On 19 January 1839, the South Arabian port town of Aden was bombarded by ships of the Indian Navy and occupied by soldiers of the East India Company. It was the first British colonial acquisition of the Victorian period.

Just a year before, Capt. S. B. Haines, the man who later commanded the assault on Aden, had met with Sultan Muhsin bin Fadl al-ʿAbdali of Lahj, who claimed the port as part of his territory. At that time, the two men discussed the possibility of leasing the town in order to store coal for the Royal Navy. After lengthy deliberations, the sultan expressed his desire to come to some agreement. Haines later wrote an account of the meeting in a letter to the superintendent of the Indian Navy in which he described Sultan Muhsin's overture: “At last he announced that he would rather have the English, but would they receive him as an ally, and protect his country from being molested; in fact receive him and country on the same terms as the Nabob of Surat.”Footnote ¹

The reference to Surat is intriguing on a number of points. On the one hand, it shows the extent to which the sultan of a small agrarian community in inner Arabia was aware of the longstanding commercial relationship between Yemen and India, linked by the coffee trade and the ports of al-Mukha and Surat. On the other hand, and perhaps of greater importance, the reference to the “Nabob” of Surat as a model for political relations between the ʿAbdali sultanate and the British reveals the extent to which the Indian empire, especially the informal empire of semi-independent states under what was called British paramountcy, became a shared field of communication and interaction.Footnote ²

There is a growing body of work within the field of modern Middle Eastern history that has either explicitly or implicitly suggested the extent to which Britain's Indian experience provided both a political language and an administrative model for its later acquisitions in the Arab world. Early work by both Roger Owen and Robert Tignor, for example, emphasizes the influence of the Indian precedent in the fields of legal, administrative, and economic reform in Egypt after 1882. Lord Cromer's Indian experience weighed heavily on his program of fiscal reform that was directed toward alleviating the condition of the Egyptian peasantry, which he understood synonymously with the peasants of Bengal.Footnote ³ More recently, Toby Dodge has outlined the fierce debates in Mandate Iraq between British administrators schooled in Egypt and those employed by the government of India. As in the case of Cromer's Egypt, one of the primary fields of contestation was rural fiscal administration, based on the competing colonial ethnographies of peasant and tribal society developed in the two countries.Footnote ⁴ James Onley's work on Bahrain has looked beyond elements of Indian influence on the administrative or ethnographic imaginations of particular administrators and argued convincingly that relations with these states were not only governed by Indian precedent but were in fact part of the larger network of semi-independent “native states” of India.Footnote ⁵

Indeed, unencumbered by the legacy of a postwar concept of “area studies” or nationalist constructs of the “Arab world” and “India,” the British Empire employed a far more inclusive definition of their Indian empire. The Interpretation Act of 1889, for example, expressly defined India in terms not only of geographical South Asia but also of “any territories of any Native Prince or Chief under the suzerainty of His Majesty, exercised through the Governor General of India or through any Governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor General of India.”Footnote ⁶ That is, the definition of imperial India was not restricted to the Indian “subcontinent” but was defined in relation to imperial sovereignty. The Persian Gulf shaykhdoms, for example, by signing treaties of protection in the late 19th century with the government of India, as Onley has shown, became part of the larger system of treaties that bound hundreds of semi-independent polities to the Raj.Footnote ⁷ The distinction between India as defined by physical geography and India as defined by political geography is a crucial one, but it is also necessary to recognize that India referred to a particular cultural geography as well.Footnote ⁸

Thomas Metcalf has offered a new way of imagining the British Empire that focuses on India as “a nodal point, from which peoples, ideas, goods, and institutions—everything that enables an empire to exist—radiated outward.”Footnote ⁹ His work intersects with the work of more conventional historians of the British Empire who have begun to write seriously about India not merely as a colonial acquisition but also as a colonizing power in its own right, such that Robert J. Blyth can refer to the British presence in the Persian Gulf and East Africa in the 19th century as the “empire of the Raj.”Footnote ¹⁰ Of most importance, Metcalf does not restrict Indian influence in the creation and maintenance of Britain's overseas empire to the provision of administrative models for governing colonized populations, trained personnel to implement these models, or the legal framework of indirect rule that effectively made parts of the Middle East Indian “native states.” As Tony Ballantyne argues, the British Empire (and for the purposes of this essay I would say “the Indian empire”) “was a structure, a complex system of overlapping and interwoven institutions, organizations, ideologies, and discourses.”Footnote ¹¹ India was thus not only a political and administrative project but also a cultural project characterized by the production, institutionalization, and dissemination of a body of knowledge about India's history, society, and culture, which, in turn, informed the practice of governing colonized populations throughout the entire British Empire.Footnote ¹²

