Indian Diaspora in the Persian Gulf States: History, Communities and Bilateral Relations

Indian Diaspora in the Persian Gulf States focuses on the historical as well as the contemporary aspects of the Indian diaspora of the region where small Indian merchant communities called Banians already existed for centuries.

Persian Gulf countries emerged as rentier states since the 1970s, mainly due to the development of the oil industry, which transformed the region from subsistence to globalized capitalist economies. In these economies, the role of sponsored Indian expatriate immigrants numbering at least 20 million during the past half century was vitally important. Taking the rentier state as the theoretical perspective, the author argues that the sponsorship (kafala) system tended to have a different impact on the Indian expatriates: incorporation and promotion of the entrepreneurs and professionals as business elites and the perpetual exploitation of the working classes.

The book is not only the first-ever definitive and comprehensive work on the Indian diaspora in the nine countries of the Gulf region, it also stands as the author's final statement on his three-odd decades of research and writing on the subject. Besides highlighting the role of Indian diaspora, the book also profiles all the Gulf-based recipients of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Awards. Bilateral trade, investment and political relations between India and individual Persian Gulf states constitute another focus area of the volume. The volume will be an interesting read for teachers, researchers and policy-makers connected with migration and diaspora studies, labour studies, political economy, international relations and geopolitics.