Theorizing Citizenship and the UAE State

While many scholars have addressed states as contingent, fluid, and historical concepts, non-Western, nondemocratic forms of government are, for the most part, reified as singular, bounded actors in the literature.Footnote ⁵ The United Arab Emirates and other Gulf Arab governments are often classified in political economic scholarship as “petro” or “rentier” states because most of their revenue is generated through the sale of oil or the rental of oil prospects. A portion of this income is then passed along to citizens in the form of welfare benefits, such as free health care, housing subsidies, guaranteed income, and other services.Footnote ⁶ The petrostate model of governance is usually authoritarian, monarchial rule with limited citizen participation in terms of voting or civil society.Footnote ⁷ Thus, forms of citizenship in the Gulf are often contrasted directly, from within and without, to forms of “liberal” citizenship in Western countries. In the case of Dubai, the authoritarian nonliberal state is often posited in contrast to a neoliberal economy in which foreigners can participate without official citizenship but remain outside the ambit of the national community.

It is estimated that upwards of ninety percent of Dubai residents are foreigners, the majority of whom are from South Asia.Footnote ⁸ Since oil accounts for only three percent of Dubai's current GDP, the emirate is focused on growing nonoil sectors such as tourism, transport, trade, construction, and financial services, all areas that rely upon foreign businesses. Government narratives often convey a tension, therefore, between the need for foreign investment and labor on the one hand and the desire to preserve authoritarian, monarchial rule over a narrowly defined citizenry on the other. While citizens may receive certain rights in terms of welfare, foreigners have no official political rights and are tied to temporary, renewable work visas.

In order to address this demographic imbalance and the competition for jobs engendered by nonoil industries, the Emirati government has laid out plans to “Emiratize” sectors of the economy, replacing foreign workers with nationals. In addition, in recent statements government officials are adamant that foreigners are temporary “guests” and not “migrants” in the country. In his “Strategic Plan for 2015,” for example, Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai stressed the need to maintain a balance between national identity and international business, arguing that Dubai as a “global city” is not a threat to national identity but rather that “adopting best global standards and practices is the only way to preserve national and cultural identity.”Footnote ⁹ The Sheikh's balancing act between satisfying the needs of global business and assuaging the insecurities of nationals is clear in this speech, and he leverages the language of minimal government interference in market processes to do this.

As numerous scholars across the social science disciplines have shown, to lure foreign business and increase their incomes many countries have in recent years adopted neoliberal strategies—by which I mean the use of market mechanisms to achieve the ends of governance. These include the privatization of migration regulation, greater rights for multinational corporations and fewer rights for people, the rise of duty-free zones, and a shift toward a consumer model of the state in which identities are formed through consumption.Footnote ¹⁰ This goes hand in hand with an increasing notion of market sovereignty, as if the market “had a mind and a morality of its own.”Footnote ¹¹ The UAE has been implementing neoliberal policies since its inception in 1971. In fact, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks the economy of the UAE one of the world's most “open.”Footnote ¹²

Western media portrayals of Dubai have also increased dramatically in the past five years and focus on how these policies have created an economic boom in the emirate, one that is based upon the exploitation of foreign laborers, mostly from the Indian subcontinent. The plight of laborers in the UAE has garnered international attention, and this has forced the rulers to begin to publicly address working conditions and workers’ rights.

The state, then, especially as embodied in the person of the sheikh, is officially accountable to international organizations, global capital, and the citizenry. But global capital in this case is not just large multinational corporations but also smaller family firms, such as Indian-run businesses in Dubai. Elite expatriates, therefore, form part of the nexus of activities that generate a state-effect in the form of a centralized bureaucracy (and in the actual body of the sheikh); however, these expatriates, through a disavowal of both political participation and national belonging, produce room for both objectives—the preservation of citizen interests and the conformation to international standards—to dominate official government activities and discourse.

My field research, however, indicates not that the Dubai economy is neoliberal and the state nonliberal, but rather that multiple logics of governance coexist in the production of distinct spaces and populations. The assumption of a singular bounded state and a purified national identity in the United Arab Emirates contributes to the elision of the role of expatriates in forms of belonging and processes of governance. Expatriate elites in particular are central to the production of the ideological effect of a centralized state, both through their practices of belonging and governance over other populations, and also in their narratives, which deny and obscure their activities. The production of the Emirati state, then, involves supposed outsiders as much as supposed insiders and hinges upon a firm belief by both citizens and expatriates in the distinction between liberal and nonliberal, economy and nation.