This article argues that Aden and the Aden Protectorate constituted one of the westernmost parts of India, both in terms of their political–legal identities and in terms of their place in the cultural project of imperial India. The port of Aden was the only place in what is now called the Arab world to have been governed as part of the Bombay Presidency and the government of India, a status that it held until it was transferred to the British Colonial Office in 1937. Moreover, the tribal hinterland beyond the port town was gradually incorporated into the Indian residency system as a series of native states, each of which, by the early years of the 20th century, had signed protectorate treaties with the British.

In what follows I trace the specifically Indian history of the Yemeni south and the Aden Protectorate in light of its administrative status as part of the residency system and its cultural production as an effect of the mundane state practices of ethnographic observation, historical inquiry, and state ritual. The article concludes with an analysis of Aden's place in the 1903 Delhi Coronation Durbar that took place under the administration of Lord Curzon. I argue that it was not only the structures of empire that united the Yemeni south and India but also the assumption that both places were characterized by a condition of political and cultural fragmentation that could be united only by British imperial power. This ethnographic assumption was the basis for what Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf have called the “durbar” view of government, by which the British ruled India in consultation with what were considered the “natural” leaders of local society.Footnote ¹³

THE PRODUCTION OF YEMEN'S NATIVE CHIEFS

Britain's Indian empire by 1857 was divided roughly between those areas under direct rule and those areas that were considered, however accurately, as “native states” or often “princely India.” The native states had varied histories. Some were pre-Mughal polities such as the Rajput states in the west, and others, such as the Nizams of Hyderabad, were founded by former Mughal provincial administrators who carved out independent political spheres with the contraction of the empire in the 18th century. The British dealt with these states through a policy of indirect rule that was developed on an ad hoc basis over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, often responding to the financial burden that direct rule would bring or the necessity of securing military alliances with more powerful native states. The relationship between the British and the princely states was embodied in the “treaty of friendship” and, in the case of the larger states, the establishment of a British residency to represent imperial interests. These treaties often entailed the surrender of certain elements of sovereignty in exchange for British protection and support, hence the description of these relationships as a form of indirect rule.Footnote ¹⁴

As in India, colonial rule in the Yemeni south after 1839 was based on the distinction between direct and indirect rule. The port town of Aden was to be ruled directly as a colony through the Aden Residency, and the tribal hinterland beyond was to be subject to the various agreements and treaties that were the substance of indirect rule. Although Aden was originally occupied to provide a coaling station for the Royal Navy, many of the political residents hoped that it would become a prosperous port in its own right. Aden was declared a free port in 1850, and local merchants from the once prosperous port of al-Mukha were encouraged to relocate to Aden. Land in the town was given to wealthy merchants who agreed to build houses and shops in stone. The development of the port as a settlement, commercial center, and military base encouraged the growth of a cosmopolitan population of Europeans, East Africans, Arabs, Jews, and South Asians. An 1864 act organized the town's legal system according to Indian civil and criminal procedure and decreed that the population would be subject to the Indian Penal Code and ultimately to the High Court of Bombay.Footnote ¹⁵

By the 1850s the Aden Residency was staffed primarily by men from the Indian Political Service, and the men appointed as political residents to Aden in the same period had very similar professional backgrounds and fields of experience.Footnote ¹⁶ All of the residents came from the ranks of the Bombay Army and, after 1857, the Bombay branch of the Indian Army. Moreover, all of these men had campaign experience either in the Afghan wars of 1838–39 and 1879–80 or in the annexation and administration of Sind.

