Passage from India
They came across the ocean to build railways and work as traders. They settled as merchants, farmers, and government workers, and have stayed for generations. It’s a familiar immigration story, but in this case it concerns a largely unfamiliar group: the Indians of Kenya, who the novelist Shiva Naipaul once described as having “an odd kind of invisibility.” Traders from present-day India — as well as parts of South Asia that are now in Pakistan — had been sailing across the Indian Ocean to East Africa for centuries. But after Britain took control of Kenya in 1895, many more Indians, already subjects of the British Empire, began migrating there. By 1963, about 35 percent of the population of Nairobi was of Indian heritage. “It’s this hidden history that has not been uncovered,” says Sana Aiyar, an assistant professor of history at MIT. “Yes, there’s an imprint of South Asia and Indians in...