Introduction
In July 1944, and as the Second World War continued to ravage parts of Europe and Asia, about 700 delegates from 44 countries made their way to Bretton Woods, a remote town in New Hampshire in the United States, to participate in an international monetary conference. An Allied victory was imminent, and it was time that the world emerging out of two lethal and expensive wars embraced a new international order as a bulwark against future wars.Footnote 1 The nineteenth-century international system revolving around the classical gold standard had collapsed to the point of no return, while lessons offered by a series of economic and political crises during the twentieth century strongly advocated against reviving it along earlier lines. Fundamental to the agenda of the conference, therefore, was evolving a mechanism that reigned in the speculative powers of gold and supplanted it with a single currency as the basis of the post-war international order. Given the dominant role of the United States at the time, this currency could not have been anything but the dollar. Accordingly, the price of gold was set at US$ 35 an ounce and a consensus reached by which only central banks were authorized to trade in the metal at no more than a mere 1 per cent of the official price. The London gold market, the biggest one per cent of its kind, where gold was bought and sold freely by private traders, investors, and speculators up until the onset of the Second World War in 1939, would remain closed. The obstacles to international trade posed by monetary gold would be curtailed further by suspending the direct convertibility of all currencies, except the dollar. What this implied was that for any currency to secure its equivalent value in the metal, it had to be converted first into the US dollar which, in turn, yielded the gold it was worth. The logic behind this restrictive gold policy was to restore a competitive, multilateral, and non-discriminatory system of trade underwritten by stable and mutually convertible currencies, as it had prevailed in the late nineteenth century. What was radically different, however, was that, unlike in the nineteenth century, such a system would not be leveraged by gold, but the dollar, which was as good as gold.Footnote 2 By 1944 the world had officially moved away from gold, condemning it, like Keynes himself, as a barbarous relic and one out of place in the world to come.
Meanwhile in the western Indian Ocean, far away from the conference rooms of Mount Washington Hotel where Anglo-American economists, diplomats, and treasury officials were busy chalking out plans for a post-war world free of the evils of gold, a curious phenomenon was gathering storm. In a prelude to the gold smuggling episodes of the 1950s and 1960s for which the tiny city-state of Dubai was to become infamous, men and a few women travelling from combat zones in the Persian Gulf as well as princely states and Portuguese territory in western India began to carry gold in unusual quantities.Footnote 3 Much of this gold reached Bombay, which was quickly gaining ground as a regional market for the metal alongside a host of other commodities and luxury goods. Carried out in stark violation of wartime controls imposed by the British government on the movement of currency, gold, and silver, this exceptional traffic caught the eye of colonial officials no sooner than it had begun. Instances of passengers on voyages carrying gold sovereigns and silver rupees in tin trunks, prayer mats, and bird cages have been documented in the memoirs of customs officers and others who were witnesses to such activities at the port of Bombay.Footnote 4 However, except for a few individuals intercepted by customs, very little could be done to prevent this traffic in gold. Consequently, gold smuggling—although this particular traffic was yet to be identified as such in the popular imagination—continued well into the post-colonial period, magnified many times over from the early years. This had important repercussions not just for India and the Persian Gulf but also for the international monetary system. It shaped the fate of the western Indian Ocean in remarkable ways, creating an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states. The focus of this article is the evolution of this trans-regional economy of gold smuggling and the ways in which Bombay in India and Dubai in the Persian Gulf became its principal constituencies and key drivers in the immediate post-war period.Footnote 5
Creating an analytic space for the study of gold smuggling
Gold smuggling began to garner the attention of the press and the public in the 1950s as a newly independent India, with clearly marked territorial and political borders, set itself the task of defining itself economically.Footnote 6 With leaders like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru taking the logic of Bretton Woods to its idealistic extreme, India found itself in the grip of an economic nationalism riveted on new laws geared towards import substitution, currency controls, and, more importantly, the ban on private trading in gold. Legislation was complemented by even greater efforts on the part of various state agencies, including customs, police, and the navy, to enforce trade controls and regulations. Reports of surveillance and interception of dhows carrying gold in the territorial waters of the Arabian Sea, alongside sketches and descriptions of its modes of transfer at various points in the circuit that linked land and sea, were carried by the press on an almost everyday basis. The Times of India, an English daily published out of Bombay, was perhaps the most notable in this regard. Not only did these stories in the press evoke popular images of smuggling as revolving primarily around the dhow, but they were also instrumental in creating the figure of the smuggler whose activities often bypassed the illegal transfer of goods into other, more dangerous kinds of criminal activity. Long editorial columns too contributed to the discourse by portraying smuggling as an act of economic and political sabotage as well as moral degeneracy, all of which threatened the interests of the nation in the long run. In the same stroke, these discourses also opened up space for a critique of the post-colonial state as having done more to facilitate, rather than prevent, smuggling through its flawed economic policies, corrupt bureaucratic machinery, and general political lethargy.Footnote 7
Smuggling sparked moral outrage of yet another kind. In an analogy drawn with Chicago-style gangsters, journalists observed that it was the Persian Gulf and its rulers that were the fundamental cause of the problem.Footnote 8 Even the Indians themselves, whose cultural appetite for gold, despite all modern political aspirations, remained primitive as ever, seemed less deserving of reproach than these unscrupulous sheikhs living off the gains of gold smuggling in the desert.Footnote 9 What was particularly striking in some of these accounts was the sense of marvel at the rise of Dubai. A sleepy Persian Gulf town throughout most of the early twentieth century, and one the world had hardly heard of, Dubai was transforming into a modern port with deep-water berths for container traffic in the 1950s. Such transformation could not have been achieved except on the back of ‘cuts’ earned from smuggling gold into India.Footnote 10 Other city-states like Kuwait too pulled off many deals, their merchants often travelling to Bombay for the purpose of physically transferring consignments of gold to their Indian business partners in the city. However, unlike in Dubai where the state's laissez-faire policy of trade recognized gold smuggling as a constitutive feature of the economy and pushed aggressively for its expansion, in Kuwait by the late 1960s it had switched to oil, the black gold of the international economy. Since oil itself was a legitimate commodity traded by states and was needed to fuel industrial development within national economies, criticism of Kuwait took on a different note. Highlighting the social and economic excesses brought in by oil, critics deemed the city-state a ‘crisis of sheer opulence’.Footnote 11 Dubai, meanwhile, moved on to become, and rightfully so, the singular face of gold smuggling for the rest of the twentieth century.
