On a Thursday evening on Old Montgomery Road, the sound of a Sai Baba bhajan drifts out of a borrowed hall, and a few miles west, the office at a Swaminarayan mandir on Centennial Lane fills up after a long workday of code reviews and contract deadlines. The Indians in Ellicott City have not built their world on the famous granite Main Street downtown. They have built it in the subdivisions above it, in the strip-mall supermarkets, and in the highest-rated classrooms in Maryland, knitting an old mill town into one of the densest concentrations of South Asian professional life on the corridor between Washington and Baltimore.
The Place
Ellicott City sits in the heart of Howard County, almost exactly midway between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, which is the single fact that explains nearly everything about it. The historic core, founded in 1772 as Ellicott’s Mills by three Quaker brothers from Pennsylvania, is a steep, stone, flood-prone street of antique shops and the first terminus of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad outside Baltimore.
But the Ellicott City that Indian families know is the sprawling census-designated place that fans out west and north of that gorge, full of 1990s and 2000s subdivisions, county schools, and shopping plazas along Route 40 and Baltimore National Pike. It is consistently among the most affluent and best-educated communities in the state.
By the most recent counts, Ellicott City’s population is roughly 30 per cent Asian, and that share has been rising sharply, driven above all by Indian arrivals.
How It Became Indian
For a long time the Asian story of Ellicott City was a Korean one. The plazas along Route 40 earned the area an informal reputation as Howard County’s Koreatown, anchored by Korean churches, groceries, and the H Mart and Lotte supermarkets that still trade there. The Indian presence, when this century began, was a minority within a minority.
That has flipped, and quickly.
The contractor corridor, 1990s to 2000s
The first sustained wave of Indian settlement in Howard County rode the region’s defining industry: government and the contractors who feed it. Ellicott City’s location, almost equidistant from the federal agencies of the capital and the institutions of Baltimore, made it ideal for engineers and analysts holding security-adjacent jobs with defence and IT contractors.
Many arrived on H-1B skilled-worker visas during the post-2000 technology boom, working in software, systems engineering, and the biotech and health corridors that thread through the Baltimore-Washington region. They chose Howard County, again and again, for the same two reasons: the commute reached employers in both directions, and the public schools were among the best in America.
The turn of the tracts, 2009 to today
The change is visible in the census numbers, not just in anecdote. Across Howard County, the Indian population has more than doubled since 2009 and now makes up around 6.7 per cent of all residents, the largest Asian group in the county.
The sharpest shifts are in the tracts wrapped around Ellicott City. In one tract just north of the town, the Indian share rose from 5.7 per cent to 24.8 per cent over roughly fifteen years, while the Korean share fell from 10.9 per cent to about 4 per cent. The Chinese population doubled too, but the headline of the last decade has been Indian.
Rakesh Patel, who has lived in Ellicott City for more than a decade, has watched the increase arrive in yearly increments: new neighbours, new faces at the grocery, new families at the festival. Some came directly from India on work visas. Others, like Aanal Patel, who moved up from Atlanta in 2022, relocated from established Indian-American hubs precisely because Ellicott City offered the schools, the housing, and the grocery shelves they wanted without the price tags of the bigger metros.
Religious persecution and refuge
Not every story is a tech-recruiter story. Swapna Raina fled the Kashmir Valley in 1989 amid the religious persecution that drove out the region’s Hindu Pandit community, and she has now lived in Howard County for more than twenty years. She serves on the board of the Indian Cultural Association, volunteers at food drives, and runs mental-health workshops, a reminder that the community gathering on Route 40 carries histories far heavier than a relocation package.
Institutions follow people
As families clustered, institutions followed. The Indian Cultural Association of Howard County, led by president Sanjay Srivastava, grew from a cultural club into a civic force. Since 2020 it has distributed some 3.5 million pounds of food across the county, and its annual Festival of India, held at the Howard County Fairgrounds, now draws more than 20,000 visitors, roughly a third of them non-Indian, and has been voted the county’s best festival three years running in the Baltimore Sun’s reader poll.
Temples arrived to match. A Swaminarayan mandir took root on Centennial Lane, a Shirdi Sai congregation established itself nearby, and Indian groceries opened along the same plazas that once defined the Korean corridor. The Koreatown nickname stuck to the signage, but the customers and the shelves told a different, newer story.
The Landmarks
Haridham MD Hindu Swaminarayan Mandir, 3589 Centennial Lane, Ellicott City. Run by the Yogi Divine Society of Maryland, this Swaminarayan congregation gathers chiefly on Sundays, its hall filling through the afternoon and into the evening. For many Gujarati families on the west side of town it is the anchor of the religious week, a place to bring children for assembly and elders for darshan.
Sri Shirdi Sai Mandir of Maryland, Columbia. Founded in 2018 by a group of trustees working to build a permanent home in Howard County, this Sai Baba congregation has held its Thursday bhajans and aarti at borrowed halls near Ellicott City, most recently moving to a new Columbia address as it grows. Its annadhanam, the free serving of blessed food, keeps the doors open to anyone who walks in.
Triveni Supermarket, 8450 Baltimore National Pike, Ellicott City. One of the community’s busiest South Asian groceries, its aisles stocked for cooks from Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh alike. A cashier here, Samhidhaa Badam, has noted that her regulars come mainly from those two states, a quiet census of who actually lives in the surrounding subdivisions.
