"We Would Gather These Grieved": Recentring South Asian Migrants and Their Political Mobilisation in the Arabian Peninsula

This paper centers the mobilization of South Asian migrants in the 20th century Gulf as being politically significant to the history of the Gulf, challenging Gulf historiography and academic literature on the Gulf. This paper argues that South Asian migrants mobilized against wider structures of colonialism and capitalism in the Gulf, they perceived their struggle as connected to the Gulf Arabs, and that they challenged their deportability in the Gulf. Significantly, this paper also highlights the anti-colonial subjectivity gained by the struggle for Indian Independence which informed their mobilization and how they perceived imperialism in the Gulf. To accomplish this, Dr. Hessa utilizes a decolonial approach which prioritizes a ‘history from below’ approach to studying the Gulf. This paper draws on original archival research to recenter South Asian mobilization as well as to demonstrate how the British reactions to South Asian mobilization degraded their political agency. A representation which has been subsequently inherited by the academic literate. Ultimately, the paper centers South Asian migrants’ mobilization as politically significant and as embedding the Gulf within wider political history of the Global South.