While drawing heavily on insights offered by these accounts, including the part played by the dhow, the smuggler, and the post-colonial Indian state's economic policies, this article challenges the fundamental notion of smuggling at work in such accounts. Smuggling in the western Indian Ocean has often been seen in geographical isolation and in tandem with the territorial concepts of economy, society, and law embodied by the Indian state. To be more precise, it is the direction of illegal flows from Dubai to Bombay that constitute the focus, but never the two in terms of their complex commercial synergy with each other. Viewed primarily from Bombay, a post-colonial city lodged within the territorial, economic, and legal space defined as India, our understanding of the phenomenon has remained partial, episodic, and as revolving predominantly around acts of illegal transfer by smugglers and their accomplices at the borders. To that end the debate on smuggling has remained within the discursive and analytic space limited by the smuggler on the one side and the state on the other. Moving away from this approach, the article offers a perspective on smuggling that not only highlights its colonial dimensions, especially at the height of war in the Persian Gulf, but also its shifting geographical contours through the transition to a post-colonial milieu of nation-states. It also highlights how international monetary politics in the immediate post-war period contributed to gold smuggling in ways that defined it as a trans-regional economy operating in the interstices of a retreating empire and an emerging nation-state in India. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai, I argue, become the key to unlocking its many dimensions, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Dubai was able to capitalize on the arbitrage possibilities offered by import regulations in India, tap into the global networks of trade and finance, and chart its own course of development as a modern urban space.
Gold smuggling has been a relatively understudied theme in the history of post-colonial India, and plausibly, I contend, for want of an analytic framework essential to exploring its many nuances.Footnote 12 Even if one were to look at it in terms of the links between Dubai and Bombay, smuggling only serves as a footnote to labour migration in the context of oil—a phenomenon that has been primarily engaged with in terms of connections between India and the Persian Gulf, rather than between the two cities. A focus on international migration under the aegis of fully formed nation-states left little room for discussion of how port-cities like Bombay and Dubai remained integral to the flows of men, women, commodities, gold, and remittances between these different national territories.Footnote 13 Where port cities in the western Indian Ocean have formed the object of scholarly study, they have predominantly been in the context of empire and its commercial and political footprints across this vast oceanic region.Footnote 14 If the labour migrant dominates the post-colonial narrative, it is the Indian Ocean merchant who was the key player in the colonial period.Footnote 15 The transition in categories at the centre of the narrative on India's ties with the Persian Gulf makes perfect sense when we take both partition and economic nationalism to mean literally what they imply. If, as empirical research demonstrates, the transition was far from complete and the Indian Ocean merchant survived the pressure of import restrictions and political fetters to emerge as a powerful player in times of globalization, how do we account for these? A study of gold smuggling, as is undertaken here, attempts to do precisely this. In other words, it seeks to fill the huge temporal and structural gap that exists in our understanding of the subcontinent's ties with the Persian Gulf, while illustrating how the two distinct regimes of mobility—colonial and post-colonial—overlapped to create social connections that were thicker than labour migration alone could have effected.
What has enabled an intervention along the lines attempted here has been the return of the city as part of the conceptual ensemble of globalization, on the one hand, and a more dynamic approach towards Indian trading diasporas in the Persian Gulf in the heyday of labour migration, on the other.Footnote 16 With globalization shifting the focus away from cities as bounded territory to cities as networks hinged on the flows of labour, commodities, capital, and signs, so did the analytic space required to study the relations between Bombay and Dubai evolve. Likewise, the revival of the Indian Ocean in attempts to explain the striking cultural and linguistic similarities between the subcontinent and the Persian Gulf in contemporary times offers grounds to reflect on how these similarities have come to be constitutive features of such cities.Footnote 17 Scholars like Neha Vohra trace this to deliberate state policy in Dubai which gave Indian merchants commercial monopolies and economic freedom in ways that set them apart from other ethnicities as well as their compatriots who were workers and professionals. Gold smuggling too becomes an integral part of this commercial and political strategy, or what she calls ‘multiple logics of governance’.Footnote 18 While drawing on this state-merchant partnership, which is unique in many ways to the city in the latter half of the twentieth century, this article zooms in and out of both Dubai and Bombay to illuminate how smuggling itself was tempered by larger developments not just in the subcontinent, but in the international monetary order as well. It adds historical layers and nuances to both Dubai's and Bombay's contemporary Indian Ocean-ness by illustrating how it was mutually constituted through a trans-regional economy of gold smuggling in the twentieth century.
Partition, refugee migration, and Indian mercantile capital in exile: a view from Dubai
The experience of partition in the Persian Gulf and the ways in which it fed into an economic phenomenon as remarkable as smuggling is a tale yet to be told. The dominant narratives of violence and communal rioting accompanying territorial division, displacement, and refugee migration leave little room for stories of commercial success, especially outside the borders of the newly formed post-colonial states of India and Pakistan. Shift the lenses from Punjab, where much of the violence took place, to Sind and a story emerges that is unfamiliar to most of us. Unlike Punjab and Bengal, which were divided between the two newly created states, Sind went over entirely to Pakistan. As a consequence, it responded in radically different ways to this massive event. In fact, a year into partition, the majority of Sindhi Hindus had relocated to Bombay from where they migrated soon afterwards to Dubai and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the Persian Gulf. This section revolves around one Sindhi merchant whose personal narrative outlines the shifting milieu of gold smuggling in the western Indian Ocean through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It draws together the receding commercial world of pearl merchants in the Persian Gulf and that of partition and refugee migration in India. Read alongside developments in the international economy and the shifts in monetary politics underwriting it (which is the focus of the next section), his narrative offers us a comprehensive picture of gold smuggling—a picture far more dynamic than a post-colonial perspective allows for.
Maghanmal Jethanand Pancholia arrived in Sharjah, Dubai's neighbouring emirate, in the year 1942.Footnote 19 Born in Thatta, a village in Sindh, he was 18-years-old when he reached the shores of the Persian Gulf, following in the footsteps of his father and the other elders of the Bhatia community. Affectionately called Magabha, he is the last surviving Thattai Bhatia from a generation of merchants that set out to be part of the early twentieth-century pearl boom in the Persian Gulf.Footnote 20 The times in which Magabha made his debut as a merchant in Sharjah, however, were far from prosperous. The pearl industry was on the verge of collapse as the Great Depression of the 1930s brought the price of pearls in international markets crashing down. To add to the misery of Indian merchants and the Arab crews whose pearling expeditions they had financed, the cultured pearls introduced by the Japanese had flooded, and almost completely taken over, the markets in Europe.Footnote 21 Most merchants suffered huge losses while the poor Arabs who worked as captains and crew on pearling boats, or dhows as they are called, found themselves heavily indebted to these Indians.
