Mauritius

Mauritius had no indigenous population, so every faith on the island arrived by ship. The Dutch came and went, the French planted Catholicism along with sugar, and the enslaved Africans and Malagasy they brought were baptised into a creole Catholic culture that remains the church's heart. When Britain abolished slavery, the planters turned to indentured labour, and between 1834 and the early twentieth century roughly half a million Indians passed through the Aapravasi Ghat immigration depot in Port Louis, now a World Heritage site. They carried Hinduism in its Bhojpuri north Indian and Tamil south Indian forms, along with Islam from Gujarat and Bihar, and their descendants made Mauritius the one African country where Hindus are the largest community.

The island's calendar tells the story better than any statistic: Maha Shivaratri empties towns for the pilgrimage to Ganga Talao, Thaipoosam Cavadee pierces the devout of the Tamil temples, Eid and Christmas and Chinese New Year are all public holidays, and Père Laval's shrine at Sainte Croix draws Catholic, Hindu and Muslim petitioners alike to the grave of the missionary beatified for his work among freed slaves. Communal politics exists, and the census counts carefully, but the island's dense interweave of shrines, mosques, temples and churches has held peacefully since independence in 1968.

High in the forested southwest of Mauritius lies Ganga Talao, a crater lake that Hindu Mauritians have made a piece of the Ganges. The tradition dates to the 1890s, when a priest named Jhummon Giri Gossagne reported a dream in which the waters of the lake sprang from the sacred river itself, and pilgrims began walking to the crater to fetch its water for Shiva. In 1972 the link was made literal: water carried from the Ganges in India was ritually poured into the lake, and the site, long called Grand Bassin, took the name Ganga Talao in earnest. Each year at Maha Shivaratri the island performs one of the largest Hindu pilgrimages outside India, as hundreds of thousands of white clad devotees walk from every corner of Mauritius, many bearing kanwar, the decorated bamboo arches hung with mirrors and flowers, to pour water over the lingams at the shore and carry lake water home to their own shrines.

A colossal statue of Shiva, more than thirty metres tall and modelled on the Mangal Mahadev of Gujarat, rises at the entrance, with a matching statue of Durga nearby. The lake's shores hold temples to Hanuman, Lakshmi and Ganga, and the whole mountain basin functions for Mauritian Hindus as India transposed, an axis that lets an island in the far southwest of the Indian Ocean stand, for one week each year, on the banks of the Ganges.