In this article, I consider how Indian elites act as unofficial or substantive citizens in Dubai—through their practices and narratives of belonging and through their political engagement with the state and acts of governance—in ways that reify an Arab and Muslim nation-state to which they cannot officially ever belong.Footnote ¹³ In what follows, I explore three main ways in which I observed Indian elites participating in these processes. First, Indian businessmen work with governmental authorities and legal institutions to produce regulations and opportunities that appear to satisfy the seemingly contradictory expectations of citizens and noncitizens. Second, they police the gendered boundaries of their own cultural communities and disavow belonging in ways that purify the Indian presence out of Emirati national identity. And third, elite Indians govern other migrant populations, often in lieu of the state and citizen sponsors. However, as I discuss in the final section of this article, my research also shows that Indian businessmen do stake certain historical, geographic, and cultural claims to the emirate, claims that may simultaneously challenge the supposedly clear divisions between citizen and foreigner in the UAE, as well as both illiberal and liberal logics of citizenship.

Indian Entrepreneurs in Dubai: Regulating Citizen and Noncitizen Interests

The first way in which I argue that Indian businessmen are part of the state-effect in the UAE is through their political engagement with the government to produce economic regulations and loopholes that both preserve their own monopolies over certain sectors of the economy and enforce limitations on foreign business that favor nationals. Most scholars of ethnic entrepreneurship have argued that transnational and diasporic networks and their informal and familial business practices work around the restrictive and often racist policies of states.Footnote ¹⁴ In Dubai, however, I found that Indian entrepreneurs blended formal and informal business practices and more often worked in conjunction with governmental institutions, thereby producing the legitimacy of the state. In fact, the ability to combine informal and formal business practices with minimal government interference was a central component of my informants’ definitions of Dubai as a place of freedom.

While the UAE has no income tax and very low import and export duties, foreign businesses are regulated by the Commercial Companies Law, through which a foreigner can own only forty-nine percent of any business. This means that any foreigner has to conduct banking, hiring, and other activities through a majority stakeholder who is a citizen of the country. While this regulation may appear to restrict the foreign investment and neoliberalization programs that the Dubai government has been promoting in the last two decades, all of my informants were adamant that the Commercial Companies Law was merely a formality and that there were many ways to get around the system of privileging citizens. However, as I learned over the course of our interviews, these loopholes often required networks of knowledge and expertise that were unavailable to newer entrants into the Dubai marketplace. Indian businessmen, particularly those who had been in the Gulf for many years or generations had developed long-standing relationships within the business community (both with Emiratis and with other foreigners) and were able to leverage these connections within the supposedly open market of Dubai to maintain their ethnic strongholds in certain sectors of the economy.

There are thriving legal and consulting businesses designed to assist expatriate business owners in increasing control over their investments in the UAE. These businesses assist in official and unofficial ways to change the fifty-one-to-forty-nine business ownership balance decreed by the Commercial Companies Law. First, it is possible, with knowledge and contacts, to obtain an official memorandum notarized by the Dubai government through which eighty percent of the business is owned by the foreigner and twenty percent by the local partner. It is also possible for an expatriate businessperson to get official power of attorney. This would mean that while the majority of the company is in the citizen's name, the local partner has no real access to the company's finances or any way to make major decisions that affect the company. Unofficially, business partners enter into many “side agreements.” For example, a citizen sponsor might agree to a lesser stake in the company, a specific annual payment, or the passing on of the company in case of death of one of the parties.

Besides the legal ways to get around the fifty-one percent local ownership mandate, there are other ways in which long-standing businesspeople in Dubai and those with connections (wasta) are able to operate outside of the restrictions on foreign business in the UAE. First, the law of local partnership came into effect in the mid-1980s. While most businesses had to comply with the new dictate, some, which were well established and well connected, remained 100 percent foreign-owned. Therefore, there are several businesses currently operating in Dubai outside of free zones that are completely foreign-owned, including many Indian-run firms.

