Mayank Chhaya speaks with Vinod Busjeet, debut-making writer of novel about Indians in Mauritius | SAM Conversation

Sep 23, 2021

"Silent Wind Dry Seas" is the first major novel in English about Indians in the French-speaking Mauritius where Indians were first brought between 1721 and 1810 - some 12,000 of them - as virtual slaves. Three centuries since their first arrival, people of Indian descent now constitute 65 percent of this Indian ocean island nation’s population  of some 1.3 million people. They are like an Indian outpost in the Indian Ocean between India and Africa. Their stories have been told to much critical success by Mauritian Indians writing in French, but it fell upon Busjeet, a retired career professional  at the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank, to write a slice of that history for the first time in English.

Busjeet tells his story from the standpoint of a fictional but plausibly real family of the Bhushans. He spoke to Mayank Chhaya Reports.

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