As subjects of the British empire and as individuals wielding considerable political influence with colonial officials, Indian merchants and others were entitled to legal protection in the Persian Gulf, including in the recovery of debts. However, with the Second World War on the horizon and the huge economic demands it made on the empire, there was little these officials could do to actually implement such protective measures. Demands made for restitution lodged with the ruling chiefs and sheikhs of port cities like Dubai and Sharjah—who were to pay what their subjects owed these merchants—were met with cries of helplessness in the face of poverty, starvation, and political dissent among the native population.Footnote 22 With the breakout of war, the immediate priority of the colonial authorities was to ensure the unconditional support of the sheikhs and their subjects who tended to lean every now and then towards the Germans.Footnote 23 Additionally, there were oil fields and air routes to defend in the Persian Gulf, the loss of which, either by capture or attack, would have been fatal to the Allied war effort.Footnote 24 The terms of imperial engagement in the Persian Gulf had changed since the capture of Ottoman territories in the Middle East. As the war dragged on, the differences between the various administrative departments that enforced policy decisions became even more pronounced.Footnote 25 Taking up the case of Indian merchants in any explicit manner, when there was so much at stake for an empire at war and with extensive bureaucratic politics behind the scenes, was practically impossible.
Ironically, and through much of this political chaos, admits Magabha, it was Britain's war policy itself that offered some respite from the pearl crisis. Shaken by Germany's growing trade in Iran and apprehensive about the enemy's economic advantage translating into political control in India, imperial bureaucrats began to streamline trade, control exports from Allied ports and colonies, and implement licensing.Footnote 26 Sanctions were imposed on the export of gold, silver, currency (particularly Indian rupees), and petroleum products, and rationing was introduced in the export of essential foodstuffs such as rice, wheat, sugar, and tea. The key to survival for smaller merchants like Magabha and his brothers lay in taking advantage of the quota system and importing sugar, wheat, and rice into Dubai and Sharjah where these goods were in great demand among the Iranians and Arabs who ‘smuggled’ them to southern Persia. The colonial logic behind implementing the quota system was not merely to prevent imperial goods from feeding the enemy's war machine, but also ensuring that the sheikhs’ subjects themselves did not die of starvation or suffer hardships that would leave them resentful of the British. Accordingly, the prices at which these essentials were offered to merchants trading in the Gulf were much lower than their Indian prices, making smuggling from the region, even to India itself, a lucrative activity. This policy, which inadvertently created networks of smugglers operating between various ports in the western Indian Ocean, drew in even the sheikhs of Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al Khaimah, and Qatar as they remained ‘tempted by the high prices obtainable in Persia or Iraq to export surreptitiously a certain quantity of essential foodstuffs to the detriment of the interests of their own subjects’.Footnote 27
When Magabha's ties with Dubai, which he refers to as ‘my adopted homeland’, began in 1944, smuggling had already become the city's economic lifeline and context for social interactions among different ethnic groups sojourning in it. It was during these closing years of war that gold smuggling in particular had begun to draw the attention of colonial officials in India. Germany was losing ground in both Africa and Europe. An immediate offshoot of this was that the gold that had previously made its way into the coffers of the enemy through smuggling in places like Kuwait and Iraq began to flow back to Bombay through different avenues and entry points. Arabs and Indians travelling by steamers as well as air carried gold concealed in their luggage or on their person, as episodes of interception, which were rather few and far between, revealed. The demand for gold in India had surged as confidence in the financial stability of the empire waned, and its wartime debts (or sterling balances as they are euphemistically called) mounted. Besides, an India divided between itself and Pakistan, it was feared, would soon be a reality and gold would be the only real value in the crisis that was entailed by partition.
The reverberations of these larger political developments in the subcontinent and the demand for gold they stimulated, reached as far as Dubai and the Persian Gulf. The reversal in the direction of the flow of gold brought people, including women from the southern coast of Iran, to Dubai where they sold off their gold to Indian merchants like Magabha, as he revealed during one of our conversations. Pearl divers, haulers, and the Bedouin in and around the city approached him, he remembers, with their meagre holdings of jewellery to buy food, cloth, and other essential goods. The gold that they exchanged was melted down by Magabha and his brother with the help of an Arab worker and sent over as tola barsFootnote 28 to merchants in Bombay.Footnote 29 The payments for these were made in rupees, which was then legal tender in the Persian Gulf. The profit margins were as low as 4 annas or 25 paise a tola; nevertheless, the volume of sales was so high that there were months when they made about Rs 500 in profit.
While gold and the rupee brought Dubai and Bombay closer through smuggling networks during the war, they helped terminate all commercial and social links between Karachi and Bombay at the time of partition. As violence began to grip parts of Sind, now part of Pakistan, Hindus began to flee in large numbers to Bombay, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and other parts of India. Gold and currency became the drivers of this refugee migration, as many among those leaving abandoned property, sold off land, and converted whatever liquid capital they could into bills of exchange or money to see them through their days ahead in a new country. Some even managed to bribe Pakistani officials at the docks and carry jewellery on their person as they left Karachi on steamers bound for Bombay.Footnote 30 Magabha's brother Paramanand, who had travelled from Dubai to oversee the family's move to Bombay, began to buy up the gold of fellow Sindhis, arrange different forms of credit, and facilitate their voyages. This did not last beyond 1948 by which time most of the Sindhi Hindus had wound up their businesses in Karachi and begun life anew in India, initially as refugees and then as traders, merchants, and even professionals.
‘Smuggling’ in the shadows of empire
Dubai and ports in the Persian Gulf may have been a natural destination for the Thattai Bhatias and other mercantile groups like them, whether India was part of the British empire or not. Subsequently, when they lost Karachi and could find no economic niche in Bombay—where the post-independence temper was one of public sector industrialization and export-oriented manufacturing—it was not difficult for the young men of the community to leave behind their elders, women, and children in the city and move to Dubai. This, however, was not true for many other Sindhis whose ties with the Persian Gulf began only in the aftermath of partition and the refugee migration to Bombay it triggered.Footnote 31 Nonetheless, what was common to these new migrants and old mercantile communities like the Thattai Bhatias was that both retreated from the territorial spaces of the nation-state to move into the shadows of empire lingering on in the Persian Gulf as well as the Middle East. It was here that smuggling consolidated itself as a trans-regional economy oriented towards India's national economy, on the one hand, and an international economy, on the other.
