Mauritian of Indian origin
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 882,000 | |
| Languages | |
| Creole · English · French · Bhojpuri · Tamil · Marathi · Telugu · Urdu · Odia • Hindi | |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Hinduism with minorities following Christianity, Islam and others |
Mauritians of Indian origin, also known as Indo-Mauritians, are Mauritian people whose ancestors are from the Indian subcontinent. They currently make up more than 68% of the Mauritian population.
People from British India first arrived in Mauritius to work as indentured labourers, commonly referred to as coolies, that were intended to work in sugarcane fields. Indentured laborers were mostly brought from the state of Bihar, with a large number of Tamil and Telugu people amongst them. A sizeable portion of labourers were Marathi-speakers from Maharashtra and Odia-speakers from Odisha.
Non-indentured arrivals from India had their origins largely in Gujarat, with smaller numbers coming from Sindh. As free immigrants, these later arrivals were commonly employed by the British in the armed forces, police forces, as security personnel, especially those from the Punjab and Bombay Presidency with a substantial portion of immigrants from Gujarat and Sindh arriving as traders, businessmen and merchants.
In the late 19th to early 20th century, Chinese men in Mauritius married Indian women due to both a lack of Chinese women and the higher numbers of Indian women on the island. At first the prospect of relations with Indian women was unappealing to the original all male Chinese migrants yet they eventually had to establish sexual unions with Indian women since there were no Chinese women arriving in the country. The 1921 census in Mauritius counted that Indian women there had a total of 148 children fathered by Chinese men. These Chinese were mostly traders.
Today the population consists of mainly Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Bahá'is. The mother tongue of almost all Mauritians is the Mauritian Creole, while a minority of Indo-Mauritians still use both their ancestral language and Creole at home. Indo-Mauritian use their ancestral languages mostly in religious activities, some of them include Bhojpuri, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Odia.
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