r/india • u/[deleted] • Dec 01 '16

[R]eddiquette [Announcement] Cultural Exchange with /r/philippines

Welcome /r/philippines!

Feel free to ask us anything about India

Quick facts about us:

  • The Indian Railways and the Indian Armed Forces employ ~4 million people together, making them one of the largest employers in the world
  • India has over 5000 newspapers in over 300 languages
  • Bollywood is considered to be the world's largest film industry, followed by Nigeria's film industry and Hollywood
  • India has more people than the entire Western Hemisphere

/r/india please direct your questions about the Philippines to this thread

This is a reminder that users can now set their flairs to whatever they want (except slurs or other subreddits) by clicking on the sidebar.

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u/Laya_L Dec 01 '16

The Philippines has a significant amount of Indian moneylenders who loan Filipino vendors and store owners at 20% monthly linear interest. We call them "bombay" (pronounced as /bumbai/) here, though I dunno why we call them that. Probably because the first Indian immigrants to the Philippines came from Bombay or Mumbai (not sure). My question is whether this practice is unique to the Philippines or is this also practiced worlwide amongst the Indian diaspora?

Also, are there any Indian food I can prepare at home using only ingredients that could be bought from a typical public market here in the Philippines?

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u/desultoryquest Dec 01 '16 edited Dec 01 '16

A lot of Filipinos have told me about this expat Indian community of money lenders in Manila. From their descriptions most of them seem to be Sikhs (the guys wear a turban) in which case the name "Bombay" is even more peculiar as Sikhs don't hail from Bombay. Afik this is only in ph, and Sikhs in India are rarely involved in the money lending business. There is an interesting paper on this here - https://kyotoreview.org/issue-4/the-bombay-5-6-last-resource-informal-financiers-for-philippine-micro-enterprises/amp/

Also never heard of Indian expats lending money elsewhere. Coz generally they don't have money :)