Second, because of the networks of influence and ethnic monopolies in Dubai, in many cases new shops can only be obtained through word-of-mouth recommendations from other merchants, which has led to a system in which certain areas of the city (particularly in Bur Dubai and Deira) and certain sectors of the economy are controlled by merchants of particular nationalities. In Dubai, gold, textiles, and electronics shops are almost exclusively Indian-run, and there is a strong Indian presence in supermarkets and private education as well. Gujaratis, Sindhis, and Keralites are the most numerous Indian businessmen, and they often employ and conduct business with other members of their communities. Their businesses have also been passed on through several generations and typically expanded by bringing in family members from India. Both of these practices solidified ethnic control over these sectors.

Finally, Dubai's tax-free environment and recent focus on building factories and becoming a site for production (instead of just “re-export”) have allowed Indian businesses to earn significantly more profits in Dubai than in India. And the established hold that Indian merchants have on certain sectors of the Dubai market makes it easier for them to make higher profits than newer entrants into those sectors. In Dubai, according to one of my informants, you are always a “big fish in small sea.” Although the Indian businessmen I spoke to acknowledged that certain policies could not be changed, like those of citizenship and access to political rights like voting or freedom of speech, they were quick to tell me that the government is mostly benevolent toward foreign business. While the state was working on educating nationals and including them in the private sector, my informants were not worried about this conflicting with their interests. They were adamant that the state has always been doing both simultaneously, improving the lives of nationals and providing expats with the most value for their investment.

Indian businessmen's narratives often mirrored those of the ruling families, and they referred to themselves as “guests” in a host country who needed to behave with respect for the local laws and customs. Indian businessmen were particularly proud of what they could accomplish in a “free” place like Dubai and articulated their membership in Dubai society in terms of how Dubai lets them be themselves to their full economic potential, without restrictions. Freedom for these Indians, then, was defined in terms of market fundamentalism more than anything else. As Mr. Menon, a prominent South Indian retailer in Dubai, told me:

However, Mr. Menon and the other Indian businessmen I spoke to did not always include the role they played in the manipulation of Dubai's “free” market to benefit their businesses or the specific advantages they received from the Dubai government in their definitions of freedom.

Producing Indianness in Dubai

The second portion of my argument considers Indian elite diasporas in Dubai, their patriarchal production of community, and the ways in which they participate in the erasure of South Asian elements from Emirati national identity. Although they engaged with and participated in producing the processes of governance and economic (de)regulation in the UAE, Indian businessmen were very adamant, even while praising Dubai and preferring it to India in many ways, that they were Indians and nothing else. They claimed no interest in belonging politically to the UAE in the form of citizenship or other juridico-legal rights. These elite businesspeople were actively involved in Indian social, cultural, and religious organizations, reproducing what they called Indian “tradition” in Dubai, and providing a platform to educate their children about Indian customs, language, and history. In fact, because their business, family, and community lives overlapped to such a degree, they often had little or no daily interaction with people outside of their religious, ethnic, regional, and/or linguistic circles. The ability to self-segregate and to police the boundaries of their communities was something that Indian elites preferred about Dubai, in contrast to Western countries, where they felt the cultural identities of their children would be threatened. This statement by Ramesh, a high-level Punjabi engineer, summarizes these sentiments:

Dubai's most prominent Indian social institution is the India Club, which is over forty years old and includes some of the wealthiest and longest-established Indian families in Dubai as members. An India Club membership requires several years on a waitlist, costs thousands of dollars, and is open only to people with Indian passports. Most of my business community informants and their families were members. In addition to the India Club, Dubai has a Hindu temple, several churches and mosques, and a Sikh Gurdwara, which draw people from the Indian community to religious as well as social events. And there are countless regional organizations, including several Malayali clubs, a Bengali Club, a Maharasthra Association, a Jain Association, Sindhi organizations, and an Ismaili Center. These organizations form the backbone of the social lives of business elites and their families in Dubai. Weekends are often spent with people from one's regional, religious, or ethnic background, either at picnics or events organized by particular groups, or at parties and get-togethers in halls, restaurants, or people's homes. The children of the Indian businesspeople I spoke to often go to Indian schools, and their parents try to maintain an Indian language in the home. They have servants and nannies living in the home as well who do not speak English, which furthers the Indian language skills of their children. Most of the people I spoke to were quite religious (most were Hindu, Jain, or Muslim) and maintained shrines in the home, had Hindu or Muslim images and items displayed in their offices, and observed religious festivals, fasts, and pujas on a regular basis.

