Bolton is a unique town when you compare the make up of its visible minority communities to other similar towns and cities. Certainly in Greater Manchester it is the only town where there is a larger Indian population than there are other Indian sub continent communities.

If you were to break this Indian community up into the various religious and regional factions you would find that contrary to popular belief there are a massive number of Gujerati Muslims living in Bolton. And they have been living in Bolton since the mid to late 1950s. If you were to break up the Gujerati Muslims into their places of origin you would find a startling number of Muslims from the Surat (city in Gujerat) area.

You need to break this down even further to understand this booklet. About nine miles from Surat is a village called Barbodhan and it is about the people from this village that I am going to portray in the booklet. In the mid to late 1950's and early 1960's non-white migrants or visible members of the minority communities were very small in number in England. They numbered perhaps a few tens of thousands and that was all.

This included Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Africans, Jamaicans and so on. This figure rose considerably over the years and the 1991 census quoted the number of visible minority communities to be around 5% of the population. The forecast for the year 2100 is that white people will be a minority in England. According to local folklore the name Barbodhan comes from the term "Babul Aden" or translated into English this would mean "Gateway to Aden".

It is known that in the early days Muslims traveling to Mecca on pilgrimage passed through this small village through to the seaport, hence the name. More recently though the village Barbodhan was known as the "Golden Village". So the village is very old, with a lot of character and history and the graveyard suggests that Muslims were buried there some 3 to 4 hundred years ago. Remembering that it was in Surat that Britain established its first foothold in India in 1612, when the newly formed East India Company got permission from the Moghul Emperor, Jahangir, to set up a trading "factory".

Surat was then, as it is now, a very prosperous city, a centre of trade between India, Arabia and beyond. It remained Britain's chief settlement on the West Coast until 1687 when Bombay succeeded to the title. The purpose of the booklet is to inform the present and future generations of communities about when and where members of the Barbodhan Muslim communities settled in Britain. I hope that it will be the catalyst for further research and more in depth interviews.

This must be done quickly before the entire generation of first arrivals pass away. One must do this quickly whilst they are still alive and relatively young and active. Barbodhians ended up in Burma, Mauritius, Africa, Madagascar, Canada but it is about those who ended up in Bolton that I will focus upon. It is estimated that some 80 to 90 % of Barbodhians are living in England with the vast majority living in Bolton.