On the third Saturday of most Octobers, the children of Lexington’s software engineers and research scientists gather in Cary Memorial Hall, a few hundred metres from the green where the American Revolution began, and dance to Bollywood playback under stage lights. The Indians in Lexington, Massachusetts have made one of the most storied small towns in the United States into something its eighteenth century militiamen could not have pictured: a place where Diwali shares the civic calendar with Patriots’ Day. This is the story of how a Revolutionary battleground became home to thousands of Indian families, and what they built there.
The Place
Lexington sits about eleven miles north west of Boston, just inside the ring of Route 128, the highway that gave America’s first technology corridor its name. It is a town of roughly 34,000 people, leafy and expensive, with colonial saltboxes and mid century moderns spread across wooded lots.
Its fame is older than the country. On 19 April 1775, British regulars and colonial militia exchanged the first shots of the Revolutionary War on Lexington Battle Green, where Captain John Parker is remembered for telling his men to stand their ground. The town has called itself the Birthplace of American Liberty ever since.
What draws families today is less the history than the schools and the jobs. Lexington’s public high school is consistently ranked among the very best in Massachusetts, and the town sits within easy reach of Cambridge’s laboratories, the biotech cluster along Route 128, and the federal research campus that anchors its own north western edge.
How It Became Indian
For most of its existence Lexington was a farming community, an agricultural town of a few hundred families in the late eighteenth century. The transformation into a wealthy bedroom suburb came with the railroad and then the automobile, as Boston professionals moved out along the commuter lines. By the second half of the twentieth century it was prosperous, well educated and overwhelmingly white.
The Indian story begins, as so many Indian American stories do, with engineers and scientists following the work.
The Lincoln Laboratory pull
On the western edge of town, on Wood Street, MIT operates Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development centre that employs thousands of scientists and engineers working on radar, communications, space systems and cyber security. In fiscal year 2024 roughly 4,500 staff worked there.
A research campus of that size, devoted to advanced engineering and physics, was always going to draw the graduate students and PhDs who began arriving from India in growing numbers after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reopened the country to skilled migrants from Asia. Some came directly to Lincoln Laboratory. Many more came to the wider Route 128 economy, to the software and defence and instrumentation companies that clustered along the highway, and chose Lexington for the same reason their American colleagues did: the schools.
The slow turn of the 1990s and 2000s
In 1990 Asian residents made up only around six and a half per cent of Lexington’s population. That figure climbed steadily through the technology booms of the 1990s and 2000s, as the Boston area’s Asian population grew faster than almost any other group in the region.
The arrivals were disproportionately professional. Indian Americans nationally are among the most highly educated groups in the country, the large majority holding at least a bachelor’s degree, and the families who could afford Lexington’s house prices were doctors at the Boston teaching hospitals, professors at the universities, and engineers and managers in the technology and biotech firms ringing the city.
A community organises
As the numbers grew, the families began to build institutions. Indian Americans of Lexington, known locally as IAL, became the central body, running cultural programming, education and senior services, a town liaison committee and library partnerships, and above all the annual Diwali celebration that now fills Cary Memorial Hall.
By the 2024 Diwali, eighteen separate performance groups took the stage, from elementary school children to high school Bollywood dancers, and the audience included the superintendent of schools, members of the Select Board, the police, and representatives of the Chinese American Association of Lexington. The festival had become a civic event, not a private one.
The Landmarks
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 244 Wood Street. The federally funded research centre on Lexington’s western edge is, in a sense, the reason much of this community is here. Its thousands of engineers and physicists working on radar and space and cyber systems helped seed the flow of Indian scientific talent into the town, and it remains one of the region’s marquee employers.
Lexington High School. The town’s single public high school is regularly ranked among the top three in Massachusetts, with the great majority of its students scoring proficient or better on state assessments in English, mathematics and science. For many Indian families it is the whole reason for the address, and its hallways and clubs are where the second generation grows up.
Clay Oven, 1666 Massachusetts Avenue. A casual upscale Indian restaurant in the heart of Lexington Center, opened in 2019 by Vinod and Shikha Kapoor with their son Sorabh and his wife Anuradha. The Kapoor family had spent decades in the Boston area restaurant trade, and Clay Oven, with its northern and regional dishes given a modern turn, has become a fixture of the town centre.
Spirit of India, 321 Marrett Road. A neighbourhood Indian kitchen on the southern side of town, serving the families and commuters around Marrett Road. It is the kind of everyday restaurant, open through the day, that signals a community has put down roots rather than merely passed through.
