1. Indian immigration and Indian languages in Mauritius: Historical perspectives

Reflecting upon the settlement history of Mauritius, historian Megan Vaughan highlights that:

Indeed, as Vaughan points out, throughout its rich history of human habitation, Mauritius was a “profoundly cosmopolitan place,” hosting on its shores visitors of various racial and linguistic backgrounds.Footnote ³² Discovered by Arab and Portuguese sailors and fitfully colonised by the Dutch (1598–1710), it is during the French colonial period (1710–1810) that efforts to create a permanent colony resulted in its transformation into what Vaughan labels as a “Creole island,” a place characterised by “multiple influences, multiple sources, which to differing degrees merge[d], t[ook] root, and ‘naturalize[d]’ on this new soil.”Footnote ³³ While the first settlers to call Mauritius home were from Bourbon Island (present-day Réunion), they were soon followed by a motley crew of people consisting, among others, of pirates from Madagascar and some other coastal regions of Africa, sailors and soldiers from the French East India Company, and “the scum of Europe and Asia, bankrupt, ruined libertines, thieves and wretches of every kind.”Footnote ³⁴ Another crucial component of this multilingual matrix was the multiracial crew members aboard the numerous naval vessels which, during the years of conflict opposing France and Britain over India, used Port-Louis as a stopover for rest, repairs, restocking and refuelling.Footnote ³⁵ With a workforce consisting primarily of men of African and Indian origins, it can be surmised that Indian languages always had a strong presence on the island. Historian, Janet Ewald, for instance notes that while in the Atlantic, the demand for increased labour on European ships resulted in the mass employment of more African-American sailors, in the Indian Ocean, “Europeans increasingly turned to African and Asian sailors.”Footnote ³⁶ British ships, in particular, stood out with “60% of these men c[oming] from the Indian subcontinent”, and speaking multiple Indian languages.Footnote ³⁷

The early years of French colonisation were marked by considerable hardship. The island’s dense forests, rugged terrain, and the frequent devastation wrought by cyclones created significant barriers to development, making it hard for successive governors to achieve any kind of meaningful progress.Footnote ³⁸ The appointment of Governor Mahé de Labourdonnais marked an important turning point in the history of Mauritius, or Isle de France as it was then known. Confronted with a country with a fledgling agricultural sector, buildings in various stages of construction and a population living in cramped, overcrowded conditions, he embarked on the arduous task of transforming it into a thriving, sugar-producing colony.Footnote ³⁹ This was made possible, in large part, through the introduction of skilled workers and slaves from India, followed by the further mass importation of African slaves from “Mozambique and elsewhere in East Africa (40–45%) and from Madagascar (30–35%).”Footnote ⁴⁰ The register of maroon slaves bears testimony to the high degree of racial and, by extension, linguistic diversity existing on the island, documenting the presence of “Abyssinians, Bambaras, Bengalis, Cafres, Guineans, Lascars, Malabars, Malambous, Malays, Talingas and Timorians.”Footnote ⁴¹ While the register documents ethnic and geographic origins rather than the languages spoken on the island, the presence of Malabars, Talingas and Bengalis among the recorded population makes it reasonable to infer that Indian languages such as Tamil and Bengali were part of the Mauritian linguistic mosaic.

By far, the biggest contributor to the social and linguistic metamorphosis of the island was its takeover by the British (1810–1968). The abolition, in quick succession, of the slave trade in 1833 and of slavery in 1835 coincided with a rise in the selling price of Mauritian sugar on the British market.Footnote ⁴² By the time slavery was formally abolished in 1835, an unprecedented 648, 548 pounds of sugar were being produced in Mauritius.Footnote ⁴³ The resulting shortage in labour, arising at such an inopportune time, was therefore even more acutely felt and threatened to jeopardise the economic well-being of the country. Faced with the imminent prospect of substantial financial losses, the colonial authorities turned to India to boost the island’s workforce.Footnote ⁴⁴ An experimental convoy of 36 and 39 men from Calcutta and Bombay respectively had already been brought to the island in 1834.Footnote ⁴⁵ The success of this initial experiment prompted the colonial authorities to lend their support to mass Indian immigration, which began in earnest in 1835. By the time it ended in 1907, 450,000 men, women and children had been transported to Mauritius.Footnote ⁴⁶ Without any surprise, the rapid influx of immigrants brought about drastic demographic change: While in 1835, Indians accounted for an infinitesimally small fraction of the island’s inhabitants, thirty years later, two-thirds of the local population was of Indian origin.Footnote ⁴⁷