The British empire may have ceased to be political reality in India, but the economic space it vacated was no vacuum. In fact, the trans-regional economy that influenced the movement of the Sindhis in the early post-partition decades towards Dubai and the Persian Gulf stood on two imperial legs. One was shipping in the western Indian Ocean and the other, international private trading in gold commanded by the City of London. If Sindhi migrants managed to be at the helm of this trans-regional economy, it was by taking advantage of—even shaping—Britain's post-imperial politics in the Persian Gulf. Yet another dimension to this trans-regional economy of gold smuggling—a third leg balancing the other two—was the currency situation or India's rupee politics in the Persian Gulf. Although the subcontinent was divided between India and Pakistan, it was India that inherited the prestige and liabilities of the Raj. The greatest evidence of this was the Indian rupee retaining its status as legal tender and international currency in the Persian Gulf.Footnote 32 The post-colonial state's colonial mantle implied that the frontiers of India's domestic economy and national currency did not coincide with its newly marked territorial borders in the subcontinent. On a much more significant plane, it meant that the rupee continued to be the means, as in colonial times, for buying the gold in Dubai required for smuggling into the country. Partition may have done much to define India's economy along national territorial lines; however, in its enduring colonial avatar, the rupee offset many of the gains implicit in the act, leaving an earlier Indian Ocean economy hanging and a prevailing order of market transactions intact. By 1968, most states in the region had begun to issue their own currencies, but by finding its way into clandestine financial and remittance networks such as the Hawala, the rupee continued to fuel gold smuggling throughout the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 33
Let us return to shipping. By the closing years of the 1940s, the British India Steam Navigation Company (or the BISN) had set to work on its passenger vessels as a priority. Many of these vessels had been refitted for the war either as machines of combat or as naval hospitals, while several others were partially or completely destroyed in bombing. BISN's rigorous efforts at post-war restoration helped reinstate vital steamer services in the Persian Gulf.Footnote 34 Sailing from Bombay and Karachi to Gwadur, Muscat, Dubai, Umm Said, Bahrain, Bushire, Kuwait, Khorramshar, and Basra on the Express Gulf Service, these new passenger ships—the Dara, Dumra, Dwarka, and Daressa—were referred to as the ‘Four Ds’. The Four Ds carried Europeans and Indians—businesspeople and employees of oil companies and other British establishments—as well as those from American firms in first and second class cabins. These passenger-cargo liners also shipped essential foodstuffs, manufactured goods, cloth, and textiles as well as building materials required for company towns and new building sites in the emerging oil economies of the Gulf.
The new vessels may have been significant for new and existing projects in the Persian Gulf, but their operations were far from profitable, given the political and economic conditions of the times. No longer did they have generous mail subsidies from a colonial government in India to cover the cost of a voyage to the Persian Gulf and back. It was imperative to find alternatives to keep the service running in such a situation. Fortunately for BISN, British trade in Dubai, despite competition from manufacturers in America and Japan, was gradually gaining pace.Footnote 35 There were signs that Indian merchants, having lost their commercial bases both in Karachi and Bombay, were only too eager to tap into Dubai's expanding trade. As in times of war, they would somehow use the avenues opened up by Dubai and find their way back into the subcontinent's markets. Opportunities presented themselves for both the merchants and the company in a new pool of potential recruits for labour and smuggling—a pool created out of the displacement and hardships brought on by partition, on the one hand, and the inability of Indian industry to absorb them as employees, on the other. Such men, hoping to merely survive or start afresh in trade, comprised deck passengers to the order of several hundred on a weekly basis, earning the Four D vessels the nickname of ‘working ships’. As reported by Patrick Fyere, the commercial officer at the Political Agency in Dubai, some of these ‘Indians from Bombay or Pakistan who came from Karachi via Gwadur’ would stay on in Dubai as sojourners for a month or more, ‘buying whatever was then cheapest in Dubai and dearest in India and Pakistan’, sometimes radios, candles, or irons. Weekly ships brought as many as 40 such sojourners to Dubai alone, making smuggling, according to him, the lynchpin of the city's economy.Footnote 36
Smuggling, as Fyere observed, included ‘smuggling of gold’ and ‘the smuggling of anything else’. Among the sojourners and travellers who frequented Dubai were the Sonis or goldsmiths from parts of Sindh, Kutch, and present-day Gujarat. As artisans with the skills to craft and set jewellery, they took orders from wealthy Arab households for chains, necklaces, and bangles, the consumer appetite for which had begun to grow with oil in the Gulf. This marked the beginning of their presence in Dubai's Gold Souk in the 1950s alongside the textile traders and provisions merchants of the Bania community in Dubai. Under cover of artisanal manufacturing, they also emerged by virtue of their sheer numbers as a major social constituency specializing in gold smuggling and wholesale trading within a short span of time. In fact, it was the Sonis who provided Magabha and other merchants like him with the incentive to go into the gold import business in the early 1950s. Forming a significant majority of his customers, they approached him for quantities ranging from anywhere between five and 50 grammes in a single order, depending on the nature and scale of the smuggling operations in which they were involved. If some were mere peddlers, carrying one or two wafers of five or 10 grammes alongside goods like radios, irons, etcetera, others formed part of large smuggling syndicates, buying up gold on behalf of different individuals or investors and overseeing, in the capacity of an agent, the logistics of the operations on either side of the Arabian Sea.
