A Global Community
Around 26 million Sikhs live worldwide, roughly nine in ten of them in India. The rest — in Canada, Britain, the United States, Australia, Italy, Malaysia and dozens of smaller communities — make up one of the most widely dispersed religious populations of its size.
Around 26 million Sikhs live worldwide, making Sikhism the fifth-largest of the world’s organised religions.7 Roughly 23.8 million of them — close to nine in ten — live in India, overwhelmingly in Punjab.4 What follows is about the other tenth.
Where the numbers are
Canada has the largest Sikh population outside India: 771,790 at the 2021 census, about 2.1 per cent of the country — more than England and Australia combined. Sikhs live in every province and territory, but the weight is in Ontario (300,435) and British Columbia (290,870); just under a third of Canadian Sikhs live in greater Toronto and over a quarter in greater Vancouver. More than two-thirds were born outside Canada.2 Britain counted 520,092 in England and 4,048 in Wales at the 2021 census, giving a UK total of roughly 535,000 once Scotland and Northern Ireland are added — though those were counted separately, and Scotland’s census was taken a year later.1 Sikhs are most concentrated in the West Midlands: Wolverhampton has the highest proportion of any local authority at 12.0 per cent, and Sandwell 11.5 per cent.1 Australia counted 210,400 — 0.8 per cent of the population, and a number that has almost tripled since 2011. The median age of Australian Sikhs is 30, among the youngest of any religious group there, which is what recent migration looks like in the data.3 Italy holds a comparable number, on estimate rather than count.4
The United States is the significant unknown. Estimates range from about 280,000 to over 500,000, because the US census does not ask about religion — a gap that matters for political representation and for the recording of hate crimes.4 Malaysia has around 100,000, Spain around 26,000, Germany somewhere between 13,000 and 20,000.4
Treat the uncounted figures carefully. Where there is no religious census, numbers come from community organisations and researchers, and they vary widely between sources.
Why communities ended up where they did
Diaspora settlement rarely follows a plan. It follows specific work.
Sikhs reached East Africa building the Uganda Railway, and left the gurdwara at Makindu on the Mombasa road. They reached Malaysia and Singapore as colonial policemen, recruited under the British doctrine of martial races. They reached British Columbia for the sawmills and California for the farms, opening gurdwaras at Abbotsford in 1911 and Stockton in 1912. They grew bananas on the New South Wales coast and built Australia’s first gurdwara at Woolgoolga. They milk the dairy herds that make Parmigiano-Reggiano, which is why Novellara in the Po valley has one of the largest Sikh populations in Italy. They work the meat plants of Olot in Catalonia.
Two upheavals redirected all of it. Partition in 1947 displaced Sikhs en masse and severed Punjab in two. The Africanisation policies of the late 1960s and 70s, culminating in Idi Amin’s expulsion order from Uganda in 1972, moved most East African Sikhs to Britain — which is why families in Southall and Leicester often reached England via Nairobi rather than direct from Punjab.
What travels
A gurdwara is not a building type so much as a set of commitments, and they turn out to be portable. Wherever there are enough Sikhs there is a Guru Granth Sahib installed with respect, kirtan sung, and a langar feeding whoever arrives — the same three elements everywhere, whatever the building started life as.5,6
That last one is the most visible in practice. Makindu has fed passing truck drivers on a Kenyan highway for nearly a century. Southall’s kitchen serves thousands of free meals a week. Sikh disaster-relief organisations now turn up with field kitchens at floods and earthquakes far from any Sikh population. The instruction is the one Guru Nanak set at Kartarpur five centuries ago, and it does not require a translation.
Architecture adapts where the commitments do not. Woolgoolga’s first gurdwara was built in Australian brick and tile to look like the town around it; Novellara’s was purpose-built in 2000; most European gurdwaras began as converted houses, mills and chapels.
Not only growth
An atlas of the diaspora reads naturally as expansion. It is not the whole picture.
Afghanistan’s Sikh community numbered about 100,000 in the 1970s. After decades of war and two attacks on Kabul’s last gurdwaras in 2020 and 2022, fewer than a few hundred Sikhs and Hindus remain in the country. In Pakistan, Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur — the birthplace of the faith and the place Guru Nanak died — sit in a country with only a small resident Sikh population, reachable across a border that has been mostly closed since 1947. The corridor opened in 2019 precisely because that separation had lasted seventy years.
At the far edge, in Rosario de la Frontera in northern Argentina, a few hundred people maintain the only gurdwara on the South American continent. That is what most of the diaspora actually looks like: not landmark buildings, but small numbers of people keeping a room, a book and a kitchen going a very long way from Punjab.
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