Educated, ambitious, ever more powerful: How Indian migration is changing the nation

This story is part of the August 13 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

It’s grey, gloomy and wet on this wintry Sunday in Rowville, on the industrial eastern edge of Melbourne’s suburban sprawl. But inside a warehouse behind the Australian Indian Community Centre, things are heating up. The smell of sweat and saffron rice mixes in the air, and the stereo is so loud, none of the 170 or so dancers can hear anything but the cacophonous assault of continuous Hindi music.

We’re halfway through a six-hour dress rehearsal for an amateur Bollywood spectacular – an explosion of sequined skirts and head-wobbles and henna hands – which grows steadily more glittery and raucous, like a fireworks display approaching its crescendo. It’s then that a dozen kids in white satin saris march through the complex shouting “Vande Mataram!” , which loosely translated means “I praise my motherland!”

Another translation is “Long live India!” – and the sentiment is not misplaced. The first tranche of data from the 2021 census recently confirmed that Australia is now the first English-speaking country in the world to be a “migrant majority” nation – where 50 per cent of the population were born overseas or have an immigrant parent. And the biggest story within those numbers? India.

People of Indian ancestry in Australia number more than 780,000 – an increase of almost 165,000 since 2016. As migrant groups go, Indians have leapfrogged the Chinese and now sit second only to the British – and not for long, either. Monash University demographer Dharma Arunachalam expects his countrymen to comfortably vault into the top spot within five years, to become our undisputed dominant migrant group. And the indicators are there, he adds, to suggest this cultural bloc might more profoundly influence Australian society than any other.

First, they’re in a generational sweet spot. The median age of Indians here is 35 – the Australian median is 38 – as opposed to migrants from, say, Vietnam (47) or Italy (72), who came in earlier waves. They’re highly educated, too: 63 per cent of Indians here had a bachelor’s degree or above in 2016 (the most recent figures, and compared with an Australian-born number of 24 per cent).

They’re also highly employed, at a full-time rate of 51 per cent (compared to 47 per cent Australian-born and 33 per cent Chinese-born). Even their preferred profession (IT specialist) suits the times, meaning their personal income is strong, with 23 per cent earning more than $91,000 a year in 2016 (24 per cent of Australian-born earned at that level).

Indians help settle new urban areas, too. In Victoria, for instance, where the majority of Indian migrants gravitate (more than 275,000 and counting), 94 per cent live within the boundary of greater Melbourne, set to be Australia’s fastest-growing city next year, attracted by greenfield developments and a level of affordability difficult to find in Sydney.

In the five years to 2021 alone, the number of children born in Australia with Indian ancestry was more than 63,000, up by almost half.Credit: Josh Robenstone

With that kind of bedrock, urban-fringe Indian families are burgeoning. In the five years to 2021 alone, the number of children born in Australia with Indian ancestry was more than 63,000, up by almost half.

“Their whole determination is to climb the social ladder, and that shows up in the data,” says Professor Arunachalam, who was born in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and migrated here in 2006. “Indians want to make it work.”

“Think of India as the EU – a collection of states with their own language, history, culture, food, traditions – loosely grouped together.”

But is there a thread or through line connecting this diaspora? One of the biggest takeouts from Chinese migration here has been the story of those enjoying astronomical wealth, while the Sudanese settling in suburbia, who’ve often fled famine, drought and war, are turning up on AFL footy grounds and fashion runways. Yet Indian migrants resist easy categorisation – politically or socially, geographically or religiously (more on those later).

Aarti Betigeri, a former freelance foreign correspondent in India, suspects they’re more disparate and divided than other migrant cohorts, and that simple truth is the most important thing to understand about Indians (even within India itself).

“India is a country where it’s okay to shed all your worldly possessions and spend the rest of your life walking from town to town, but it’s also a country of 161 billionaires and 458,000 millionaire households,” she says. “Think of it as the EU – a collection of states with their own language, history, culture, food, traditions – loosely grouped together. Someone from the south has as much in common with someone in the north as a Russian has in common with a Londoner.”

