Thaipoosam Cavadee, the festival of Muruga

Some festivals in the Mauritian calendar can be recognised from afar by their lights or their firecrackers. Thaipoosam Cavadee is recognised by an object: the cavadee, a flower-covered arch that devotees carry to the temple, together with consecrated milk, in honour of Muruga. It is a Tamil festival, dedicated to a god whom Hinduism holds to be one of the sons of Shiva. It is also one of the Republic’s public holidays.

Thaipoosam Cavadee is celebrated at the full moon of the tenth month of the Tamil calendar. On the civil calendar, the festival falls between January and February, and its date changes from one year to the next. Each year the government fixes the exact day in the list of public holidays it publishes for the following year.

In 2026, Thaipoosam Cavadee fell on Sunday 1 February. That day the island had two public holidays in one: the festival of Muruga and the commemoration of the abolition of slavery, which Mauritius observes every year on 1 February. Nobody had planned it; the moon decided. Yet the meeting, on a single day, of a Tamil devotional festival and the memory of slavery says a good deal about the Mauritian calendar: a succession of festivals from every horizon, set side by side, none of them erasing another.

For anyone planning a stay, the essentials are quickly told. Thaipoosam Cavadee falls at the height of the southern summer, the hot, humid season that runs from November to April, during the hottest months of the year.

The festival is more than a public holiday. Devotees prepare for it by keeping to a vegetarian diet for ten days. On the day itself, devotion takes forms that startle the outsider: some pierce their skin, others walk on fire. At the centre of it all is the cavadee, carried to the temple, and the consecrated milk offered to the god.

These gestures are acts of faith, performed by people who have prepared for them over many days. Visitors who find themselves in the path of a procession watch it as they would any religious ceremony far from home: as witnesses, at a distance, without turning other people’s fervour into a backdrop.

The 2022 census gives the measure of the community behind the festival. That year, 63,950 residents of the Republic gave their religion as Tamil or Tamil Hindu, a little over 5 per cent of the population. They form one of the groups within Mauritian Hinduism, alongside the Telugu group, which numbers 25,216 people, and the Marathi group, with 19,052. In all, 590,263 Mauritians identify with Hinduism, nearly half the country.

One figure is surprising. Only 32,867 people give Tamil as the language of their ancestors, to whom may be added 5,731 people who name both Creole and Tamil. Nearly 64,000 Mauritians, then, describe themselves as Tamil by religion, while barely more than 38,000 are Tamil by the language of their forebears. In Mauritius, Tamil identity is declared more widely through faith than through language.

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A community present across the island

The Tamils of Mauritius do not live clustered in one place. The district of Plaines Wilhems, the most populous on the island, counts 24,237 of them, more than one in three. Then come Rivière du Rempart with 6,317, Pamplemousses with 5,862, Flacq with 5,695, Savanne with 5,536 and Moka with 5,167. Yet it is in the district of Savanne that their share of the population is highest: a little over 8 residents in 100. In Rodrigues, they number 41.

Tamil culture also has its public institutions. The Mauritius Tamil Cultural Centre Trust, set up by an act of 2001, and the Tamil Speaking Union, governed by an act of 2015, both come under the Ministry of Arts and Culture. In 2024, the Tamil cultural centre held a competition of kolattam, a folk dance with Tamil roots, brought over by Tamil forebears and practised in Mauritius for generations. The competition drew 147 participants.

What a traveller will take from these figures is simple. Thaipoosam Cavadee is not the festival of one neighbourhood or one town. It belongs to a community present in every district of the island, and one that the whole country acknowledges by granting it, every year, a public holiday.