The Indians are coming! Whisper it quietly, but the boys (and girls) from the old country are shaking off the shackles of colonialism and splashing the cash here in Blighty.

No longer the poor relations, Indians are now exporting money and capital into Britain; it’s the rebirth of the Raj - only the other way around. One shudders to think what Her Majesty Queen Victoria, erstwhile Queen Empress of India, would have made of it all.

There are currently five Indians in the top 100 of The Sunday Times Rich List, two of which are in the top four - headed by the richest man in Britain, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, with a fortune of £27.7 billion.

Among the other prominent Indians in the list are the British passport-holding Hinduja brothers, Srichand and Gopichand - who were thrust back into the limelight this week after their old friend Peter Mandelson was brought back into government - with a combined wealth of £6.2 billion.

Mittal, the fourth-richest man on the planet, has twice as much money as Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and recently teamed up with Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone and Renault boss Flavio Briattore to take a stake in Queens Park Rangers football club.

And just last week, Bennett, Coleman and Co, owners of The Times of India, took control of Virgin Radio from Sir Richard Branson. Absolute Radio, as it’s now known, went on air on Monday morning to the strains of the aptly named Absolute Beginners by David Bowie.

Aside from a slight tweak to the schedules and promising to bring in more live acts, less chat and more music (don’t they all?), the new owners promise a smooth transition, not so much a revolution as a re-jigging - so don’t expect a line-up of Desi DJs spinning the latest bhangra hits.

This is probably a good thing, in so far as one of the only Asian DJ I’ve ever heard on mainstream radio is Apprentice wannabe Tre Azam, who hosts a mid-afternoon Saturday show on LBC.

To say the show is boring would be the understatement of the year.

The monotony of his voice, the painfully slow delivery, the complete lack of personality, wit or humour, the absence of any anecdotes and the general gormlessness of his accent had me reaching for the cyanide.

It was an experience comparable to that of listening to Suicide 105.4 - sorry, Magic 105.4 - the station whose remit is to make you as depressed as possible, with their continuous loop of heart-breaking love songs and gooey love stories; not so much music to watch girls by as music to kill yourself by.

Thankfully, at Absolute, the presenters remain the same, and the formula of all-time classics and hot new music is unaltered. If anything, the music’s got better: on Monday night they played Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety!

If there are to be any changes, however, if they’re really looking to shake things up, the new owners could do worse than bring in Times of India columnist and former editor of the Asian Age M.J. Akbar, possibly as host of a new version of “drunk versus stoned”, entitled “shutki versus shaikh” in which a listener high on dry fish takes on a spinach-oholic to see who makes the most sense… or maybe not.

The chair of Bennett, Coleman and Co, Absolute Radio’s parent company, is Indu Jain, one of the richest women in India and the 236th richest person in the world with an estimated wealth of £2.7 billion.

In all there are more than fifty Indians in the Forbes list of the world’s top 1,000 billionaires, including a scarcely believable four men in the top eight: Mittal (fourth), Mukesh Ambani (fifth, £26.5bn), Anil Ambani (sixth, £25.9bn) and KP Singh (eighth, £18.5bn).

Another Indian making it big is Vijay Mallya, chairman of United Breweries Group and Kingfisher Airlines and owner of the Silverstone-based Force India Formula One team, who’s also been linked with a move for Newcastle United.

Though Force India and their drivers Giancarlo Fisichella and Adrian Sutil are yet to record a point this season, Mallya is confident India will soon be a force to be reckoned with on the racetrack, with an Indian Grand Prix pencilled in for 2011.

Fast cars, floosies and free-flowing champagne may seem a world away from the poverty-stricken slums of down-town Delhi or central Calcutta, but in three years’ time the circus will roll into town, all exhausts firing.

It is to be hoped that the millions of rupees generated from the race, and from events like the Indian Premier League permeate down into society, especially in these times of economic Armageddon.

Not that the rich are worried or anything; for the lucky few it’s very much a case of “credit crisis? What crisis?!”

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