Gold, international monetary politics, and the Middle East
If the Sindhis and Sonis reinforced a historical geography of commerce in the Indian Ocean by either spearheading or physically undertaking the illegal transfer of gold, it was the Thattai Bhatias and their access to premium gold markets like London, Kuwait, and Beirut in the early 1950s that set the stage for these activities. The Bretton Woods settlement may have put in place regulations to curtail the free flow and hoarding of gold in the post-war world and pushed powerful British bullion houses trading freely in the metal into a corner.Footnote 37 This, however, was not to say that such developments took the steam out of an international market where gold continued to be traded at a premium even in the immediate post-war years. As much as it was a monetary instrument, the volatility of which created much anxiety for economists, bankers, and statesmen, it was also a commodity that ensured dollar earnings for producer countries, particularly those in Latin America. While in New York and Mexico—markets close to producing countries in Latin America—gold fetched US$ 43 an ounce, the price reached as high as US$ 80 in India. What this signified was an interesting window of opportunity for arbitrage. In other words, between the push of the producer markets and the pull of consumer markets, with huge price differentials separating them, existed a zone where much of the money in the gold trade was made. Occupying this zone were gold centres like Kuwait and Beirut in the Middle East where international trading cartels involving the Swiss, the French, and the Lebanese held sway and set the premium over the official price.Footnote 38 The gold that Sonis and Sindhis carried into Bombay as contraband reached Dubai from these markets via merchants like Magabha.Footnote 39
Centres like Beirut and Kuwait had become active by 1949, with South Africa beginning to sell substantial quantities of its newly mined gold on the international market and Swiss banks absorbing it directly.Footnote 40 Until 1947, the Swiss had bought their gold directly from London's bullion houses and dealers that were authorized to act as principals and brokers for them. With the Bank of England's 1947 ban on transactions in ingots, bars, and coins at prices greater or less than 1 per cent of the official price of US$ 35 an ounce, this business equation changed to Swiss advantage.Footnote 41 There was a twist in the tale, however. While London could be completely bypassed in the transactions of the Swiss with markets in Western Europe, the old bullion capital continued to remain inevitable as far as the Middle East and India were concerned. Even when Swiss banks had captured a sizeable share of Beirut's trade in small bars, ingots, and coins in the years between 1949 and 1954, they found themselves unable to challenge the City's unwavering influence in the East. London had been at the forefront of refining, mining, and assaying gold in specific shapes and sizes since at least the nineteenth century. The tola bars minted by refiners and assayers like Samuel Montagu and Co., and Johnson Matthey greatly appealed to people across India, not unlike the Maria Theresa thaler and its popularity in the Red Sea and parts of East Africa around the same time. The bars had become synonymous with purity and a culturally valued artefact, meaning they were not easily replaced. More significantly, the preference in the Persian Gulf and India was for smaller or tola bars—a state of affairs quite unlike European markets which bought heavy gold bars or bricks generally weighing 10 kilograms, mostly for industrial uses or for speculation by private traders. If the Johnson Matthey mark on a bar was deemed a stamp of authenticity, or the purity of its gold content, its physical dimensions were another attractive feature, especially at a time when smuggling was rampant. Shaped like wafers of chocolate, in individual sizes of ‘an inch and three quarters by one inch’, these tola bars were easier to conceal in multi-pocketed jackets worn by couriers underneath shirts on voyages to Bombay, or to stow away in books, radios, irons, shoes, socks, etcetera.Footnote 42 The Swiss found it difficult to replace the tola bar that the East demanded with their own bars for the longest time. Such a state of affairs created the space required for Johnson Matthey to continue selling their wares and ensuring their presence in the markets of the Middle East.Footnote 43
The influence wielded by the City of London in the international gold trade was difficult to blunt even in times of severe restrictions and controls on free market operations. With the reopening of the London gold market in 1954 and the restoration of over-the-counter sales, under enormous pressure from brokers, bullion houses, and dealers, it regained its position as the premier gold market and international financial centre of the world. Meanwhile, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed considerable instability as American monetary liabilities abroad were rising rapidly in proportion to its gold reserves. Foreign aid, military expenditure, and capital exports had all led to the accumulation of dollar assets by recipient countries, meaning the dollar was valued way above its worth in gold. This, as banks and investors realized, could snowball into a crisis resulting in the dollar's devaluation or suspension of convertibility.Footnote 44 In what was a sign of anxiety, individuals and banks began to abandon the dollar and turn to gold, which both pushed prices up and gave smuggling a new impetus. New players entered the market everywhere to cater to the rising global demand for gold spurred on by the dollar deficit, key among which were international banks.
With banks appearing on the scene and cutting into the market share of cartels, the geography, logistics, and nature of smuggling began to change.Footnote 45 Beirut and Kuwait began to gradually cede territory to Dubai, which emerged as the greatest beneficiary of the many global developments in the sphere of banking, money, and the trade in gold during the 1950s and 1960s. Put differently, Dubai became the new centre of gravity of the international gold trade in Asia and the Middle East. The advantage that accrued to Dubai in the wake of these developments was visibly reflected in its urban development plans and programmes which propelled the city to become the global engine of gold smuggling, on the one hand, and an economy centred on a floating urban population of professionals, bankers, labourers, tourists, and businessmen, on the other. Administrative reforms were introduced and steps taken for the reorganization of customs as well as the establishment of a legal system, police force, and municipality, with British consultants and Arab expatriates overseeing these.Footnote 46 Many new roads were opened, maintenance of existing ones undertaken, and bridges and tunnels built with the help of loans advanced by Qatar and Kuwait. The state administration began to invest in infrastructural developments on a massive scale—this included the dredging of the creek and the building of a modern port and warehousing facilities. By the time, the first shipment of oil left from Dubai's port in 1968, the city was well on track towards its development as a modern city.
Overall efforts at modernization also meant reorganizing the city's prevailing social infrastructure of smuggling along institutional lines. The transfer of gold in Land Rovers and the exercise of packaging them in dhows along the creek may have been an everyday phenomenon carried out in broad daylight by Arabs, Indians, Iranians, and Pakistanis. However, what these outwardly visible, everyday signs of smuggling in Dubai masked were closed syndicates of merchants and oil barons who invested and financed these activities and, interestingly, insurance companies that protected smuggled goods against confiscation.Footnote 47 At the topmost rung was the syndicate comprising ten or more merchants and investors who came together in individual operations that saw the gold arriving in Dubai from Beirut or London shipped out to India. Below the investors were agents based in Dubai and further down the hierarchy, their counterparts in Bombay. The agents on either side commanded a wide network of couriers and associates all across the western Indian Ocean to successfully pull off an operation in Indian territorial waters and further beyond.
As banks stepped in, they began to import gold on a hitherto unprecedented scale, making banking in Dubai almost synonymous with the gold import business and pushing merchants like Magabha out of business. Accordingly, the established practice of sending cash in advance, a week or sometimes a month earlier, for a consignment gave way to new credit-based arrangements. London's bullion houses or Swiss banks shipped huge consignments of the metal as air freight, based on orders made by Dubai's banks, while receiving payments only after the sale to potential investors or syndicates operating out of the city had taken place. Banks in Dubai amounted to more than importers in the scheme: they acted as warehouses, intermediaries, and facilitators in the interests of global capital. Adding a new layer to the already existing operations between merchants and bullion houses, and masquerading as institutions acting in the interests of national economies in the West, they brought a certain added legitimacy to the city's gold business. By the 1970s the shift was complete as mounting tensions within the international economy led to the winding up of the Bretton Woods system, the closing of the gold window by the United States, and eventually its bouncing back to trade driven by the market.
