From Malabar to Zanzibar

A visit to this tiny Gulf country last week — tiny compared to India, Oman is size-wise second only to Saudi Arabia in the region — brought home that enduring fact in many compelling ways. Muscat’s bustling Muttrah souq reveals the palimpsest of cultures that Oman is made up of. Fleshy African features (Sayyid Said bin Sultan, the Omani king who expanded the empire during his reign from 1804-1856 had made Zanzibar his second capital) overlaid with the golden-brown skin of the Arab genotype vie for attention with the fairer native from Baluchistan. Of course, you can’t miss the distinctively rounded vowels of the large Malayali community (Indians comprise 55 per cent of Oman’s expatriates), definitely the working-class backbone of the Gulf.

Now, trade with Malabar was already a thriving business when Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut. Naturally, then, local Omanis refer to the Malayalis as ‘‘Malabaris’’.

Oman’s Gwadar connection

Vasco’s men, on their way home after ‘‘discovering’’ India, decided to return the compliment to the Omani navigators. So they landed in Muscat in the early 16th century and stayed on for a 150-odd years — until expelled in 1650 by a major king of the Ya’aruba dynasty. But in the ebb and flow of the succeeding centuries, the Omanis returned to their seafaring ways in the East and succeeded in taking control of the Makran coast in Baluchistan. Gwadar, a port city on the coast — of present-day Pakistan — became a major Omani city. Even after the Partition, Oman retained full control of Gwadar, selling it back to Pakistan for a fairly handsome price in 1958.

History will decide whether that was — like the sale of oil-rich Alaska by Russia to the US — a grave historical error or not. Certainly, Gwadar’s natural access to the Indian Ocean as well as its deepwater attributes are a major attraction to China, which is currently developing what aims to become Pakistan’s most modern port city. A Gwadar native this reporter happened to chance upon in Muscat’s souq bemoaned the fact that India, at the time of Partition, had abandoned not only the North West Frontier Province (remember Ghaffar Khan’s plea to the Congress to absorb the NWFP into independent India, rejected because G.D. Birla is supposed to have told Gandhi that it would ‘‘cost’’ too much), but also Baluchistan. You sold us to the Pakistanis and left us to our fate, Dil Murad said, adding, and so we left Pakistan and came to Oman.

Tale of two diplomats

When the long, tortured and often pointless history of India-Pakistan relations is finally written, Jalil Abbas Jilani and Sudhir Vyas may only find themselves featuring as shortish footnotes. But the charge d’affaires of both India and Pakistan conducted themselves with such exquisite manners and grace that they often managed to put the unseemly reality of their situations in the shade. Within the narrowing parameters of diplomatic space, they articulated the desire of their silent majorities who knew they couldn’t afford the luxury of living in the past — and desperately wanted to get on with the business of life. Both Jalil and Sudhir made many friends who were also opposed to them politically and ideologically. They are sorry to see them leave.

Reassuringly, other diplomats have in the past stood up in their own little ways to the ‘‘eye-for-an-eye’’ norm of their establishments. In the wake of the heightened bitterness spawned by the attack on Parliament, Pakistan’s former foreign secretary Inamul Haq drove India’s High Commissioner Vijay Nambiar to the airport to bid him goodbye. (Nambiar was being pulled out by Delhi as a sign of its displeasure.) Their personal friendship was bigger than the insecurities of their nations.