At the linguistic level, the large-scale immigration of these indentured labourers resulted in Indian languages such as Bhojpuri, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Gujarati being called upon to coexist alongside more established ones such as French, Mauritian Creole, and, to a lesser extent, English.Footnote ⁴⁸ Since “the backbone of Indian immigration consisted of people from Bihar,” with time, Bhojpuri emerged as an indispensable lingua franca, particularly on rural sugar estates, where it became associated with “sociability and brotherhood.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Derived from the root word Bhojpūr, itself a blend of the terms bhoj (a clan of rulers) and pūr (town), the name Bhojpūri denotes both the language and those—usually inhabitants of the Bhojpūr region—speaking it.Footnote ⁵⁰ In India, Bhojpuri functioned primarily as an oral language, utilised mainly in folk songs, poems, and short stories.Footnote ⁵¹ In contrast, in Mauritius, it soon achieved the status of a vehicular language, utilised by the “Estate Manager as well as the corner Chinese shopkeeper.”Footnote ⁵²

However, as French writer and naturalist Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre so astutely remarked during his trip to Isle de France in the late 18^th century, demographic and linguistic change has the potential to undermine social harmony. Referring specifically to the multiracial local populace of that time, he revealed:

A similar situation was evidenced during British colonial rule too, with the different factions of the Mauritian population harbouring deep mistrust or even outright animosity towards each other, thus making it difficult to formulate language policies which would appeal to everyone.Footnote ⁵⁴ Equally significant was the profoundly divisive role played by the British colonial authorities who saw all forms of policy decisions as a further means to “divide and rule [over] an émigré French elite …, a Creole community and an Indian community without assimilating them.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Likewise, decisions regarding language policy were firmly embedded within and perpetuated existing social and political hierarchies. Used as a tool for “legislating colonial and human differences,” they were often instrumental in protecting and promoting the sociopolitical and economic interests of the colonial regime, widening the gulf which already existed between different groups of people.Footnote ⁵⁶

So far as 19th-century Mauritius was concerned, the British sought to undermine the privileged position of the French by firstly limiting the use of the French language in specific domains and secondly, by promoting the use of languages associated with other communities.Footnote ⁵⁷ The first objective was achieved through the judicious implementation of two key policy decisions, namely a ban on the use of the French language in all local courtrooms, followed by a modification of public service employment conditions, stipulating that holders of professional qualifications from English-speaking institutions would be prioritised over those having studied in French-medium ones.Footnote ⁵⁸ Bearing in mind the demographic strength of the indentured immigrant population and wary of the possibility that the “French Mauritians would try to Gallicize the Indians if they c[ould],” British colonial authorities also endeavoured to “increase the power and influence of the Indians” by supporting the use of Indian languages in the public domain.Footnote ⁵⁹ Many public notices including those about the election of officials to specific committees started being published in Indian languages such as Tamil.Footnote ⁶⁰ These measures were greeted with vociferous protests on the part of the French settlers who denounced “les actes les plus importans et les plus tyranniques du Gouvernement Britanique [the most important and the most tyrannical acts of the British Government].”Footnote ⁶¹ Foremost among these was “l’abolition de leur langue maternelle, la destruction de leur legislation et l’intronisation d’un système bâtard [the abolition of their mother tongue, the destruction of their legislation and the officialisation of a bastard system].”Footnote ⁶²

Despite the strong resistance put up by the French, the British persisted in their efforts to enhance the status of Indian languages by introducing explicit policies aimed at including Indian vernacular languages in the education system of the island.Footnote ⁶³ As a matter of fact, at the time of the takeover, there were only a limited number of French-medium primary and secondary schools, and these were reserved exclusively for the children of the French settlers. Children of the former enslaved and those from the Coloured community, on the other hand, were denied access to formal education.Footnote ⁶⁴ While the early years of British colonisation did little to upset the existing status quo, a free day school designed to serve children of all races and offering instruction in both French and English was eventually established. However, the steady increase in the population of Indian immigrants prompted the colonial authorities to consider setting up schools that could accommodate the latter’s distinct cultural and linguistic needs.Footnote ⁶⁵ While the original plan was to “assist in the instruction of the Indian population” by putting in place English-medium schools, the simmering tension between the British and the French soon led to the adoption of an overt policy favouring Indian languages as the preferred medium of instruction.Footnote ⁶⁶

This emphasis on Indian languages reflected the increasing demographic power of the Indian community. From its humble beginnings in the 1830s, when Indians “constituted only a minute proportion of the population,” Indian immigration evolved to become the single most defining event in the settlement history of the island.Footnote ⁶⁷ As a result, the benign neglect with which early governors treated the indentured labourers gave way to more active interest in their wellbeing.Footnote ⁶⁸ Not only were measures taken to deter brutal corporal punishment, but ordinances were also passed to allow the Indians to create their own family units by encouraging, among others, the transportation of more female migrants to the country.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the level of language policy, two governors, Sir James Macaulay Higginson (1851–1857) and Sir Arthur Purves Phayre (1874–1878) are credited with bringing about significant change by formulating and implementing guidelines intended to facilitate access to the education system through the introduction of Indian vernacular languages as medium of instruction.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Le Cernéen newspaper so convincingly argued:

One way in which to prevent such a disaster was to foster a sense of belonging among the Indians. So far as the British were concerned, apart from the obvious financial benefits of such a decision, a language policy favouring the interests of the Indians would serve two key purposes: It would undermine the privileged position held by the French language—and symbolically that of its speakers as well—while also potentially providing the Indians with an additional incentive to settle in Mauritius once the indenture period was over.

