Indians in Turkey are a small community numbering 300 and comprising roughly 100 families.[1][2] Most of them work as doctors and computer engineers or employees in multinational corporations.[2] India also has a small business presence in Turkey through representative offices of Reliance Industries, Tata Motors and Indorama.
Most Indians are Hindu and the community forms the bulk of Hindus in Turkey. In recent times, there have been efforts to promote tourism and culture from India as a means of developing the community and establishing better relations with Turkish society.[2]
Ottoman Empire[]
Some Muslim Roma families in Istanbul who deny their Roma origins claim to be the descendants of Indian Muslim men who served at the medical team of the Red Crescent Society of India, led by Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari and Abdur Rahman Peshawari, to care wounded Ottoman soldiers during the Balkan War (1912-13).[3]
After the war, few of the Muslim Indian men from the medical team, didnt returned to India, but stayed in Istanbul and married Turkish women who were widows, whose descendants then married later each other and therefore they had the brown skin color, they call themselves Hintli[4]
