have estimated the number of Hindus living in
particular countries. For example, the sociologist
Prema Kurien suggests that Hindus accounted for
approximately 65 percent of more than 800,000
people of Indian origin reported in the 1990
United States census. Using the same calcula-
tion on the 2000 U.S. census figure of almost 1.7
million people of Indian origin, one arrives at a
figure of approximately 1.1 million Hindus in the
United States. Mauritius, a small country with a
long history of Indian migration, is home to more
than half a million Hindus, 48 percent of its total
population.
Indians have been migrating since premodern
times, both inside and outside India. The large-
scale migration of the modern period, according
to the historian Roger Daniels, may be the result
of the British abolition of the slave trade and then
of slavery itself during the first half of the 19th
century. Without slaves, the British began to rely
on indentured servants and contract laborers to
work their plantations from Fiji to the Caribbean.
The Indian subcontinent provided much of this
cheap labor, and the British transported these
workers throughout their empire. Some of these
laborers eventually returned to India, but most of
them remained in these distant colonies. Bhikhu
Parekh, a political theorist, estimates that approx-
imately three-quarters of the indentured laborers
during the period from 1834 to 1924 were Hindu.
Many Hindus were among the farmers and skilled
laborers from Punjab and merchants from Gujarat
who migrated as individuals to destinations such
as East Africa and Canada.
Because purity and pollution are significant
concerns for many classes of Hindus, orthodox
Hindus, especially in the early period, were skep-
tical of travel abroad. At the least, international
travel meant living among people who would be
considered polluting. Further, many felt it would
be difficult for Hindu sojourners to resist engag-
ing in polluting activities such as MEAT-EATING or
drinking alcohol. Members of the upper castes did
begin to travel abroad, often for higher education,
but significant numbers did not settle abroad until
the last half of the 20th century.
The patterns of global dispersal among Hin-
dus have shifted since World War II as members
of the middle and upper rungs of Hindu society
began settling abroad in increasing numbers. Great
Britain faced a labor shortage after the war and
immigrants from India filled labor needs in the
1950s and 1960s. At first, these migrants were
mostly single men, but women joined them and
helped establish families there in the 1970s and
1980s. Although migration directly from South
Asia slowed in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s,
many East Africans of South Asian origin decided
to migrate to Britain when political pressures
forced them to leave Africa. Having lived abroad for
multiple generations, those Hindus among them
had already established Hinduism in the Diaspora
and took strong orthodox traditions to Britain.
This newer wave of South Asian migrants
began to arrive in the United States in the late
1960s. After decades of racist immigration laws
that discriminated against Asians, among others,
Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration Act of
1965, drastically altering U.S. immigration policy.
This act replaced an immigration quota based on
national origins with preferences for relatives of
residents of the United States and members of
certain professions. The new law also increased
the limits on immigrants from countries outside
the Western Hemisphere. Many of the earliest
post-1965 Indian immigrants were well-educated,
English-speaking professionals, who tended to
be from upper castes. On the basis of the family
preferences in the new law, many of their relatives
began to join them in the 1980s and 1990s.
These different historic immigration patterns
affected religious communities in different ways.
Parekh notes, for example, that the Hindus in
French colonies such as Mauritius faced assimila-
tion policies and many adopted Christianity, albeit
in a hybridized form. Hindus in East Africa, by
contrast, often remained connected to India and
lived in more independent, homogeneous settle-K 132 Diaspora