Sharjahਸ਼ਾਰਜਾਹ

Sharjah is the third-most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, the capital of the Emirate of Sharjah, home to 1,872,000 people in 2024 on the Persian Gulf coast immediately north of Dubai. For Punjabis, Sharjah is the working half of the Gulf story told on our Dubai page: about 720,000 Indians live in Sharjah, more than a third of its people, Sikhs are named among the UAE communities concentrated in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, and the city holds the Indian Association Sharjah, one of the largest Indian schools in the Gulf, and a Hindu Sikh crematorium serving the whole Northern Emirates.

Where is Sharjah, and why do Punjabis live there?

Sharjah stands on the western coast of the UAE, on the Khalid Lagoon and the Gulf shore, and forms part of the Dubai-Sharjah-Ajman metropolitan area, so close to Dubai that the two cities run into each other. It has been ruled by the Al Qasimi dynasty since the 18th century, its settlement history runs back over 5,000 years, and on 8 January 1820 its Sheikh signed the General Maritime Treaty with Britain: Sharjah's position on the sea route to India is what first made it matter. On 2 December 1971 Sharjah joined six other emirates to form the United Arab Emirates. Today it is known as the cultural capital of the UAE, the Islamic culture capital of 2014 and the UNESCO World Book Capital of 2019, and it is a centre for culture and industry that alone contributes 7.4 per cent of UAE GDP.

Punjabis live in Sharjah for the same reason Indians have crossed to this coast for centuries, and for one reason that is purely its own. India and the emirates traded for centuries before oil, and when oil brought mass work from the mid 1960s, Indians arrived by sea from Bombay and then in growing numbers through the 1970s and 1980s, into construction, retail, finance, healthcare, manufacturing and transport. Sharjah took a large share of that flow because it offered the same metro jobs as Dubai with room for families: workers could live in Sharjah, where the Indian Association and its school were founded in 1979, and work across the border in Dubai or in Sharjah's own industrial areas and free zones. Sharjah completes this series' map of Punjabi places in the United Arab Emirates.

What do the numbers say?

The United Arab Emirates publishes no census of religion, language or Indian state of origin by city, so there is no official count of Punjabis or Sikhs in Sharjah, and this page invents none. The figures that exist are attributed estimates. The Sharjah census of 2022 counted 1.8 million people in the emirate, 1.6 million of them in the city, of whom only 208,000 were Emirati citizens and the remainder expatriates. Indians are the UAE's largest expatriate community, over 4.3 million people and more than 35 per cent of the country's population, and a 2025 geographic breakdown puts about 720,000 of them in Sharjah, about 18 per cent of all UAE Indians, behind only Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The same 2025 estimates put Punjab at 8 per cent of UAE Indians, about 320,000 people across the UAE. Sikhs in the UAE are put at over 100,000, the majority of them in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Sharjah. Most of this population lives on employment or business visas rather than citizenship, which makes Sharjah's Punjabi community large and long settled in daily life, yet temporary on paper.

Work, industry and the Dubai commute

Sharjah's economy explains its Indian weight. The Sharjah Airport International Free Zone, the SAIF Zone, hosts more than 6,000 companies, drawn by the lowest business setup cost in the UAE, and the emirate's industrial areas have turned it into a commercial centre whose GDP reached about AED 145.2 billion in 2023. Sharjah International Airport is the home base of Air Arabia, the first low-cost airline in the Middle East, and its cargo operation is among the largest in the region. Across the metro, the E11 Al Ittihad Road and the E311 carry the daily flow between Sharjah homes and Dubai workplaces, one of the defining commutes of the Gulf. For sport, the Sharjah Cricket Stadium has hosted almost 238 One Day International matches, more than any other ground in the world, before crowds drawn heavily from the South Asian communities of both cities.

Worship, last rites and the road to Jebel Ali

Sharjah has no gurdwara of its own on the published lists. Its Sikh families pray at the Guru Nanak Darbar in Jebel Ali, Dubai, the first official Sikh gurdwara in the Gulf, which serves over 10,000 worshippers and runs Saturday classes teaching children Punjabi and kirtan, the same temple this series describes on the Dubai page. What Sharjah holds instead is the other end of the community's life. In Al Juwaiza, opposite the Sharjah Cement Factory, stands the Hindu Sikh Crematorium, a Dh6 million facility with two gas-fuelled incinerators on 10 acres of land gifted by Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah. Run with the Sharjah Indian Association, it was the fourth crematorium in the UAE and serves families from Sharjah and the Northern Emirates, including the Sikh charity Sarbat da Bhala, whose volunteers help families complete last rites without sending a body home to India. Dubai and Sharjah are the only two emirates with operating cremation facilities.

The Indian Association and its school

The Indian Association Sharjah was established in 1979 to promote Indo-Arab friendship and to provide educational, socio-cultural, charity and relief facilities for Indians in the area. Its largest work is Sharjah Indian School, started in a small rented villa for the children of expatriates across Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain, inaugurated on 5 September 1979 with 280 pupils and 13 teachers, and now a CBSE-affiliated senior secondary school of 8,763 students and 450 teachers on a campus built on land donated by the Ruler of Sharjah. Around the school the Association runs a community hall, medical camps, festival celebrations and relief work for workers in distress, in coordination with the Consulate General of India in Dubai. South Asian languages are spoken widely across the emirate, and Punjabi is heard in its industrial areas, its souqs and its school corridors alongside Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil and Urdu.

Sharjah is the old port on the India route that became the UAE's cultural capital and the quieter, family side of the Dubai metro. For Punjabis it is a city of about 720,000 Indians around them, a school founded the same year as its Indian Association, a crematorium that lets long-settled families complete the last rites where they lived, and a Friday road south to the gurdwara in Jebel Ali. Read about Dubai, the emirate next door, or see the full map of Punjabi places in the United Arab Emirates.