The particular Indian culture that Indian elites produce in Dubai is one that they claim is apolitical. They narrate their Indianness in terms of tradition, culture, and group identity, but not in terms of class, party, or postcolonial consciousness. As feminist scholars of South Asian diasporas have noted, diasporic communities often draw the boundaries around gender roles tightly and police the mobility and practices of women, who are considered responsible for teaching cultural values to children.Footnote ¹⁵ Among Indian elites in Dubai, I also found a gendered and patriarchal construction of Indian culture. In most elite families, it is not wives but rather servants, cooks, and nannies who do the housekeeping and childcare; boys often follow in their fathers’ footsteps and join the family business; marriages outside of the community are restricted; arranged or semiarranged marriages are common; and consumption is a central part of elite women's lives. There are many high-end boutiques and five-star restaurants that cater to Dubai's Indian elite. On any given evening, well-dressed Indian women can be seen purchasing diamond jewelry in Damas, or designer Salwar-Kameez in Meena Bazaar, or shopping at Dubai's luxury malls. Charity lunches are held at major hotels and attended by couples dressed in Armani suits and the newest Delhi sari styles; Bollywood stars are regularly spotted at events in Dubai; and lavish weddings and parties are thrown by Indian families at which members of the Emirati royal family often make an appearance. My informants raved about the cultural and social offerings of Dubai—there are groceries, restaurants, tailors, beauty parlors, and other amenities that are “just like” what one would find in Bombay or Delhi. Thus, according to my informants, in Dubai they could be more “Indian” than in any other place outside of India, definitely more so than London or New York, where they had family members who, unlike them, were struggling to make sure their children maintained Indian values and identities.

While these elites often live in high-rise apartment buildings or villas surrounded by nationals and expatriates from many other countries, they tend to maintain a nondiverse social circle, sticking to those they feel form part of their community (usually based on religion, region, language, and class simultaneously). These group-based associations are often extensions of transnational economic networks, which also form the basis for Indian business monopolies in certain sectors of Dubai's economy. Because they define their own ethnic identities so narrowly and vigilantly work to maintain “culture,” Indian elite expatriates do not challenge Emirati national identity and citizenship; rather, they help cement the idea of an Arab nation-state by purifying Indian and Emirati national identities into distinct, mutually exclusive forms.

Ethnic Firms and Privatized Governance

The final and perhaps most important way I argue Indian elites legitimize the state and rehearse citizenlike behavior is through their governance over other migrant populations. Under the kafala system of migration regulation in Dubai and other parts of the Gulf, foreigners’ visas are tied to individual citizen sponsors, who are responsible for visa procurement and renewal, and for the activities of the foreign resident while he or she is in the country. Thus, in theory, the Emirati partner is the main sponsor of a foreign employee. In practice, the regulation of foreign workers is mostly conducted by other foreigners. In order to satisfy expatriate businesses, Dubai government discourses and policies allow businesspeople formal and informal ways to govern other populations, usually laboring classes of South Asian migrants. While the state has an official policy of Emiratization, it has avoided problems faced by other Gulf countries (which have nationalized whole industries overnight) by installing a system in which employers basically pay more to keep their workforce of one nationality. An employee visa costs more if a company does not employ a variety of foreign nationalities; and it costs even more if a company does not employ a certain percentage of Emiratis. However, many Indian owners I spoke to were happy to pay to keep their work force exclusively Indian—and often not only Indian, but also of specific regional, state, or linguistic backgrounds. The extra visa costs were outweighed by the money saved on employee salaries and company housing. By employing other Indians, migration from South Asia is in effect privatized into the hands of individual expatriates, not simply Emirati sponsors (kafeels). Indian businessmen maximize their profits from this situation while the state relegates responsibility over the well-being of migrant workers to their compatriots.

South Asians, unlike most Europeans and North Americans, need a visa even to enter the UAE as tourists, so they cannot stay in the country unless they are employed or are a dependent of someone who has employment. Therefore, many procure employment in Dubai through recruiting companies before leaving home. This often requires giving a large sum of money as a down payment to a headhunter for paperwork, visa processing, and travel expenses. Upon arrival in the UAE, these migrants often have their passports confiscated by their employers (to prevent flight). The migrants sometimes find that wages are lower than promised or are garnished for a range of added expenses, resulting in a debt situation that delays saving and remitting for several years. Others arrive in the UAE on a visit visa and look for a job, after which they must fly back home and return with the proper work visa. If they lose their job, they have to return to their home country for a minimum of six months before they can apply for new employment, and if they try to switch positions, they can be put on a “black list” that leads to deportation. Thus, people are always maneuvering between the subcontinent and the Gulf as part of the practice of Gulf employment.

