In the winter of 1956, The Times correspondent David Holden arrived on the island of Bahrain, then still a British protectorate.

After a short-lived career teaching geography, Holden had looked forward to his Arabian posting, but he hadn't expected to be attending a garden durbar in honour of Queen Victoria's appointment as Empress of India.

Everywhere that he went in the Gulf - Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman - he found expected traces of British India.

"The Raj maintains here a slightly phantasmal sway," wrote Holden, "a situation rich in anomaly and anachronism… The servants are all bearers, the laundryman a dhobi, and the watchman a chowkidar," he wrote, "and on Sundays the guests are confronted with the ancient, and agreeable, Anglo-Indian ritual of a mountainous curry lunch."

The Sultan of Oman, educated in Rajasthan, was more fluent in Urdu than Arabic, while soldiers in the nearby state of Qu'aiti, now eastern Yemen, marched around in now-defunct Hyderabadi army uniforms.

In the words of the governor of Aden himself:

"One had an extraordinarily powerful impression that all the clocks here had stopped seventy years ago; that the Raj was at its height, Victoria on the throne, Gilbert and Sullivan a fresh and revolutionary phenomenon, and Kipling a dangerous debunker, so strong was the link from Delhi via Hyderabad to the South Arabian shore."

Although largely forgotten today, in the early 20th Century, nearly a third of the Arabian Peninsula was ruled as part of the British Indian Empire.

From Aden to Kuwait, a crescent of Arabian protectorates was governed from Delhi, overseen by the Indian Political Service, policed by Indian troops, and answerable to the Viceroy of India.

Under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these protectorates had all legally been considered part of India.

The standard list of India's semi-independent princely states like Jaipur opened alphabetically with Abu Dhabi, and the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, even suggested that Oman should be treated "as much a Native State of the Indian Empire as Lus Beyla or Kelat [present day Balochistan]".

Indian passports were issued as far west as Aden in modern Yemen, which functioned as India's........

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