Gujarati

Gujarati-speaking merchants are Bahrain's oldest Indian community: Hindu Bhatia and Lohana traders from Sindh and Kutch settled in the Manama souq in the early 19th century, trading pearls, dates, rice and textiles with Mandvi and Bombay. In 1817 they built the Shrinathji Temple, a shrine to Krishna as a seven-year-old child and the oldest Hindu temple in the Gulf, still at the heart of the community's festivals. Today's Gujaratis are mostly businessmen, doctors, accountants, engineers and lawyers, far from the labour camps of other South Asian migrants. The Shri Gujarati Samaj, founded in 1980 with 80 members and now about 800, fills the calendar with Navratri garba nights, Diwali, Holi and a Gujarati kite festival.

Gujarati-speaking merchants are the oldest Indian community on this coast: Hindu trading families financed pearling boats in Sharjah and Dubai in the nineteenth century, and their Krishna shrine beside Dubai Creek began in a cowshed in the early 1900s. Today about a quarter of a million Gujaratis live in the Emirates, from fourth-generation textile, gold and electronics traders in Bur Dubai and Deira to accountants, bankers and shopkeepers. Most are vegetarian Vaishnava Hindus devoted to Krishna or to the Swaminarayan movement, whose marble temple in Abu Dhabi drew four million visitors in its first two years, while Jains and Shia Bohra, Khoja and Sunni Memon Muslims form their own close-knit communities. Navratri turns Dubai's parks and halls into nights of garba and dandiya dancing that draw thousands.