The logic behind this system of employment, which also disadvantages other Asian, non-Gulf Arab, and African groups, is that migrants are temporary and remit all of their earnings. Therefore, they should be paid according to the standard of living in their home countries, since they make more money in the Gulf than they would at home and also take money away from the Emirati economy. The reality is quite the opposite, however. While remittances by UAE Indians total over two billion dollars a year through official banks (and even more through unofficial streams)Footnote ¹⁶ and while most Dubai-based Indians earn more than they could in India, their remittances are a very small percentage of their earnings. By having to pay for their housing, pay for their children's schooling, and buy their own cars or other transport, most nonelite Indians in Dubai actually spend the bulk of their income inside the UAE. Western expatriates, in contrast, are provided with assistance at almost every level of the migration process, and many expenses (such as housing, schooling, transportation, health care, and visa fees) are included in their employment packages. Therefore, they manage to save significant amounts of money in just a few short years in the Gulf.

Informal economic structures and practices, which are utilized by Indian businesses in Dubai, are often extensions of similar practices in India. Barbara Harriss-White argues that liberalization in post-1990s India, instead of creating more formalization within the economy, actually “catalyzed” a nexus of collective action by local businesspeople, politicians, and other actors that furthered informal-sector activities, increased capital accumulation among elites, and resulted in an economy that is actually less “free” because of the very neoliberal reforms that promised freedom.Footnote ¹⁷ In the case of business owners, they deploy both formal and informal economic strategies in order to increase the wealth extracted from workers. For example, charging employees for setting up jobs, withholding salaries, and utilizing family members (usually women) as unpaid labor all allow for larger profit margins. These processes also often keep employees in an insecure position where they are beholden to employers and have little actual access to forms of resistance.

Transparency in business practices, one of the hallmarks of economic liberalization policies, is therefore not helpful to Indian business owners who operate in small family-owned patriarchal businesses. Joint family firms and credit-sharing situations are common to the Indian economy, and many of these practices have been in place for quite some time through generations of family members and through transitions in local politics.Footnote ¹⁸ These organizational structures allow for lower costs (often cheaper than the market), and they extend into local and regional political bureaucracies and into the overseas diaspora. They also reinforce male relations of patriarchy—pure trading firms in particular have almost no paid female labor, and it is actually the Indian state that has been providing employment opportunities for women, not the supposed free hand of the newly liberalized market.

Many of these informal-economy structures are reproduced in the transnational space of Dubai, where elite Indians rely upon economic practices that exploit the labor of other Indians in order to maximize their wealth accumulation. Money extracted from poor migrant workers makes up a sizable fraction of elite income in the Gulf. Although exact figures are difficult to confirm, it is estimated that the rent alone that is extracted from migrant workers in the Gulf exceeds one billion dollars a year.Footnote ¹⁹ In the case of the Indian businesses that I studied, workers arrived in Dubai through familial and community networks or were recruited by headhunters in their hometowns. They either paid money in India for jobs promised upon arrival in Dubai, or they arrived in Dubai on a visit visa, stayed with friends and family members, and ended up finding jobs within companies and industries that employed their relatives and acquaintances.

In Indian-run industries like gold and textiles, workers are often housed in cheap accommodations near work or even on the work site. They are provided with canteen-style food and therefore receive lower cash wages. By providing these services, employers maintain lower costs (which rely upon contacts and cheap labor), and they are able to pay Indian workers less without resistance because the wages are often still much more than the migrants would have been able to command back in India. There have been countless cases in the international press about Indian workers whose passports and wages have been withheld, who have been forced back to work (sometimes violently) if they try to resist, who live in housing with sporadic access to water and electricity, and who often share bed space or extremely cramped living conditions.Footnote ²⁰