Dhow networks: negotiating history, technology, and politics in the western Indian Ocean
Bombay, as we saw earlier, was instrumental in linking Dubai to the international centres of gold trade by rerouting some of its mercantile networks in the wake of partition and the post-colonial state's policy of economic nationalism towards the city-state. In order for gold smuggling to assume the proportions it did, however, Bombay had to remain vital to these networks in diverse capacities, and not exclusively as the largest market and feeder point for gold into the country. Mercantile networks with access to the metal in Dubai had to tie into logistical networks with the capacity to transfer and distribute it beyond India's maritime borders in the west. Bombay was significant precisely because it provided the interface between these two different, but mutually complementary networks—a remarkable feature of its colonial history that was carried through and expanded exponentially in the post-colonial phase. The most tangible aspect as well as the instrument of this interface was the dhow and the forms of mobility it afforded many players, including the so-called ‘smugglers’ in the game. It was the dhows and their widely dispersed networks that recruited the labour required to transport the gold across the Arabian Sea from the creek in Dubai to coves north and south of Bombay, stretching as far as to Calicut in Malabar.Footnote 48 It was the dhows that blended into the seascape among countless fishing vessels and provided cover to gold concealed in jackets worn by these couriers or sunk in the waters during a chase by customs. How the dhow came to define gold smuggling in the mid-twentieth century requires us to view Bombay not as a bounded place, but in terms of its physical and social contiguity with the Persian Gulf evolving against key historical developments in the western Indian Ocean.
Bombay rose to prominence with the English East India Company shifting its headquarters from a declining Surat in the eighteenth century, thereby driving a migration of merchants, bankers, traders, and shipbuilders towards the port.Footnote 49 As the company's commercial interests gave way to political ones, these migrants from Surat and elsewhere in Gujarat found greater scope for expanding their businesses as well as striking economic and political bargains with the British. English merchants trading on their own account or as servants of the Company needed ships that could sail the length and breadth of the Indian Ocean from Arabia to China. Likewise, the Company needed money to meet its new civil and military obligations. Parsi shipbuilders partnered with British merchants and others to form agency houses that built shops and docks, and served as bankers to the company. The timber required to build ships, the lascars needed to man them, and the trade goods that they were built to carry brought Kathiawar, Konkan, and Malabar into close ties with Bombay, thus widening the sphere of influence of its merchants along the western coast of India.Footnote 50
Political control augmented commercial hegemony in more ways than one. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, Bombay had become a naval base from which colonial officials began to control the port towns of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and as far as Zanzibar in East Africa. The growth of steam shipping turned over a new leaf in the history of Bombay as a colonial city replete with modern docks, wharves, and warehouses, and a speculative economy revolving around European banks and share trading firms. A steamer port built primarily to supply raw cotton to the textile mills of Glasgow, Bombay reflected and responded to the needs of the Scottish textile merchants—a state of affairs that ensured it greater access to market information and entrenched it within ‘geographically circulating coalitions of capital’ in the imperial milieu.Footnote 51 As the two world wars and the transition from coal to oil changed the dynamics of shipping in the twentieth century, Bombay became a bunkering port with facilities for storing fuel while its dockyards provided refit, repair, and maintenance support for ships that were damaged in combat.Footnote 52
Through all of its transitions, Bombay built a unique and multidimensional relationship with the Persian Gulf, creating adequate space for the dhow and its many ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ activities to flourish and take on a life of their own. The advent of the steamship—operated by private British capital and subsidized by colonial governments—had altered existing patterns of trade in the Indian Ocean, reoriented traffic, shipping routes, and nodal points within them, while bringing the age of indigenous merchant princes and ship owners to a close.Footnote 53 The centuries-long trade in Bengal was taken over by the East India Company which coerced and streamlined local economies to produce opium in quantities that made profitable cargoes on European steamers sailing to China.Footnote 54 The dhow may have outlived its time in the Bay of Bengal, but not in the Persian Gulf, where a very different set of challenges awaited the British. Unlike in Bengal and Gujarat where opium and cotton could be grown to supply and consolidate markets linked by steamers, the Persian Gulf was mostly desert with sparsely populated coastlines unfit for agricultural or any other form of production.Footnote 55 Even with large government subsidies meant to cover fuel and other costs of operation, the trading ventures of the BISN steam vessels were far from economic since the market for foreign goods and the availability of cargoes for export in the region did not often meet their tonnage standards.Footnote 56 Added to these were the difficulties of navigation in a maritime region with shallow waters, reefs, and rocky coastlines, unlike Bombay or other ports in western India, which were natural harbours. With little prospect for sustained commercial expansion and Persian claims to territory creating obstacles in the form of customs duties and taxes, there was hardly any incentive on the part of BISN or its shipping agents to invest in infrastructural improvement or construction befitting steamer ports. The paradox of the situation—of steamships without steamer ports—could only result in the inevitability of dhows and the feeder routes they plied in the commercial schemes and sailing schedules of liners servicing the Persian Gulf.Footnote 57
The revival of the dhow must not be interpreted solely as an offshoot of the expansion of the steamer trade. In fact, the crackdown on maritime piracy by the colonial establishment in Bombay and the revival of pearling in the mid-nineteenth century charted an independent trajectory for the dhow as a vehicle of trade, transport, and industry with a reach spanning even beyond the Persian Gulf. The heavy demand for pearls both in India and the world market stimulated traditional shipbuilding on a hitherto unprecedented scale in ports like Gujarat, Malabar, Oman, and Kuwait, which became its primary centres. As goods required for shipbuilding (like timber, coir, and bamboo) moved between these centres, they reinforced an older network of connections forged even before Bombay had become a reality, while bringing new centres and nodes into it.Footnote 58 Pearling opened new avenues for Indian merchant capital in the Persian Gulf and created markets for different commodities besides pearls in Bombay. The involvement of Arab chiefs who owned pearling dhows and Indian merchants who financed the former's expeditions brought it under the political protection of the colonial government in Bombay which closed off this native industry to foreign competition, including from English traders themselves. It was this relationship between Arab political sovereignty and Indian merchant capital, and the ways in which Bombay coordinated it under colonial protection, that constituted the basis of a trans-regional economy: of pearling, to begin with, and gold smuggling, later, in the western Indian Ocean.
