Indians in Réunion
ethnic group
Indians in Réunion are people of Indian origin in Réunion. They form two ethnic groups on the island, Malbars (Hindus or Christians) and Zarabes (Muslims).
Origins
Originally brought in as indentured laborers, as in Mauritius, they were mostly of South Indian Tamil origin. However, these "Sugar Indians" also included a large Telugu component, as well as a noticeable Bhojpuri and Awadhi population, all of whom merged into a single ethnicity dominated by Tamil influence. The second and smallest group was composed of Sunni Muslims from Gujarat, who came as a trading or retail community. There were also later emigrants, mostly Hindu traders and businessmen. In Réunion, Indians from South India, often Hindu, are known as Malbars and Muslim Indians from Northwestern India are known as Zarabes.
Additional communities, among the later settlers, are the Franco-Pondicherrians (known as the Pondichériens), either Hindu or Christian, who initially constituted the sole living Tamil-speaking community on the island, and the Karanes, a Gujarati Shia Muslim community which came from Madagascar after the independence of that country from French rule.
Today
Indo-Réunionnais people have affected the culture of Réunion, bringing Indian cuisine as well as flora and fauna to the island. The Indo-Réunionnais Hindus have mainly assimilated with other ethnicities on the island.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7386166. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Indians in Réunion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.