The career of James Outram, who served as resident in 1854, is instructive. Outram began in the Bombay infantry, participating in the Afghan war of 1839 and later joining Charles Napier in the Sind campaign, which resulted in the establishment of the British Residency in Hyderabad. In this early period Outram forged a reputation as a keen manager of “tribal politics” in the frontier marches of the Bombay Presidency, especially among the seminomadic Bhil peoples. In a policy later replicated in the Aden Protectorate, Outram attempted to discipline what was considered to be a “predatory” tribe by creating an all-Bhil army unit and encouraging settled agriculture in Bhil communities. Both were considered a success. Later, Outram was given the residency of Baroda, the largest native state in western India, where he was viewed as a stern reformer and champion of administrative discipline.Footnote ¹⁷ The men who followed Outram in the position of resident were well acquainted with the problem of managing tribal or itinerant populations along the western frontiers of imperial India; Afghanistan, Sind, and the Punjab provided, whether explicitly or implicitly, useful analogies for forming policy in the Aden Protectorate.

By the mid-19th century, a bureaucratic apparatus for the administration of the tribal hinterland was slowly developed. The creation of an institutional and legal structure for colonial rule in the port of Aden was mirrored by the concurrent normalization of procedures by which information on the tribes would be collected, evaluated, and deposited within the state archive for later collection and publication as the official body of knowledge on the inhabitants beyond Aden. Similar to practices earlier deployed in India, the Aden government embarked upon a number of projects meant to catalog and record the territory and its population that lay beyond its own fortified refuge in the city. In this period we begin to see the development of what Nicholas Dirks calls the “ethnographic state,” a state that was dependent on the production of knowledge about the colonized and the institutionalization of cultural and political difference as a means of ruling colonized populations.Footnote ¹⁸ The result of this process was that the difference of the tribal hinterland and the port city of Aden was institutionalized—and with it the importance of the native “chief” at the top of the local social and political hierarchy.

In 1858 the Aden government established the Arabic Translation Department, which was responsible for all correspondence with the hinterland and the collection of information on its inhabitants.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1869 the Arabic Guest House was created to host visiting notables from outside of Aden. The translation department and its guesthouse quickly became the locus of the colonial production of knowledge on the tribal hinterland through its monopoly on the translation of correspondence and its elaboration of a hierarchy of tribes linked to Aden through stipends and rituals of rule.Footnote ²⁰ Whereas in the past state largesse had been dispensed to tribal chiefs according to rather arbitrary criteria, entertainment in the guesthouse was offered according to a carefully graded hierarchy that determined not only the allowance given to each chief but also the number of retainers they were allowed to bring with them, reflecting their importance to the colonial state.Footnote ²¹ Administered and staffed by local informants in the early years, the rise of British interpreters in their stead pointed to an increase in the specialized knowledge of colonial administrators and, ironically, the rise of the power of the ʿAbdali sultans as the principal intermediaries between the colonial state and the population beyond Aden.Footnote ²²

Once the institutional apparatus for dealing with tribal correspondence had been established, the Ottoman occupation of the northern highlands and the city of Sanaa in 1872 and the subsequent incorporation of the region into the Ottoman Empire provided the context in which the British formally recognized the tribes as constituting a British sphere of influence. In a letter presented to the Porte in 1873, the British formally requested that the Ottoman government respect the independence of what were thenceforth referred to as the “nine tribes” (often the “nine cantons”) of the Aden hinterland with whom they had established treaty relations. These tribes were the ʿAbdali, ʿAqrabi, ʿAlawi, Amiri, ʿAwlaqi, Fadli, Hawshabi, Subayhi, and Yafiʿi.Footnote ²³ What is important to note at this point is that these were, with only slight variation, the local ruling houses and tribes that had rebelled against the Qasimi dynasty of Zaydi Shiʿi imams of northern Yemen in the 18th century, so the British quite consciously maintained the appearance of the previous political geography beyond the walls of Aden.