The shift from pearls to gold, as we have seen earlier, was far from random. The wide geographical compass of the dhow and the networks of capital, power, and protection it had plugged into over the course of more than half a century had made the dhow a force to reckon with, even when the pearl trade had declined significantly. The onset of the Second World War gave it an added impetus as many of the steamers plying the Persian Gulf route were redirected towards empire's war effort, making the dhow the economic lifeline of ports like Dubai and Sharjah, and the key driver of smuggling in the western Indian Ocean. Part of the story of smuggling was told in an earlier section, but the emphasis there was on staples such as wheat, rice, tea, and sugar which Indian merchants on the verge of bankruptcy imported into the Gulf, and Persian and Arab dhow captains and crews smuggled back into India or the southern coast of Iran. The other parts of the story revolve around activities such as slave trading and arms trafficking, as well as the illegal movement of gold and silver. An intriguing feature of the traffic in gold and silver was that it was almost completely ignored by colonial officials who vigorously monitored dhow captains and their sailing routes for the smuggling of tea, piece goods, and sugar, as well as slave trading and arms trafficking.Footnote 59 Ironically, officials themselves documented in their regular correspondences how regulations and export licensing introduced to prevent the smuggling of gold and silver targeted only huge consignments for shipment by steamers, planes, or post. They also noted how agreements made with the ruling chiefs to allow small amounts ‘to be taken out without any restriction to facilitate normal trade transactions’ kept dhows out of the picture.Footnote 60 Whatever may have been the reason for such indifference on the part of colonial officials, it only helped reinforce the existing loopholes in the regulations for gold smuggling and consolidate further the dhow networks as its arteries in post-colonial times.
Bombay, the highway to Dubai
Bombay lay at the confluence of imperial and international economies and was British India's gateway to the world. Very little changed in independent India's approach except for the fact that its institutional and financial links with international markets were inherited and taken control of by the state, much to the disappointment of private capitalists and merchants. Clearly, for India to develop its national economy along competitive lines and secure a share for its products in the international market it had to pursue an aggressive industrialization and export promotion agenda. Ironic as it may seem, however, all such policies and programmes were immaterial in a situation where the post-colonial state did not fall back on its own imperial networks and connections converging in and fanning out from Bombay. Comparably, a post-imperial Britain and other markets in Europe as well as Asia needed Indian tea, jute, cotton, and other products, as they had for a century or more, in exchange for exports of industrial equipment, iron, steel, and heavy machinery.Footnote 61 That India's future was contingent on Bombay was not lost on leaders like Nehru, who factored the port into the country's first Five-Year Plan as a significant site of investment.Footnote 62 Through the successive Plans, Bombay attracted even greater investment for maintenance and expansion as new warehouses were set up, old hydraulic cranes were replaced by new electric ones, docks were expanded, and deep water berths constructed.Footnote 63
As Bombay expanded to become the premier port, controlling over 70 per cent of the country's exports, the fortunes of monarchies and chiefdoms in the Persian Gulf, where oil continued to be struck throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, began to rise rapidly. The latter, as in colonial times, continued to look towards Bombay not only to channel goods and produce, but to supply the labour required to run their economies, too. Couched in the vocabulary of international exports, Bombay, with its shipping agencies like Gray Mackenzie and Co., subsidiaries of oil companies like British Petroleum, and others like Shaw Wallace and Co., carried over its imperial tradition of recruiting labour for their parent firms as well as clients in the Persian Gulf.Footnote 64 What this implied for many among those who had benefited from a technical or professional education, including engineering, accountancy, medicine, and nursing in different parts of the country, was that Bombay became a springboard for a career in Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates. This regime of migration too spurred its own ingenious schemes and practices of smuggling, particularly as air travel became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Some, including air stewardesses, became mules for smugglers, not unlike the couriers sailing in dhows, concealing gold and foreign currency in handbags, clothes, shoes, or suitcases with false bottoms.Footnote 65 Smuggling by air also included instances where airline staff concealed gold in washrooms, concealed it in flasks and ovens on food trolleys in flight kitchens, and ‘shortlanded’ all kinds of contraband goods in undeclared baggage.Footnote 66 To discuss this trajectory of gold smuggling beyond some of these repetitive patterns may be to detract from the argument of this article and therefore will not be attempted here.
The magnetic power of Bombay drew men with dreams of making money in their tens of thousands from across the length and breadth of the country. They fed smuggling in ways that allowed illegal outfits and networks to mushroom and spread their tentacles far and wide, and way beyond the state's reach. Not everyone who made it to the Persian Gulf, however, was recruited formally by oil companies and their subsidiaries. While the city itself offered temporary respite in the form of employment in textile mills and factories to those left out by these companies, these men emerged, in a rather short span of time, as a big pool of potential recruits for the physical transfer of contraband into Indian territorial waters. Many were immediately roped into dhow networks as couriers who undertook assignments for agents acting on behalf of investors or for ‘smugglers’ themselves. Some of these were one-time couriers, while others undertook many assignments before they eventually made it to the Persian Gulf or gave up altogether.Footnote 67 The alarming frequency of smuggling expeditions undertaken by dhows in the Arabian Sea during the 1950s and 1960s reinforced this trajectory as an alternate route of migration to the Persian Gulf.Footnote 68
Yet again, not everyone who came to Bombay from other parts of the country became a courier who eventually made it to the Persian Gulf. Smuggling certainly involved more than couriers and the transfer of contraband gold by dhows, nor was it about transgressing maritime borders alone. Given the stringent controls on the transfer and possession of gold in the Indian context, there was an inland component to it as well. One need not have been a courier on a dhow or a mule on an aircraft, but a driver on a mission in a vehicle carrying gold through the city. Likewise, connections with Dubai did not always imply migration to the city of dreams in the desert—in other words, finding a job there and sending money home. Ashraf, an informant from Malabar and now running a small-time business in Dubai, recounted how the refrain in the 1960s and 1970s in their villages was, ‘Go to Dubai; if you can't, then go to Bombay. It is the highway to Dubai. If you don't make it to Dubai, then bring Dubai to Bombay.’Footnote 69 When I asked him how one could bring Dubai to Bombay, he laughed before continuing, ‘Well, by becoming Haji Mastan or a lesser version of him.’Footnote 70 The conversation with Ashraf and later with several cab drivers in Bombay and parts of Malabar gestured to two significant yet interrelated aspects of the phenomenon. One was how Dubai had become synonymous with gold in the imagination of Indians, particularly from Gujarat to Malabar along the western coast. Applying this logic to Ashraf's statement, bringing Dubai to Bombay actually meant bringing gold into the city. The other aspect was the territorial or the landed component of gold smuggling in the city at the helm of which was the smuggler himself.