Ganesh Groceries, 8000 Locust Mill Street, Ellicott City. A neighbourhood Indian grocer on Rogers Avenue that does more than sell lentils and spices. It has hosted Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in its own car park, the kind of street-level festival that turns a shop into a gathering place.
Lotte Plaza Market and the Route 40 plazas. The Korean-anchored supermarkets that gave the corridor its nickname now serve an Indian clientele too. Inside one Lotte plaza nearby, Sagir Kazi runs Biryani and Bakers, a sign of how the food map of the area has been redrawn dum biryani by dum biryani.
Howard County Fairgrounds, West Friendship. Just west of Ellicott City, the fairgrounds host the Indian Cultural Association’s Festival of India each year. For one weekend the rural showground fills with more than 500 performers, classical and folk and Bollywood dance, dhol tasha drumming, and food stalls, drawing over 20,000 people from across the region.
Marriotts Ridge, River Hill, and Centennial High Schools. The trio of Howard County high schools that families chase. River Hill, Centennial, and Marriotts Ridge rank among the very top public high schools in Maryland year after year, and their attendance maps are, in effect, the real estate map that brought many Indian families to Ellicott City in the first place.
Where They Came From
The origins are visible in the grocery baskets and the temple calendars. The two dominant streams into Ellicott City are Gujarati and Telugu, the latter from Andhra Pradesh and the wider Telugu-speaking south, with Tamil and other South Indian families woven through. The Swaminarayan mandir signals a strong Gujarati presence, while the Sai and Telugu networks reflect the Andhra and broader Deccan migration.
Most came for work in the knowledge economy: software and IT contracting, biotech and pharma, federal and defence-adjacent engineering. That occupational profile, more than any single home region, is what binds the community, and it is why the migration tracked the H-1B era so closely.
There is also the Kashmiri Pandit thread, smaller but historically weighty, of families like Swapna Raina’s who left the Valley under duress rather than for a job offer. Ellicott City, for them, was less a career move than a place to start over.
Ellicott City Today
Today the Indian community of Ellicott City is large enough to be ordinary, which is its own kind of arrival. A child can attend a top-ranked county school, pick up groceries for a Gujarati or Andhra kitchen on the way home, and spend the weekend at a mandir or the fairgrounds festival, all within a few miles, all in a town that still markets its 1772 granite Main Street to weekend antiquing tourists.
It is worth naming what this is not. This is not the Korean Ellicott City, even if the two share the same plazas and the same nickname on old signs. The Korean community built the corridor’s reputation, and it remains real, with its churches and groceries intact. The Indian community has grown up alongside and now around it, distinct in its temples, its festivals, and its origin states, sharing the geography without merging the story.
For more on the wider arc of Indian settlement across Maryland’s affluent suburbs, see Atlas of Home’s pieces on the Indians in Fulton, the Indians in Clarksburg, the Indians in North Potomac, and the Indians in Germantown, neighbouring chapters of the same corridor migration. For the community whose plazas the Indian arrivals inherited, see the Koreans in Ellicott City. The county’s own demographic record, tracked through the U.S. Census, sits behind all of it. (Census QuickFacts; Ellicott City history.)
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Indian community in Ellicott City, Maryland?
Ellicott City is around 30 per cent Asian, and the Indian share is rising fast. Across Howard County, where Ellicott City sits, the Indian population has more than doubled since 2009 to roughly 6.7 per cent, now the largest Asian group in the county. In some tracts around Ellicott City the Indian share has climbed toward a quarter of all residents.
Why did so many Indian families settle in Ellicott City?
Two reasons dominate. Ellicott City lies almost exactly between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, which suits engineers and analysts working for government and IT contractors in either direction. And its public schools rank among the best in Maryland, a powerful draw for the professional families who form the core of the Indians in Ellicott City.
Is Ellicott City the same as Howard County’s Koreatown?
They overlap geographically but are not the same community. The Route 40 plazas earned a Koreatown reputation decades ago, and Korean churches and supermarkets remain. The Indian community grew up alongside and around that corridor, and over the past fifteen years it has become the larger and faster-growing Asian group in the area.
Where do the Indians in Ellicott City worship?
Religious life centres on temples such as the Haridham Swaminarayan Mandir on Centennial Lane, which serves Gujarati families, and the Shirdi Sai Mandir of Maryland, which gathers nearby for Thursday bhajans. Several other Hindu congregations and groups across Howard County round out the picture.
Which regions of India do most families come from?
The two dominant streams are Gujarati and Telugu, the latter from Andhra Pradesh and the wider Telugu-speaking south, with Tamil and other South Indian families also present. Grocery owners along Route 40 report that their customers come mainly from Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh.
What is the biggest Indian cultural event near Ellicott City?
The Festival of India, hosted by the Indian Cultural Association of Howard County at the Howard County Fairgrounds in nearby West Friendship. The free two-day event draws more than 20,000 visitors, about a third of them non-Indian, and has been voted the county’s best festival three years running.
If your family’s story passed through Ellicott City, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Gujarat or a town in Andhra Pradesh, to a subdivision above the old mill on the Patapsco, to wherever you are now.