By region
Britain, Ireland, and the Indian communities of the Continent.
Born in Muzaffarpur and raised in Cardiff from the age of 12, Kanishka Narayan was sworn into the British Cabinet on 20 July 2026 as the country's first Minister for Artificial Intelligence — a role created for him by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
In the late 1990s, the diaspora in the US and UK bought more than half of Bollywood's overseas tickets. Today the Gulf leads and 'overseas' is its own territory. How the diaspora's wallet reshaped Indian film.
For decades, Indian faces in Hollywood played cab drivers and terrorists. A crossover generation — Irrfan Khan, Dev Patel, Priyanka Chopra, Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari — turned that into leads, Oscars and authorship.
From a Wandsworth launderette to a Springsteen-loving teenager in Luton, British Asian film built a body of work about the second generation — made by the British-born children of South Asian migrants.
While Bollywood made the diaspora its muse, three Punjabi women — Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadha — made it their subject, turning the immigrant's double vision into world cinema.
In 1995, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge made the non-resident Indian Bollywood's hero — and the diaspora its most valuable audience. How the 'NRI film' was born, and the movies it made.
As the US, UK, Canada and Australia raise the drawbridge, Indian students are pivoting to Germany (near-free tuition), Ireland (a 24-month work visa) and France. The numbers, the visas and the trade-offs.
In August 1972 Idi Amin gave Uganda's South Asians 90 days to leave. Some 80,000 people, many holding British passports, scattered to Leicester, Toronto and beyond — and rebuilt. The expulsion and its long afterlife.
For the first time, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and Singapore together send more money to India than the Gulf — 51.2% of remittances against the Gulf's shrinking share. Behind India's record inflows is a diaspora quietly changing shape: from Gulf labourers to Western professionals.
Uday Nagaraju, Geeta Nargund, Neena Gill and Shama Tatler have been appointed to Britain's House of Lords, deepening the Indian diaspora's footprint in the upper chamber.
Part 6 of Power Abroad. The son of a Mumbai-born doctor, Leo Varadkar became Ireland's youngest leader, its first openly gay one, and the first of half-Indian descent - governing a country that in one generation went from banning divorce to electing him.
Part 5 of Power Abroad. The son of a Goan writer, António Costa governed Portugal for nearly a decade and now presides over the European Council - the first person of colour to hold one of the EU's top jobs, and an overseas citizen of India who has never hidden where his name comes from.
The UK's post-study Graduate visa is being cut from two years to 18 months for bachelor's and master's graduates - but only for those who apply from 1 January 2027. Indian students, the route's biggest users, now face a deadline: graduate and apply before the end of 2026 to lock in the full two years. Here is the 2026 guide.
Sending money from the UK to India? The GBP-INR corridor is one of the world's most competitive - which is exactly why the advertised fee is the wrong thing to watch. Here is how NRIs move money in 2026: the exchange-rate margin that matters more than any fee, NRE vs NRO routing, UPI's new cross-border reach, and when Indian tax actually applies.
At Paris Haute Couture Week, Rahul Mishra's 'Devi: The Eternal Muse' turned the apsaras of Ajanta and a 12th-century Karnataka stone dancer into couture - with Cardi B and Isha Ambani front row, and a Tanishq diamond first.
In a corner of north-west London, a Gujarati congregation built Europe's first traditional Hindu stone temple — 5,000 tonnes of hand-carved marble and limestone, raised entirely by the community.
Part 9 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. A doctor who renounced medicine to write 200 books and train the teachers who carried yoga across the world — the hidden hub of the whole story.
Part 5 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He turned meditation into something anyone could do in twenty minutes — and for one luminous moment in 1968, the most famous band on earth came to sit at his feet.
Part 6 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He arrived in New York in 1965 at sixty-nine, with seven dollars and a trunk of his own books — and within a decade had founded a worldwide religion.
Part 7 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. Raised English from boyhood, he came home a stranger, became a revolutionary the British jailed — and emerged from prison one of the most ambitious philosophers India produced.
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 Temples of the Diaspora. In the fields of central New Jersey, a hand-carved stone mandir the size of a cathedral announced that the Indian diaspora in America had come of age.
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.
