Bhojpuri’s Global Flame-Keeper: Dr Sarita Boodhoo’s Path to Winning India’s Highest Diaspora Honour

On Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in 2025, as President Droupadi Murmu handed over the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman -- India’s highest honor for the diaspora -- the applause wasn't just for a woman. It was an ovation for a language, a history, and a legacy that refused to be forgotten.

For Dr. Sarita Boodhoo, that moment on 10 January 2025 was the culmination of a lifetime's quiet, fierce devotion. A fourth-generation daughter of the Bhojpuri belt, born as Sarita Makhan in Port Louis, Mauritius, she represents a lineage forged in the crucible of the 19th-century indenture system. Her ancestors were Girmitiyas, souls who boarded ships starting in 1834 carrying little more than grief, resilience, and the songs of the Gangetic plains. In the sugarcane fields of Mauritius, Bhojpuri became their lifeline – the language of the hearth, the soil, and a quiet resistance against erasure.

Yet, as generations turned, the tongue of the ancestors faced a modern quietus, threatened by the pressures of Creole, French, English, and urban drift. Enter a scholar with the heart of a poet and the tenacity of a movement-builder.

From the Gangetic Plains to the Mauritian Classroom

Dr. Boodhoo’s journey to becoming the global flame-keeper of Bhojpuri began with the power of education. Armed with an Indian government cultural scholarship, she crossed oceans to study Geography at Lady Brabourne College in Calcutta, before diving deeper into her roots to earn a Master’s and a PhD in Hindi from the prestigious Banaras Hindu University. Training in advanced journalism in Germany and France further honed her voice, teaching her how to turn ancestral memory into global narratives.

Returning home, she wore many hats – teacher, writer, editor of the Hindi weekly Jan Vani, and journalist. But her true north was cultural revival.

In 1982, she founded the Mauritius Bhojpuri Institute. What began as a grassroots kitchen-table initiative blossomed into a cultural renaissance. Through nationwide Bhojpuri Weeks, ballets, audio CDs, and meticulous documentation of proverbs, folk songs, and kahani-kissas, the institute stripped away the unfair stigma that dismissed Bhojpuri as a rustic tongue, restoring its inherent dignity.

She produced the iconic anthem Pani Nai Ba, spearheaded the recognition of 2 November as a public holiday commemorating the arrival of indentured laborers, and lent her visionary strength to the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund and historical monuments like Antoinette Phooliyar.

Securing UNESCO Immortality

If her decades of institution-building laid the foundation, her crowning achievement arrived in 2016.

Leading the official Mauritian delegation, Dr. Boodhoo achieved a historic milestone: the inscription of Geet Gawai – the traditional folk songs and pre-wedding rituals preserved by generations of women singers, the geetharines – onto UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Refusing to let the honor sit as a static plaque, she went a step further, helping establish dozens of Geet Gawai schools across the island. Today, young Mauritian girls and boys learn the exact melodies their great-grandmothers hummed across the tumultuous seas.

Her institutional leadership matched her cultural output. From 2012 to November 2024, she served as the inaugural Chairperson of the Bhojpuri Speaking Union, a statutory body established by an Act of Parliament. Under her watch, Bhojpuri found its way back into school curricula, international Mahotsavs were convened, and short-film competitions brought folk traditions into the digital age. Her scholarly works, including Bhojpuri Traditions in Mauritius, Kanya Dan, and Geet Gawai – Bhojpuri Folk Songs in Mauritius, remain indispensable bibles for researchers of global diaspora and linguistics.

A Living Bridge Between Two Worlds

The honors have rolled in steadily over the years: the Vishwa Hindi Samman (2012), the Vishwa Bhojpuri Samman (2013), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the ICCR (2016), and Mauritius’s high distinction, the Grand Officer of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean (GOSK) in 2023. Yet, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman stands tall as the ultimate validation of her life's work.

Married to Harish Boodhoo, former Deputy Prime Minister of Mauritius, Dr. Boodhoo remains an indefatigable scholar, writer, and social activist.

In an era when indigenous and diasporic languages fade into the hum of globalization, Dr. Sarita Boodhoo’s legacy stands as a timeless reminder: language is never just a collection of words. It is memory, identity, and the unbroken continuity of the human spirit.

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