On a Saturday morning along Route 9, the cars turning into the plaza at 276 Turnpike Road belong to families who left Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Chennai and ended up here, in a town founded by Puritan orchardists in 1717. The Indians in Westborough did not arrive in a single wave. They came one software contract at a time, until the trolley of a sleepy MetroWest town filled with the smell of Bombay Bazaar’s spice aisle and the chant of a chariot procession a few miles up the road.
The Place
Westborough sits at the crossroads of MetroWest, where the Massachusetts Turnpike meets Interstate 495 and Route 9, roughly forty minutes west of Boston. It was incorporated in 1717 as the hundredth town in the Commonwealth, a settlement of orchards and dairies that the railroad reached in 1834, as the town’s recorded history notes.
The trains brought industry: first sleighs, straw hats and boots, later computer and telecommunications equipment. By the late twentieth century the town had become an office park of its own, an obvious address for company headquarters thanks to those three highways.
It is also affluent. The median home value passed 600,000 dollars in 2024, more than seventy percent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree, and the public schools rank among the strongest in the state. For an immigrant family weighing where to raise children, those numbers are the whole argument.
How It Became Indian
The Indian story in Westborough is really a story about two adjacent towns, Westborough and Shrewsbury, and about a quiet engine three miles away in Worcester.
A society before there was a community
In 1963, when there were perhaps twenty-five Indian residents in the whole Worcester area, mostly graduate students at the colleges, a man named Shyam Sharma founded what was first called the Indian Association. Its first president was Dr. B.L.T. Lingappa. For its first two decades the group celebrated essentially three days a year: Diwali, India’s Republic Day and its Independence Day.
The India Society of Worcester, as it came to be known, was an institution waiting for a population. That population did not exist yet. It would be built by an industry that had not yet been invented.
The technology corridor
Westborough’s transformation tracked the rise of its employers. Through the 1980s and 1990s the town’s plazas and research drives filled with names like Data General, 3Com, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and AMD. When the H-1B visa programme expanded in the 1990s, these technology companies recruited heavily from India, and Central Massachusetts received a large cohort of Indian engineers.
The most striking example was founded in Westborough itself. In 1999, Girish Navani, an immigrant from India with a master’s degree from Boston University, co-founded the electronic health records company eClinicalWorks. It grew into a billion-dollar business and the largest minority-owned company in Central Massachusetts, with its headquarters still in town, a story chronicled by the Worcester Business Journal. For young Indian professionals, eClinicalWorks made Westborough not just a place to live near work, but a place where the work itself was Indian-led.
The boom years
The numbers tell the rest. Between 2000 and 2010, the Indian population of Westborough grew by 192 percent, and Shrewsbury’s by 173 percent. By the start of the 2010s the two towns together held more than 5,000 Indian Americans, one of the largest concentrations in Massachusetts.
Westborough specifically counted 2,160 Indian residents, close to twelve percent of its people, ranking it seventh among all Massachusetts municipalities by Indian share. Shrewsbury held 3,137, ranking third. The India Society of Worcester, founded for twenty-five members, grew past a thousand.
What had been a dormant institution became one of the most active Indian organisations in New England. In November 1991 it had acquired a five-acre lot with existing buildings at 152 West Main Street in Shrewsbury, just off Exit 22 on Route 290, and that India Center became the spine of community life: language classes, dance, festival nights, a free medical clinic.
From cinema to temple
The clearest sign of how far the community had come arrived recently, and it involved a movie theatre. The Regal Cinemas Westborough 12 at 231 Turnpike Road, a multiplex that had for years reserved a screen for Bollywood releases shown in Hindi with English subtitles, closed its doors. In a settlement reached over the property, the buyer was the BAPS Swaminarayan organisation, which agreed to pay 5.1 million dollars to convert the abandoned cinema into a house of worship.
The image is hard to improve on. A suburban multiplex that once sold samosas and chai at the concession stand, beside the popcorn, becoming a Hindu mandir outright. The audience had simply grown large enough to buy the building.
The Landmarks
India Society of Worcester, 152 West Main Street, Shrewsbury. Founded in 1963 and rooted at this five-acre site since 1991, the India Center is the institutional heart of the area’s Indian life. It runs cultural programmes, language and dance classes, and a free medical clinic, and its membership has grown from a couple of dozen students to more than a thousand families.
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, 275 Turnpike Road, Westborough. The local centre of the worldwide Swaminarayan tradition, the mandir anchors Gujarati religious life on Route 9. Its presence here, and the organisation’s purchase of the nearby former cinema, marks the community’s shift from renting space to owning landmarks.
Bombay Bazaar, 276 Turnpike Road, Westborough. The town’s Indian general store stocks spices, frozen and ready-to-eat curries, household goods and festival decorations for every Hindu occasion. For a family newly arrived on an H-1B visa, this aisle is the first proof that home is buyable here.
Patel Brothers, Boston Turnpike, Shrewsbury. An outpost of the country’s largest Indian grocery chain sits a short drive east on Route 9, the kind of full-scale supermarket that signals a market has reached genuine density. Weekend queues at the till are their own form of census.
