Oman is India’s closest neighbour on the Arabian Peninsula with which there have been uninterrupted commercial and cultural ties that go back to the Indus Valley Civilisation. However, most studies on this country and its ties with India have been done by Western scholars whose principal focus has been on British and other European engagements with this region. The Omani people and their rulers have largely been missing from these stories.
Seema Alavi’s book has two unique features: One, it moves from the Western perspective and gives us the view from Oman. Two, it places Oman’s sultans at the centre of the narrative and presents them not as subservient vassals of the British, but as active players in national and regional affairs, holding their own through native cunning and adroit diplomacy.
The author has discussed four Omani sultans of the 19th century, Sultan Sayyid Said (r. 1806-56) and his four sons — two of whom,
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