Part 1 of The Crossing. For decades the answer was America. In 2026, with US student-visa refusals near record highs, the world's largest cohort of outbound students is redrawing its map.
Part 1 of Power Abroad. The grandson of Punjabi migrants became the United Kingdom's first British Indian prime minister — and lit Diwali lamps on the steps of Downing Street.
Part 1 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. On 11 September 1893, an unknown Bengali monk walked onto a Chicago stage and began, 'Sisters and brothers of America.' The ovation that followed marked the moment India's spiritual tradition went global.
US F-1 student-visa refusals for Indian applicants rose from 23% in 2015 to about 61% in 2025, even as European applicants faced roughly 9%. The gap is pushing Indian students toward Germany, Ireland and Canada's graduate routes.
The IOM's World Migration Report 2026 confirms India received about $138 billion in remittances in 2024 — the most of any country, and nearly double second-placed Mexico — underscoring the diaspora's economic weight.
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.
Directed by Lakshmipriya Devi and backed by Farhan Akhtar, the Manipuri-language film 'Boong' won Best Children's and Family Film at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards — the first Indian film to take the category in the prize's history.
A growing number of diaspora families are quietly moving back. The plane is the easy part. The actual return runs through tax-residency arithmetic, customs paperwork at Nhava Sheva, banking accounts that have to be redesignated on a clock, and a hundred small adjustments nobody warns you about. This is the practical map.
Indian study permits to Canada have collapsed from 188,715 in 2024 to 94,605 in 2025 — a 50 per cent drop in a single year. The approval rate for Indian applicants fell from 81 per cent to 28 per cent. Brampton's agent economy is folding; families in Punjab and Andhra are reassessing; the Canadian dream that Indian families spent two decades constructing is being quietly dismantled. This is what the data shows, and what it does not.
Most Indian estates are run on default settings: no will, no plan, no conversation. For the OCI cardholder thirteen time zones away, that default is the slow tax — months of paperwork, frozen bank accounts, sibling disputes, property that mutates into nobody's. This is the part of the law where preparing in advance costs almost nothing and not preparing costs years.
An OCI pays Indian tax on Indian-source income — rent, interest, capital gains — under residency rules that tightened again on 1 April 2026. The TDS regime, DTAA relief, TCS on outbound money, and the traps, explained.
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.
For the first time in Australia's history, a non-British-origin migrant community is the country's largest. The shift coincides with a rise in anti-immigration demonstrations, including the 'March for Australia'.
Diaspora remittances to India climbed 14% year-on-year to US$135.46 billion, with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia driving the growth.
The United Kingdom's House of Commons now includes 26 members of Parliament of Indian descent — a 73% increase since 2015, reflecting the community's steady political ascent in Westminster.
New Zealand's revised 2026 student visa framework adds a 25-hour-per-week work limit, post-study work pathways, and new skilled-migrant entries — positioning the country as a quieter alternative to the harder-to-access US/UK routes.
The number of Indian students in Ireland has climbed from 700 to over 9,000 over the past decade. The 2026 GOI-IES scholarship cycle opened on 29 January.
They invest before they turn 22. They run side hustles before they land their first job. They send money home and build portfolios abroad — at the same time. Meet Gen Z NRIs: the most financially ambitious generation India has ever produced. With sources from WEF, SEBI, BCG, and AMFI.
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
If you or someone you know has been quietly Googling hair transplants abroad — and wondering whether it makes sense to combine a trip home with treatment — this story is for you. Picture this: a man boards a flight from Manchester to Mumbai, not for a wedding or a family visit, but for a hair […]
The Edison wedding The Patel wedding I went to in Edison last summer had 1,400 guests, two days of pre-events, a sangeet rehearsed by a choreographer who flies in from Mumbai, and a baraat that got the local police to block off Oak Tree Road for forty minutes. It also had the most Gujarati I […]
What the OCI actually is The Overseas Citizen of India card, in plain language, is a lifetime visa to India that comes with most — but not all — of the practical rights of Indian citizenship. It is a document, not a status. It does not make you a citizen of India. India does not permit […]
Nutrition science is universal, but it doesn't land the same on every body. For the Indian diaspora — prone to particular deficiencies and metabolic risks, far from the sun and the kitchen of home — the fine print matters more.
