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Emran Feroz
Journalist
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piqer: Emran Feroz
Saturday, 31 March 2018

Afghans In India: The Kabuliwalas Of Kolkata

I just returned from India and I met a lot of Afghans there. New Delhi, especially, has a large Afghan diaspora, consisting of many migrants and refugees.

However, India is a very large country and some other parts of it are inhabited by Afghans too.

This great picture gallery by journalists Moska Najib and Nazes Afroz portrays the Afghans of the city of Kolkata.

By locals, they are often called as "Kabuliwala" (people from Kabul) although a lot of them are not originally from the Afghan capital but also from other parts of the country. 

But the term "Kabuliwala" is famous since 1892 when Rabindranath Tagore, India's first Nobel laureate, wrote an iconic short story and gave it that name. It was the tale of a man from a distant land — Afghanistan — living in Kolkata, now the capital of West Bengal state.

Today, there are only 5,000 Kabuliwala families in Kolkata, a city of 16 million people. Many of them are still "stateless" people without any citizenship documents.

Afghans In India: The Kabuliwalas Of Kolkata
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