Indentured Labour Brings Hinduism To Mauritius

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The British colonial ship Atlas departed Calcutta in 1834 carrying 36 Indian labourers under a trial indenture scheme bound for Mauritius, the first voyage of what grew into a system that carried more than 1.6 million Indian workers, most of them Hindu, to plantation colonies across the British and French empires over the following century. What began as a single trial voyage of three dozen labourers became, within decades, one of the largest forced migrations of the colonial era.

Mauritius itself received sustained migration under the indenture system for decades after the Atlas first arrived, and the Hindu community those indentured workers founded on the island grew steadily rather than remaining a small transplanted minority. Successive waves of labourers, following the same route the Atlas had opened, built out a religious community that outlasted the plantation system that had brought it there.

What this changed for Hinduism's spread was the creation of a Hindu majority far from India itself: the community founded by indentured labour grew into Mauritius's largest religious group, giving the island the highest proportion of Hindus of any nation outside India and Nepal, a standing traced directly back to one trial voyage of 36 labourers in 1834.