Yet these differences are hard to spot – perhaps even impossible through a Western gaze – because here’s another important truth: Indians assimilate swiftly and subtly. In a 2021 essay for Australian Foreign Affairs magazine, Betigeri describes how her own father and mother arrived in 1968 and 1971 and became the very model of those “grateful, pliant migrants Australia loves best”. They brought their skill and grit, and held on to the palatable parts of their culture while shedding all else. They blended in, holding true to an old maxim: Indians, when in a new place, dissolve like sugar in milk. Invisible, but making everything sweeter.

This much has been true for decades. Jayant Bapat, 83, has written three books on the diaspora. He untangles the timeline for me over tea at his home in leafy Glen Waverley, an eastern suburb of Melbourne. Indian migration patterns to Australia, he says, actually led to a highly fragmented community. Initially none came here, save for a few cameleers in South Australia and a lone cloth merchant in Sydney. The first real trickle were doctors and academics in the 1960s.

Bapat – now an expert in sociology and a Hindu priest to boot – was one of them, coming in 1965 as a PhD student as one of the first Marathi-speaking people in Australia from Bombay state. “I was probably the fifth Indian person in Melbourne,” he says, smiling. “There was one Indian restaurant. No atta flour for making chapatis. Only the sticky rice from Queensland. It was a very Anglo-Saxon society.”

That changed somewhat when the Whitlam government further opened the doors to Australia in 1972, and a wave of Indian engineers arrived. And again in the 1990s, when an influx of skilled migrants (especially IT workers) helped keep important segments of the economy humming. But it’s easy to forget that Australia was far more pale and stale than it is now.

That was when journalist Preeti Jabbal came here – 27 years ago – following her husband, so he could take up a job in banking. Jabbal, 50, was a newspaper sub-editor at home and eventually became a correspondent for the Indian Link newspaper here. We meet for coffee in Federation Square, where she explains how she initially found herself mopping floors at an Indian takeaway joint and, in her spare time, playing Spot the Indian.

“I’d be sitting having a coffee like this, and a random Indian person would walk up to me: ‘You look like you have just arrived from India. This is my card.’ All your friendships were built like this,” she says. “You would meet someone on a tram – ‘You’re Indian? I’m Indian!’ – and become friends for life. That’s not the case anymore.”

“You would meet someone on a tram – ‘You’re Indian? I’m Indian!’ – and become friends for life. That’s not the case anymore.”

What changed was due to the final, new-millennium wave of migration. In 2006, the Howard government opened the doors to Indian students – both higher-education and vocational – and a stream turned into a river, Australia welcoming those squeezed out of work by India’s “youth bulge” (where there are simply not enough jobs for the 600 million Indians aged under 25).

In 2001, for instance, the number of people with Indian ancestry in Australia was only 156,000. In 2006, that number leapt to 242,000. By 2011 it was 474,000 and in 2016 it grew to 619,000. It’s now 783,000, but for those seeking a new life, the process often becomes a burdensome nightmare.

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Karan Mehta, 25, came here in 2019 to complete a master of analytics at RMIT. To stay and pursue residency meant meeting the conditions of visas most commonly used by student migrants, which require applicants to accrue an ever-shifting number of “points”.

English proficiency bestows points, for instance, but you have to prove it every two years with a test that can cost as much as $1000. If you can prove you speak other languages, that’s more points, too. Your job or course adds points, and you can get more by doing a “Professional Year” – a kind of paid internship that helps make students job-ready (and costs about $10,000 a year).

“Then you get pressure from your family,” says Mehta, the chairperson of the Indian Students’ Association of Victoria, who has just started work as a data analyst. “Parents have often sold their houses or given up all their retirement investments and taken out loans. Students spend a decade chasing these points from course to course, doing test after test, their parents spending $300,000 on an education. It’s deeply exploitative.”

