Drive south on Route 206 through Hillsborough on a Saturday morning and the township tells on itself. The strip plazas that once held a Moe’s and a string of nail salons now carry signs in Gujarati and Tamil, and the parking lot outside Patidar Supermarket fills with families loading sacks of basmati and atta into SUVs. The Indians in Hillsborough did not arrive with a single wave or a single story. They came in quietly, household by household, drawn by good schools and a short commute to the pharmaceutical labs of central New Jersey, until one of Somerset County’s old farming townships had quietly become one of the most Indian places in the state.
The Place
Hillsborough is a large, leafy township in the middle of Somerset County, chartered in 1771 and still partly rural at its edges. Its 54 square miles wrap around the village of Millstone and the 2,700 acres of Duke Farms, the former estate of tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke that opened to the public as a nature preserve in 2012.
For most of its history this was farm country, mills along the Millstone River and fields that General Washington crossed on his way from Princeton to winter quarters at Morristown. The suburban township arrived late, mostly after the 1980s, when developers turned the cornfields into cul-de-sacs.
Today roughly 47,000 people live here, with a median household income above $150,000 and a poverty rate under three percent. It is affluent, well graded, and increasingly Indian.
How It Became Indian
Hillsborough’s Indian story is inseparable from the chemistry of the land around it. The township sits at the western edge of one of the densest pharmaceutical and biotech corridors in the world, the stretch of central New Jersey running from New Brunswick down to Princeton that locals simply call the corridor.
The pharma and IT corridor
New Jersey is home to 14 of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies, and Somerset County holds the highest cluster of biopharma and medical-device specialisation in the state. The labs and corporate campuses of firms like those clustered around nearby Bridgewater needed chemists, statisticians, formulation scientists and data analysts, and from the 1990s onward a great many of those roles were filled by Indian professionals.
Somerset County markets itself today as a life-sciences hub and a talent hot spot for data scientists, and the description is not hollow. The county hosts the densest concentration of biopharma and medical-device expertise in New Jersey, and Indian-founded firms have planted flags in it: Biocon Biologics, the first Indian company to commercialise biosimilars in the United States, built its North American headquarters in neighbouring Bridgewater.
The same decades brought the technology economy. Indian software engineers and IT consultants, many arriving on H-1B visas to staff the banks and telecoms of north and central Jersey, settled wherever the schools were strong and the commute was bearable. Hillsborough, a half hour from the corridor and from the larger Indian centre at Edison, fit both tests. A young scientist or engineer could rent near work in their first years, then buy a house in Hillsborough once a family and a mortgage made the schools matter more than the nightlife.
The spillover from Edison and Bridgewater
Hillsborough did not build its Indian community from nothing. It grew it from the overflow of older, denser settlements nearby. Edison and neighbouring Iselin, with their Oak Tree Road sari shops and sweet houses, had been the gravitational centre of Indian New Jersey since the 1980s.
As those towns filled and aged, families that had made some money looked west and north for newer houses and larger lots. The Indians who built Edison into the heart of the diaspora sent the next generation outward, and a good share of it landed in Somerset County. Hillsborough, along with the Indian community in Bridgewater a few miles up Route 206, absorbed that movement of upwardly mobile households looking for elbow room and top-rated public schools.
Why the share grew so fast
The math compounded the way it always does in immigrant suburbs. A pharmaceutical scientist buys a house on a quiet Hillsborough street, and within a few years a cousin, a college roommate and two former colleagues have bought on the same side of town. Word of the school district travels through WhatsApp groups and temple parking lots.
By the 2020s the township’s Asian population had reached about 9,300 people, roughly 21 percent of all residents, the large majority of them of Indian origin. In a township that had been overwhelmingly white within living memory, that is a remarkable turn, and it happened in barely thirty years.
The change registered most clearly in the institution Indian families care about most. In 2023 the Hillsborough school board, responding to residents who wrote in and spoke up at meetings, added Diwali to the official school calendar as a day off, alongside Juneteenth. A district closing for the festival of lights is the surest sign that a community has arrived not as guests but as constituents.
The Landmarks
Patidar Supermarket, 649 Route 206, Hillsborough. The anchor of the township’s Indian grocery trade, part of a small New Jersey chain with sister stores in North Brunswick and East Windsor. The aisles run from forty kinds of dal to fresh paneer and a vegetable counter stocked with okra, bitter gourd and curry leaves, and on weekends it functions as much as a meeting place as a shop.
Mishta, 220 Triangle Road, Hillsborough. Opened in October 2024 in the New Village Center, Mishta bills itself as the only farm-to-table Indian restaurant in New Jersey. Chef Parthiv Buch, who trained in regional cooking in Bombay, sources produce and meat from five local Hillsborough farms and imports rare spices and Kashmiri saffron, building a menu that moves across India’s regions rather than settling on one.
Tarang Indian Restaurant, 438 Route 206, Hillsborough. A neighbourhood standby on the township’s main commercial spine, sharing a plaza with Indian grocers and serving the everyday North Indian dishes that families order on a Friday night when nobody wants to cook.