However, as the next section demonstrates, the language policy decisions taken by both Higginson and Phayre and the circumstances surrounding them would also become an essential building block of the Language Making of Mauritian Bhojpuri and would end up having lasting consequences.

2. Language making in colonial Mauritius: The case of Mauritian Bhojpuri

At the end of his tenure and mere weeks ahead of his departure from the island, Le Cernéen newspaper published a message from outgoing governor Higginson. Addressing the inhabitants of the region of Savanne and thanking them for the farewell gathering they had hosted for him, he underscored the personal satisfaction he felt on seeing “les plantations florissantes, les nouveaux moulins avec leurs machines perfectionnées et la joyeuse et satisfaite population de travailleurs qui nous entoure [the flourishing plantations, the new mills with their sophisticated machines and the joyous and contented population of workers surrounding us].”Footnote ⁷² His sense of achievement was well-founded. Having reached Mauritius following a posting of five years in Agra, India, he had witnessed first-hand the sustained increase in the profits generated from the sale of sugar.Footnote ⁷³ Realising very early on during his tenure that the wellbeing of “our Indian Immigrants now comprising fully half of the whole population and annually increasing” was central to the long-term economic prosperity of the country, he devoted his “anxious attention to recommending a plan” to improve “the abnormal state of our Immigrant population.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, upon his arrival in Mauritius, he was prompt to notice the climate of “antagonistic difficulties” plaguing the Indian immigrants who, though valued for their contribution to the agricultural sector, were systematically denied any privilege which could encourage them to “ruin society by withholding [their] labour.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Despite explicit instructions from his predecessor, Governor William Maynard Gomm, to “refrain from attaching [his] support to … the promotion of education of the lower classes” and to focus on providing them with training “best adapted for the various mechanical occupations,” he resolutely set about to decrease “the various degrees of comparative inequality” and to raise “the spirits and the hopes of the innocent sufferers.”Footnote ⁷⁶

However, Higginson’s wish to extend access to formal education to Indian immigrants was not driven solely by altruistic intentions. He was, in fact, deeply concerned about the “isolation” of the British who “disconnected by any bond of sympathy with the higher class of proprietors” were unable to “advance the knowledge of English”—a language which, even after nearly half a century of British rule, remained an “unknown tongue.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, fourteen years following the establishment of Colonial Schools funded by the British administration, children would “often be called away from school without having had time to learn a single element of English Grammar or translation.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The inclusion of Indian immigrants in these and other prospective English-medium Colonial Schools would, therefore, serve “the two-fold purpose of doing good where it is so much wanted [and] make new openings for the feeding of these schools” through the provision of a ready supply of potential students.Footnote ⁷⁹ He had already been informed that in regions where teachers had taken the initiative to visit the “Indian Camps” and had spared “no pains, to win over a class of Indian pupils,” the latter “once placed under training, [had] proved themselves docile, attentive and singularly apt to learn.”Footnote ⁸⁰

One major stumbling block, though, remained the reluctance of Indian parents who, fearing proselytisation, were hesitant to send their children to schools where “the different dialects spoken by them [and] the religious creeds professed by them” would be overlooked.Footnote ⁸¹ To quote Higginson:

To overcome this challenge, he decided to come up with a “scheme offering a well grounded prospect of such measure of success as appeared to justify the pecuniary outlay to be unavoidably incurred in putting it into operation.”Footnote ⁸³ He proposed the use of Indian vernacular languages as a medium of instruction, possibly with the hope that it would both assuage the apprehensions of the parents and serve as a pedagogical bridge, facilitating an eventual transition to English-medium instruction. Amid the ongoing power struggle between the British and the French, this could, in turn, be construed as yet another calculated move against the latter, underscoring their gradual relegation to an increasingly precarious position in the colonial hierarchy.

Upon learning that “excellent School Houses might be constructed, in the country districts, at an expense not exceeding 280-pound sterling each,” he put his plan into action by investing £200 in the creation of a vernacular school for the children of the Indian workers on a sugar plantation in Savanne.Footnote ⁸⁴ Unfortunately, this initiative did not meet with much success. Although the closure of the Savanne school was initially attributed to the high rate of absenteeism and the relative inexperience of the teacher, Jacques Martial De Joux, the Superintendent of Schools, believed that a more likely reason was the unrealistic expectation to accommodate a “multiplicity of tongues” in the classroom.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although De Joux himself provides no further information regarding the various languages spoken on the Savanne sugar plantation, the prevailing linguistic diversity must be understood within the broader context of similar plantation communities where Indian indentured labour was a staple. Highlighting the deeply multilingual nature of such communities in South Africa, Mesthrie notes the presence of “Tamil and Telugu, and in small numbers, Malayalam and Kannada” alongside “a variety of Indo-European languages including Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Magahi, Kanauji, Bengali, Rajasthani, Braj, etc.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It appears reasonable to infer, therefore, that a broadly similar range of languages could have been present on the Savanne plantation too.

