On a Saturday morning along Route 9 in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, the queue outside Patel Brothers can spill toward the road, and the air near the doors carries cumin and frying ghee. The Indians in Shrewsbury did not arrive all at once. They came as hospital residents and graduate students, then as software engineers and biomedical researchers, and over four decades they turned a quiet Worcester suburb into one of the largest centres of Indian American life in New England.
The Place
Shrewsbury sits just east of Worcester, across Lake Quinsigamond, about ten minutes from the city’s downtown and roughly forty-five minutes west of Boston. It was named after Shrewsbury in England, first settled in 1722 and incorporated in 1727.
Unusually for a New England town, it was never a mill village or a strict farming community. It grew from the start as a suburb of Worcester, a place of apple orchards, taverns and lakeside leisure, later filling in with single-family streets as streetcar lines pushed out from the city.
Today it is affluent and academic in temperament, with a median household income of about 136,000 dollars, well above the Massachusetts figure. That comfort, and the schools that come with it, is a large part of why so many Indian families chose this particular town. It is a pattern repeated across affluent Massachusetts suburbs, from the Chinese community in Wellesley to the Armenians of Belmont.
How It Became Indian
The story of the Indians in Shrewsbury begins not in Shrewsbury at all, but in the hospitals of neighbouring Worcester.
The doctors came first
In the late 1960s and 1970s, American hospitals were short of physicians, and the medical schools of India were producing more graduates than the subcontinent could place. Worcester, with Worcester City Hospital and St. Vincent Hospital, became a landing point for young Indian doctors arriving to complete residencies.
Dr. Sahdev Passey, a later president of the India Society of Worcester, was one of them. He arrived in 1973 as a hospital resident, part of a small cohort of physicians who would put down roots in the towns ringing the city. Many of them settled in Shrewsbury, drawn by its quiet and its schools, and they formed the nucleus of everything that followed. It is a familiar arc in the story of Indian America, the same medical-then-technical sequence that built communities as far afield as Chanhassen, Minnesota and Saratoga Springs, Utah.
The society that held it together
Even before the suburb filled with Indian families, there was an institution waiting for them. The India Society of Worcester had been founded in 1963, originally to support homesick Indian students far from home.
As the doctors and their families arrived, the society became the social spine of the community. It organised festivals, language classes and gatherings that let scattered households find one another across central Massachusetts. Over time its membership climbed past a thousand, and it eventually built a large centre on Main Street in Shrewsbury, a permanent home for a community that had begun as a handful of lonely students.
The tech boom and the second wave
The second migration arrived in the 1980s and accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s. This wave was not medical but technical, drawn by the corridor of technology firms and research labs stretching along Route 128 toward Boston, and by the biomedical and academic institutions clustered around Worcester.
Indian engineers, researchers and analysts chose Shrewsbury for the same reasons the doctors had: proximity to the jobs, and the reputation of the public schools. Shrewsbury offered a middle ground that suited skilled migrants on H-1B visas and green cards, close enough to the eastern labs and tech firms to commute, far enough west to buy a single-family house on a teacher’s-favourite school district. Word travelled along professional and family networks, and each arriving household made the next one more likely.
The arithmetic of that choice shows up plainly in the census. Between 2000 and 2010, the Indian population of Shrewsbury rose by 173 percent.
By the early 2010s the town counted 3,137 residents of Indian origin, nearly nine percent of its population, ranking it third in Massachusetts behind only Boston and Cambridge. Counted together with neighbouring Westborough, more than five thousand Indian Americans had made the two towns home, one of the densest Indian communities in the state. The pattern echoes Indian suburbs elsewhere on the East Coast, from the Indians of Montgomery, New Jersey to the community in Wake Forest, North Carolina.
A community that became visible
For years the Indian presence in Shrewsbury was largely domestic, lived inside houses and at the India Society’s events. By the 2010s it had become visible on the streets.
Grocers and restaurants opened along Route 9. Indian salons appeared in the strip plazas. In the summer of 2012, residents Saqib Syed and Fazal Alam helped establish the town’s first proper cricket pitch on municipal land, funded through private donations, and Shrewsbury played its first full cricket season. A community that had arrived to work in laboratories and clinics was now reshaping how the town spent its weekends.
The Landmarks
India Society of Worcester, 152 Main Street. The cultural anchor of the community and one of the oldest Indian organisations in New England, founded in 1963. Its centre in Shrewsbury hosts festivals and runs a parent-led cultural school that teaches several Indian languages, an elder support group, and a weekly free health clinic for the uninsured, a quiet echo of the community’s medical origins.
Patel Brothers, 504 Boston Turnpike. A branch of the country’s largest Indian grocery chain, and the busiest Indian address in town. It became so popular that the owners reportedly had to move one of its entrances farther back from Route 9 to manage the traffic. On weekends it functions as much as a meeting place as a shop.
