Jai Ho, Gujaratis! How Indians Became Antwerp's Diamond Traders

Walk down Hoveniersstraat near Antwerp's central station today and you might wonder which continent you are on. Young Indian traders in sharp suits haggle with Hasidic diamond buyers in long black coats; a street once famous for its kosher restaurants now serves some of the best curry in Belgium. The world's most famous diamond district is being quietly remade in an Indian image.

The story starts decades back. Indian traders — many of them Gujarati Jains from Palanpur with deep roots in the gem trade — began arriving in Antwerp in force from the 1980s onward, building on Surat's rise as the world's diamond-cutting capital. Community pioneers like Ramesh Mehta helped dozens of Indian families set up their own diamond businesses in the city from the early 1990s. Trade bodies estimate that India now cuts and polishes close to 90 percent of the world's diamonds by volume, and Antwerp became the natural European beachhead for that trade.

The shift has real commercial logic behind it. The district's traditional Jewish dealers, many of them observant, close from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday; their Indian competitors trade through the weekend. Over time, the balance of the $26-billion-a-year trade tilted decisively. Some Jewish traders moved their cutting and polishing to lower-cost centers in Thailand and China; others stopped doing business in the Diamond Beurs' public hall and retreated to private offices, worried about competitors poaching clients.

It has not been frictionless. Within the Jewish community itself, the change has opened old debates: secular dealers who keep their shops open on the Sabbath have drawn fire from rabbis, and as one former trader put it, neither side is much enchanted with the other.

What is remarkable, though, is the larger pattern. The Gujaratis of Antwerp join a long Indian tradition of thriving far from home: reviving the jewelry districts of New York and Hong Kong, rebuilding the American motel industry, and writing the code of Silicon Valley. In Antwerp, they did not just join the diamond trade. They inherited it.