In addition, as Sociolinguist Rajend Mesthrie notes, a significant challenge among the Indian population, especially first-generation migrants, was the “inability to converse among themselves”, with speakers of Indo-European languages unable to understand those “who spoke Dravidian languages.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In such circumstances, a demographically or socially dominant language typically emerged as a lingua franca. It is this shared medium of communication to which De Joux was possibly referring when he subsequently recommended the adoption of one common vernacular language which was used and broadly understood by everyone instead of having teachers struggle with a “more or less imperfect acquaintance with a language which [was] not [their] own.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In a brief message published in Le Mauricien newspaper in support of De Joux’s recommendation, Higginson confirmed that:

De Joux and Higginson faced particularly fierce opposition from a special committee of Council which argued for the use of both English and French as medium of instruction on the grounds that the education provided to Indian children should be “in the mode of communication as that given to the children of other races.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite being in favour of compulsory education for the children of the Indian labourers, the Colonial Office, in its avowed wish to be as inclusive as possible, recommended that the language selected as medium of instruction should be one known and used by all the inhabitants of the island.Footnote ⁹¹ Henry Labouchère, the Secretary of State, went one step further, advising that since the education system would be funded by the income earned from the sale of sugar, Higginson should put aside previous feelings of antagonism towards the French and give in to their wish to maintain the French language as the sole medium of instruction.Footnote ⁹²

Undeterred, Higginson pointed out that the colony was already equipped with French-medium schools which remained out of bounds to children from the labouring classes.Footnote ⁹³ Instead, he proposed that the children of the formerly enslaved population be taught in the “Creole or Patois of the island,” with “the vernacular Dialects on a system similar to that pursued in the village schools in India” reserved for those of Indian origins.Footnote ⁹⁴ Sticking to his original plan of having the “Vernacular Dialects [as] the vehicle of instruction,” he reiterated his desire for the local schools to mirror those he had seen in the Bengal presidency, most notably in Agra, “where this system [had] been for years in beneficial operation.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Drawing attention to the parallels between the situation in Agra and that in Mauritius and emphasising the benefits of vernacular-medium education, he is reported to have said that:

Aware that these children hailed from “both the Bengal and Madras presidencies” and wishing to accommodate both groups, he proposed the creation of two new schools “one for the children from Madras, in the Tamil language; the other for Calcutta children, in the Hindoo dialect.”Footnote ⁹⁷ As mentioned previously, the majority of the immigrants transported to Mauritius were from Bihar, a region located within the Bengal presidency whose capital, at that point in time, was the city of Calcutta. The “Calcutta children” referred to in Higginson’s edict were, in fact, the offspring of these Bihari migrants, all native speakers of Mauritian Bhojpuri. Following this logic, it can be concluded that the Hindoo dialect being recommended as potential medium of instruction was, to all intents and purposes, Mauritian Bhojpuri.Footnote ⁹⁸ Further corroboration is provided by Anthropologist Patrick Eisenlohr, who asserts that British colonial administrators, including Governor Higginson, were aware of the existence of two main languages “presumably Bhojpuri and Tamil” spoken by the “Bengal and the Coast Indians.”Footnote ⁹⁹ This perspective is echoed by Mauritian researcher, Kumari Issur, who underlines that “Kalkatiya [from Calcutta]” served as a label both for the indentured labourers whose port of embarkation was Calcutta and for the dominant language spoken by most of them. By the same token, those having embarked from Bombay or Madras were commonly referred to as “Bombayy” and “Madras” respectively.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Reporting upon the above decision, the local press devoted much attention to Higginson’s overt opposition towards the French settlers who wished, according to him, to “tenir la basse classe plongée dans les ténèbres de l’ignorance [keep the lower class plunged into the darkness of ignorance]” by denying them access to education in their home language.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The solution to this problem, according to Higginson, was the creation of “des écoles spéciales dans lesquelles il décrète que la langue indoue sera la langue d’enseignement [special schools in which he decrees that the Hindoo language will be the medium of instruction].”Footnote ¹⁰² Commenting further on the special consideration provided to the “Calcutta children,” Le Mauricien notes that:

Of key significance in the above excerpts is the use of the term “indoue”—a literal translation of the word “Hindoo” first utilised by Higginson—to refer to the immigrants’ home language which was being recommended as medium of instruction in these “special schools.”