In order to make sense of this latter aspect, we need to turn to the docks in Bombay where many among those who migrated from the rural parts of the country found work. Dockhands were in huge demand in the 1950s and 1960s since modern containerization in the port did not really begin until at least the early 1970s. Bombay, in a seeming contradiction of sorts, was still following the conventional methods of handling cargo with men transferring boxes, bags, and cartons from ships to warehouses and vice-versa. This was possible and, indeed, preferable to container shipping because India's exports were mostly tea, jute, cotton, and other kinds of agricultural produce, rather than heavy machinery or automobiles.Footnote 71 A major spin-off of this was a certain power of agency that allowed porters and dockhands, such as Haji Mastan, ample room for the smuggling of gold.
Bombay's smugglers were the counterparts of Dubai-based agents working for transnational syndicates that shipped out consignments of gold from the Persian Gulf city to India. Exemplified by men like Karim Lala, Varadarajan Mudaliar, and others (besides Haji Mastan himself), the smuggler coordinated the operations in Indian territorial waters and beyond, sometimes up to the final buyer in Bombay. Overseeing the penetration of gold into Indian territory required him to pull together multiple networks and logistical chains within the city, including men who could moonlight as drivers as well as mechanics in automobile workshops who made false bottoms for trucks or secret compartments for cars. It was in such specifically designed cars that gold was carried from the coast to empty apartments in the city where the deal with the buyer was closed. It is the smuggler's capacity to operate as the single interface between Bombay, with its clandestine networks of buyers, jewellers, drivers, etcetera, and Dubai which sparked intense competition, making gangsters and criminals out of smugglers whose activities crossed into the domain of the underworld, and brought the post-colonial state to its knees. The risks involved had a chilling effect, but the returns were too tempting for the ambitious to quit the game. For those who were adept at managing logistical chains, controlling information networks, and eliminating rivals, Bombay promised a smooth entry into Dubai's investor partnerships and international syndicates which carried their own political advantages besides even greater profits in smuggling.Footnote 72 These syndicates never enjoyed the anonymity and abstract identity of the investors they may have started working for. On the contrary, in the more than half a century of India's history of smuggling, they have been its most visible and targeted figures. Newspapers, Indian cinema, and even popular narratives romanticize them and celebrate their lives of adventure and glamour. This is even as they remain remarkably silent on the upper echelons of financiers and investors operating within the western Indian Ocean, straddling multiple legal systems and political orders in different countries in South Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Europe.
Conclusion
It is not difficult to understand why the gold smuggler whose emergence as a transnational player within Bombay's post-colonial context—one in which international currents of trade merged with national currents of production—constitutes the limits of the narrative on smuggling in India. With smuggling understood as the violation of the territorial borders and laws of the nation-state, the smuggler was the ideal figure on which to project the political and economic anxieties of the state. The state saw in the smuggler an economically and politically subversive category, an actor undermining its territorial sovereignty in a post-war world of nation-states competing with each other for greater advantage in trade and commerce. To put it otherwise, the post-colonial state saw the smuggler, his infrastructure of control, and his ability to operate at the interface of multiple political geographies as akin to its own power—a parallel state of sorts. What enabled this, as the state rightly diagnosed, was gold and its ability to infuse power into random actors, such as dockhands, couriers, henchmen, etcetera, who through often criminal and violent means ensured their access to the metal.
For the historian and scholar with a different set of investments, gold and the question of smuggling, as is discussed here, gestures to an interesting paradox and some key developments in the post-war world order. Following the grave economic and political disasters of the two world wars, gold was condemned by the international monetary order and sent into exile, with bars and bullion resting in the underground vaults of central banks across the world. This article argues that gold was anything but a monetary instrument lying dormant in the subterranean enclaves of banks. More importantly, it illustrates how gold, pushed out of the international monetary system, found its way into the western Indian Ocean, transforming it into a trans-regional economy in its own right—one that worked in the interstices of the international or global economy and India's national economy. It traces the consolidation of this trans-regional economy against the post-imperial politics of empire played out via shipping in the western Indian Ocean and private gold trading in the Middle East, as well as the rupee politics of the post-colonial Indian state. Partition and the ways in which Persian Gulf cities like Dubai responded to India's post-colonial policies of import restrictions, by drawing merchants and ‘accidental traders’ like the Sindhis into the city's perfectly legal gold trade, complement this politics at the other end.Footnote 73
What holds the story of the post-war Western Indian Ocean economy together in this article is the connection between gold, the dhow, and the smuggler, and the hierarchies of economic, social, and political relationships they set up among different players. Such players include international banks, Indian merchants, the states in India and Dubai, as well as aspiring migrants, agents, dockworkers, drivers, mechanics, and even bureaucrats in India. It is impossible to understand how this economy works if one were to see it like the state. The post-colonial state in India essentially viewed smuggling through a gaze that looked out across its territorial borders and saw no progression as the international economy slid into the trans-regional and the trans-regional into the national through the movement of gold. This explains why it refused to see beyond the smuggler when several other players were not merely involved in smuggling but were structurally constitutive of it, as is argued here. Not only did it not look beyond the smuggler, it also constructed him as the link between the international economy in Dubai and the national economy in India. That Dubai was not a part of the international economy during the immediate post-war years but of a trans-regional economy involving Bombay in western India was the crucial link missing in the state's narrative of smuggling.
A significant contribution that this article makes to scholarship is a view of how gold defined mobility in the post-war world when passports, identity documents, and border control were legitimate forces regimenting international movement and migration between states. Looked at from Bombay and Dubai, the institutional practices defining migration between nation-states makes little sense, at least in the early decades after partition. Where such practices mattered, they fed back, inadvertently or otherwise, into existing patterns of mobility rather than being relegated to the margins as history. Nothing exemplifies this better than oil migration as the shared history defining states and provinces from Gujarat to Malabar (Kerala) in late twentieth-century western India. Bring mobility to the fore and the sharp divide, both temporal and structural, between empire and a world of nation-states simply vanishes in the western Indian Ocean, whether for merchants and their associates, smugglers, or for oil and shipping companies—perhaps even the state itself. A different temporality and periodization than the one implied by the colonial/post-colonial binary help reveal aspects of shared history in port cities like Bombay and Dubai that have long remained hidden from view.