The formal recognition of the “nine tribes” as political and social entities necessitated greater knowledge of the land beyond Aden, and thereafter the British initiated several projects to map the area. Again with reference to the Indian frontier experience, a group of cavalry seconded from the Sind Horse was sent to the port in 1868 and renamed the Aden Troop. Encouraged as a means of monitoring frontier lands, the Aden Troop also became an essential tool in the production of geographic knowledge of the hinterland. During the 1870s the Aden Troop conducted a number of forays outside Aden, collecting topographical details on much of the neighboring territory.Footnote ²⁴ A formal survey of the area was conducted in 1891–92 by an Indian surveyor, Colonel R. A. Wahab, who had earlier been employed in the demarcation of the Russo-Afghan frontier. He was later named the chief British commissioner for the more expansive and politically charged project of delimiting the protectorate's northern boundary with the Ottomans. The joint Anglo-Ottoman Boundary Commission of 1902–5 took the British further into the area of the nine tribes than they had been to date, providing an opportunity to collect information on hinterland inhabitants and to fix them permanently in geographic space through the state cartographic project.

The institutionalized accumulation of knowledge on the tribal hinterland was then codified in authoritative texts. In 1886 Hunter and Sealey's statistical and descriptive work, An Account of the Arab Tribes in the Vicinity of Aden, was published and quickly became the point of reference for those writing about or formulating policy for the Aden hinterland.Footnote ²⁵ During the period of the Anglo-Ottoman Boundary Commission, a new series of memoranda were written on the nine tribes, which, although they included far more detail than previous reports, generally reproduced the account of Hunter and Sealey (which was updated and reissued in 1909).Footnote ²⁶ A tribe as it was constituted through the field of state ethnography was less a community organized according to common patrilineal descent than a complex of ruling houses, the men they ruled, and the geographical space they inhabited.

The nine tribes named in the 1873 memorandum were, in fact, a group of notable families who shared a history of opposition to the northern Zaydi imamate in the 18th century. These families ruled over populations of martial tribesmen, left anonymous in British accounts, characterized only by their proclivity for warfare or brigandage. Indeed, Aden's colonial administrators brought with them from India an ethnographic language of “martial” and “criminal” races that was intuitively applied to the Aden hinterland. The Yafiʿi and ʿAwlaqi tribes of the eastern mountains, for example, were thought to be natural warriors, often compared to the Pathans of the North-West Frontier Province or the Gurkhas of Nepal.Footnote ²⁷ In a similar vein, the Sabayha, who resided in the plains and valleys along the Red Sea coast, were constructed as natural criminals and brigands in colonial ethnographic thought, due primarily to the absence of both settled agriculture and hereditary leadership among them.

The institutionalization of the “nine tribes” as a social, political, and historical construct ensured that when the British signed treaties of protection with them in the period between 1888 and 1904, they assumed that they had done so with the natural leaders of the Yemeni south.Footnote ²⁸ What is perhaps most surprising about the institution of the protectorate system at the turn of the century, however, is that the ʿAbdali sultanate of Lahj was absent from the list of signatories who collectively represented the “nine tribes” and the protectorate chiefs. Its exclusion was no accident; it was an expression of the extent to which the ʿAbdali sultans were tied to the colonial presence of the British in Aden and their continued political and economic hegemony in the region. From the occupation of Aden and the signing of the first treaty with the British in 1839, the ʿAbdali sultans had been able to capitalize on their proximity to Aden and their own claims to preeminence in the hinterland in order to effect a near hegemonic position within the protectorate system—economically, politically, and even conceptually. It was they who benefited most from the economic and political realignment of the hinterland, and no treaty was necessary to bind them to the British. However, their position was rationalized not only in terms of their service to the colonial state and their relatively long history of friendly relations with the British but also in terms of an older history of rebellion, independence, and state formation that justified their importance past and present.

