Hinduism in Mauritius

Hinduism in Mauritius began when Indians from diverse religious groups were brought as indentured labor to colonial French and later in much larger numbers to British plantations in Mauritius and neighboring islands of the Indian Ocean. The migrants came primarily from what are now the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Bengal, Maharastra, and Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, India.

Hinduism is the largest religion in Mauritius, with over 670,000 adherents, representing approximately 51.9% of the total 1.3 million population of the country according to the 2011 census made by Statistics Mauritius. This makes the Mauritius islands in the Indian Ocean as the country having highest percentage of Hindus in Africa and third highest percentage of Hindus in the world after Nepal and India.

The European colonial powers banned slave capture and trading in the first half of the 19th century, with the British Empire banning it in the early decades. However, the demand kept rising for low cost, high intensity labor in colonial plantations of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco and other cash crops. The British Empire substituted the slave labor supplies from Africa with indentured labor supplies from India.

The indentured people brought from India included primarily Hindus, but also included Muslims and Christians. They were subject to indenture, a long-established form of contract which bound them to forced labour for a fixed term; apart from the fixed term of servitude, this resembled slavery. The first ships carrying indentured labourers from India left in 1836.Sugarcane, a crop that is native to India, does not grow in the cold latitudes such as those found in Europe, but grows in tropical latitudes, were grown in large colonial tropical plantations to meet the growing European and American demand. It is these sugarcane and other tropical cash crop plantations that brought the indentured Hindus and other migrants from India to Mauritius, and other island countries such as Fiji, Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Suriname and others.

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