronted with the ancient and agreeable Anglo-Indian ritual of a mountainous curry lunch. So he writes gorgeously about the lingering impact of the Raj on this region. But as you said, what's extraordinary is that he has entered the news this year as one of the big double agents of the Cold War. Working for the KGB against the CIA. Well, working for kind of both.

21:20His former editor at the Sunday Times remembers him as a small neat man, not a hair out of place, who with his bush jacket and debonair manner managed to bring a touch of beau geste to our newsroom hubbub. He was generous in providing contacts and very well aware of the dangers of practicing journalism in tense exotic places. And if you look at a photo of him, he's a kind of smug and confident young man in a cotton suit with combed black hair and a sort of penetrating gaze. He looks like he works for the tax office and he's just landed me with an enormous bill and he's very happy with it. That's what he looks like.

21:50That's exactly what he looks like. some kind of administrator who's got the cream. But yeah, so what is he doing at this time? And how is he sort of playing both sides of each other? One of the great mysteries of the Sunday Times' history that the editor Harold Evans spent years trying to solve and never managed to solve was why was Holden mysteriously murdered in Cairo? And he's found, I think, in a parking lot or somewhere. His body's just found kind of dumped on the side of the road. When is the murder? Bodies found in 1977, so just six years after my book ends. And yeah, it's one of the great mysteries of the Sunday Times' history.

22:27And there was all sorts of stuff coming out when I was researching the book about his mysterious meetings with a known Soviet bloc agent. And it was recently discovered just in the last year of my research that he'd had a passionate romantic affair with ex-communist and spy Leo Silberman, who turns out later to have been a KGB recruiter. There's a letter that he writes to his brother that in such a conservative environment as Arabia, what is a fellow to do except turn queer? So news investigations recently have concluded that his relationship with Leo Sibelman eventually evolved into him working for the KGB himself, and that he was working for the CIA at the same time, and that it was one of the big scandals, basically, of the Sunday Times' history.

23:16But what the hell is he doing in the Gulf states? I mean, what do they both want of him? I mean, is he working for them? Who is he there for? And is he doing this for money or is he a communist? I mean, his description of the absurdity of British rituals in the Gulf would indicate that he's a lefty, sort of laughing at the pompous Brits, which would imply a more left-leaning politics. He's definitely that. I think that it's still unclear what's going on. I think that he is covering the whole of this region, including Egypt after the Suez Crisis. He's covering Israel-Palestine. There's all sorts of major politics blowing up at the time that he's basically just being sent out by the Sunday Times to cover.

23:59But obviously, there's all sorts of murky dealings in terms of the US versus the USSR throughout this region at exactly the same time. And I think this is such a new story that But it's still unclear precisely what he was doing when. But I think as more research is done, it'll become clearer. And this will soon be regarded as one of the great Kim Philby stories of the Cold War. It's just an extraordinary thing. An extraordinary thing. I mean, we did mention just before the break that India had said no thank you to all of these Gulf states because oil had not been discovered. I mean, at what point is oil discovered where India can really kick itself in the shin?

24:35and Pakistan can as well by saying no thank you to this great gift. And when Holden is there, is it the start of money starting to pour in, pour out of this region? Precisely. So there was oil discovered in the region shortly before separation and before the partition of Arabia from India, but it was discovered in small quantities. The thing that changes everything is when Iran tries to nationalise the Anglo-Persian oil company in the early 50s, Which I think I'm right in saying is part of Burma oil, which we discussed in the last episode. It's a subsidiary. It's a subsidiary, that's right. So you've got these kind of funny connections.

25:14And crucially, this bit of Iran where oil is, Muhammad was very almost recognised as an independent princely state of the Raj. And the Brits tried to get the local sheikh to basically declare independence of Iran and be recognised alongside Kuwait and Qatar, etc., as a princely ruler. But when Holden's arriving, it's just beginning. You're just suddenly getting this new investment in all the oil reserves of Bahrain. And I think Abu Dhabi has just discovered some, but it's not yet discovered in places like Dubai. And when he's going around, he's shocked. The crucial thing that he's seeing everywhere is this lingering Indian influence.