Hinduism outside India challenges the scholar. How can a religion often perceived as consubstantially linked to the Indian territory travel, adapt, and take roots far from the “Motherland”? A Creole society with half the population declaring Hinduism as its religion, Mauritius indeed stands as an ideal case to question, not only the conditions of existence and evolution of Hinduism outside India, but also the interactions between ethnicity (Hindu-ness/Indian-ness) and hybridity (creole-ness) that are characteristic of these Hindu populations abroad [9].

We can find in Mauritius a perfect example of “Creole Hinduisms” [4] – those born in the peculiar context of the indentured labor system which transplanted Indians into plantation societies in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, or the Pacific isles during the nineteenth century. Such Creole Hinduisms result from the cohabitation, within a small island, both (1) between several Hindu traditions (from various castes...