Indian businesses and services in Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town's Indian community is much smaller than those of Durban or Johannesburg, and its history has two distinct strands. The first is very old: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch East India Company brought enslaved people to the Cape from India, among other places, and their descendants became part of the Cape's coloured and Cape Malay communities rather than a separate Indian one. The second began in the days of the Cape Colony, when Indian traders and other so-called passenger Indians, who had paid their own way, settled in the city and could own property and trade.

Rylands, on the Cape Flats beside Athlone, and the neighbouring commercial area of Gatesville, both part of greater Athlone, are the centre of the community today. The main roads have mosques, Hindu temples, schools, sweet shops and grocers selling spices, pickles and Indian groceries, and the area is the most reliable place in the city to find them in one trip.

Hindu temples and cultural organisations keep the festival calendar going, and Diwali is celebrated in temples, homes and at community events. Indian families also live in many suburbs across the metro, and newer arrivals from India, working in technology, medicine and business, tend to settle closer to their workplaces rather than in Rylands. Because public transport across the Cape Flats is limited, most people drive to Rylands from other parts of the city.