This becomes even more stark where unregulated vocational colleges are concerned. Migrants often end up paying to do short courses while working in hospitality and retail, cleaning and transport, because their labour is essential to those industries.

Sushi Das, chief of staff at RMIT’s ABC Fact Check (and a former colleague at The Age), says such students are lured not by courses in hairdressing and cooking so much as the carrot of permanent residency (PR). Das points out that “PR” sounds very much like pyar - the Hindi word for love. “I used to hear taxi drivers saying they were chasing love,” she muses, “but they were actually chasing a new home.”

Das wrote a series of stories about dodgy colleges offering bogus qualifications, often run by Indians themselves, some of whom also charged exorbitant fees as migration agents. “I got followed home once by these two huge Indian Sikh men. They were basically trying to intimidate me – telling me I should keep my nose out of their business,” she recalls. “Mostly I just feel awful for these people and their unending wait.”

Sometimes the wait is simply too long. Gaganpreet Dureja, 38, came from Punjab to Melbourne in 2016, where he ended up studying business and driving taxis, then B-Double trucks. He lived in a two-bedroom share house in Dandenong with four other migrant drivers, all accustomed to hours waiting on the phone seeking clarity from the Department of Immigration. “I did finally speak to one person who said I might get permanent residency in two months,” Dureja says, “but he also said it might take two decades.”

Dureja made friends here and liked his work but had to leave – as many do – because without permanent residency you can neither marry (unless to an Australian) nor apply for a mortgage. He chats to me by video from Vancouver, having left Australia for Canada. It was snowing and minus two degrees when he arrived, but at least he had a clearer pathway to his future. “I can’t tell you how difficult it was to leave Australia. But I have to make my family now,” he says. “It’s time. My uncles and aunts in India are finding a girl for me, sending me pictures.”

Arranged marriages are common in Indian society, and the custom has led to one of the few points where Indian and Australian cultural norms clash, namely in the form of a high domestic violence rate among some in the Indian community, often through what’s known as “dowry abuse”. The expert on this topic is Dr Manjula O’Connor, the author of Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia, whom I speak to in a cafe below her office on Collins Street.

Manjula O’Connor is an expert on “dowry abuse” – domestic violence in the Australian-Indian community.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Durga, she points out over a cup of masala chai, is the goddess of power, who rides a tiger and carries swords, and to whom many Hindu women pray. It was 2005 when she began investigating the topic of “missing women” – those eliminated through honour killings, widow abuse and dowry murders.

A dowry, of course, is a gift from the family of a bride given to the family of her groom, from a house to a car, cash or gold or even a lavish wedding. It turns problematic when the groom’s family tries to extract (or extort) more money. O’Connor has fielded countless calls from desperate women tortured by their husbands.

She met the family of Deepshikha Godara, who was murdered by her estranged husband in 2014, after her family were harassed for cash by him and his family at every birthday and festival. “She was continually humiliated and abused, and told she was freeloading,” says O’Connor. “She was beaten, burnt with hot tongs and smashed with beer bottles. She told the police, ‘His family want dowry,’ but they didn’t understand.”

Many women feel trapped not just by their husbands, but the stigma of separation. In 2018 and 2019, a group of struggling Indian women in northern Melbourne’s Whittlesea area became a suspected suicide cluster. O’Connor successfully lobbied for “dowry coercion” to be included under the Family Violence Protection Act, but admits not all Indian women know the provision exists. “They often don’t even know they can call triple zero to ask for help from the police.”

The next generation is working hard to improve conditions and smash the patriarchy. I meet Daizy Maan one night at the launch of the Australian South Asian Centre, an organisation she co-founded to empower young professionals from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and elsewhere. There’s a table selling tongue-in-cheek bumper stickers (“Full sari – Fierce AF”) and fridge magnets (“Shouldn’t you be married by now?” ).

Maan is from a farm in country NSW, where she grew up speaking Punjabi. A few years ago she created the Soul House, a wellness space for South Asian women who felt the need for sisterhood, but which quickly ended up as a domestic violence refuge. Maan bemoans the aspect of her culture that removes girls from the world by sex-selective abortion, infanticide and neglect.

