Divali, the festival of lights

Some festivals are lived in the street, others at home. Divali belongs to the second kind, and that is precisely what makes it so visible. Towards the end of the year, in October or November, the island celebrates the Hindu festival of lights: houses are decorated with lights, traditional sweets are prepared, and families draw rangolis, those colourful, painstaking patterns most often traced on the floor. When evening comes, it is the houses themselves that carry the festival.

Divali follows the Hindu calendar, which depends on the moon. Its date therefore changes from one year to the next, between October and November, and the government fixes it each year among the public holidays. In 2026, Divali falls on Sunday 8 November.

The timing matters to the traveller. Divali comes at the turn of the seasons. October is the driest month of the year and one of the two months of transition between winter and summer; the cyclone season opens on 1 November. Depending on the year, the festival of lights thus falls in the last weeks of the dry season or in the first days of the southern summer.

Why does Divali matter so much in Mauritius? Because Hinduism is the country’s leading religion. At the 2022 census, 590,263 residents of the Republic identified with Hinduism, nearly 48 per cent of the population. The great majority of them, 474,623 people, describe themselves as Hindu without further detail. The others belong to the Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Vedic or Arya groups. This Hinduism is above all rural: of those 474,623 people, 342,085 live in the countryside, more than seven in ten.

This presence has a history. After the abolition of slavery in 1835, more than 462,000 indentured labourers arrived in Mauritius, up to the First World War. Most came from India, and many were of Hindu or Muslim tradition. They worked in the cane fields and profoundly changed the island’s society. The country commemorates their arrival every 2 November with a public holiday. In 2026, only six days separate the two dates: 2 November for the memory of the indentured labourers, the 8th for Divali.

Divali is celebrated first of all at home. The house is decorated with lights, the festive sweets are cooked, rangolis are traced on the floor. These three gestures are enough to convey the festival: light, a shared table, the care of a pattern drawn by hand for the occasion. None of this is put on as a show, and yet it is what the traveller notices first when passing through a village or a town at dusk.

The festival also has its public side. The Ministry of Arts and Culture organises national Divali celebrations: in 2022, a concert brought together finalists and winners of the Indian television talent shows Indian Idol and India’s Dancing Superstars, alongside Mauritian artists. In 2020, the celebration had featured dance and music troupes from the island. For its part, the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority holds Divali concerts every year at several places around the island, combining well-known artists with cultural performances, and open to visitors.

In the list of public holidays for 2026, Divali is the last of the year’s Hindu festivals. It comes after Thaipoosam Cavadee on 1 February, Maha Shivaratree on 15 February, Ugaadi on 19 March and Ganesh Chaturthi on 16 September. Five Hindu festivals out of fifteen public holidays: the proportion reflects the weight of Hinduism in the life of the country, without eclipsing the others. The same list grants one day to Eid ul-Fitr, two to Christian feasts, the Assumption and Christmas, and one to the Chinese Spring Festival.

This proximity is what makes the Mauritian calendar distinctive. In a few weeks at the end of the year, the island moves from the memory of the indentured labourers to the festival of lights, and then to Christmas, accompanied by the vivid red of the flamboyant trees in bloom.

For the visitor, Divali offers a rare way of seeing the island. Not its beaches or its mountains, but its homes, its families and its neighbourhoods, at the very moment they turn to celebration.