home countries and states – for all these reasons, these migrants came to see
themselves more as Kashmı ̄rı ̄s, Benga ̄lı ̄s, and Guja ̄ratis, as Hindus, Muslims,
and Sikhs. Increasingly, the communalism found in the Indian subcontinent
has fueled (and, occasionally, been fueled by) communalism in Great
Britain.^33
By the late 1960s, South Asian sojourners to the United Kingdom were
becoming settled and women and children were joining the men who had
come to seek work. The first Hindu temple was constructed in Coventry
in 1967. Since the end of mass immigration in 1973, temples and places
of worship have proliferated – estimates are that by 1982 there were some
100 Hindu temples in the UK and that these had increased to over 300 in
the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s there were over 1.25 million South Asians
in Great Britain, of whom some 440,000 were Hindus.^34
Other European countries have witnessed migration on a more modest
scale. In the Netherlands, for example, most of the Hindus are of Surinamese
background. Some 100,000 such Hindus have brought their particular form
of Caribbean Hinduism, divided into factions associated with the A ̄rya
Sama ̄j and Sana ̄tana Dharma and maintaining some twenty temples all
told. In addition, some 4,000 Tamil Hindus and 3,000 Hindus from Uganda
have settled in the Netherlands. Furthermore, scholars have estimated that
some twenty-seven Hindu-related groups are to be found in the country.
There is considerable rethinking of the nature of Hinduism among these
settlers as they look to India and well-established centers in London for
guidance in this process of reinterpretation.^35
Germany, in the meantime, has received refugees, especially from
Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. About 75 percent of the 60,000 refugees from Sri
Lanka are Hindus; while most of the 40,000 Afghan refugees are Muslim.^36
Other countries of Western Europe have even less visible South Asian popu-
lations. In Portugal, for example, it is estimated there are some 20,000
persons of Goan Catholic descent and another 5,000 or so Hindus who are
refugees from Mozambique.^37 In France, some 60,000 Hindu Tamil refugees
from Sri Lanka have found asylum, while some 10,000 Guja ̄rati Hindus, most
of them from Uganda, have settled. In Switzerland, most of the South Asian
settlers are Tamils, about 24,000 of them, who have established fifteen places
of worship in the country’s major cities since the mid-1980s. In Scandinavia,
there are said to be a total of 10,000 Hindus, about half of these Sri Lankan
Tamils while most of the others are Guja ̄ratis from Uganda.^38
The year 1965 witnessed a change in US immigration laws. These changes
were such that professionals and their families could enter much more easily
and a steady stream of Indians have made their way into the US ever since.
According to one study, some 85 percent of this early wave of immigrants in
a particular city held graduate degrees and were professionally employed,^39
India’s Global Reach 237