A NATIVE PRINCE OF ADEN

Why the ʿAbdali sultans of Lahj were recognized as the preeminent native chiefs within the nine tribes had much to do with the understanding of the political history of the Yemeni south in the 18th century on the part of Aden's first administrators. Not long after the occupation of Aden, Haines attempted to write a basic historical narrative of the Aden hinterland, which centered on the ʿAbdali sultanate of Lahj. He included his narrative in an 1845 memo, to which he affixed the title “History of the Present Family of Lahej.” On the basis of the ruling family's own dynastic chronicle, or dāʾira, Haines recreated the history of the ʿAbdali dynasty. His introduction to this text is worth quoting in full:

This introduction is important for the colonial historiography of Lahj for two reasons. First, the description of the ʿAbdali dāʾira as the “Doomsday Book” of Lahj suggests a similarity between the dynasty and Britain's own medieval past—and therefore places the ʿAbdalis on a course of linear civilizational development that ultimately results in some form of the modern state. Second, and more important to the overall production of the protectorate order within the framework of the Indian native states, is the reference to the date 1141 a.h. (1728), with which the dāʾira began. As Haines wrote, 1728 marked the “commencement” of the dynasty after declaring its independence from the Qasimi state in the Yemeni north that had conquered much of the south in the 17th century. The pivotal events of the year 1728 came to frame the basic British understanding of the polities of the Yemeni south and their inclusion in the construct of the “nine tribes.”

Haines began his historical summary with an account of the various dynasties that had ruled Yemen, giving special attention to the Zaydi imamate based in the Yemeni highlands and the Qasimi dynasty of imams that had ruled from the 16th century. The sources for this history were the high literary chronicles of the period, the narrative of which he largely followed. Beginning with the date 1728, however, the narrative shifts to the history of the ʿAbdali family, and the sources shift to the dāʾira. According to Haines's reading of the document, it was in this year that Sultan Fadl bin ʿAli al-ʿAbdali, in alliance with the Yafiʿi tribe, threw off the suzerainty of the Zaydi imamate and established an independent polity based in Lahj and Aden.Footnote ³⁰ The narrative thereafter becomes an account of a localized movement of liberation from the rule of the northern Zaydi imamate in concert with the polities that would later be singled out as the “nine tribes.” By the beginning of the 19th century, Haines's narrative ceases to record that of the ruling dynasty of Lahj, becoming the history of the British occupation of Aden instead.

The importance of this narrative for the British should not be underestimated, not so much because it reflected a historical reality but because it justified the British occupation and its institutionalization of what was believed to be a meaningful social and political order.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, the Qasimi withdrawal from the south was only the symptom of a larger process of state contraction that increasingly confined the dynasty to the Yemeni highlands. As for the ʿAbdali dynasty, its opposition to the Qasimi state was dwarfed by the more significant uprising of the Yafiʿi tribe in the mountains to the east; it was a relatively minor participant in the events beginning in 1728.Footnote ³²

For British purposes, however, the narrative suggested a sense of historical continuity in colonial rule by asserting that the “nine tribes” on which the protectorate order was based were a historically meaningful category. It also offered a defense of what was to become ʿAbdali hegemony within this construct (despite the minor ʿAbdali role in the opposition). Reproduced in Hunter and Sealey's Account of the Arab Tribes as well as later official handbooks, the narrative became the institutionalized history of Lahj.Footnote ³³ Moreover, this view of the political geography of southern Yemen had the virtue, at least to the British political residents, of legitimizing their own role as the successors of ʿAbdali dominance in the region—they were merely replacing Lahj as suzerain. Upholding the “nine tribes” as a political unit that derived its importance from history and maintained it in the protectorate order attests to the British self-image as caretakers of this past and preservers of it for the future.

THE DURBAR MODEL AND THE INDIANIZATION OF THE PROTECTORATE

If the ʿAbdali dynasty of Lahj was defined as the paramount “native chief” in the Yemeni south through its status as preeminent successor state to the Zaydi imamate in the south and its subsequent position in British political and economic strategy, its incorporation into the wider Indian empire was accomplished through its placement in a symbolic and ritual order that was decidedly imperial rather than local. The context for this elevation of the role of the ʿAbdali sultanate from local British ally to participant in the imperial arena was the ostensible transformation of British policy in India in the period after the 1857 revolt. In an attempt to address the causes of the revolt, Queen Victoria addressed India in a proclamation that ended the rule of the East India Company and transferred sovereignty to the British Crown. Moreover, the proclamation promised “to respect the Rights, Dignity, and Honor of Native Princes as Our own” while confirming a future policy of noninterference in local “custom” in the rest of India.Footnote ³⁴ In the remainder of this article, I analyze the role of the Aden Protectorate chiefs, and especially the ʿAbdali sultans, in this post-1857 order, with specific reference to their participation in the Delhi Coronation Durbar of 1903.

