ABSTRACT
The study investigates how Mauritian writers use the French language to appropriate a crucial insider outsider position to critique Mauritian modernity and its "religious" framework. Mauritians are predominantly Hindu and maintain close emotional and political ties with the country of their ancestors. Like postcolonial literatures that "write back" to a Euro-metropolitan center in order to question the basis of a European metaphysics and to challenge center periphery binaries, Mauritian writing in French challenges the centrality of an imagined Indo-Hindu worldview within an Indian Ocean continuum. The history of Mauritius in the Southwest Indian Ocean, an island without any indigenous populations, is the history of successive waves of European colonization and multiple immigrations. If English is judged neutral with respect to a colonial past, French becomes neutral with respect to a present within an Indian Oceanic space of "Indian" imperialism.
