In his enthralling new book, Images of a Journey: India in Diaspora, Steve Raymer estimates that some 20-25 million Indians now live in over a hundred countries. Raymer himself has worked in nearly that many countries during his forty years as a photojournalist, including his 24 years on the staff of National Geographic. In researching and photographing the Indian diaspora he circled the globe, ranging from Singapore (where the president is of Indian descent) to South Africa (where Mohandas Gandhi’s granddaughter serves in Parliament), from Dubai (where he had to hide his camera from authorities) to Great Britain (where curry has displaced fish and chips as the national food), from New York City (where Indians star in newsrooms and hospitals) to California (where turbaned Sikhs grow almonds and Indian engineers make Silicon Valley hum).

Although Indians have traveled out from their homeland in pursuit of commerce for at least two thousand years, only in the past two centuries has a large-scale exodus occurred. After slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834, hundreds of thousands of Indians, many of them indentured servants hardly distinguishable from slaves, were shipped abroad to replace the lost labor. They worked on sugar and rice plantations, in factories and logging camps, on docks and railroads. Because they also served the British Empire as soldiers, policemen, and administrators, Indians often suffered discrimination or outright expulsion when colonies gained independence in the middle of the twentieth century. They fled especially from countries in East Africa and Southeast Asia, migrating to Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. And in recent years, Indians who have prospered in places like Silicon Valley have begun what Raymer calls a reverse diaspora, carrying their wealth, talents, and western tastes back to Mother India, where they are fueling the phenomenal growth of cities like New Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad.

Raymer traces these worldwide migrations in brief essays, incisive captions, and compelling photographs. Admirers of his previous books—about St. Petersburg, Vietnam, and the Muslims of Southeast Asia—will recognize in these photographs the characteristic intimacy and respect Raymer shows toward his subjects. He also reveals a capacious, compassionate vision, taking in the full human range. So on one page we see a homeless man with bandaged head sprawled on a sidewalk in Malaysia, and on the next page we see a wealthy hotelier entertaining dozens of guests for dinner in his glittering Hong Kong mansion. The two images are rendered with equal care, and without judgment, except in their juxtaposition.

On page after page, people of Indian descent appear in revelatory moments, often in the midst of cultural practices that link them to their ancestral homeland—dancers perfecting traditional gestures, a hostess welcoming guests by lighting oil lamps around a mandala fashioned of colored rice and chalk, vendors selling every kind of spicy and savory Indian food, cricketers dressed all in white shaking hands after a match, a bevy of women in vibrant saris carrying earthenware pots on their heads to prepare for a wedding, and brides and grooms feted in time-honored ways. Above all, Raymer’s photographs show that Indians of the diaspora are bound to the Subcontinent by religion, as we see in images of Hindu deities painted on a house front, worshippers wading in a river on Trinidad to honor the holy Ganges, family members preparing a corpse for cremation by swabbing the body with sandalwood and ghee, firewalkers resting after their sacrificial feat, Muslim men kneeling on carpets in a Burmese mosque, devotees of Hare Krishna prostrate before a golden altar or celebrating the Carnival of Chariots.

Images of a Journey also records the blending of cultures, as in the photograph of an Indian Jew in Israel kissing the Torah, for example, or a Sikh in Edinburgh who sells in his store the two official Indian-Scottish tartan plaids, or a family of the reverse diaspora beside the California-inspired swimming pool and red-tiled villa they have recreated in Bangalore. This globe-encircling journey of a resourceful, resilient people has found a worthy chronicler in Steve Raymer.