ABSTRACT
Contemporary Mauritian society is a very rich field for the study of religious interactions with economic and politics. This is possible not only because of the multiplicity of its religious and cultural forms – Hinduism being practised by more than half the population –but also to its close relation with economic and the state, which has been the great classifier of population categories since the Treaty of Paris in 1814, conferring the sovereignty of the territory to the United Kingdom. The colonial model was inspired by the United Kingdom and was circulated round the double valorisation of the religion and of the origin of migrations. Thus, the cult of goddess Kali, whose altars are multiplied throughout the island, has been built around the relationship between capital and labour that began under this colonisation. Actually, the scholarly emergence of the new divinities in urban temples indicates a process of inescapable transformation of popular cults into a scholarly religion. A change which has been followed in the restoration of the sugar economy and textile industry with the development of technology, information and communication (TIC).
