NEW DELHI, JANUARY 13: Hardly 10 people of Indian origin represented the Reunion Island at the 6th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) last week. A small number considering that the country has around a quarter of a million people of Indian descent. But they had to come. “India has never really gone away from us,” says Jean-Regis Ramsamy, the president of the Reunion section of the Organisation for Diaspora Initiatives (ODI).

“The Indian diaspora in Reunion Island, along with the French islands in the Caribbean, is the only one which has lost its mother tongue,” adds Ramsamy. Most of the estimated 117,813 indentured Indians sent to the French colony were from Tamil Nadu.

“To get an appraisal in the sugarcane fields, the Indian workforce had to give up its mother tongue and use Creole,” explains Sully Santa Govindin, president of the Group of Studies and Researches on Malbarité.

As Reunion Island became a French Overseas Department in 1946, it turned its face towards France and Europe. “After independence, India refused to give us dual citizenship. Now, we are proud to be European, but at the same time preserve our legacy in the Tamil villages on our island,” adds Govindin.

One of the requests put forward by the ODI of Reunion is an easier way to get hold of a PIO card. “It takes a very long time for us to get the PIO card as there are problems in plotting our genealogic tree,” says Ramsamy.

Aurore Patchane, an 18-year-old management student who attended the conclave under the Know Inter Programme, has met such difficulties: “I managed to go only up to my great grandparents generation because my forefathers’ names may have been written with mistakes on the French immigration registers or they might have taken Christian names.”

Sulliman Issop, a 55-year-old-journalist from Reunion who celebrated the New Year in Chennai, was more lucky as he knew his Indian origins on his father’s side.

“My father was about 10 years old when he left Gujarat along with his five-year-old brother after an epidemic took the lives of his parents and sister. They were sheltered and educated by an uncle settled in the Reunion,” he says. His aunt actually told him that his father came from the village of Kamboli in Gujarat and he first went there in 2001. “People showed me the mosque, the orphanage and the school built with the money he had sent.”

There must be around 45,000 Gujarati Muslims in Reunion now according to writer Ismael Daoujee. “The first wave of Indo-Muslim immigration was in 1860,” Daoujee explains. Most of them came as free merchant or workers in the jewellery sector.

“The famine in Gujarat between 1899 and 1902 brought a second wave of Muslims, who were employed by those who got there before,” he adds. But despite the onslaught of French culture, the Indians in Reunion have hung on to their cultural legacy. The Tamils still eat on banana leaves and wear saris on special occasions. Hinduism is still vert dynamic on the island.

“More than a hundred fire walks are organised every year,” says Govindin, adding that animal sacrifices too are very popular along with Deepavali celebrations. But mixed weddings are getting more common. “More and more Indians are marrying outside their community, especially when they go to mainland France,” says Ramsamy.