The term “Hindoo”, however, is not without ambiguity and warrants further scrutiny. Tempting though it may be to read “Hindoo” as a straightforwardly religious adjective designating the language of Hindu as opposed to Muslim speakers, the colonial Indian context cannot be reduced to such neat categorisations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, in colonial India, the term “Hindu” was one which suffered from a degree of semantic ambiguity. On the one hand, it acted as a geographical referent indicating a speaker’s belonging to “Suba Hindustan―the region that is bounded by the Himalayas”.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the other hand, it could also refer to a speaker of Hindu faith, using a variety of Hindustani—“the common language of North India which has at different times and by different people been described as Hindi, Urdu … or simply bhasha, i.e. language” ― characterised by a Sanskritised vocabulary.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Commenting on the use of the words “Hindu” by linguist and colonial administrator, George Grierson, academic Alok Rai notes that:

The same observation regarding tenuous colonial knowledge becoming institutionalised is equally relevant in the Mauritian context. Higginson himself offers no precise definition for the term “Hindoo,” leaving it open to conjecture as to whether the language he was pushing to institutionalise was one associated with speakers from a specific regional or religious background.

However, it should be borne in mind that vernacular languages in colonial India led what historian Pritipuspa Mishra calls “dual lives”, with their “quotidian and institutional” functions, often, at odds with each other.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In its original sense, the term “vernacular”, was used to refer to the language utilised in informal domains as opposed to a more dominant, socially valued one such as Latin in Italy or Sanskrit in India. In the British colonial context, it became associated with local languages, distinguishing them from the language of the colonisers, namely English.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet, as Mishra points out, despite being grouped under the same broad category, not all vernaculars were considered important enough to serve as languages of instruction. So far as language-in-education policies were concerned, predictably, English took precedence as the medium of instruction, with languages considered as “major native” ones following close behind. Among these were regional languages such as Tamil in southern India and Hindustani in the north, which were used as lingua francas across large geographical areas and transcended religious boundaries. At the bottom of the hierarchy figured more local languages spoken by comparatively smaller groups of speakers.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A similar logic appears to have informed Higginson’s proposed vernacular schools, with English as the eventual target language and the two contemporary lingua francas, Tamil and the Hindoo dialect, as transitional mediums of instruction. Given the parallels in the way language-in-education policies were conceived in India and subsequently in Mauritius, it can be inferred that this Hindoo dialect was, in all likelihood, Mauritian Bhojpuri, a lingua franca which, Eisenlohr argues, was shared by immigrants of different faiths.Footnote ¹¹¹

Although Higginson’s guidelines were not immediately implemented, they had created the foundation for the Language Making of Mauritian Bhojpuri. Two decades later, when the question regarding the “methods for providing instruction, for the great mass of Indian children” resurfaced, Governor Phayre followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, stating that “the better plan w[ould] be first to establish some schools in select localities, where Indian children may be taught in their own language.”Footnote ¹¹² Once again, the similarities between the Indian and the Mauritian context were emphasised, leading Phayre to ask:

Concerned about the large number of children “running among us destitute of the means of acquiring instruction” and believing that “instances [of advancement] may however be less expected for in the other schools where French is taught,” he advocated for the establishment of “Indian education” with the “vernacular tongues of the general peoples” as the medium of instruction.Footnote ¹¹⁴ He further added that since, “for colloquial communication, they use Hindi or Hindustani,” the languages employed in these schools should “certainly [be] Tamil and Hindi.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ As the above extracts demonstrate, Phayre’s stance closely mirrored that of Higginson. Caught in the hostile crossfire between the economically dominant French settlers and the British administration, both sought to consolidate the British foothold in the colony through their shared advocacy for vernacular-medium instruction as an alternative to the French-medium one. Equally noteworthy was the label each assigned to Mauritian Bhojpuri: While Higginson referred to it as “Hindoo dialect,” Phayre opted for “Hindi” or “Hindustani.” Unlike Higginson, though, Phayre went one step further, specifying that “[t]he pupils [of these vernacular schools] would for the most part be the children of Hindus and Mahomedans”, making it clear that the language proposed as a potential medium of instruction was one that cut across religious lines.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The mislabelling of languages, particularly in colonial contexts, was by no means unprecedented. Mesthrie, for instance, reveals that South African Bhojpuri suffered much the same fate, with the colonial authorities referring to it as Hindustani.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Blaming it on their lack of familiarity with the linguistic specificities of the language, he finds it unsurprising that this ignorance should have extended to “its very name.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Such decisions, however, are rarely without consequences. Indeed, as Krämer, Mijts, and Bartens assert, “[n]aming, and thereby defining, a linguistic entity can be a powerful act of colonial practice” and can influence the future trajectory of a language.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Building on this argument, the following section looks at the evolution of MB in the light of the decisions taken during Higginson’s and Phayre’s time, highlighting their enduring impact.

