Indians in France
ethnic group
Indo-French people or Indians in France are residents from India in France, as well as people of Indian national origin. According to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, there are an estimated 119,000 overseas Indians living in metropolitan France, in addition to 367,379 in the French overseas departments and regions of Guadeloupe, Réunion, Martinique and French Guiana.
History
A majority of France's minority ethnic Indian community originate from Chandernagore of West Bengal and the Union territory of Pondicherry, the two former French colonies in India, mostly comprising Bengalis (from Chandannagar), Tamils, Malayalis as well as Telugus (from Puducherry).
The Indo-French population also includes a significant number of twice-migrant communities. These include Mauritian Indians (Biharis, Tamils, Telugus and Marathis), Indo-Guadeloupeans, Indo-Martinicans, and communities from the Seychelles (Tamils, Gujaratis and Biharis), Réunion (Malbars and Zarabes), French Guiana, and Madagascar (mostly Gujaratis). Additionally, it comprises 'repatriates' (locally known as « rapatriés ») from former French Indochina and other decolonized French territories.
Later immigrants to mainland France were drawn mostly from Gujarati, Sindhi, Konkani, and Punjabi backgrounds, with a subsequent wave of Keralites from the state of Kerala. Student and professional mobility also produced a local, diverse, and growing Indian NRI community.
The public source identifies “Indians in France” as ethnic group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Indians, France and ethnic.
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This entry incorporates text from “Indians in France” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.