Panchhi Groceries, 438 Route 206 South, Hillsborough. A smaller, well-loved grocer in the same Route 206 cluster, the kind of shop where the owner knows which households are hosting a puja that week and what they will need for it.
Duke Farms, 1112 Dukes Parkway West, Hillsborough. Not an Indian institution, but the township’s green heart, and a place where the community has put down social roots. On warm weekends its meadows and tree-lined lanes fill with multigenerational Indian families walking after lunch, grandparents in tow.
BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham, Robbinsville. A half hour south sits the largest Hindu temple in the United States, the marble Akshardham completed in 2023 and carved entirely without steel. For Hillsborough’s Hindu families it is the destination for major festivals and family pilgrimages, the grand centre that the township’s smaller home pujas and weekend prayer groups orbit.
Hillsborough High School, 466 Raider Boulevard, Hillsborough. The reason many families chose the township in the first place. With roughly 2,400 students, a 96 percent graduation rate and a regular place in the state’s top high-school rankings, it is the school district that fills the WhatsApp groups and sells the houses.
Where They Came From
Hillsborough’s Indians do not trace to a single village or state the way some older diasporas do. They are a professional migration, and that shows in their geographic spread across India.
Gujaratis are heavily represented, visible in the Patidar and Panchhi grocery names and in the BAPS Swaminarayan tradition that draws families south to Robbinsville. So are South Indians, Tamil and Telugu speakers who came through the IT and pharmaceutical pipelines and whose presence shows in the regional restaurants opening along Route 206.
What they share is not a home region but a path: an engineering or science degree, often a graduate degree earned in the United States, and a job in the labs, hospitals, banks or software firms of central New Jersey. The chain that brought them ran through universities and employers rather than a single ancestral town.
That distinguishes Hillsborough from older immigrant suburbs built by a single province or caste. Here a Gujarati pharmacist might live two doors from a Telugu software architect and a Punjabi physician, their children in the same Hillsborough classrooms, their festivals overlapping rather than competing. The community’s institutions, from the grocers on Route 206 to the temple trips to Robbinsville, are pan-Indian by necessity, serving a population assembled from across the subcontinent.
Hillsborough Today
The township today is a comfortable, high-achieving suburb where Indian life has become ordinary rather than exotic. Diwali is a school holiday, the grocery plazas on Route 206 stock everything a Gujarati or Tamil kitchen needs, and cricket has quietly joined soccer on the township’s fields and in its parks.
It is not a Little India in the visual sense of Edison’s Oak Tree Road. Hillsborough wears its diaspora more quietly, spread across subdivisions and folded into a still largely suburban landscape. The Indian presence is in the school enrolment figures, the restaurant turnover and the weekend traffic at Patidar, more than in any single dense and signposted district.
That diffuseness is itself the point. Families came here precisely for the houses, the lots and the schools, and they have built a community that feels integrated into township life rather than set apart from it. For households still anchored in the Indian community of West Windsor and nearby Plainsboro to the south, Hillsborough is part of the same broad arc of Indian central Jersey, a region that now reaches from the Raritan to the edge of Princeton.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Hillsborough, New Jersey?
Hillsborough Township’s Asian population is roughly 9,300 people, about 21 percent of its 47,000 residents, and the large majority are of Indian origin. The Indians in Hillsborough have grown from a small minority to one of the township’s largest communities in roughly thirty years.
Why did so many Indian families move to Hillsborough?
The main draws were highly rated public schools, large affordable houses, and a short commute to the pharmaceutical and biotech labs of central New Jersey and the IT employers of the region. Many families also moved out from the older, denser Indian centres in Edison and Iselin in search of more space.
Where do Indians in Hillsborough shop for groceries?
The township’s Route 206 corridor holds several Indian grocers, including Patidar Supermarket at 649 Route 206 and Panchhi Groceries at 438 Route 206 South. They stock South Asian staples from dals and atta to fresh paneer and Indian vegetables.
Is there a Hindu temple near Hillsborough?
The largest Hindu temple in the United States, BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham, sits about half an hour south in Robbinsville and serves as a major destination for Hillsborough’s Hindu families during festivals. Many families also gather for home pujas and weekend prayer groups within the township.
Does Hillsborough celebrate Diwali?
Yes. In 2023 the Hillsborough Township school district added Diwali to its official calendar as a day off, responding to requests from residents, a clear marker of how established the Indians in Hillsborough have become.
How does Hillsborough relate to Edison and Bridgewater?
Hillsborough’s Indian community grew partly as an overflow from the older settlements in Edison and Iselin, and it sits a few miles down Route 206 from Bridgewater, which has its own substantial Indian population. Together they form part of the broad belt of Indian central New Jersey.
If your family’s story passed through Hillsborough, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a university lab bench or a software desk, to a quiet street near the top-rated schools off Route 206, to wherever you are now.