The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

Till as recently as the 1960s, the Indian rupee was used as legal tender in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE! For a while, the Reserve Bank of India even issued a special Gulf rupee for use in these countries. It was only when the Indian rupee sharply devalued in June 1966 that these countries began to issue their own currencies (Bahrain had already made the shift a few years earlier).13