“In our culture when a boy is born, the family hands out these sweets called ladoos. You don’t give out sweets when a girl is born,” she says. “People think, ‘If you’ve been in Australia your whole life, surely by now you’re liberated and independent,’ but that’s not true.” What’s considered respectful is obedience to family. “Who you’re going to marry. Where you’re going to study. I have friends who were born here whose father took them in on the first day of uni to enrol them in their subjects – they didn’t have a choice.”

The other point of cultural friction is the Indian caste system, which puts Brahmins at the top and Dalits, or “untouchables”, at the bottom. It’s alive and well locally, according to Professor Hari Bapuji, who researches economic inequality at the University of Melbourne. Throughout the country there are both formal and online associations for different castes, from the Rajput warriors to the Vaishya traders, and people have ways of trying to work out where you belong within this stratified system. Bapuji points to the work of the Dalit poet Chandramohan S., who describes the casual caste inquisitor as if he were a fast bowler chasing a wicket.

He tries assessing me with an inswinger first

“What is your full name?”

Then he tries an outswinger that seams a lot

“And what is your father’s name?”

By this time, he loses his patience

And tries a direct Yorker

“What is your caste?”

Others want to tell everyone, almost like Sydneysiders boasting about their suburb or Melburnians slipping into conversation which high school they attended. The JATT personalised number plate, for instance, is not available through VicRoads anymore (nor is JATT1, JATT2, JATT3, and so on), because it’s incredibly popular to denote yourself as a proudly upper-echelon Jatt in the Sikh community.

The great fear is that geographic pockets will form within suburbs, creating ghettos by caste. I speak to a white-collar woman who lives in the eastern Melbourne Brahmin stronghold of Glen Waverley and admits – only with anonymity – that she will not shop or eat in the south-eastern suburb of Dandenong, where she believes lower-caste migrants have settled. “This snobbery exists – there’s a very clear divide,” she says. “It’s harsh, but it is a reality with us.”

For the most part, however, the principle dictating where new Indians end up is housing affordability, and the hotspot right now is Tarneit, 40 minutes west of Melbourne. New Chinese migrants might gravitate to apartment living, says Dush Khanna, chief commercial officer for property developer Punvec, but for Indian buyers a greenfields setting is one of peace. “Property is in their DNA,” says Khanna, whose company has sold 400 new lots in Tarneit this winter – 85 per cent to Indian families. “They see Australia as a land of opportunity, while India is about survival of the fittest.”

I take a drive through this nascent suburb, past factories and flat paddocks, and a strip mall rises as though built solely for these new settlers. Hungry? Get a table at Angaara Cuisine or vegetarian takeaway from Sahib-E-Swad – or buy your own ingredients at Mera Desh. Heck, buy in bulk from Sabjiwale Wholesale Grocer. Pick up dessert from Bobind Sweets, then work off the weight at Kahma 247 Gym. Prepare an event with Delhi Nights catering and get your beauty treatment beforehand at Patel Paan Parlor. Pimp your ride with a car detail at VDESI Customs, then park it in the driveway of a home bought through Bal Real Estate.

You can fill your castle with furniture from Kisaan Imports or Living India Decor, but make sure you find one of many local vastu shastra consultants, such as Oum Prakash, who advises buyers and builders about the ways they can best enhance their prospects for health and wealth and love, according to the Indian version of feng shui. (If you’re having financial woes, examine the south-east corner of your home: “Sometimes the toilet is there,” he says, “and that is the problem.” )

It’s said that for Indians the postcode isn’t as important as the house, which seems never more true than with businessman Intaj Khan, who is planning a 16-bedroom mansion here, complete with a 30-seat movie theatre, two swimming pools, seven-car garage, tennis court and helipad. Locals have already dubbed his dream palace “The In-taj Mahal”.

