The article critically interrogates the assumptions and frameworks that underlie the concept of ‘cultural preservation’ among the Bhojpuri-speaking diaspora in Mauritius. Unlike considering culture as an inheritance preserved throughout the centuries, the article regards it as a dynamic terrain of negotiation, reinvention and performance. In terms of ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interview research and critical cultural theory, the article examines how ritual practices, culinary arts, language and festival celebrations are used, differentially recalled and in some instances commodified in line with the imperatives of modern-day state multiculturalisms, tourism economies and intergenerational politics of identity. Women are framed as the authors and transporters of cultural transmission, and youth are involved in symbolic but detached enactments of heritage. The article carries on the work of Stuart Hall (1990, In Identity: Community, culture, difference, pp. 222–237), Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983, The invention of tradition) and Avtar Brah (1996, Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities), in claiming that Bhojpuri identity in Mauritius is not an inherent continuity of the past but a variable and contested terrain constructed out of the terms of affect, labour, memory and power.
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