The postrevolt policy of noninterference in local custom and the increased interest in maintaining certain forms of what could be called traditional authority encouraged the elaboration of hierarchies of importance to the colonial state and related schedules of honorifics by which native princes could be recognized. In 1861 a knighthood specific to the Indian empire (the Order of the Star of India) and comprising three classes was created to honor service to the colonial state on the part of both native princes and British civilian and military officers. In 1865 the alqābnāma register was compiled, listing all of the native princes, their specific forms of address, and their associated privileges from the colonial state. In addition, by 1867 the use of gun salutes as a mark of honor had been organized according to the hierarchy established in the alqābnāma.Footnote ³⁵ This was the elaboration of what Metcalf and Metcalf have called the “durbar” form of government. The term darbār (“durbar” in British usage) was taken from Indo-Persian political practice, roughly translated as “royal court” or “royal audience.”Footnote ³⁶ The durbar model of colonial governance was based on the assumption that India comprised separate and autonomous communities of castes, tribes, and religious communities that could be ruled only by their natural leaders through a process of consultation with the imperial state.Footnote ³⁷ It was a vision of Indian political society, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, based in the notion of immutable difference that was inherently incapable of democratic government.Footnote ³⁸

In the Aden Protectorate, the Arabic Guest House and Arabic Translation Department were responsible for the creation of a tribal hierarchy that, by the early 20th century, also entailed a rigid system of honors and protocol. Tribes were divided into four classes, which corresponded to their size, wealth, and general importance to British policy. Each class determined the number of gun salutes a chief received, the type of reception he was given upon his arrival in Aden, his access to the office of the political resident, the number of retainers he was allowed to bring on official visits, and his ability to recommend followers for individual access to government officials and state hospitality at the guesthouse. The ʿAbdali, Fadli, and Quʿayti sultans, as well as the rarely seen sultan of Qishn and Socotra, were ranked in Class I and received the commensurate benefits.Footnote ³⁹ The most sought after of these benefits was the personal meeting with the political resident, which was itself governed by strict protocol, especially regarding seating arrangement, as a means of depicting spatialized relationships of dominance and subordination.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although official visits by Class I native chiefs occurred generally no more than once per year, visits by those recommended by these chiefs were more frequent.Footnote ⁴¹ Lacking public spectacle, the lesser meetings were nonetheless important enactments of state ritual and, for the practical purposes of colonial rule, an indispensable source of information on affairs beyond Aden. The basic points of contact between the Aden government, then, were often informal visits at which the British distributed payments to influential tribesmen through an official “darbar fund,” often euphemistically referred to as “gifts.” As Bernard Cohn has argued in the Indian context, the idiom of durbar in British usage came to connote a ritualized meeting between British officials and local “notables” at which honors, titles, and presents were granted or exchanged. What had been previously a ritual act of incorporation between the royal person of the Mughal emperor and his feudatories, Cohn argues, was transformed by the British into a contractual agreement based on an economic exchange.Footnote ⁴²

That the durbar in Aden came to connote not only individual meetings between colonial officers and native chiefs but also the fund from which largesse was distributed indicates that this understanding was maintained in Arabia as well.Footnote ⁴³ Harold Jacob, one of Aden's more experienced administrators, noted as much in his description of a typical meeting with a local tribal shaykh:

It is a testament to the power of the Raj as a normative model of colonial governance that by the time the idiom of durbar was transplanted to South Arabia, the Mughal state ritual of royal incorporation had already been transformed into a ritual enactment of a contract relationship that, at least to the British, centered in part on an economic exchange. As far as I have been able to ascertain, no British official suggested the potential difficulties of applying a ritual idiom rooted in the Indo-Persian state practices of the Mughals to the Yemeni south—nor did anyone recognize that these rituals had no basis in a South Arabian past, whether real or imagined. In the Aden Protectorate the durbar was reinvented by the Aden Residency and its administrators, certainly in effect if not by intent, as a uniquely colonial creation, defined by its relationship to British power. Through the institution of durbar in the Aden Protectorate, a group of tribal polities defined by their history of resistance to the Zaydi imamate in the 18th century was recontextualized in a modern history of empire whose core lay far beyond the boundaries of Arabia. If this was only suggested by the localized idiom of durbar, it was made evident by the invitation of the native chiefs of the protectorate to the Coronation Durbar in Delhi in 1903.

