Geet Gawai: A Diasporic Echo Across Oceans

‘We may not have understood it as children, but we were witnessing a tradition with centuries of memory behind it’

By Nandini Bhautoo

On 1st December 2025, Mauritians marked nine years since Geet Gawai was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This event was recently celebrated at the initiative of the Bhojpuri Speaking Union, which brought together well-wishers and practitioners at the Rabindranath Tagore Institute to commemorate this milestone. It is certainly a moment of pride, but also one that invites a more reflective understanding of what this tradition represents — not only for Mauritius, but for a much wider arc of communities shaped by indenture.

For many of us who grew up in Mauritius, Geet Gawai was not an abstract heritage item. It was the soundscape of childhood. We knew only that women were singing in a room where boys were not allowed — a mysterious, fragrant world of laughter, clapping, turmeric, teasing, devotion. We did not realise then that we were witnessing a practice with deep historical currents, born in the Bhojpuri belt of India and remade across continents through the journeys of indentured women.

Mauritius: A Women’s World Inside the Wedding House

In the Mauritian context, Geet Gawai developed into a finely textured ritual: a circle of women preparing the bride, singing sohar and banna, invoking blessings, poking gentle fun at relatives, and preserving memory through melody. It created an autonomous feminine space — one of the few arenas where everyday women could speak, joke, critique and console without surveillance. The UNESCO recognition in 2016 brought visibility and pride, yet the lived meanings of Geet Gawai remain anchored in the intimacy of these gatherings, not in their staged versions.

Mauritius is not alone in this legacy. In Trinidad, the Matikor night forms a near mirror: women gather before the wedding, joking, blessing and singing in Bhojpuri-inflected cadences. Suriname and Guyana possess equally resonant traditions —sohar, banna, and baithak gana-with women’s wedding songs that carry the same blend of devotion and mischief. In Fiji, vivah and haldi songs similarly survive in women’s pre-wedding gatherings, maintaining older meters and melodic patterns even as language shifts.

Despite geographical distance, these traditions form a single diasporic constellation. Each community adapted the old North Indian forms to new soils, new social realities, and new cultural blends. Yet the fundamental structure — a women’s communal space where voice, memory and emotional life could circulate freely — remains recognizable across oceans.

Euphoria and the Edges of Visibility

The UNESCO listing triggered a justified wave of celebration in Mauritius. Community groups perform with renewed confidence; younger Mauritians are rediscovering a tradition that once seemed destined to remain behind curtains. But the public excitement also reveals a paradox: while the community feels uplifted, broader society often engages with Geet Gawai only at a surface level — as entertainment, a token of multiculturalism, or colourful heritage for national stages.

Outside the intimate wedding house, the deeper textures of the tradition — the women’s humour, the coded social commentary, and the emotional bonds forged through ritual labour — often remain unacknowledged. The practice is embraced symbolically, yet not fully integrated into the country’s shared cultural imagination.

Across Space and Time

If the nine-year UNESCO moment means anything, it is this: Geet Gawai is part of a vast, oceanic story. It connects Mauritius to Trinidad, Suriname, Guyana, Fiji, South Africa and beyond. It reveals how women carried culture across indenture, how songs travelled when almost nothing else could, and how communities re-rooted themselves through repetition, rhythm and ritual.

We may not have understood it as children, but we were witnessing a tradition with centuries of memory behind it — and a future still being negotiated. The euphoria is real. But so is the need to understand the depth of what has been inherited, and the fragility of what remains to be passed on.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 19 December 2025