Drive north on Interstate 270 out of Washington and the office parks start to thicken into a skyline of glass and lab space. This is the biotech corridor, and at its upper reach sits Germantown, a planned suburb that filled in from farmland inside a single generation. The Indians in Germantown, Maryland arrived with that build-out, and today their presence is woven through its grocery aisles, its temple calendars and its crowded science classrooms.
The Place
Germantown lies in upper Montgomery County, about thirty miles northwest of the capital, strung along the I-270 corridor that locals still call the Technology Corridor. It is the third-most populous community in Maryland, home to roughly 91,000 people, and it grew almost entirely after 1980.
The town is one of the most ethnically balanced places in the country. In 2024 the personal-finance site WalletHub ranked Germantown the most ethnically diverse city in the United States, with its residents split close to evenly between white, Black, Hispanic and Asian populations, a finding reported by WTOP.
That Asian share, just above a fifth of the town, carries a large and rising Indian component. It is a community defined less by a single high street than by a corridor: the stretch of Wisteria Drive, the temples a short drive west, the schools that draw families up from Rockville and Gaithersburg.
How It Became Indian
To understand why Indian families settled here, you have to understand that Germantown is a town that was, in effect, willed into being. For most of its history it was a crossroads village.
From a German crossroads to a railroad town
The name is older than the suburb. German immigrants opened shops at the intersection of Liberty Mill Road and Clopper Road in the 1830s and 1840s, though, as town histories note, most of the surrounding land was farmed by families of English and Scottish descent. The settlement stayed small and rural for over a century.
The first great change came with the railroad. When the Baltimore and Ohio completed its Metropolitan Branch through Montgomery County in 1873, Germantown’s businesses migrated a mile east to sit beside the tracks, and the village became a railroad town. Even so, by 1980 fewer than 10,000 people lived there.
The master plan and the corridor
What transformed Germantown was a planner’s blueprint. Montgomery County adopted a Germantown Master Plan in 1967, and an amended 1974 version laid out a downtown and six self-contained villages, each with its own schools and shopping centres. A new sewer line, finished in 1974, unlocked the land.
The growth that followed was astonishing. The population leapt from 9,721 in 1980 to more than 41,000 by 1990, and to over 91,000 by 2020. Germantown was building houses at the exact moment that a new kind of employer was filling the corridor below it.
DNA Alley and the H-1B generation
That employer was science. The I-270 corridor, once nicknamed DNA Alley, became one of the country’s densest clusters of biotechnology, federal research and information technology. The National Institute of Standards and Technology sits at Gaithersburg, the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research is headquartered in Germantown itself, and biotech firms such as Qiagen North America, along with Hughes Network Systems, anchor the local economy.
These were precisely the jobs that drew Indian professionals to America from the 1990s onward. Software engineers, biologists, pharmacists, data scientists and federal contractors moved to the corridor on H-1B visas and green cards, and many wanted to live near work in safe, well-schooled neighbourhoods.
Germantown offered newer and more affordable housing than the older suburbs of Rockville, North Potomac and Bethesda further south. A family priced out of Potomac could buy a townhouse or a single-family home in Germantown or, later, in neighbouring Clarksburg, and still be a short commute from the labs. The Indians who put down roots in the newer subdivisions of Clarksburg are very often the children and colleagues of the families who arrived in Germantown first.
Chain migration up the corridor
What began as individual hires became a chain. A cousin sponsored a cousin, a colleague recommended a school district, a new arrival rented near someone from the same home state. The pattern echoed what happened in other Indian engineering hubs, from the data-centre suburbs of Ashburn across the river in Virginia to the older tech enclave of Herndon.
By the 2010s the community had reached the size where it could sustain its own infrastructure. Grocers stocked the lentils and spice mixes that families wanted, restaurants opened to feed them, and cultural and temple associations gave the calendar its festivals. The corridor had grown an Indian backbone.
Diwali became a fixture of the autumn, marked in homes, in rented halls and in the cultural programmes of the Telugu and pan-Indian associations. Cricket, too, found a foothold, with corridor players turning out on county fields through the warmer months. These were the small, repeated acts that turn a cluster of co-workers into a community with its own rhythm.
The Landmarks
India Bazaar, 13097 Wisteria Drive. The anchor of Indian Germantown is a grocery store. India Bazaar stocks dals and basmati, fresh and mixed masala spices, frozen snacks, pickles and puja items, the everyday supplies that make a kitchen feel like home. On weekends its aisles fill with families stocking up for the week, and its noticeboard often carries the first word of a new cultural event.
Curry Place, 12951 Wisteria Drive. A few doors along the same drive, Curry Place serves North Indian, Nepalese and Indo-Chinese food, the curries and kababs that have made it a neighbourhood fixture. Its presence beside the grocery store has turned this short stretch of Wisteria Drive into the closest thing Germantown has to a desi high street.
Sri Bhaktha Anjaneya Temple, 4143 Ayodhya Way, Ijamsville. Founded in 1999 and dedicated to Lord Hanuman, this temple sits just up the road in Frederick County and serves worshippers from across the upper corridor, Germantown families very much among them. Its festival days and weekend pujas draw devotees who might otherwise drive far further for darshan.