The former Regal Cinemas, 231 Turnpike Road, Westborough. For years one screen here played the latest Hindi films. Now closed and sold to the BAPS Swaminarayan organisation for conversion into a place of worship, the building tells the community’s whole arc in a single address.
eClinicalWorks headquarters, Westborough. Founded in town in 1999 by Indian immigrant Girish Navani, this electronic health records company became a billion-dollar firm and the largest minority-owned business in Central Massachusetts. It is the reason many Indian engineers came to Westborough in the first place, and a reason many stayed.
Westborough Public Schools. Not an Indian institution, but central to why Indian families chose the town. Consistently ranked among the best districts in Massachusetts, with a graduation rate near 97 percent, the schools are the practical centre of gravity around which the community settled.
Where They Came From
The Indians of Westborough came overwhelmingly through work, not through refuge, and that shaped where in India they came from. The technology and biotech recruiting of the 1980s onward drew heavily on South India’s engineering pipeline, from the Telugu-speaking cities of Hyderabad and the surrounding Andhra and Telangana regions, and from Tamil Nadu and Chennai.
Gujarati families came too, many of them tied to the Swaminarayan religious network whose mandir now sits on Route 9. Hindi-speaking professionals from the north filled out the rest. The common thread was not a single state but a single visa category and a single skill set: educated, English-speaking engineers and physicians who could move where the contracts were.
That is why the community feels pan-Indian rather than regional. Patel Brothers and Bombay Bazaar stock for every kitchen, the cinema played films in Hindi for audiences whose mother tongues were Telugu and Gujarati, and the India Society deliberately kept itself secular and broad, celebrating Diwali alongside Christmas, Halloween and Easter so that no one regional or religious group owned it.
Westborough Today
Westborough today is a town where the Indian presence is no longer a curiosity but a structural fact. The plazas along Route 9 carry Indian groceries and restaurants as a matter of course, the school district educates a large second generation born here, and the calendar of MetroWest now includes Diwali events as reliably as it includes the autumn town fairs.
For comparison, the same pattern of affluent suburb plus technology employment has produced sibling communities the country over, from the Indians in Wake Forest, North Carolina to the Indians in Chanhassen, Minnesota and the Indians in Montgomery, New Jersey. It echoes the same dynamic that drew the Indians in Saratoga Springs, Utah to a fast-growing town built on tech salaries. Westborough’s version is older and more institution-heavy, thanks to that 1963 society and the gravitational pull of eClinicalWorks.
The pattern is not unique to Indian families in Massachusetts, either. The same calculus of strong schools and easy commutes shaped the Chinese in Wellesley, Massachusetts and the Armenians in Belmont, Massachusetts, immigrant communities that, like Westborough’s, organised around institutions and education rather than a single arrival.
It is not a perfect story. The technology economy that built the community is also volatile, and H-1B status has grown more precarious in recent years, leaving some families anxious about whether the children in those excellent schools will be able to stay. But the landmarks now have deeds, not leases. A community that buys a cinema and turns it into a temple is not a community passing through.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Westborough, Massachusetts?
By the early 2010s, Westborough counted roughly 2,160 Indian residents, close to twelve percent of the town’s population, ranking it seventh among Massachusetts municipalities by Indian share. Together with neighbouring Shrewsbury, the two towns held more than 5,000 Indian Americans, one of the largest such concentrations in the state.
Why did so many Indians settle in Westborough?
The Indians in Westborough came primarily for work. The town’s position at the junction of the Mass Pike, Route 495 and Route 9 made it a hub for technology and biotech employers, who recruited heavily from India after the H-1B visa programme expanded in the 1990s. Excellent public schools and high incomes then kept families there.
Is there a Hindu temple in Westborough?
Yes. The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir sits at 275 Turnpike Road in Westborough. The BAPS Swaminarayan organisation also agreed to purchase the former Regal Cinemas property at 231 Turnpike Road for 5.1 million dollars to convert into an additional place of worship.
What is the India Society of Worcester?
Founded in 1963, the India Society of Worcester is the area’s main Indian cultural organisation, based at a five-acre India Center at 152 West Main Street in Shrewsbury, acquired in 1991. It runs cultural and language programmes, festival events and a free medical clinic, and has grown to more than a thousand members.
Where can you buy Indian groceries near Westborough?
Bombay Bazaar at 276 Turnpike Road in Westborough stocks spices, curries, household goods and festival items. A short drive east on Route 9 in Shrewsbury, an outpost of Patel Brothers, the country’s largest Indian grocery chain, serves the wider community.
Which company is the biggest Indian-led employer in Westborough?
eClinicalWorks, an electronic health records company founded in Westborough in 1999 by Indian immigrant Girish Navani, is the town’s most prominent Indian-led firm. It grew into a billion-dollar business and the largest minority-owned company in Central Massachusetts, drawing many Indian professionals to the area.
If your family’s story passed through Westborough, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Hyderabad or Ahmedabad to a plaza on Route 9, to wherever you are now.