Indian community

The Indian community in Bristol is the most socially mobile of Bristol's South Asian residents. Most Indians in Bristol can trace their origin either to the Punjab or to Gujarat (both states in NW India). However, many of those with such origins came by way of Uganda or Kenya and arrived in Bristol in the late 1960's and early 1970's. This was because Indians (Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims) had been brought to East Africa as indentured railway workers by the British in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century their descendants came to constitute a middling class of shopkeepers, officials and professionals between the colonised Africans and the Britsh ruling elite. Their position made them popular scapegoats for the inequalities suffered in East Africa and they were formally expelled from Uganda by the dictator Idi Amin in 1972.