Gaya, Dec 31 (IANS) Mauritius President Rajkeswur Purryag will visit his ancestral village in Bihar Jan 6 in search of his roots, an official said Monday.
“Mauritius President Rajkeswur Purryag will visit his ancestral village Vajitpur in Patna district next Sunday in search of his roots,” an official in the Chief Minister’s Office said here.
According to officials, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar visited the village to review preparations for Purryag’s visit.
Purryag will be in India to attend the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in Kerala Jan 7-9.
In January, Kamla Persad Bissessar, the first woman prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, visited her ancestral village Bhelupur in Itarhi in Bihar’s Buxar district.
Persad-Bissessar’s ancestors are said to have migrated as Girmitiya labourers to Trinidad and Tobago, then a British colony in the Caribbean islands, in the 19th century.
According to an official record sent by the Trinidad and Tobago government to Bihar, Persad-Bissessar’s great-grandfather Ram Lakhan Mishra had left Bhelupur in 1889.
Nearly five years ago, Mauritius Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam had visited his ancestral village in the state’s Bhojpur district.
A large number of people from Bihar had migrated to the Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Suriname, South Africa and other places in the 19th century to serve as indentured labourers on sugarcane and rubber plantations.
