Abstract

Hinduism was brought to Reunion by indentured workers of whom the majority were from southern India and by a few merchants and shopkeepers from the same region who had decided to go to the island. It was, then, fundamentally an unsophisticated, popular Hinduism such as was practised in Tamil villages. 

Since the island has become a French department, it has undergone an important social transformation. It used to be a « plantation society », centred on the sugar-growing areas controlled by the important white landowners, the mountainous regions being occupied by poor small farmers of European extraction. The Indians lived in the plantation belt, working on the large holdings. 

Recent changes have seen an important expansion of the middle class, due mostly to the development of the Civil Service and commerce. The extension of education throughout the island has opened the doors of this new class to a growing number of Indians. At the same time, rural employment has decreased and many country dwellers have crowded into the city-outskirt shantytowns. 

This twofold social evolution has been accompanied by a certain adaptation of the local Hinduism. As it has developed, the middle class has sought to leave behind the popular folk practices. Under the influence of Mauritians and Indians from India, it has adopted a form of worship much closer to that of the urban centres of southern India, at the same time as it has revived Tamil culture. In poorer areas, on the contrary, the forms of popular folk worship have, as they have spread to the non-Indian sectors of the population, given rise to syncretic practices whose ends are a mixture of medicine and magic.