Africa-Press – Mauritius. Baijas—derived from the bhajias—are a ubiquitous snack in the country, and there are deep-fried “cakes” of sweet potato, aubergine, and cassava everywhere. Even French jus in various dishes in the country comes with a generous dose of garam masala.
The small island nation of Mauritius is anything but small when it comes to the food it serves up.
Mauritian cuisine is a bold and delicious mix of Indian, French, Creole, and Chinese flavors that were once brought to Mauritian kitchens by European colonizers.
In the case of India, it was indentured laborers who were brought into the country and who brought with them their food, as Indians have done everywhere in the world.
In 1836, John Gladstone, a Liverpool merchant – incidentally, the father of the British Prime Minister William Gladstone – proposed that Indian laborers be employed to make up for a decrease in the labor force expected due to the abolition of slavery after the French Revolution.
This practice established a form of de facto slavery, as impoverished Hindu peasants were bound to contracts that obligated them to work for five or seven years in exchange for housing, food, medicine, clothing, meager wages, and a free passage to the country where they were to toil.
Many of them came from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Often, these workers did not even know where they were headed. In 1838, the initial consignment of bonded workers departed for Demerara, and by the time the Indian National Congress effectively worked to terminate this practice in 1919, 1.5 million had departed India, and at the most, only one-third had returned to India.
From 1843, indentured labor transported Indians and their cuisine to Mauritius, British Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica in 1845, South Africa and Fiji in the 1870s.
All these nations now show a powerful Indian influence in their culinary customs. And there are a lot of Indian influences in the patois (local dialect) of the regions as well, especially Bhojpuri.
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