ਦੁਬਈਦੁਬਈ

Dubai is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates and the capital of the Emirate of Dubai, home to 3,944,751 people in 2025 on a creek on the southeastern coast of the Persian Gulf, 92 per cent of them expatriates. For Punjabis, Dubai is the Gulf's great meeting point: Indians are the largest expatriate community in the UAE and about 2 million of them live in Dubai, Sikhs number over 100,000 across the UAE with the majority in Dubai, and the Guru Nanak Darbar in Jebel Ali, the first official gurdwara in the Gulf, was founded to serve over 50,000 Sikh residents of the emirate.

Where is Dubai, and why do Punjabis live there?

Dubai stands on Dubai Creek, a natural inlet of the Persian Gulf that splits the historic city into Bur Dubai and Deira. It was founded in the early 18th century as a pearling and fishing settlement, was a town of some 700 to 800 people by 1822, and established itself as a free port in 1901, with no taxation on imports or exports. Oil was struck in 1966, but the revenue was modest: by 2018 oil production contributed less than 1 per cent to the emirate's GDP. What replaced it was trade, tourism, aviation, financial services and real estate, a construction boom that raised the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and an airport, DXB, that handled over 92 million international passengers in 2024, the busiest in the world for international traffic.

Punjabis live in Dubai because India and the Gulf have traded across this water for centuries. Dubai was an entrepot for trade between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent long before oil, dominated by Indian merchants in the gold and textile trades, and Indian rupees circulated in the emirates into the 1960s. The oil era turned trade into mass work: from the mid 1960s workers came by sea from Bombay, and Indian migration surged through the 1970s and 1980s as the oil industry expanded and free trade in Dubai grew, into construction, shipping, retail, transport and the Jebel Ali Free Zone, where Indians have made up more than half the workforce. Professionals, traders and business families followed, and Punjabis came in both streams, as workers and as merchants. Dubai opens 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 Dubai, and this page invents none. The figures that exist are attributed estimates. 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 about 2 million of them live in Dubai. A 2025 breakdown of the UAE's Indians by state of origin puts Punjab at 8 per cent, about 320,000 people across the UAE, behind Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Sikhs in the UAE are put at over 100,000, the majority of them in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, and the Guru Nanak Darbar was founded to serve over 50,000 Sikh residents in the Emirate of Dubai alone. Most of this population lives on employment or business visas rather than citizenship, which makes Dubai's Punjabi community large and long settled in daily life, yet temporary on paper.

Guru Nanak Darbar and community life

The Guru Nanak Darbar stands in the Churches Complex in Jebel Ali Village. It was established by Surender Singh Kandhari, a resident of Dubai since 1976, on land given by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Ruler of Dubai, built for 65 million dirhams, about 20 million dollars, and opened on 17 January 2012 in a ceremony attended by 50,000 devotees. It is the first official Sikh gurdwara in the Gulf region and the Middle East, modelled on both the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the gurdwara in ਸਾਊਥਹਾਲ, London. Before it, Dubai's Sikhs prayed in homes and borrowed rooms; after it, the community had a landmark of its own in the desert city it helped to build.

The Darbar serves over 10,000 worshippers, and before the COVID-19 pandemic about 10,000 people visited every Friday, among them Afghan Sikhs, Sindhis and Hindu Punjabis. Its kitchen serves langar through the day, its prayer hall carries kirtan and the full round of Sikh ceremonies, from Anand Karaj weddings to naming and memorial prayers, and on Saturdays it holds three hour classes teaching children Punjabi, kirtan and gurdwara protocol. In April 2017 it entered the Guinness World Records after serving breakfast to more than 600 people from 101 nationalities, and it is the world's first gurdwara to receive ISO certifications. Across the Creek in Bur Dubai, the Shiva and Krishna temples have served Hindu worshippers since the 1950s, part of the same old Indian Dubai.

Work, trade and the Punjabi Dubai

Indians in the UAE are key to the construction, retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and transport sectors, and Dubai concentrates all of them: the Jebel Ali port and free zone, the Dubai International Financial Centre, the gold and textile souks of Deira and Bur Dubai where Indian merchants have traded for generations, and the construction sites that keep redrawing the skyline. Punjabi Dubai runs from drivers, carpenters, masons and electricians to traders, jewellers and business owners, and its institutions match that range. The Indian High School, Dubai, established in 1961, is the oldest and largest Indian curriculum school in the UAE, Indian restaurants and grocery stores anchor the older districts, and money flows steadily home: the UAE accounts for about 19.2 per cent of all remittances sent to India.

Dubai is the pearling creek that became a free port, an oil town that chose trade, and then the world's crossroads airport city. For Punjabis it is the Gulf's anchor: about 2 million Indians around them, a Sikh community counted in the tens of thousands, and a gurdwara in Jebel Ali built, in its founder's stated dream, to stand second only to the Golden Temple. Read about ਸਾਊਥਹਾਲ, the London district whose gurdwara helped inspire the Darbar, or see the full map of Punjabi places in the United Arab Emirates.