The British exerted strong influence in India for a couple of centuries plus, and the British Isles being the place where these pukka sahibs came from, there resulted a natural affinity in the local populace for this fabled land. Thus it was that the post-independence Indian, and also Pakistani (for a new country had been carved out) leaders had all been educated in England. The upper classes continued to go to England for their higher level education in the professions and the sciences. Chartered Accountants, doctors, engineers, scientists and so forth returned with British diplomas all set to reap their financial rewards.
Post WW2 however, there was another form of traffic — manpower. Having lost many young men and older ones in the war, there was a shortage of labor in Britain and it looked to the colonies: West Indians, Pakistanis and Indians with little education streamed in to seize the opportunities of higher wages and a better life in the fabled mother country. Their children and grandchildren, born in the UK, prospered further …
So it is that Rishi Sunak, ethnic Indian, heads the current English government; Humza Yusaf, ethnic Pakistani, is the first minister of Scotland; and Leo Varadka, whose father was Indian, is the Irish leader. It is a changed world where once subjugated peoples begin to rule the subjugators.
Then there was indentured labor where the British transported Indian labor, under contract usually for five years, to its other colonies to work on plantations: sugar in the West Indies and in remote islands like Fiji; coffee in East Africa, tea in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); rubber in Malaya (now Malaysia); food crops in South Africa, although one might add that the late 19th century Boer war diminished British influence there.
Along with the West Indies, there was British Guiana where Indians also settled. Independence from Britain in the 1960s and merger with Dutch Guiana resulted in the new country of Suriname on the northern coast of South America.
One side effect of major consequence was how the mistreatment of Indians awakened Gandhi, a young lawyer, to fight against colonialism first there, then later in his home country of India. Eventually, the British left many of these places.
In the wake of their departure, the settlers, or rather descendants, found their privileged positions in society no longer tenable so many returned to Britain, somewhat bewildered by the alien (to them) culture of a modern western industrial country.
It was a three-cornered trade that brought wealth to Britain in the 19th century: Manufactured goods were sent to West Africa, from where slave ships took their human cargo to the West Indies and particularly the southern United States for the arduous work of planting and picking cotton, that is the valuable cotton bolls.
The cotton, tobacco and sugar shipped to Britain completed the triad. Cotton mills in Lancashire turned the cotton into cloth shipped to the colonies, particularly India for Gandhi to rail against as it destroyed India’s fine cotton producing skills, so fine as to be almost transparent as pictures of the Mughal nobles and kings often show.
Yes, the peripatetic Indian has a long history, tied in closely with Britain.