Dosa & Chaat, in nearby Gaithersburg. For South Indian families, the corridor’s dosa and chaat houses are a fixed point. Dosa & Chaat, a short drive south, turns out crisp masala dosas, idli, vada and street snacks for the Tamil, Telugu and Kannada households scattered through Germantown and Gaithersburg.
Kaveri South Indian Restaurant, Gaithersburg. Kaveri is the place families name when they want Hyderabadi biryani, kebabs and a proper South Indian thali, and its unlimited dosa nights have become a small local institution. It draws heavily on the Telugu-speaking professionals who form one of the corridor’s largest Indian sub-communities.
Northwest High School, Germantown. The town’s flagship public high school is one of the reasons families move here. Roughly a fifth of its students are Asian, many of them the children of corridor scientists and engineers, and its strong results in a county already known for its schools make it a magnet within a magnet.
Capitol Area Telugu Society. Formed in 2005 to promote Telugu culture across the Washington metro area, CATS is one of several associations, alongside the Telugu Association of Maryland, that organise the festivals, sports days and charity drives that bind the community together across the upper county.
Where They Came From
Germantown’s Indians are not drawn evenly from across the subcontinent. The corridor’s hiring pattern, weighted toward software and the life sciences, pulled hardest on the regions that send the most engineers and technologists abroad.
The Telugu-speaking states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are heavily represented, which is why the area supports two large Telugu associations and a string of South Indian restaurants. Hyderabad, India’s own biotech and IT hub, has a natural affinity with a corridor built on the same industries.
Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala add to the southern weighting, while Gujarati, Punjabi and Hindi-speaking families from the north round out the mix. Maryland as a whole reflects this scale: India is the second-largest source of the state’s foreign-born residents, after El Salvador, with roughly 62,000 India-born people statewide.
Germantown Today
Germantown today is a working suburb rather than a showcase enclave. There is no ornate gateway or single Indian shopping plaza of the kind found in older communities like the Indian heart of Edison, New Jersey. The community here is dispersed through townhouse clusters and single-family streets, surfacing most visibly at the grocery store, the temple and the school.
That dispersal is partly a function of newness and partly a function of the corridor itself. Indian families in Germantown live among, and not apart from, the town’s striking diversity. The same villages hold Salvadoran, Ethiopian, Chinese and Nigerian neighbours, and the public schools are among the most mixed in the nation.
The centre of gravity is also shifting north. As Germantown has filled in, newer Indian arrivals have pushed up into Clarksburg, while established families maintain ties to the older suburbs of Rockville and North Potomac. The corridor functions as one connected Indian geography, from the immigrant communities of Rockville at its base to Germantown and Clarksburg at its head. What holds it together is not a single neighbourhood but a shared dependence on the science and technology that built the corridor in the first place.
For the families themselves, that is the quiet appeal of the place. Germantown asks nothing of them in the way of assimilation pressure, because nearly everyone here arrived recently from somewhere. A child can grow up eating dosas on a Sunday, sitting national exams at one of the country’s stronger high schools and counting Salvadoran and Nigerian friends as easily as Telugu ones. That ordinary, unremarked belonging is, in its way, the whole point.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Germantown, Maryland?
Germantown does not publish a standalone Indian population figure, but Asian residents make up just above a fifth of its roughly 91,000 people, and Indians form a large and growing part of that share. Statewide, India is the second-largest source of Maryland’s foreign-born residents, with about 62,000 India-born people.
Why did so many Indians settle in Germantown?
The Indians in Germantown, Maryland came largely for work in the I-270 biotechnology, federal research and information-technology corridor. Germantown offered newer, more affordable housing near those jobs than the older suburbs further south, which drew engineers, scientists and pharmacists from the 1990s onward.
Where do Indian families in Germantown shop for groceries?
The main anchor is India Bazaar at 13097 Wisteria Drive, which stocks dals, basmati rice, fresh and mixed spices, frozen foods and puja items. Other Indian and South Asian grocers operate across the Germantown and Gaithersburg corridor.
Is there a Hindu temple near Germantown?
Yes. Sri Bhaktha Anjaneya Temple, dedicated to Lord Hanuman and founded in 1999, sits a short drive west at 4143 Ayodhya Way in Ijamsville, and serves families across the upper corridor. The broader Washington area also offers many other Hindu temples within reach.
What Indian food can you find in Germantown?
Curry Place on Wisteria Drive serves North Indian, Nepalese and Indo-Chinese dishes, while nearby Gaithersburg adds South Indian specialists such as Dosa & Chaat and Kaveri, known for dosas, biryani and thalis. The Telugu, Tamil and North Indian communities all have their favourites.
Are Germantown’s schools good for Indian families?
Yes, which is a major draw. Northwest High School in Germantown, where roughly a fifth of students are Asian, posts strong results within Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the most highly regarded districts in Maryland.
If your family’s story passed through Germantown, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a software job advertised in Hyderabad to a townhouse off Wisteria Drive, to wherever you are now.