While the Dubai government has been enacting laws to protect the health and safety of migrants, mostly due to pressure from international human rights organizations and from an increase in worker agitation over the past few years, the enforcement of these laws remains dubious, and since it is technically individual sponsors who are responsible for working conditions, very few changes have actually taken place in terms of the lived experience of foreign workers in the Gulf. While my research focused mostly on business owners and managers, I did get several opportunities to speak to South Asians who worked as taxicab drivers, retail shop employees, craftsmen, deliverymen, grocery store employees, domestic workers, and low-level office workers. In every case, the person I spoke to was not in physical possession of his or her passport; in many cases, she or he was still paying off debts accrued from the process of migration; and most people complained that they were earning a fraction of the salaries promised in India by headhunters. In addition, across the board, regardless of income, South Asians noted that they were paid less for the same jobs than similarly qualified Europeans, North Americans, and Arabs. Indian workers command some of the lowest salaries and make up the largest percentage of the work force in the United Arab Emirates.

Thus, many informal economic practices proliferate in the transnational space of Dubai-India business relations, where certain elite groups of Indians rely upon nontransparent, nonfree economic practices that exploit the labor of other Indians for profit and wealth accumulation. While technically citizen business owners are responsible for the conditions of employment, in practice it is most often expatriate elites who exploit South Asian migrant labor in Dubai. Thus, certain forms of governance are relegated to elite expatriate populations, and it is through these practices of governance that foreigners participate in the production of the state's authority.

Ambivalences and Narratives of Belonging

By articulating political and cultural alienness in the UAE but participating in practices of governance and political engagement, Indian business elites are in some respects similar to citizens, extracting labor from other migrants, influencing decisions that maintain their position in the economy, and exercising governance over laboring classes. These subjects, however, are ambivalent, and, as I turn to now, they often rehearsed discourses, practices, performances, and affects of belonging that went past their scripts of being in Dubai solely for economic reasons.

Throughout my interviews, Indian businessmen told me that they did not have political influence in Dubai, that neither they nor their children considered themselves “Emirati” in any way, that Emirati culture and UAE citizenship were closed to foreigners, and that they were nothing but Indian in their “hearts and minds.” Dubai for them was a strategic home, an extension of India in which they could earn and live without much interference, and a place they actually favored because of the lack of possibilities for assimilation. While it would seem that my informants were rehearsing a form of neoliberal globalization in which they functioned as participants in the market but not the nation, if one looks more closely at their narratives and practices, there are several ways in which they were asserting belonging that ranged beyond the economic, and these assertions of belonging may simultaneously undermine the neat divisions between citizen and foreigner and between South Asia and the Gulf that dominate both my informants’ and other representations of the UAE.

First, while naturalization is officially impossible for Indians, and Indian businesspeople were adamant that they themselves were not Emirati, many people told me that there do exist Indians who have become Emiratis. These “Indian Emiratis” (if that is what they would be called) were described as community leaders who have contacts with the sheikh, or have completely adopted Gulf dress, culture, language, and religion. The existence of such Indians would come up in conversation without my encouragement, usually right after I asked them whether they felt limited by their own lack of citizenship. I would be told something like, “but of course there are Indians who have become citizens.” “Where are they? Do you know anyone personally that I could speak to?” I would ask. They would say, “Well, not personally, but they are there.”

I never did find this mythical Indian Emirati (and a little research among expatriates who are familiar with the naturalization process suggests that there are a small handful), but this specter played a very important role in asserting belonging while simultaneously disavowing it. With this claim, Indian elites established that the possibility of naturalization for them was not closed, but rather that their nonbelonging was voluntary. Thus, it was not just the state but also expatriate elites who were producing distinct divisions between Emirati and expatriate national identities. In addition, the mythical figure of the Indian Emirati citizen provided an opening for us to speak about problems with the UAE government, problems which, just earlier in the same conversations, had been vigorously denied. My informants expressed their desire to remain purely Indian in terms of citizenship through a sense of nationalistic pride, through their satisfaction with the economic status they enjoyed in the Emirates, and through an insistence that Emirati citizenship was not such a wonderful thing at the end of the day: “Why would I want to be a citizen? I can't vote…” The question of whether one could be a citizen was opened by my informants in order to establish their role as partners with the state in producing their status as elite foreigners in Dubai—they chose to stay outside the realm of national identity and solely within that of the economy. This was a way of displaying political power and engagement with the processes of governance while disavowing more formal modes of belonging to the Gulf.