Cary Memorial Hall. The town’s grand 1928 auditorium on Massachusetts Avenue is where IAL stages its Diwali festival each autumn, eighteen performance groups deep, and where the Festival of Lights has become part of the civic calendar of the Birthplace of American Liberty.
Lexington Battle Green, Massachusetts Avenue. The triangular common where the Revolution began, marked by the Minuteman statue unveiled in 1900 and by the boulder bearing Captain Parker’s words. It is the symbolic heart of the town, and the backdrop against which today’s residents, Indian families among them, raise their children.
Patel Brothers, Burlington. The nearest branch of the national Indian grocery chain sits just over the line in neighbouring Burlington, on the Cambridge Street commercial strip, alongside several other South Asian grocers. Lexington itself, zoned tightly residential, sends its families a few minutes north for atta, dal and fresh produce.
Where They Came From
The Indians of Lexington are not drawn from a single region of the subcontinent in the way some American Indian enclaves are. Because the community was built on professional migration rather than chain migration through one village or city, it is broad: families with roots in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab and Bengal all live within the same school district.
That breadth shows in the Diwali programme, where the eighteen performance groups deliberately showcase classical forms such as Bharatanatyam and Kathak alongside regional folk dances and Bollywood numbers. The festival is widely embraced across faiths, by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and others, reflecting the many identities inside the town’s Indian population.
What the families share is less a place of origin than a path: an advanced degree, often in engineering, medicine or the sciences, and a job in the Boston knowledge economy that made a Lexington mortgage and a Lexington school district possible.
Lexington Today
Today Asian residents make up roughly a third of Lexington’s population, the second largest group after white residents and a share that rose by something like seventy per cent over the decade to the early 2020s. Indians are the fastest growing part of that Asian population, and the town’s character has shifted accordingly without ever ceasing to be Lexington.
The colonial centre still looks the part, white clapboard and the green and the Minuteman, but on an October weekend the marquee on Cary Hall reads Diwali, and Lexington Center now hosts its own Festival of Lights events to draw shoppers to the local restaurants and retailers. The two histories sit beside each other without friction.
It is not a frictionless paradise. Lexington is expensive, intensely competitive academically, and the pressure of its schools is a recurring subject of local conversation. But for the Indian families who have made it home, the bargain is clear, and it is the same one that drew them: the work is nearby, the schools are among the best in the state, and the community they built, IAL and Clay Oven and the Diwali stage, means their children can be wholly American and wholly Indian on the same patch of historic ground.
If you want to understand how Indian families spread across America’s best school districts, Lexington belongs in a wider map. The same pattern, top schools and technology jobs drawing Indian professionals, repeats in McLean, Virginia, in Montgomery, New Jersey, in Chanhassen, Minnesota, and in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Closer to home, the same affluent Boston suburbs have drawn other communities, from the Armenians of Belmont to the Chinese families of Wellesley.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Lexington, Massachusetts?
Lexington has a total population of around 34,000, of whom roughly a third are Asian, more than 10,000 residents. Indians are the fastest growing part of that Asian population, though the US Census does not publish an exact standalone figure for Indians in the town. The Indians in Lexington, Massachusetts number in the thousands.
Why did so many Indian families move to Lexington?
Two things drew them: jobs and schools. Lexington sits inside the Route 128 technology corridor and is home to MIT Lincoln Laboratory, while Boston’s universities, hospitals and biotech firms are a short drive away. Combined with one of the top ranked public school systems in Massachusetts, it became a natural destination for Indian professionals.
Is there an Indian community organisation in Lexington?
Yes. Indian Americans of Lexington, known as IAL, is the main body. It runs cultural programming, education and senior services, town liaison work and the town’s large annual Diwali celebration, and it partners with the local government and library.
Where do the Indians in Lexington, Massachusetts celebrate Diwali?
The main Diwali festival is held at Cary Memorial Hall on Massachusetts Avenue, organised by Indian Americans of Lexington. The 2024 celebration featured eighteen performance groups, and the town centre now hosts its own Festival of Lights events as well.
Where can you find Indian food and groceries near Lexington?
In Lexington itself, restaurants such as Clay Oven on Massachusetts Avenue and Spirit of India on Marrett Road serve the community. For groceries, families head a few minutes north to Burlington, where Patel Brothers and several other South Asian grocers sit along Cambridge Street.
How good are Lexington’s schools?
Very good. Lexington High School is regularly ranked among the top three public high schools in Massachusetts, with the large majority of students scoring proficient or better on state assessments. The strength of the schools is one of the central reasons Indian families choose the town.
If your family’s story passed through Lexington, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a graduate degree and a job along Route 128, to a house in the best school district you could reach, to wherever you are now.