By contributor Sean Carey
Around 20 years ago, I paid a visit to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute (MGI) in Mauritius to consult the records of Indians who were brought from the subcontinent to work as indentured labourers in the sugar plantations after slavery was abolished in 1835.
Before examining any documents, I was invited to meet one of the island’s leading experts on Indo-Mauritian culture. During our conversation, I raised the subject of caste and its contemporary significance among different groups of Hindus in Mauritius. “It doesn’t exist any more,” the scholar said. “Even in the village where I come from caste is not important — people marry who they like.” The scholar paused before declaring: “The only people who use caste are the politicians at election time.”
I was doubly surprised at these remarks. First, because among my fellow academics there is an ethic of not hiding sensitive or embarrassing facts. Second, on the basis of having made several trips to the Indian Ocean island, I was convinced that caste among the Hindu population is an important principle of social and cultural organization. Indeed, the big questions from an anthropological perspective were: how important and what were the variations, say, between towns and villages?
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