3. Mauritian Bhojpuri and the legacy of colonial language making

When languages are brought into being through, for example, the incorrect attribution of labels, their consequences might not be immediately apparent. While contemporary speakers might retain some awareness of the nature and specificities of their language prior to the intervention of colonial authorities, this consciousness might fade over time, giving rise to a form of collective amnesia or “unremembering.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Eventually, the historical conditions which gave rise to these new languages might be consigned to oblivion, resulting in the guidelines put in place during the colonial period becoming accepted as the norm.Footnote ¹²¹ For some languages, mislabelling may result in their “silencing,” culminating in a type of “forgetting [which] is covert, unmarked and unacknowledged.”Footnote ¹²² Mauritian Bhojpuri appears to have gone through a similar process, with the intricacies of colonial Language Making becoming unremembered as the language became silenced by being forgotten and going unacknowledged in several key documents.

Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Language Making process, speakers appeared to have retained an awareness of the distinctiveness of Mauritian Bhojpuri vis-à-vis Hindi. According to Hindu priest, Pandit Vishwanath Atmaram, whose seminal work provides an insider’s perspective into the languages, customs, and traditions of the Mauritian Hindu community, it was at the beginning of the 20^th century that Hindi first started being taught to the children of the Indian immigrants. It was seen as being so unlike Mauritian Bhojpuri that it was either rejected outright or greeted with laughter.Footnote ¹²³ In his words:

Not only were the grammatical inflections used in Mauritian Bhojpuri and Hindi very different from each other, but insertions from Mauritian Creole into Bhojpuri had become so common as to dilute much of the lexical similarity that might have existed between the two languages.Footnote ¹²⁵ However, in due course, the gradual silencing of Mauritian Bhojpuri in official documents led to it becoming unremembered as the native language of many immigrants. The use of terms such as “Hindoo dialect,” “Hindi” or “Hindustani” to designate the language meant that Mauritian Bhojpuri became a nameless and, by extension, an invisible entity, which, though used conversationally in many Mauritian homes, was omitted from all censuses and other official documents published during the British colonial period.

Although not originally included in local censuses held during the 19^th century, language questions became a staple from 1944.Footnote ¹²⁶ In Mauritius, where the high rate of intermarriage and conversion to other faiths made the classification of the population into distinct communities quite challenging, they were valued for their ability to shed light on the racial and/or ethnic origins of all inhabitants.Footnote ¹²⁷ As a result, since 1944, questions about a respondent’s current language use and that of his forefathers have been utilised as a convenient proxy to determine the “population group” that (s)he belongs to.”Footnote ¹²⁸ From 1944 to 1972, it was Hindi, not Mauritian Bhojpuri, which was included in the list of options available to respondents.Footnote ¹²⁹ Commenting on the above situation, both sociolinguist Anil Kumar Biltoo and anthropologist Burton Benedict assert that despite efforts to teach Hindi to the younger generation, the immigrants spoke Mauritian Bhojpuri and, in failing to include the language as a valid option, the local authorities had “determined the two language labels to be synonymous.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Although Mauritian Bhojpuri has been included in the census since 1983, Biltoo advises that the reported figures need to be viewed with caution since the possibility that many Mauritian Bhojpuri speakers have continued to opt for Hindi cannot be dismissed.Footnote ¹³¹

Another important set of documents warranting further examination is the British-era Constitutions of the Colony of Mauritius, as they offer valuable insights into the evolution of the language situation on the island. From 1825 to 1958, five constitutions were enacted, with each one bringing about a steady erosion in the privileges afforded to the French settlers.Footnote ¹³² While the 1825 constitution established a Council of Government dominated by British officials, successive constitutional reforms introduced further restrictions on the French by, for instance, preventing those who had benefited from any kind of financial assistance from the British administration from either standing for election or getting registered as a voter.Footnote ¹³³ In contrast, the Indian population experienced incremental constitutional support, culminating in the 1947 constitution which granted suffrage to any immigrant who could “speak and read and write simple sentences in, and [could] sign his name in, any one of the languages mentioned in the Second Schedule.”Footnote ¹³⁴

The above stipulation had been a long time in the making. As early as in 1886, British colonial authorities had started considering the implementation of an “educational test” as a prerequisite for being allowed to vote, with the Secretary of State further explaining that “it would not … be just to the Indian population to require them to read or write in any other than their own language.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The objective of the second schedule was, therefore, to provide a list of the languages currently in use in the community. It made provision for a total of nine languages, namely English, French, Creole, Urdu, Chinese, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and, finally, Hindustani. No mention was made of Mauritian Bhojpuri.

