Hindi

Indians in Egypt are a small community of about 5,700, mostly managers, engineers and professionals posted by the fifty or so Indian companies that make chemicals, carbon black, textiles and denim in Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal zone, with their families and about 400 students. Hindi is their common language, but the community also includes Malayalis, Tamils, Telugus and Gujarati-speaking Dawoodi Bohras, whose Shia faith traces back to Fatimid Cairo and who have restored and kept the city's thousand-year-old Al-Hakim mosque since the 1970s. Most are Hindus, who have no temple in Egypt and celebrate Diwali at the embassy's India House or by the pyramids at the Mena House hotel; some 275 Indian Muslims study at Al-Azhar, and Keralite Christians join Cairo's English-language churches.

Indians in Israel other than the Malayalis of Kerala, roughly 42,000 people, are the larger part of a community that has nearly tripled since the October 2023 war. About 16,000 are young men from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar and Rajasthan who came from 2024 onward to work on building sites after Israel barred Palestinian labourers, recruited in mass screening drives in Lucknow, Rohtak and Kanpur, and Hindi has replaced Arabic as the language of many construction crews; they live together in company housing near the sites and cook their own dal and roti. Most of the others are live-in caregivers for elderly Israelis, among them women and men from Mizoram and other north-eastern states, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. India and Israel agreed in February 2026 to bring 50,000 more Indian workers by 2030.

Hindi-speaking Indians from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Rajasthan, perhaps 150,000 people, work in Qatar as masons, electricians, drivers, guards and cooks, with a smaller circle of engineers and doctors living with their families. The two big states of the Hindi belt now send more Indian manual workers abroad than any others, and their men fill the labour camps of the Industrial Area, where Bhojpuri and Maithili singers draw crowds of tens of thousands in Asian Town. Most are Hindus who keep Diwali, Holi and the Bihari sun festival of Chhath in their rooms or in rented halls, since Qatar has no Hindu temple, and a minority are Muslims. Regional societies such as the Bihar Social Forum bring Hindus and Muslims from the same home state together for Holi and Eid.