The purpose of the durbar as envisioned by the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, was to commemorate the coronation of King Edward VII and to simultaneously provide a performative instance of the durbar model of government. For Curzon, the 1857 revolt was long past. He was less concerned with rewarding those Indian princes who had remained loyal than with institutionalizing in state ritual the idea of an associational, as opposed to a representative, government. In the face of the rising middle-class nationalism of the Indian National Congress, formed in 1885, the durbar model of government offered the continued paternalism of British rule in consultation with India's native aristocracy, the native princes. In this sense, Curzon's durbar was the public announcement and demonstration of a new alliance against the agitation of a nascent nationalist movement and the introduction of the native princes to an Indian and British audience as a political force, if ultimately a conservative one, for measured reform.

The durbar was by necessity based on the imagination of a diverse though coherent society of native princes, organized at the level of something called “India.” The assumption that Indian society was composed of numerous castes, tribes, and religious sects was essential to Curzon's political vision, which understood the British monarchy and the framework of empire as the only unifying forces in an otherwise fragmented society. These sentiments were made clear in a speech delivered to the legislative council in Simla in late 1902 in which Curzon defended the institution of durbar as an authentically “Eastern” practice that unified subject and sovereign in a shared expression of solemnity. Moreover, he argued, it served the British Empire and his own project for a unified princely India, noting that “the life and vigour of a nation are summed up before the world in the person of its sovereign”:

Long after the Mughal empire had effectively been replaced by the British Empire and its sovereign, Curzon was attempting to institute a new form of imperial culture in which India's native aristocracy were not just subjects but participants in their own governance, even if in a subordinate position.

Around 100 native princes accepted invitations to the 1903 durbar. Invitees came not only from India “proper” but also from the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Burma. Invitations were also sent to the courts of Persia, Siam, and Japan, in addition to representatives from South Africa and Australia. Three of Aden's “native chiefs” were invited to the Delhi Coronation Durbar: the sultan of Lahj, Ahmad bin Fadl al-ʿAbdali; Sultan ʿAwad bin ʿUmar al-Quʿayti, of Shihr and Mukalla in the eastern Hadramawt region; and Amir Shayif bin Sayf of Daliʿ. All three accepted the invitation, and the Aden government planned a simultaneous celebration in the port city.

The specifically South Arabian political context led to their invitation. The Anglo-Ottoman Boundary Commission had begun its work in 1902, and the protectorate signatories along the proposed border were the most vulnerable to the highly contested process of boundary delimitation. In particular, the authority of the amir of Daliʿ, Shayif bin Sayf, was continually questioned by the Ottoman commission, and the mere presence of Ottoman soldiers along the proposed border created a political space in which many of the amir's erstwhile subjects or clients pushed for autonomy or even outright independence from the emirate. In light of the ongoing dispute with the Ottoman government and the perceived fragility of Shayif bin Sayf's position, the British decided that the amir's attendance at the durbar would bolster his standing with his own people and send a message to the Ottoman government that he was now an established member of Britain's empire.Footnote ⁴⁶

For the sultans of Lahj and Shihr and Mukalla, the case was somewhat different. Sultan ʿAwad bin ʿUmar's invitation was part of a general effort to secure good relations with the easternmost part of the Yemeni south, in which British influence was still nominal; the Quʿayti sultan, although having signed a treaty of friendship in 1888, was not yet considered part of the Aden Protectorate. As for Sultan Ahmad bin Fadl al-ʿAbdali, he was invited in recognition of his preeminent place in the colonial tribal order and his history of service to the colonial state.

