Ganga Talao: Visitor and Heritage Guide

Ganga Talao is not a World Heritage site and is not on Mauritius's Tentative List. It is included here because it is the single clearest expression on the island of what indenture became after the contracts ran out: a religious geography, transplanted across an ocean and made permanent.

It is a crater lake at Grand Bassin, high on the southern plateau, ringed by temples and by two very large statues of Shiva and Durga.

How a crater lake became the Ganges

The story told locally is that a priest dreamed the water of this lake was connected to the Ganges, and that water carried from the Ganges was later poured into it. Whether or not the account is exact, what it produced is not in doubt: the lake is treated as holy water, and the site is the destination of a pilgrimage that gathers hundreds of thousands of people.

At Maha Shivaratree, pilgrims walk from all over Mauritius carrying decorated wooden arches called kanwars, some of them for two or three days. It is the largest Hindu pilgrimage anywhere outside India, on an island of a little over a million people, and it exists because the indenture ships brought a religion as well as a workforce.

Visiting during Maha Shivaratree

If you are on the island during the festival, going is welcome and Mauritians will tell you so. What is not welcome is treating it as a spectacle. Walk if you are going to go, park a long way out, take your lead from the people around you, and photograph the landscape rather than the devotion.

The date moves every year against the Gregorian calendar, so check the year you are traveling.

Why it belongs in this cluster

The other four pages here are about arrival, escape and what was lost. This one is about what was carried and kept. The people processed through Aapravasi Ghat brought their gods with them, and a hundred and fifty years later their descendants walk across an island in the Indian Ocean to a lake they have made into a river in India.