By region
Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, and the wider Caribbean and Latin diaspora.
Scholars from India, Mauritius and the Netherlands convene online, 10–12 September 2026, for an international symposium on India's indentured migration — under a banner they call 'Girmitiyalogy: Text, Theory and Literature.' What the field is, and how to attend.
Part 5 of Temples of the Diaspora. Denied land to build his temple, an indentured labourer named Sewdass Sadhu built one in the sea instead, by hand, over decades. Trinidad's Hindu temples are monuments to a stubborn refusal to disappear - and to a diaspora that made an island its own.
Part 6 of Mother Tongues. Carried across an ocean by indentured labourers, the Bhojpuri of the Ganges plain became something new in the Dutch colony of Suriname - Sarnami Hindustani, a language of its own, now spoken as much in Rotterdam as in Paramaribo, and quietly fading in both.
A north Indian street snack crossed the ocean with indentured labourers, lost its name, gained a new one, and became the unofficial national breakfast of Trinidad and Tobago.
On 30 May 1845 a single ship anchored in the Gulf of Paria with 225 Indian labourers aboard. Over the next seventy years it became a nation — today, Indo-Trinidadians are one of the two peoples of Trinidad and Tobago.
In 1838 two ships landed 396 Indians in British Guiana — the very first indentured labourers of the whole system. Their descendants are now the largest community in Guyana.
The Dutch took Indian indentured labourers too. Their descendants — the Hindustanis — are the largest community in Suriname, and a sizeable diaspora in the Netherlands.
Part 1 of Mother Tongues. When labourers from a dozen Indian districts were thrown together on Fijian plantations, their languages fused into something new — a tongue that is now the mother language of a people.
Part 1 of Children of the Girmit. Nearly 700,000 indentured Indians passed through a single stone depot in Port Louis — and their descendants became the majority, and the rulers, of an Indian Ocean nation.
Part 1 of The Diaspora Plate. A dish nobody in India had quite eaten became, in the hands of Bangladeshi cooks in Britain, the country's unofficial national meal — and a perfect parable of how diaspora food is made.
The 2026 Grammy season made it impossible to ignore. Across Best New Artist, Best Pop Duo, Best Global Music Album, Best Global Music Performance, and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album — five different categories — Indian-origin singers and musicians weren't just present. They were the conversation.
External Affairs Minister Jaishankar signed an archival cooperation agreement with Trinidad and Tobago to help members of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora trace their ancestral roots. The Government of India is creating a comprehensive global Girmitiya database.
The Government of India has extended Overseas Citizen of India eligibility to the sixth generation of Indian-origin diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago — recognising the descendants of indentured Girmitiya labourers who arrived in 1845. A historic outreach with implications for other long-tail diaspora communities.
Four pathways into India's best universities for diaspora children — JEE Advanced for IIT, the DASA scheme for NITs, NEET for medicine, and direct application for the private liberal arts schools. Plus the ICCR scholarship overlay, the 4 March 2021 OCI cut-off that splits the rules, and the practical pitfalls.
The identity question is no longer a crisis — it’s a superpower For decades, young Indians growing up abroad were caught in an exhausting loop: too Indian at school, not Indian enough at home. The cultural tug-of-war that defined their parents’ immigrant experience was supposed to ease with time. For Gen Z, it has done