The 1947 constitutional reform was accompanied by further changes at the level of policy. The sidelining of one language did not preclude the promotion of others and Hindi, in particular, benefitted from additional institutional support .Footnote ¹³⁶ From 1948, the colonial government approved the recruitment of experts from India with the explicit aim of training primary school teachers to provide instruction in oriental languages. In 1949, Professor Ram Prakash was employed by the Department of Education as a Hindi language instructor.Footnote ¹³⁷ From the early 1950s, Hindi started being offered as an optional subject in all government-funded primary schools, laying the groundwork for its eventual introduction at the secondary level as well.Footnote ¹³⁸ Bhojpuri, in contrast, received no such support.One possible explanation for the exclusion of Mauritian Bhojpuri could be the fact that for much of their history, both Indian and Mauritian Bhojpuri were, above all, oral languages. Since Mauritian Bhojpuri retained its status as a lingua franca for most of the 20th century, it would be reasonable to assume that even if Hindi owed its newfound prestige to historical serendipity, the silencing of Mauritian Bhojpuri went unchallenged for practical reasons. Hindi, with its rich literary history and perceived lexical proximity to Mauritian Bhojpuri, might have been seen as both a fitting and a convenient choice for prestigious domains such as schools. However, it is worth noting that though the immigrants brought to Mauritius might not have been literate in English or French, many of them were nonetheless able to read and write in other languages, one of them being Bhojpuri.Footnote ¹³⁹ From the 16th to the mid-20th century, the Kaithi script—and very rarely, the Devanagari script—was used to write texts in Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili and even Hindi.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In fact, it is the Kaithi version of the Rāmacaritamānasa, a religious textbook written in the Awadhi language and brought to Mauritius by the indentured labourers, which was used before being replaced by its Devanagari counterpart during the course of the 20th century.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As the Mauritian Bhojpuri scholar Sarita Boodhoo notes, “the script used by Bhojpurias who were lettered was Kaithi.”Footnote ¹⁴² From the above, it is possible to infer that had Mauritian Bhojpuri been mentioned in the edicts put forward by Higginson and Phayre, provision could have been made for it to be taught and used in more formal contexts.Footnote ¹⁴³

Although it would be tempting to assume a one-to-one correspondence between conscious forms of colonial Language Making and the chain of events they inevitably set into motion, it is important to recognise that these frequently emerge within contexts which facilitate their entrenchment. Speakers themselves become complicit in the sidelining of languages when they fail to recognise, understand and eventually challenge the norms being put in place, passing on a “heritage of absences and silences” to the next generation.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Grierson, for instance, had already noted the significance of Bhojpuri as a transplanted language, observing that “thousands of them [Bhojpuri speakers] have emigrated to British colonies …; every year still larger numbers wander over northern Bengal and seek employment.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Yet, despite being spoken by the demographically dominant group, Bhojpuri was eventually attributed negative descriptors by its own speakers who referred to it variously as “tūtal ‘broken’ in Guyana, motia ‘coarse, boorish’ in Mauritius, ailī-gailī language in Natal.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Being labelled Hindoo dialect, Hindi, or Hindustani contributed to the making of Hindi and the un-making of Mauritian Bhojpuri. But this colonial legacy endures because it was bolstered by the subsequent promotion of Hindi by organisations such as the Arya Samaj as a symbol of prestige, particularly among those of North Indian ancestry and of Hindu faith.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This perceived “hinduizing [of] Bhojpuri” has also had an exclusionary effect, with Muslim speakers, for instance, becoming increasingly reluctant to associate themselves with the language and instead gravitating towards Arabic and Urdu as their purported ancestral languages.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ An analogous point is made by Rai in relation to the ethnicisation of Hindustani in India where ethnolinguistic insecurity, shored up by the colonial politics of vernacularisation, culminated in its speakers becoming divided along religious lines. As he pertinently asks:

Mauritian Bhojpuri could be confronted with a similar set of questions too. Once functioning as an effective, cross-communal lingua franca, its conflation with Hindi appears to have reconfigured it into a language increasingly marked as Hindu and renounced by those who do not identify as such.

With time, the subsuming of Mauritian Bhojpuri under the label of Hindi led to the erosion of its perceived status as a distinct linguistic entity. In 1901, when Indian nationalist and freedom fighter, Mahatma Gandhi visited Mauritius on his way back to India, he is reported to have described the language as a form of pidgin Hindustani.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Gradually, even speakers of Mauritian Bhojpuri came to see their language as a “patois,” claiming that “Bhojpuri is to Hindi what Creole is to French.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ In other words, just like Mauritian Creole was, at that point in time, regarded as a corrupt form of French, Mauritian Bhojpuri was similarly perceived as being derivative and unworthy of being bestowed the status of language. The stigmatisation of Mauritian Bhojpuri by its own speakers often resulted in them “obscur[ing] the identity of their language by referring to it as Hindi in official and formal contexts.”Footnote ¹⁵² This may partly account for the classic diglossia existing in present-day Mauritius between Hindi, the High language, and Bhojpuri, the Low language. The situation has been compounded by speakers’ increasing language shift towards Mauritian Creole, culminating in the emergence of non-classic or extended diglossia between the two languages, with Creole now considered as more socially prestigious than Bhojpuri.Footnote ¹⁵³ In addition, with English becoming the medium of instruction and one of the core subjects alongside French in 1903, the shift away from Mauritian Bhojpuri has also been motivated by instrumental reasons such as better job prospects.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The marginalisation of Mauritian Bhojpuri, therefore, needs to be seen as a form of “collusive silenc[ing],” with colonial Language Making being supported by the in-group.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Ultimately, maintaining a nuanced perspective about the consequences of colonial Language Making remains crucial. In addition, as the following section argues, the legacy of colonial Language Making, though enduring, is not immutable. As languages continue to evolve, “categories of the past” can become blurred, making it easier to move beyond their constraints.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

