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India has had trade and cultural relations with the Persian Gulf region since antiquity. However, there is evidence of Indian settlement in the region since the sixteenth century. Small communities of Indian traders called banyans existed in present-day Iraq, Iran, Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the region came under British influence in the nineteenth century, Indian merchant communities flourished in a number of towns in the Gulf countries. The Indians served as bankers, importers and exporters, customs farmers, agents for local merchants, government contractors, pearl-financiers, etc.