South Asia Center presents: Yoshina Hurgobin

Yoshina Hurgobin Department of History, Syracuse University From Migration to Citizenship: Indians in Mauritius, 1896 - 1946 Historians of pre-independence Indian diaspora have written much on Indian migrant labor within the confines of the British Empire. However, much less is known about how these Indians settled in their new lands of adoption and sought to create identities and sites of belonging. This paper traces how Indian indentured laborers migrated to Mauritius in the late nineteenth century to work on sugar cane plantations. It tracks their quests to transform from diasporic subjects to Mauritian citizens. It further explains how the Indian nationalist movement provided political, religious, and cultural influences to their project.