4. Moving on from colonial language making

As per linguists Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, the tendency to use colonial policies as the only explanation for the prevailing language situation in postcolonial contexts is akin to the act of driving a car while looking only in the rearview mirror. While it can provide a window onto the past, it is also a potentially risky activity which prevents a community from focusing on the way forward.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Instead, Makoni and Pennycook advocate for the adoption of a perspective which, though grounded in an awareness of the diachronic evolution of a language, also focuses on how it can potentially be un-made or re-made.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ This “disinvention” of a language takes on board the historical processes which led to its creation but is not limited by them. Language Making, therefore, is conceptualised not as an end in itself, but as a work-in-progress.

So far as the colonial period is concerned, Krämer, Vogl, and Kolehmainen emphasise the pivotal role played by key decision-makers as agents of Language Making. Through their ability to label linguistic entities and promote them to the status of an autonomous language, they had the power to both make or un-make a language.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As a matter of fact, even though such conscious human interventions could have “emancipatory potential,” by, for example, enhancing the status of minority languages, they could also be responsible for “drastic effects of marginalization” by rendering some varieties nameless and consequently invisible.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ It is often argued that such conscious forms of Language Making can extend beyond colonial times, with some invented languages going on to thrive while others require further political and institutional support to break free from the thrall of colonial decisions and disinvent themselves.Footnote ¹⁶¹ So far as Mauritius is concerned, governors Sir James Higginson and Sir Arthur Purves Phayre can be considered accidental agents of Language Making. Posted in a country with a prior history of colonisation, they found themselves having to manage the needs and expectations of a powerful, if hostile, French settler community as well as those of a demographically dominant Indian community. It is within this context of protracted power-wrangling that the Language Making of Mauritian Bhojpuri took place. Through the attribution of an incorrect label to Mauritian Bhojpuri, they inadvertently contributed to silencing the latter, a decision which, as this paper has argued, has had far-reaching consequences.

However, the silencing of languages is not an irreversible or unidirectional process. In some cases, it can also be potentially reversed.Footnote ¹⁶² Researcher Rachel Arteaga argues that one of the key responsibilities of the Public Humanities, a field which looks at the intersection between the humanities and public life, is to initiate a “deeply social infrastructure of repair.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Defined as a type of intellectual endeavour carried out with the aim of understanding the “histories and the cultural traditions that contextualize our lives,” an infrastructure of repair consists of any kind of socially and culturally meaningful action which ensures that “every individual can claim [his/her] rightful cultural inheritance.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The un-making or re-making of languages is inscribed within these infrastructures of repair, allowing speakers to reclaim their nameless and silenced languages and preventing the present from remaining permanently anchored to the past. A language can, thus, reclaim its voice so long as it is provided with some form of institutional support.

In the Mauritian context, attitudes towards Mauritian Bhojpuri have not always been positive. Early efforts to introduce the language in public domains such as in the media were met with some resistance, with many favouring socially prestigious languages such as French.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ However, due in large part to being “politically instrumentalised”, there are currently some manifestations of the above-mentioned infrastructures of repair.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ These include the standardisation of Mauritian Bhojpuri in 2011, the eventual introduction of the language in primary schools in 2012, the creation of a Bhojpuri-speaking Union in 2013 and the provision of a variety of television programmes on the Bhojpuri channel of the Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In early 2025, a Certificate in Bhojpuri Studies was also proposed by the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, an institution operating under the aegis of the University of Mauritius. Responding to the Mauritian government’s plan to broadcast more programmes in Mauritian Bhojpuri, this certificate was designed with the explicit aim to help prospective candidates improve both their written and oral skills in the language.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In April 2025, a suggestion was also put forward to amend the constitution to allow Mauritian Bhojpuri to be used as one of the working languages of the parliament.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Once dismissed as uncouth and unfit for polite company, Mauritian Bhojpuri, like the proverbial Phoenix, appears poised to emerge from the ashes of its colonial past. While there is no guarantee that these proposed developments will materialise, they still herald a future of cautious optimism for Mauritian Bhojpuri, thus showing that the legacy of colonial Language Making is not set in stone but is, in fact, open to repair and redress.