Maha Shivaratree, Shiva’s night at Grand Bassin

In the uplands of the Savanne district, a crater lake fills the hollow of a mountain landscape. It is called Grand Bassin, or Ganga Talao, and it is one of the great places of Hinduism in Mauritius. For much of the year, people walk around it unhurriedly, between the colourful shrines set at the water’s edge and the monkeys playing on the shore. Once a year, for Maha Shivaratree, the lake becomes the goal of a pilgrimage that crosses the whole island.

Maha Shivaratree is a Hindu festival dedicated to Shiva. It is celebrated on the thirteenth night and fourteenth day of the eleventh month of the Hindu calendar, which places it, on the civil calendar, between February and March. It is one of the most widely observed festivals of the Hindu calendar, and one of the public holidays of Mauritius.

Like every festival governed by the moon, it changes date each year, and the government fixes the day in the list of public holidays it sets for each year. In 2026, Maha Shivaratree fell on Sunday 15 February, two days before the Chinese Spring Festival. The season is the southern summer: February is, with March, one of the two wettest months of the year, and one of the hottest.

The Mauritian way of celebrating Maha Shivaratree comes down to a single gesture: walking. Devotees set out from every corner of the island and make their way to Ganga Talao on foot. Others come from much further afield, for the pilgrimage also draws the faithful from abroad. Once at the lake, they pray, burn incense and lay offerings to the gods before the shrines that line the water.

The lake is the heart of the festival, and it is during the festival that it can be seen at its fullest. Anyone who wants to understand what Maha Shivaratree means to the island would do well to come to Ganga Talao at that time, as a discreet spectator of a pilgrimage that is not meant for them, but is not closed to them either.

Outside the festival, the site keeps its solemnity. At the entrance to the lake, a statue of Shiva thirty-three metres tall greets the visitor. From there one walks round the shore, from one shrine to the next, in a calm disturbed only by the monkeys. The place remains an active place of worship, and it is visited with fitting restraint.

The sanctuary also has its place in the life of the state. On 12 March 2025, Independence Day, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, on a state visit to Mauritius, went to the Ganga Talao Spiritual Sanctuary at Grand Bassin.

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Shiva elsewhere on the island

Ganga Talao is not the only great place of Shiva in Mauritius. In the north, at Triolet, the Maheswarnath Mandir, also known as the Triolet temple, is dedicated to him. It is the largest Hindu temple on the island and one of the oldest: Pandit Sanjbunlall Ramsoondur founded it in 1888. Inside are a Shiva Linga and representations of the goddess Parvati, Shiva’s consort, and of Nandi, the sacred bull. Several smaller temples surround it within a single enclosure, and the whole can be recognised by its white columns, the delicacy of its floral decoration and its brightly coloured sculptures.

The two places complement each other. The Triolet temple is a building, at the heart of a village in the north. Ganga Talao is a landscape, a sacred lake amid the mountains. For Maha Shivaratree, it is the lake that draws the pilgrims.

Maha Shivaratree is better understood in the light of one figure. At the 2022 census, 590,263 residents of the Republic identified with Hinduism, nearly 48 per cent of the population. It is the country’s leading religion, and Maha Shivaratree is one of its great festivals.

Mauritian Hinduism is above all rural. Of the 474,623 people who describe themselves as Hindu without further detail, 342,085 live in rural areas, more than seven in ten. The religion of Shiva is first and foremost a religion of the villages, and it is from every corner of the island that the walkers of Ganga Talao set out for the great night.

For the visitor, the lesson is twofold. Maha Shivaratree is not a local curiosity but one of the major festivals of the country’s leading religion. And Ganga Talao, which many discover in the course of an excursion into the uplands, is first and foremost a sanctuary, with the festival of Shiva at its heart.