wild goose chase
Active Member
I looks like London has 989,000 South Asians as of 2011, vs 858,000 in the Toronto CMA (2011 also). However, a larger portion of London's South Asians are from Pakistan and Bangladesh, about 50% for London vs about 15% for Toronto, which leaves Toronto with a larger number of Indians (presumably including Punjabis) and Sri Lankans. The New York MSA has a comparable number of South Asians, but I think fewer Sri Lankans and Punjabis and more other Indian ethnic groups and more Bangladeshis.
So, New York might be our main challenger in terms of people of Indian descent, if not South Asian more broadly? I suppose things get tricky when you get to counting people whose ancestors left South Asia before the partition of British India (and thus before Pakistan and Bangladesh as countries as we current know them), but we are going on self-identification anyways.
I know there are countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Mauritius, and South Africa who have South Asian communities that are not only larger proportionally but older and more long-standing in number of generations (mostly descended from laborers and migrants in colonial times) than North America, but as far as I can tell from a quick search, these countries probably don't seem to have one city with an absolute greater number than New York, Toronto, or London.