He arrives for our meeting in a black Porsche SUV, as opposed to the red Ferrari for which he is known. “I’ve also got a Rolls-Royce,” he notes. “I never have the intention to show off – ‘Look at me and who I am’ – but I think it’s an inspiration.” (As if on cue, a man meekly approaches halfway through our chat. “Mr Khan, nice to see you, my name is Ali, and would it be okay to get a selfie?” )

Khan, aged 48, came from Rajasthan in 1998 with money chipped in by aunties and uncles. He studied electrical engineering before working in direct marketing, then ran a controversial training college once criticised by federal regulators. He later became a councillor for the City of Wyndham, and in 2018 was convicted of criminal offences over a failure to disclose parts of his commercial holdings.

According to Khan, a “formula of followership” steers the desire of Indian migrants to want to live here with like-minded neighbours. “I could afford to live in Toorak, but here I can be in my community, I can feel at home away from home,” he says. “Indians want to establish themselves. They want to work hard and be proud of what they can make. And if you cannot make a good living in this country, you bloody can’t make a living anywhere.”

It’s not so easy for everyone. When you’re working within the establishment, there are often entrenched systems to navigate. I meet commercial lawyer Molina Asthana at a cafe on Spring Street, opposite the old Victorian parliament, and over lemongrass and rosehip tea she describes the “bamboo ceiling”. Asthana, whose family in Delhi were all judges and lawyers, is impeccably dressed in a two-piece tweed suit, offset by stunning gold earrings with black gems from Jaipur.

Last year, commercial lawyer Molina Asthana became the first South Asian woman to be made president-elect of the Law Institute of Victoria.Credit: Elke Meitzel

She ended up here in 2004, marrying an Indian-born Australian, but despite the casual and friendly environment, she struggled. Seven years working in another common-law country counted for nothing. She needed to complete a masters of law in order to practise, and jobs were scarce.

Through perseverance and networking, she found her way to two top-tier law firms, but there she felt the subject of microaggressions – left out of Friday-night drinks and “steak clubs” (Asthana is Hindu, and doesn’t eat beef) – which she believes contributed to her billing less and progressing more slowly. She didn’t feel harassed or bullied, but says she saw unconscious bias at play. “One of the partners told me that my accent reminds him of an Englishman on a horse in breeches. The way he said it and the way I was made to feel about it, I didn’t enjoy it at all,” she says. “I had anxiety issues. I had to take time off and go and see a doctor, and then I had to get out of that toxic culture.”

Three years ago, she founded her own firm, and last year she became the first South Asian woman to be made president-elect of the Law Institute of Victoria. Yet even on boards she feels the need to continuously prove herself, an experience she believes is not uncommon. The dearth of Indian leaders in Australia is in contrast to the situation in the United States, where Indian-American households average almost double the income of the wider population and Indians occupy some of the most prominent corporate gigs, running FedEx, Gap and Deloitte as well as Silicon Valley behemoths Microsoft (Satya Nadella), Twitter (Parag Agrawal), Google (Sundar Pichai) and more.

In part, that’s down to timing. The great Indian migration to the US began in the 1980s, and the next generation is bearing fruit, while the biggest influx to Australia has only come in the past two decades. There are a few big bosses here of Indian ancestry – including Tarun Gupta (Stockland), Sanjeev Gandhi (Orica) and Vivek Bhatia (Link) – but just 7.5 per cent of the ASX300’s company directors are people of colour, and the pace of change, according to Watermark Search International, has been “glacial”.

Looking outward, Australia’s governing class could be said to lack sufficient understanding of India. In his essay Pivot to India: Our Next Great and Powerful Friend?, academic Michael Wesley writes that the geopolitical relationship between the two countries was “born troubled”. India gained independence in 1947 – 75 years ago this coming Monday – yet was greeted coolly in its early years by Australian PM Robert Menzies, while India saw in us little more than a racist backwater. “Indians found Australians loud, brash and uncultured,” Wesley writes. “Australians found Indians haughty, prickly and judgmental.”

