‘We Would Gather These Grieved’: Recentring South Asian Migrants and Their Political Mobilization in British Arabia

This article centers the mobilization of South Asian migrants in the 1940s Gulf as politically significant to the history of the region, challenging Gulf historiography and academic literature. This article discusses episodes of South Asian migrant workers’ mobilization which display anti-colonial and anti-capitalist characteristics. These instances of mobilization manifested an anti-colonial subjectivity gained through the struggle for Indian independence which informed how they perceived imperialism in the Gulf. To accomplish this, I utilize a decolonial approach which prioritizes a ‘history from below’ approach to studying the Gulf. This article draws on original archival research to recentre South Asians’ mobilization as well as to reveal how the colonial reactions to South Asian mobilization degraded their political agency, a representation which has been subsequently inherited by the academic literature. Ultimately, the article embeds the Gulf within the wider anti-colonial and anti-capitalist histories of the Global South.