Located strategically, the Gulf region provided a critical trading node between ancient Indian civilisations, predominantly the Indus Valley urban centres, and the “Fertile Crescent” of Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence seems to indicate a great deal of human interactions accompanied the trade and possibly, wealthy merchants from Indian principalities had set up base in the Gulf region, not very unlike the case today. 3.
Indians have been sea-faring into distant lands from both her eastern as well as western coast down the centuries. But systematic migration was not a phenomenon beyond what was necessary to support buoyant and sustained trade until the colonial era when the need of cheap labour for plantation industries lured large number of Indian labour to foreign shores.