Another way of displaying power in the Gulf is through whom you know. And the person you most need to know or at least know about in the Gulf is the head sheikh. One of the things that strikes a visitor to monarchial Middle Eastern countries is how often the image of the leader is publicly displayed. In Dubai, images of Sheikh Mohammed (usually the same three or four images constantly reproduced) are found in magazines, on billboards, on the sides of buildings, on restaurant menus, in shopping malls, and just about everywhere, including, I found, on the walls of the offices of Indian businessmen. Office reception areas in Dubai were decorated with photographs of business owners shaking hands with members of the royal family or attending events where a sheikh was present. This established legitimacy for the business in the eyes of the visitor and also established the expatriate businessman as a member of Dubai society as mandated by the sheikh. I have already argued that the state is seen to be embodied within the sheikh himself—the use of the sheikh as way to establish belonging, status, and legitimacy was prominent throughout conversations I had with Indian businessmen. The body of the sheikh, some sort of connection to the sheikh, and even knowledge of the sheikh's life and activities were all leveraged as forms of social capital in Dubai's business communities. While many people connected themselves to Sheikh Mohammed, the current leader of Dubai, most Indians I spoke to asserted historical belonging to Dubai through his father, Sheikh Rashid.

Sheikh Rashid is considered the “father of Dubai,” a visionary who knew that Dubai would need to develop infrastructure and a nonoil economy in order to become a global city. He was described by my informants as fair, as particularly connected to Indian culture (his teachers, advisors, nannies, and servants were often Indian), as a “democratic” man whose council chamber (majlis) was open to anybody, and as someone who relied upon the business expertise of the Indian community in order to plan Dubai's future—in short, as a man who held their same beliefs in market fundamentalism and neoliberal reform, but with a position of favor accorded to Indians. My informants were insistent about not only establishing connections to the current royal family, but also in narrating their family histories in the UAE alongside the histories of sheikhly lineages. They would tell me about how different things were in their fathers’ time, when the Indian community was more closely associated with locals, and when there were fewer Europeans and East Asians in Dubai. Indian businessmen were nostalgic for a past in which Indian merchants held a more respected and exalted place in society.

In many ways, these narratives of the past and the role of their families in building Dubai resonate with Emirati narratives of national identity as rooted in nomadism, tribalism, and patrilineal descent. Most often the history of the Gulf is retold by nationals as well as expatriates through stories of the “self-made man.” Biographies of the sheikhs portray them as visionary leaders who single-handedly produced profitable, stable countries in a short period of time. This is mirrored in the self-portrayal of Indian businessmen who have amassed their fortunes in the Gulf, supposedly through similar trials and visionary behavior.

While official state histories tend to write out the preoil Indian mercantile presence in Dubai, Indians reinsert themselves in this history through similar narrative devices. For example, in the India Club's fortieth-anniversary brochure, Dubai in the 1950s is described as a backwater in which male Indian merchants struggled to make a living alone, without their families, and without the luxuries they have today. Biography and autobiography, as individualistic narrative forms, were used to assert a masculine entrepreneurial belonging to Dubai's rough and rugged past. And the frontier metaphor in my informants’ retelling of Dubai's past mirrored official state discourses, which valorize a masculinized version of the Gulf past as one of Bedouin struggle and nomadism.

Much of Dubai's rough and rugged past is centered upon smuggling. Because of preliberalization India's restrictions on trade, especially on gold, Dubai flourished as a center from which goods were “reexported” to the subcontinent. Indian merchants repeatedly told me that the reasons for their success in Dubai were not always that savory. This was a history that they were proud of while simultaneously indexing the need for propriety in speaking about it. The space occupied by Indian merchants in Dubai as risk-taking entrepreneurs was used in their narratives as a mode of belonging—it was through a unique relationship between India and Dubai, which they single-handedly created, that Dubai is on the map at all today. The successes of contemporary Dubai in terms of commerce and development had as their basis this open secret, the sharing of which produced a sense of community between older merchants in Dubai and a sense of belonging historically to the emirate.

Thus, upon closer inspection, Indian businessmen's narratives were quite ambivalent. They were committed to the values of a free-market economy in theory, yet they were also invested in maintaining established preferential relationships with their Emirati “hosts.” Through their narratives of sheikhly mandate, belonging, and nostalgia for Dubai's prenational past, Indian businessmen staked claims to their active role in the production of contemporary Dubai, not just as economic players, but as part of a particular masculine, mercantile, and cosmopolitan social and cultural milieu.