Bollywood Grill, 97 Boston Turnpike. A long-running Indian restaurant in the Quinsigamond Plaza on Route 9, known for tandoor cooking and live dosa service. It is the kind of place that fills with families after temple events and with engineers on weeknights, a fixture of the corridor’s Indian dining.
Eggholic, 378 Maple Avenue. A newer arrival specialising in Indian street food, particularly the egg and vegetarian dishes of Gujarat and Mumbai’s roadside stalls. Its presence signals a community confident enough to support not just full-service restaurants but the specialised, regional cravings of home.
India Market, Route 9. A large Indian grocer with a cafeteria counter, the kind of one-stop shop where families pick up rice and lentils and leave with a hot lunch. It is part of the cluster of South Asian retail that has made this stretch of the Boston Turnpike a regional draw.
Lake Quinsigamond. The long, narrow lake between Shrewsbury and Worcester that gave the town its lakeside character long before the Indian community arrived. Today its shoreline parks and walking paths are as likely to host an Indian family picnic on a summer evening as any other gathering in town.
Where They Came From
The Indians of Shrewsbury do not trace to a single village or state, which is part of what makes the community feel pan-Indian rather than regional. The earliest doctors came from across the subcontinent, wherever a medical graduate had won a residency in central Massachusetts.
The technology wave that followed broadened it further, drawing engineers and researchers from the software hubs of southern and western India, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Mumbai among them, as well as families from the north. That breadth is why the India Society’s cultural school teaches several languages rather than one.
What united them was not origin but circumstance: skilled migrants who came for residencies, graduate degrees and jobs in technology and biomedicine, and who chose a comfortable suburb with strong schools as the place to raise the next generation.
This is the texture of much of post-1965 Indian migration to America. It was professional and selective rather than working-class, driven by the medical and engineering shortages of the receiving country as much as by anything pushing people out of India. Shrewsbury, with its hospitals next door and its technology corridor within reach, was almost engineered to catch exactly this kind of arrival.
Shrewsbury Today
Walk into a Shrewsbury public school classroom and the change is unmistakable. Across the district, roughly a third of students are Asian, the large majority of them of South Asian and Indian descent. The children of the doctors and engineers now make up one of the defining presences in the town’s schools.
The Route 9 corridor has become a regional Indian high street, drawing shoppers from across central Massachusetts to its grocers, restaurants and salons. The India Society’s calendar of Diwali, Holi and Independence Day events fills its Main Street centre and spills into rented halls when the crowds outgrow the space.
It is not a self-contained enclave, and that is the point. The Indians in Shrewsbury are woven into the ordinary life of an affluent New England suburb, on the school committees, in the clinics, at the cricket pitch and the lake. The community that began with a few homesick students in 1963 is now simply part of what Shrewsbury is.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts?
By the early 2010s Shrewsbury counted about 3,137 residents of Indian origin, nearly nine percent of its population, which ranked the town third in Massachusetts behind Boston and Cambridge. Counted with neighbouring Westborough, more than five thousand Indian Americans live in the two towns together.
Why did so many Indians settle in Shrewsbury?
The first Indians in Shrewsbury were doctors who came to complete residencies at Worcester hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s. A later wave of engineers and researchers arrived for jobs along the Route 128 technology corridor, and both groups chose Shrewsbury for its proximity to work and its strong public schools.
What is the India Society of Worcester?
The India Society of Worcester, founded in 1963 and now based at 152 Main Street in Shrewsbury, is one of the oldest Indian cultural organisations in New England. It runs a cultural school teaching several Indian languages, an elder support group and a free health clinic, and serves more than a thousand members.
Where can you find Indian food and groceries in Shrewsbury?
The Route 9 corridor is the heart of Indian retail, anchored by a Patel Brothers grocery at 504 Boston Turnpike and India Market nearby. Restaurants include Bollywood Grill at 97 Boston Turnpike and Eggholic, an Indian street-food spot at 378 Maple Avenue.
How diverse are Shrewsbury’s schools?
Roughly a third of students in the Shrewsbury public schools are Asian, and the large majority of that group is of South Asian and Indian descent. The strength and reputation of the schools is one of the main reasons Indian families settled in the town.
Do Indians in Shrewsbury play cricket?
Yes. In the summer of 2012, residents Saqib Syed and Fazal Alam helped establish the town’s first proper cricket pitch on municipal land, funded through private donations, and Shrewsbury played its first full cricket season that year. The pitch has become part of the community’s weekend life.
If your family’s story passed through Shrewsbury, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a residency at a Worcester hospital or a software job along Route 128, to a house near Lake Quinsigamond, to wherever you are now.