That chequered history has been on the mend for a while. Former PM Julia Gillard built early momentum by visiting India and opening the way to uranium sales, while Tony Abbott followed suit, sealing the deal. When Narendra Modi visited Australia in 2014, it was the first time an Indian prime minister had set foot here in 28 years.

Under PM Scott Morrison, the association grew more important – our diplomatic relationship with China began dissolving in tandem with the re-emergence of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between America, India, Australia and Japan. From a more pantomime perspective, the former PM curried favour using actual curries, posting Instagram pictures of homemade “ScoMosas” and dishes native to the province of his “dear friend” Modi, while listening to his “Desi hits” playlist on Spotify.

Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese were keen to appeal to the Indian-Australian vote at the last federal election, both pictured here wearing a scarf of a controversial Hindu nationalist group.Credit: James Brickwood/Alex Ellinghausen

The Morrison government undid much of that good work with its 2021 travel ban from India during the height of the pandemic. Indus Age journalist Deepa Kulkarni, a 45-year-old who speaks 12 languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali and Urdu, says resentment within the Indian community here was widespread. “Everyone understands the need to close borders, but this affects people long-term, when you can’t say goodbye, and can’t see someone when they pass,” she says. “I couldn’t speak to my dad after he was hospitalised, or hear the last rites of the Hindu faith … It was horrific.”

Domestically, the 2022 election was the first time the Indian vote was heavily courted, both Morrison and Anthony Albanese making a show of campaigning at as many temples and Indian community centres as possible. Many Indian-Australians tell me they saw a pair of white men blithely wading into a demographic they didn’t fully understand. Both were photographed on the election trail in western Sydney’s Parramatta, for instance, wearing the orange scarf of Vishva Hindu Parishad, unaware perhaps that they were endorsing a militant, right-wing, Hindu nationalist movement, the kind of thing that could alienate more Indian voters here than it might sway.

But where older migrants could be cynical about candidates wearing turbans and carnation garlands, newer arrivals might see politicians devouring dosa as a fond embrace of their lifestyle, says Western Sydney University cultural researcher Sukhmani Khorana.

Indian-Australians on the whole tend to be pragmatic voters, with no long-standing allegiance to the left or right. “One person will vote for infrastructure, another for the personality of their local MP,” says Khorana. “One wants action on recognition of overseas qualifications, another is more concerned about being able to sponsor parent migration.”

Twenty-five Indian-Australians ran for office in the May federal election, with the spread roughly balanced between Liberal and Labor (notwithstanding candidates for the Greens, One Nation and the United Australia Party).

A few were strategically deployed, the Liberals hoping that financial services professional Pradeep Pathi might draw on the migrant demography of the Sydney electorate of Greenway to upset Labor’s Michelle Rowland, and Labor hoping to do the same in the Victorian electorate of La Trobe, running unionist Abi Kumar against incumbent Liberal Jason Wood. Neither challenger was successful, and nationally there was just one Indian-origin winner, Labor MP Zaneta Mascarenhas from Western Australia.

Labor MP Zaneta Mascarenhas was the only successful Indian-Australian in May’s federal election.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Contrast that with the US, where Vice President Kamala Harris claims Indian ancestry, or the United Kingdom, where you have everyone from home secretary Priti Patel to leading Tory, former chancellor of the exchequer and current prime ministerial candidate Rishi Sunak. “Representation is a huge issue, but politicians here are often made,” notes Khorana. “The major parties work hard to pluck bright, young minds and groom them as policy wonks, before preselecting them as candidates – but that’s not really been consciously the case yet for people of colour.”

Greater Indian expertise within government would certainly be valuable. The bilateral Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA, which sounds like the Hindi word for “unity”) was signed in April, leading to predictions that trade between the two countries will almost double within five years. And as Australia India Institute chief executive Lisa Singh points out, the relationship can’t flourish without fluent communication.

“Indian culture is prolific and fun and almost every day is a festival, but there’s a lot more we could be doing with our diaspora.”

