Whether the Iran war escalates into a more devastating confrontation or cools into a diplomatic mode this week, one fact is now beyond dispute: The Gulf has moved decisively to the very top of India’s strategic priorities. Geography alone should have made this happen long ago. The Gulf is not a distant theatre; it is India’s immediate neighbourhood, separated only by a narrow stretch of water and tied to the Subcontinent through deep economic, social, and security ties. India’s approach to the current war suggests that Delhi will no longer treat the Gulf as a peripheral region.
The Gulf’s new centrality also revives an older debate in modern India’s strategic imagination — the contest between the so‑called “Bombay School” and “Ludhiana School”. The terms may sound strange to contemporary ears, but they capture two enduring ways of thinking about India’s geopolitics.
The story begins in the late 18th century, when the British Raj, newly ascendant in the Subcontinent, confronted a dramatic external shock: Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. His ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East exposed the vulnerability of the Indian empire’s western approaches. The result was the birth of the “Great Game”, the prolonged contest between Britain and its European rivals for influence across the territorial arc from the Levant to the Hindu Kush. Out of this crucible emerged two distinct strategic visions. Both saw the need for defending India well beyond its territorial borders. They diverged on questions of geographic focus and policy instruments.
The Bombay School, shaped by the commercial dynamism of the emerging Parsi and Gujarati capitalists operating in the space created by the empire in western India and the Arabian Sea, saw India’s security beginning at sea. Its leading figures — John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone — viewed Persia and Arabia as the natural outer ring of India’s defence.
Their instincts were outward‑looking and maritime. Malcolm’s early 19th‑century missions to Tehran sought to anchor Persia in a British‑Indian orbit through diplomacy and trade. Elphinstone, as governor of Bombay, expanded the East India Company’s naval presence in the Persian Gulf and concluded security arrangements with the Arab coastal principalities — the entities that would later become the Trucial States. For the Bombay School, the key to India’s security lay in controlling sea lanes, shaping littoral politics, and projecting influence across the Gulf. Ports, commerce, and naval power were its natural instruments.
The Ludhiana School — where the East India Company agents were located before gaining full control of the Punjab — was continental in orientation. Figures such as Henry Lawrence, John Lawrence, and Claude Wade operated in a world shaped by tribal politics, feudal forces, and shifting alliances in the effort to prevent European penetration through Central Asia and Afghanistan. For them, Afghanistan was the lynchpin. The defence of India required forward fortifications, tribal militias, and political manipulation in the highlands beyond the Indus.
The First Anglo‑Afghan War (1839-42) was the decisive collision between these two schools. The Ludhiana School prevailed in policy, pushing the Raj into Kabul to install a friendly ruler. The catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan vindicated the Bombay School’s scepticism about continental adventures. Yet the Ludhiana logic proved resilient. As the Raj consolidated the Punjab and fretted about Russian expansion, the Ludhiana School entrenched itself.
After 1947, Pakistan inherited this tradition. Its quest for “strategic depth”, the search for a protectorate in Afghanistan, its reliance on tribal proxies, and its entanglement with extremist forces all flowed from the Ludhiana worldview. Rawalpindi’s neglect of Karachi — once a vital node of the Bombay Presidency’s maritime universe — reflected the same landlocked worldview. It was only China’s rise and its maritime ambitions that put Pakistan’s coastline back on the strategic map.
Independent India, too, drifted toward the Ludhiana mindset. Partition created new land borders with Pakistan that had to be defended. Delhi’s socialist turn diminished the role of trade, ports, and maritime strategy. The three great port cities — Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras — ceded primacy to a land‑centric capital.
Economic reforms in the 1990s and the new focus on trade put the maritime world back in the reckoning. But the persistent demands of contested land borders kept Delhi’s strategic gaze fixed on the continent. It was the rapid rise of the oil‑rich Gulf — and the massive flows of labour, remittances, energy, and capital — that gave unacknowledged heft to the Bombay School.
Today, nearly 9 million Indian workers, nearly $50 billion in annual remittances, and critical energy and logistics dependencies tie India inextricably to the Gulf. The region has become a vital extension of India’s economic and social space. Revolutionary Iran’s confrontational politics after 1979 limited Delhi’s engagement with Tehran, but the Arab Gulf steadily assumed the centrality that Persia once held for Malcolm and Elphinstone.
The revival of the Bombay School does not mean India can ignore the challenges on its northwestern marches. The enduring hostility with Pakistan remains real. The task for Delhi is not to choose between maritime and continental imperatives but to integrate them — to anchor maritime India firmly in the Gulf while maintaining credible military deterrence on the land frontier.
Meanwhile, the rise of political moderation and economic openness in Arabia stands in sharp contrast to Iran’s oppressive theocracy and Pakistan’s persistent use of religious extremism and violent proxies to destabilise India. In subtle but significant ways, the Arab Gulf’s positive political evolution offers India a counterweight to the destabilising impulses emanating from Pakistan and Iran. Delhi’s strong support for the Arab Gulf in the current war is, in essence, about the return of the Bombay School.
The writer is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express. He is associated with the Motwani Jadeja Institute of American Studies, Jindal Global University and the Council on Strategic and Defence Research