Once Aden's native chiefs arrived in Delhi, they were removed from the regional hierarchy of the protectorate and resituated within an imperial hierarchy that governed—and indeed constituted—the entire event. In Aden, the ʿAbdali sultan sat at the head of the protectorate order, not only in terms of wealth and political power but also in terms of his place in the symbolic order. As a Class I chief, he received a salute of nine guns upon entry into the port of Aden. Only Sultan ʿAwad bin ʿUmar received a salute of twelve guns, and this was a personal rather than a dynastic salute, which ceased at his death. In India, however, Sultan Ahmad bin Fadl and his fellow chiefs were of much less importance and were placed in a much lower position in an empire-wide ranking. Curzon had decided early on to avoid any possible clash over precedence amongst India's native princes; princes were to be organized according to the presidency or region with which they were associated according to local rules of precedence.Footnote ⁴⁷ The chiefs of the Aden Protectorate were grouped with the other native states associated with the Bombay Presidency. Of the over 300 princes recognized by the British in that administrative unit (many of whom were merely large landlords), twenty (including those from Aden) attended the durbar. At the top of the Bombay hierarchy were states such as Kolhapur, Cutch, and Khairpur, the rulers of which enjoyed salutes of either seventeen or fifteen guns. The Aden chiefs with salutes of nine guns (excluding the Quʿayti sultan's personal salute of twelve) sat in the middle of the Bombay Presidency's hierarchy in terms of their perceived political importance, although no chiefs had salutes of fewer than nine guns.Footnote ⁴⁸ In comparison with the princes of major states beyond Bombay, such as Hyderabad, Mysore, and Baroda, those from Aden were even more marginal.

The camps of the viceroy's guests, all of which were situated around Curzon's main camp, were laid out according to the same hierarchies in a spatial enactment of the durbar model of government. Each guest was allotted a plot of land the size of which was relative to the number of salutes to which they were entitled. The number of guests and retainers each chief was allowed to invite was also dependent on their official status, so that the Nizam of Hyderabad, with a salute of twenty-one guns, brought 500 guests, and the sultan of Lahj, with nine, brought 200 people. The camps, then, reinforced the colonial conceit of aristocratic India—endlessly diverse, hierarchically organized, and united by the framework of British power. This sentiment was echoed by the official historian of the durbar, who described the camps as a microcosm of empire, noting that they represented “peoples of every race and religion, more diverse than those of Europe itself.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The guests from the Aden Protectorate, encamped with the other Bombay chiefs some miles south of the viceroy's camp, prompted the remark that their presence “helped to recall the fact that the political boundaries of the Indian Empire extend across the seas beyond the confines of the great peninsula.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In the durbar ceremony that followed, two moments stand out as significant statements of the Raj's policy toward its native princes. The first was Curzon's address, which reiterated the necessity of imperial paternalism, for it was only Great Britain that could master India's inherently fragmented nature. In a closing statement both reassuring and threatening, he made clear that there was no future without the Raj, arguing that “under no other conditions can this future be realized than the unchallenged supremacy of the paramount power, and under no other controlling authority is this capable of being maintained, than that of the British Crown.”Footnote ⁵¹ The second significant moment was when the native princes ascended the dais and personally greeted and congratulated the viceroy and his guests. This act of obeisance ultimately demonstrated that the durbar form of government allowed the participation of India's native aristocracy only insofar as it was subordinate to the king-emperor and his viceroy.

The protectorate chiefs were among those who offered their congratulations to their hosts. The official history notes that Sultan Ahmad bin Fadl of Lahj and Amir Shayif bin Sayf of Daliʿ approached the dais and offered brief words of congratulations to the viceroy. Sultan ʿAwad bin ʿUmar of Shihr and Mukalla took the opportunity to recite a lengthy ode extolling the virtues of newly crowned King Edward and the British Empire.Footnote ⁵² Following the official ceremony, there were nine more days of related ceremonies and exhibitions, one of which featured Sultan Ahmad bin Fadl. In the audience chamber of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, nearly 2,000 spectators arrived to observe the official procession of the Indian orders (the Star of India and the Indian Empire), of which Curzon was the grand master. As the various ranks passed in pairs through the hall, Sultan Ahmad, newly honored as Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India, was among them. His position at the pinnacle of the Aden Protectorate order had now been recognized at the level of the Indian empire.