Abstract:

This community, composed of two ethnic minorities, offers a glimpse of Central Asia as a region of international student migration. Indian and Pakistani students form a temporary community in Central Asia (they live there during their studies) and specialize in medicine (especially surgery and oncology). The presence of these students demonstrates a continuity of links between the Central Asian region, the Indian subcontinent and Pakistan, which must be read in the light of Indo-Pakistani-Soviet relations established in the 1960s, when the first students from this region entered Soviet universities.

In 2022-3, Kyrgyzstan is estimated to have hosted 14,500 Indian and about 8,000 Pakistani students in its universities. Indo-Pakistani student migration is also dependent on recent global events such as Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, which have respectively closed China and Ukraine to students. Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are the leading countries that have benefited from this windfall.

This community presents original characteristics that deserve to be studied: the number of restaurants or shops run by Indian or Pakistani nationals has exploded and plays a significant role in the internationalization of the city of Bishkek; the Pakistani minority is unfortunately and regularly the target of attacks (63 recorded in 2021). Geographically, the Indo-Pakistani community is located in Bishkek and Osh, but also in the provinces near the universities built specifically for these students (Djalal-Abad, Cholpon-Ata, Kant).

The case offered by this community allows us to study Kyrgyzstan, no longer as a country of origin, but as a host country, a perspective that is still new or very little present in Central Asian studies in general; and also, to observe the insertion of the region into the networks of globalization and to question the connections that Central Asian spaces maintain with other countries.

The aim of this paper is to present first results and perspectives on this topic after a short fieldwork in Bishkek in spring 2024.