Page 249 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Conclusion 229

al-Ha’yah, the grass-roots organisation which started the process of
Arabisation of Bahrain’s national politics and culture. No longer is the
inner city ‘Arab’, or at least Bahraini. Strolling on a Friday afternoon
along the winding roads of the old suq, while immigrant workers enjoy
their day off, one could easily be in Mumbai or in Thiruvananthapuram,
the capital of the Indian state of Kerala. Today, the landscape of the inner
city is the exclusive domain of young bachelors from the Indian subcon-
tinent seeking to earn a living in Bahrain. Even the few remaining Bahraini
shop owners shout in Urdu to advertise their products.
October 1973 was the turning point in this remarkable demographic
change as the fourth Arab–Israeli war triggered a dramatic increase in the
price of crude oil. The economic boom which ensued increased cash flows
and allowed the new middle classes and the most affluent residents of
Manama to obtain easy loans and to invest in properties outside the inner
city. Many of the historical communities such as the Baharna, Persians
and Indians left. By the mid 1970s, the exclusive marriage patterns which
characterised urban social life in the days of pearling had also started to
change. In the markets, even artisans and shopkeepers could now afford to
employ Asian labourers. Housemaids from the Indian subcontinent also
became a status symbol for the middle classes, a privilege which in the
previous decades was the preserve of the rich.
The construction boom of the mid 1970s was the most important
development which drew very large numbers of labourers from the
Indian subcontinent. By 1981 the number of non-nationals living in the
city surpassed that of Bahrainis. Ten years later the ratio was two to one.
This figure does not entirely show the extent of the ‘Indianisation’ of the
inner city. Population censuses for Manama, in fact, include also new
neighbourhoods such as al-‘Adliyyah and al-Salmaniyyah where some of
the former residents of the old town relocated from the late 1960s. In the
early twenty-first century only very approximate population estimates are
available, based on the electoral registers of 2002. Taking into consider-
ation the municipal boundaries of Manama in the late 1950s, only 15,000
residents were Bahrainis (and thus eligible to vote). This is a small
proportion of the population of the old city, which in 2001 reached
approximately 50,000.
Since independence the historical ‘town of foreigners’ has undergone
yet another transformation. It is ironic that the Indian subcontinent has
once again played so large a role in defining its character. In the first half of
the twentieth century the British Raj had transformed Manama into the
western frontier of British India and the outpost of modernisation in the
Gulf. By the end of the century, the new Indian ‘connection’, the result of
the new geopolitics of the Gulf region, has somewhat reversed the process