Singh, the former senator from Tasmania, runs her think-tank from a terrace house on the edge of the University of Melbourne campus. She declares the Indian diaspora one of “the biggest untapped economic assets” we possess. “We need to go beyond the Diwali stuff,” she says. “Indian culture is prolific and fun and almost every day is a festival, but there’s a lot more we could be doing with our diaspora. Unfortunately, there’s a lack of ‘India literacy’. Most people here don’t understand India beyond the three Cs – cricket, curry and Commonwealth.”

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Half of all Indian migrants here are Hindu, 18 per cent are Christian and 7 per cent Muslim, while 12 per cent are Sikh, the most visibly loud and proud group. Sikh Volunteers Australia recently rose to national prominence for their charitable work through bushfires, floods and the pandemic, delivering 271,000 free meals between early 2020 and late 2021. Their faith is instantly recognisable, the men often wearing a dastar to cover their long, uncut hair.

Western Bulldogs CEO Ameet Bains (left) with coach Luke Beveridge. Credit: Getty Images

Ameet Bains grew up in Bendigo, keeping his long hair tied in the patka topknot until he was seven. Now 44 and CEO of the Western Bulldogs AFL club, his hair is close-cropped, but he still wears the kara, an iron bracelet and Sikh symbol of God having no beginning or end. We meet in his office one morning as the team trains below. Bains says he never experienced racism growing up in rural Australia, but immersion in sport helped this assimilation. Not one Indian has played AFL at the highest level: how long until we see a Manpreet or Gagandeep on the field? “The only Indian I can recall was Balraj Singh,” he answers. “He was on the Adelaide Crows list for a year but never played a game.”

Indians are crazy about cricket, of course, but the only contact sport Bains can think of there is kabaddi, an indigenous game that’s half-wrestling, half-slapping, so perhaps safety is the issue holding parents back. He’s actively working on clinics in his club’s backyard – Melbourne’s expanding western suburbs – by tailoring Auskick hours and sending players into schools, but it’s slow-going. “If I’m catching a taxi and the driver is Indian, I always use it as an opportunity to ask about their background and practise the language, and I always ask, ‘Do you follow Aussie rules football?’ ” Bains says. “I’m batting at one out of 50. If you ask the corresponding question about cricket, it’s 49 out of 50.”

If blending Indian and Australian culture is the goal, examples do abound. India is obviously visible here through yoga and chai lattes and the proliferation of Indian temples and Indian grocers. The Indian wedding industry is booming. The Indian Film Festival of Melbourne begins this weekend, and is bigger than ever in its 13th year, welcoming special-guest Bollywood, Kollywood and Tollywood stars Vaani Kapoor and Tamannaah, but also former India cricket captain Kapil Dev, who today presents a screening of a new film – 83 – based on his team’s 1983 World Cup victory at Lords.

Indian Film Festival CEO Mitu Bhowmick Lange (centre): “We’re not going to stay in that multicultural box.”Credit: Penny Stephens

Mitu Bhowmick Lange, director of the festival, tells me I could look even further back, to Salaam Namaste, the 2005 film she helped produce only a few years after she arrived here, about two groovy young Indian students in Melbourne, living together – “Can you imagine?” – and the girl gets pregnant – “Can you imagine?” – before a big wedding scene filmed in Rye.

Bhowmick Lange, 48, followed her husband here “very resentfully and very reluctantly” but has created a company that distributes Indian movies. She engineered deals with cinema chains to show films that previously only screened in community rooms or university lecture halls. Her first release took $30,000, while the highest-grossing Indian film screened here recently brought in $3.6 million. 2022 is Indian film’s biggest year yet locally – taking $20 million at the box office, Hoyts alone screening 67 different titles – with four months left to go.

“When I got here, the only references to India were the Taj Mahal, Sachin Tendulkar, or butter chicken takeaway,” says Bhowmick Lange. “No one would say now that all Indians drive taxis or work at 7-Eleven. The community has a new confidence,” she says. “We’re not going to stay in that multicultural box.”

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