Indian Maltese

Indian Maltese
Total population
6,972 (2021)[1]
Languages
English · Maltese · Languages of India
Religion
Hinduism (50.42%), Christianity (40.53%), others (9.05%)[1]
Related ethnic groups
Sindhi diaspora
One side of a city street
Kingsway, Valletta, during the 1910s. The Pohoomull Brothers' store, founded in 1887, was the predecessor of other Indian Maltese businesses.

The Indian community in Malta (Maltese: Il-Komunità Indjana f’Malta), about 6,900 people in 2023, is just under 0.5 percent of the population of Malta. Some families have been living in Malta since the country was a Crown colony.

Malta has a small, established Sindhi trading community of about 45 families (200 people) of shop-keepers from Hyderabad, Sindh (in present-day Pakistan) rooted in a migration which began around 1887, when Malta and India were under British colonial rule. Malta was a stop along a trade route for the export of silk; Indian-made hand-loom clothing was sought after in Europe for several centuries. After the partition of India and due to Maltese immigration laws, Indian immigration to Malta was halted from 1952 to 1985.[2]

Since the 1990s, a wave of immigration from India to Malta has brought a community from Kerala. Indians in Malta work primarily in the health and hospitality sectors, and almost half are from Kerala.[3] Since 2017, Kerala Indians in Malta have celebrated the annual Onam festival.[4]

  1. ^ a b "Census of Population and Housing 2021 Final report: Religious Affiliation, pages 159-168" (PDF). nso.gov.mt. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 February 2023. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  2. ^ Falzon 2001, pp. 73–92
  3. ^ TVM
  4. ^ TVM Onam